Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (review)

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 212 Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. By Douglas A. Blackmon. New York: Doubleday, 2008. x, 468 pp. $29.95. ISBN 978-0-385-50625-0. On April 9, 1865, Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered his troops to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. In the succeeding days and weeks (indeed months), Confederate forces laid down their arms and the federal government inaugurated proposals to reintegrate the Confederate states. President Andrew Johnson—who was sworn in on April 15, 1864, the day after President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination—and Congress differed on the approach to reunite the country. There was one surety, however, and that was the destruction of the peculiar institution of slavery. On December 18, 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment was adopted, which prohibited slavery and involuntary servitude except “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” In theory, at least, slavery had been dealt a death blow. The aspiration of African Americans to control their labor and the labor of their offspring conflicted with the ambition of their former owners as well as those who hired the services of the formerly enslaved. This struggle finds context in Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name, a study of involuntary servitude from the Civil War to the beginning of the early civil rights movement. Blackmon posits that emancipation left white southerners financially ruined and “intellectually bereft,” thus a network of entities conspired to create a new form of slavery. In doing so, southerners used arbitrary powers and enforced laws that disproportionately affected newly freed people. The author pays particular attention to how black men served the South’s commercial interests and provides a narrative for the countless black Americans who were parceled through the convict lease system to labor for coal, turpentine, brick, and steel industries. The opportunity to pilfer black men’s labor in order to acquire cheap and copious workers appealed to southern industrialists, farmers, and enterprising whites. As well, local and state lawmakers saw the convict lease system as a method to eliminate black men from the body politic and to reimpose a prewar social hierarchy. In culling a plethora of sources to examine a system that largely operated in southern states such as Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama, Blackmon gives voice to such men as Green Cottenham, Will Gordon, Mose Ridley, and scores of other African Americans arrested for petty crimes and forced into the convict lease system. In 1908, Cottenham became a victim of Alabama’s vagrancy law. Found guilty, he was sentenced to thirty days of hard labor. Due to Cottenham’s inability to pay the ex- J U L Y 2 0 0 9 213 orbitant fees associated with his arrest, trial, and subsequent imprisonment , his term was extended. His labor was then sold to the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company (a subsidiary of United States Steel Corporation) where, according to the author, he labored for the remainder of his short life. Deprived of the right to due process, Cottenham and other black prisoners who performed hard labor for American corporations perished, “dead of disease, accidents, or homicide” (p. 2). Blackmon also examines the efforts of the federal government to jettison or purge laws that sanctioned such labor practices—efforts that were met with strong rebuke from southerners invested in maintaining a form of the master/slave dichotomy. Labor camps or the convict lease system survived in Alabama for five decades. The institution’s slow death finally came with World War II and America’s desire to conceal its hypocrisy. Involuntary servitude stood at odds with notions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as well as due process, and it illuminated the racial dimension of the country’s forced labor systems. Blackmon’s prose makes for an easily readable text that seamlessly weaves together a complete narrative (complete in part because of the author’s use of conjecture). The book does have its weaknesses. For instance , Blackmon argues that scholars have neglected the topic and reduced the...