Free Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon

went the way
    of the southern church.2
    There were no free blacks there before the war. The explosion in
    slave numbers in the adjoining counties—where tens of thousands
    of black men and women populated plantations strung along the
    Tennessee, Alabama, and Tombigbee rivers—o ered a huge
    inventory of readily available African Americans and sustained a
    thriving local traf ic in slaves.3
    In Montgomery, the state capital seventy miles from the Bibb
    County seat, a huge wholesale market in slaves preoccupied the
    commercial life of the bustling city. Richard Habersham, a Georgian
    traveling through the town in 1836, described a sprawling slave
    market with scores of black men and women and crowds of white
    men closely inspecting them. "I came suddenly upon ranges of wel
    dressed Negro men and women seated upon benches. There may
    have been 80 or 100 al in di erent parcels…. With each group
    were seated two or three sharp, hard featured white men. This was
    the slave market and the Negroes were dressed out for show. There
    they sit al day and every day until they are sold, each parcel rising
    and standing in rank as a purchaser approaches. Although born in a
    slave country and a slave holder myself and an advocate of slavery,
    yet this sight was entirely novel and shocked my feelings."4 Twenty-
    ve years later, three months after the opening of the Civil War, a
    correspondent for the Times of London watched a twenty- ve-year-
    old black man sold for less than $1,000 during a day of slow
    bidding at the same market. "I tried in vain to make myself familiar
    with the fact that I could for the sum of $975 become as absolutely
    the owner of that mass of blood, bones, sinew, esh, and brains as
    of the horse which stood by my side," wrote W H. Russel . "It was
    painful to see decent-looking men in European garb engaged in the
    work before me…. The negro was sold to one of the bystanders and
    walked o with his bundle God knows where. ‘Niggers is cheap,’
    was the only remark."5
    Elisha Cot ingham might have acquired Scipio at the Montgomery
    market, or from one of the speculative traders who moved between
    market, or from one of the speculative traders who moved between
    the big urban slave markets at Montgomery and Mobile, Alabama.
    They traveled the crude roads of the backcountry acquiring lots of
    slaves and then pushing "droves" of them shackled together from
    town to town. They pitched their tents in crossroads set lements to
    showcase their wares, and paraded slaves before landowners in
    need of labor.
    During the 1850s, a man named J. M. Brown styled himself as
    "not a planter but a Negro raiser," growing no cot on on his Bibb
    County plantation but breeding slaves on his farm speci cal y for
    sale on the open market.6 On the courthouse steps, Bibb County
    sheri s routinely held slave auctions to pay o the unpaid taxes of
    local landowners. County o cials authorized holding the sales on
    either side of the Cahaba River for the convenience of potential
    buyers in each section of the county.
    The South's highly evolved system of seizing, breeding,
    wholesaling, and retailing slaves was invaluable in the nal years
    before the Civil War, as slavery proved in industrial set ings to be
    more exible and dynamic than even most slave owners could have
    otherwise believed.
    Skil ed slaves such as Scipio, churning out iron, cannons, gun
    metal, ri ed artil ery, bat le ships, and munitions at Selma, Shelby
    Iron Works, and the Brier eld foundry, were only a sample of how
    thousands of slaves had migrated into industrial set ings just before
    and during the war. The extraordinary value of organizing a gang of
    slave men to quickly accomplish an arduous manual task—such as
    enlarging a mine and extracting its contents, or constructing
    railroads through the most inhospitable frontier regions—became
    obvious during the manpower shortages of wartime.
    Critical to the success of this form of slavery was dispensing with
    any