Free Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon Page B

a creek seven miles north of the
    county seat, not far from the Cot ingham plantation.14 Employing
    several dozen white laborers , the mil ginned cot on and spun it
    into thread and rope. Of far more portent for Scip's future, and that
    of his descendants, had been a chance discovery in the 1820s by a
    white set ler named Jonathan Newton Smith. On a hunting trip
    near the Cahaba, Smith was surprised when large stones pul ed
    from a creek to encircle a camp re ignited. Smith had tripped
    from a creek to encircle a camp re ignited. Smith had tripped
    across the massive deposits of coal abounding in Alabama, and over
    the next fty years would be a pioneering exploiter of the
    serendipitous proximity of immense brown iron ore deposits
    scat ered across the ridges and, beneath the surface, the perfect fuel
    for blasting the ore into iron and steel.15 It was a combination that
    would transform life in Alabama, reshaping Scip's last years of
    slavery and radical y altering the lives of mil ions of individuals
    over the next century.
    Smith ambitiously assembled thousands of acres of land
    containing mineral deposits, and by 1840, he and others had
    opened smal iron forges on al sides of the Cot ingham farm. One
    was built on Six Mile Creek, a few miles down the mail road
    toward the nearest set lement. Another was across the Cahaba River.
    A third was constructed on a tributary of the big river just north of
    the plantation.16 These were crude mechanical enterprises, belching
    great columns of foul smoke and rivers of e uent. But they were
    marvels of the frontier in which they suddenly appeared. A giant
    water-powered wheel rst crushed the iron ore, which was fed into
    a stone furnace and heated into a huge red molten mass. The
    "hammer man," working in nearly unbearable heat and using a red-
    hot bar of metal as his tool, then maneuvered the molten iron onto
    an anvil where a ve-hundred-pound hammer, also powered by the
    waterwheel, pounded it into bars. Primitive as was the mechanism,
    the rough-edged masses of iron were the vital raw material for
    blacksmiths in every town and on every large farm to craft into the
    plows, horseshoes, and implements that were the civilizing tools of
    the Alabama frontier.17
    In addition to Smith, two other white men living near the
    Cot ingham farm, Jonathan Ware and his son Horace, were
    aggressively expanding the infant industry18 To Smith's geological
    observations, Horace Ware, a native of Lynn, Massachuset s, brought
    a keen instinct for the market among southern cot on planters for
    local y forged iron. He had learned the iron trade from his father,
    and bought land near the Cahaba coal elds and on a rich vein of
    and bought land near the Cahaba coal elds and on a rich vein of
    iron ore in 1841. He put his first furnace into blast in 1846.19
    Slaves were the primary workers at the earliest recorded coal
    mines in Alabama in the 1830s. Moses Stroup, the "father" of the
    iron and steel industry in Alabama, arrived in the state in 1848,
    acquired land on Red Mountain just south of present-day
    Birmingham, and erected his rst furnaces. By the early 1850s, he
    was constructing a much larger group of furnaces in Tuscaloosa
    County, entirely with slave labor.20
    Indeed, nearly al of the early industrial locations of the South
    were constructed by such slaves, thousands of whom became skil ed
    masons, miners, blacksmiths, pat ern makers, and furnace workers.
    Slaves performed the overwhelming majority of the raw labor of
    such operations, working as l ers, who shoveled iron ore,
    limestone, and coal into the furnaces in careful y monitored
    sequence; gut ermen, who drew o the molten iron as it gathered;
    tree cut ers, who fel ed mil ions of trees, and teamsters to drive
    wagons of ore and coal from the mines and nished iron to railroad
    heads.21Alabama's rst recorded industrial fatality was a slave
    named Vann, kil ed in the early 1840s by fal ing rock in an iron ore
    pit near Alabama's earliest