Summary of Douglas A. Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 Henry and Mary were married in 1868, just after the Civil War. The land they were married on was owned by Elisha Cottingham, who had chosen the place for its angle of land. It was a resourceful man who could make his own indelible mark on it.

#2 The last Cottingham, Elisha, had arrived in Alabama in 1817. He and his brothers had staked out land, brought in wives, and cleared the lush woodlands. They had sired many bountiful families, and they had grown prosperous and comfortable.

#3 The Cottinghams were slave owners, and they treated their slaves cruelly. They buried their slaves closer to them than they did the people who ministered to their souls.

#4 The end of the war left Elisha’s family and neighbors in poverty. The threat of former slaves owning their land was real.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: May 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822521865

IRB Media

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Insights on Douglas A. Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Henry and Mary were married in 1868, just after the Civil War. The land they were married on was owned by Elisha Cottingham, who had chosen the place for its angle of land. It was a resourceful man who could make his own indelible mark on it.

#2

The last Cottingham, Elisha, had arrived in Alabama in 1817. He and his brothers had staked out land, brought in wives, and cleared the lush woodlands. They had sired many bountiful families, and they had grown prosperous and comfortable.

#3

The Cottinghams were slave owners, and they treated their slaves cruelly. They buried their slaves closer to them than they did the people who ministered to their souls.

#4

The end of the war left Elisha’s family and neighbors in poverty. The threat of former slaves owning their land was real.

#5

The Civil War had not been a distant event for the people of Alabama. In the early months of fighting, industrialists realized that the market for iron would become lucrative in the South.

#6

The center of the Alabama military efforts was a massive and heavily fortified arsenal, naval foundry, ironworks, and gunpowder mill located in the city of Selma. The Selma works relied on enormous amounts of coal and iron ore mined and forged in nearby Shelby and Bibb counties.

#7

The Brierfield Iron Works was a spectacle of industrial wonder in the antebellum South. The iron works rented two hundred slaves to perform the grueling tasks necessary to continue equipping the rebel army.

#8

The appearance of Confederate soldiers must have been an extraordinary event in the lives of the black members of the Cottingham clan. The war years were a conflicted period of confused roles for slaves. They were the subjects of the Union army's war of liberation, and the victims of the South's economic system.

#9

The final days of the war were only the beginning of a more chaotic struggle. Following the war, there was a wave of violence and thievery by returning Confederate soldiers against those who had doubted the war.

#10

After the war, there was a lot of lawlessness in the South. The Cottingham farm was in the middle of it all, as gangs of deserters terrorized the area.

#11

While many southern whites made their rejection of the new order clear, no alternative existed. The loss of slaves left white farm families such as the Cottinghams, and even more so those on expansive plantations with scores or hundreds of slaves, intellectually bereft.

#12

After the war, the value of a man's land and tools was nearly unknowable. The Cottinghams could not even the cash to buy cotton seed and corn, much less the labor of their former slaves.

#13

The journey of Moses’ family, who were sent to Louisiana to find him, symbolized the vulnerability of white southerners in having to place the fate and future of black people in the hands of a descendant of Africa.

#14

The Cottingham plantation was created by slaves, and it was their traces that de-marked the land. The first generation of slaves sawed down the virgin forests, dug out and dragged away the stumps, and broke up the rich, root-infested soil.

#15