Sold Down the River: Slavery in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley of Alabama and Georgia

Sold Down the River

Slavery in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley of Alabama and Georgia

ANTHONY GENE CAREY

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

Published in cooperation with the Historic Chattahoochee Commission and the Troup County Historical Society

Copyright © 2011

Historic Chattahoochee Commission

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeface: Minion

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Carey, Anthony Gene.

Sold down the river : slavery in the lower Chattahoochee Valley of Alabama and Georgia / Anthony Gene Carey.

   p. cm.

Published in cooperation with the Historic Chattahoochee Commission and the Troup County Historical Society.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8173-1741-6 (cloth : alk. paper) —ISBN 978-0-8173-8566-8 (electronic) 1. Slavery—Chattahoochee River Valley. 2. Slavery—Chattahoochee River Valley—History. 3. Chattahoochee River Valley—History. I. Historic Chattahoochee Commission. II. Troup County Historical Society. III. Title.

E445.A3C37 2011

306.3′6209758—dc22

                                                                         2010048793

Publication is made possible in part through the generous support of the Historic Chattahoochee Commission and the Troup County Historical Society.

Cover art: Illustration from runaway slave notice, Columbus Enquirer (Georgia), February 16, 1833. Courtesy of Gary Sprayberry.

To Layne, Ketchel, and Betty

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Writing Slaveries from the Perspectives of One Place

1. Slaveries, Rivalries, Revolutions, Removals: The Valley from Creek Heartland to American Frontier

2. Markets in Flesh: The Parameters of Slavery and the Slave Trade

3. The Work of Slavery, the Lineaments of Life

4. A Tight Fight Where Us Was: Punishment, Resistance, and Power

5. Praying Together for Different Things: Evangelicalism and the Limits of Biracial Worship

6. Whose Bodies? Whose Families? Whose Homes? Contesting Identity and Domesticity

Epilogue: Dere is Sumpin’ ’Bout Bein’ Free: The Overthrow of Slavery

Notes

Index

Illustrations

Figures

1. Map of the Lower Chattahoochee Valley of Alabama and Georgia in 1860

2. Map of Alabama, showing the Creek nation and key points in the lower Chattahoochee River Valley

3. A slave auction in Montgomery, Alabama

4. An advertisement from the Columbus Enquirer

5. Workers weigh cotton near LaGrange, Georgia, in the early 1930s

6. Children chopping cotton in Troup County, Georgia, in the late 1930s

7. A photograph of Spring Hill Methodist Church in Barbour County, Alabama

8. John Wallace Comer of the Confederate States Army and his slave, Burrell

9. House at Curry Hill plantation near Climax, Georgia, built by slaves in the 1840s

Tables

1. Lower Chattahoochee Valley Population, 1830–1860

2. Lower Chattahoochee Valley Slave Population, 1830–1860

3. Valley Counties by Relative Population Size, Proportion of Slaves, and Relative Slave Population Size, 1860

4. Slaveholding in the Valley, 1860

5. Distribution of Slaveholders by Individual Holdings, 1860

6. Distribution of Slaves by Slaveholdings, 1860

7. Advertisement for the Sale of Slaves

Introduction

Writing Slaveries from the Perspectives of One Place

Horace King helped commerce conquer the Deep South in the mid-nineteenth century. King built covered wooden bridges, including several over the lower Chattahoochee River, which separates Georgia from Alabama. Wagons went over and steamboats under King's spans, carrying produce for local markets in Columbus, Eufaula, or other towns, or cotton bound for New York and Liverpool. Born a slave, King ended up with owners, John and Ann Godwin, who recognized his potential and fostered his talents. By the time King attained his freedom in 1846, he routinely gained the confidence of white investors, offered advice to white politicians, and gave orders to white workers. King supported his family well, and he sat in the Alabama Legislature after Emancipation. His management of himself, his situation, and his projects made King the most-recognized African American in the Chattahoochee Valley.

Almost nothing about King's life was typical, least of all the way in which he made slavery's markets work for him. King went from being an exceptionally valuable commodity, a chattel with unique abilities, to selling his services as an independent contractor. Part of his amazing legacy was the erection of a monument over his former master's grave, which testified to their close relationship, to King's magnanimity, and to his political acumen. John Godwin died in 1859, even as Deep South whites debated the propriety of re-enslaving free blacks and contemplated secession from the Union. That was a good moment for a black man who valued his hard-won freedom to feed whites' fantasies that the enslaved benefited from enslavement and cherished their masters. And Horace King was more adept than most mortals at seizing moments.¹

King's story illustrates the variability of slavery, the ingenuity of its victims, and the power of profit to shape social relations. Slavery was many things across the globe and over millennia. As it developed in the New World, though, slavery was first and foremost about money. The buying and selling of slaves and of the commodities that they produced generated immense wealth, which reshaped existing societies and helped build new ones. From small beginnings, slavery in North America expanded until it furnished foundations for two extraordinarily rich and powerful slave societies, the United States of America and the Confederate States of America. The expansion and concentration of slavery into what became the Confederate states in 1861 was arguably the most momentous development after nationhood itself in the early history of the American Republic.²

This book examines a relatively small part of slavery's North American domain, the lower Chattahoochee River Valley, which lies between the present-day states of Alabama and Georgia.³ Although geographically at the heart of Dixie, the Valley was among the youngest parts of the Old South. Not until the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century did Americans wrest the Valley from Native Americans and eliminate European rivals in the Southeast. Just thirty-seven years separated the founding of Columbus, Georgia, from the Confederacy's surrender. Enslaved persons, to be sure, inhabited the Valley long before the first American city or county was organized. Considered solely in terms of longevity, Creek Indians—along with the European traders who came to live among them—were the principal Valley slaveholders, and the involvement of Creeks with Indian and African slavery receives considerable attention in the following pages. By the standards of mastery developed over the centuries of African slavery's gestation on the eastern seaboard of North America, however, Creeks were improvident, irresolute slaveholders, careless enough about racial distinctions to have a history of alliances with African fugitives and indifferent enough to profits to spurn opportunities for market agriculture. The conviction that Native Americans were wasting territory that could be made to yield fortunes eventually furnished a motive and rationalization for the American removal of the Creeks and other Southeastern Indians west of the Mississippi River.

The Creek nation, a society with slaves, was overrun by an American slave society characterized by astonishing demographic, territorial, and economic expansion.⁴ The leading part of this book's title, sold down the river, highlights the fundamental force, the market, at work in the transplantation in the Valley of a particular type of cotton-fueled, money-mad, slave regime. Thousands upon thousands of enslaved blacks were sold from exporting localities in the older slave states to till the fresh lands along the Chattahoochee River and its tributary streams. Others migrated involuntarily with owners. Either way, the most important, though not exclusive, task for slaves brought to the Valley was raising cotton, much of which was sold down the river to the port of Apalachicola, from which it reached the mills of the North and England. The Valley counties of Georgia and Alabama were places where everything had its price, where property rights in enslaved persons, in particular, formed the basis of economic activity. The market, which itself was continually made and remade by the wills and decisions of persons near and far, seemed operationally impersonal as it conditioned the choices of Valley residents. Market prices influenced not only planters deciding whether to buy additional slaves, but also slaves looking to earn a few dollars on produce from their garden patches. Up and down the river, buying and selling was the business of life, and the enslaved dreamed of some day possessing title to themselves.⁵

To insist upon the primacy of market forces in shaping slavery in the Valley is not to deny that innumerable other considerations affected human behaviors. Evangelical Protestantism, for example, powerfully impacted Valley whites and blacks, masters and slaves. While not exactly at odds with impulses toward gain, evangelical values did elevate the spiritual over the material and emphasize the community of believers. That the God of the Bible was no respecter of persons was a comfort to many an enslaved Baptist and a caution to many a Baptist enslaver. Emotion or ethics caused some slaveholders to sacrifice economically to sell a slave family together or to provide better clothing than strictly necessary for their chattels. Fear of punishment or strong locks partly explained why slaves did not help themselves to all the hams in Valley smokehouses, but concern for the needs of fellow bondspeople or other dictates of conscience also limited individuals' actions. One can imagine a host of motives aside from the pecuniary for, as a plantation mistress, wanting to hide the proverbial family silver from the Yankees, or, as the trusted and enslaved cook, wanting either to keep the secret or to reveal all to the first bluecoat. Human affairs were, if anything, more complicated in the Valley and the rest of the Old South than in many other societies, because of the contradictions necessitated by a system in which enslaved people with minds, hearts, and souls were daily treated—and resisted being treated—as things.

Among forces mediated by but not reducible to market factors, concepts of race most significantly molded Valley slavery. The intertwining of color and condition in the race-based slave society of the mid-nineteenth-century Valley reflected the long and tortured process of ideological elaboration by which masters sought to justify and to safeguard vast investments in African slavery. The Creeks' record on perceiving and/or acting upon constructed racial difference was mixed, as the book's opening chapter makes clear. To say the least for the moment, Creeks did not originally draw rigid lines between peoples based on physical characteristics such as skin color—as evidenced by their willingness to deliver captured Indian slaves to South Carolina while assimilating some fugitive slaves of African descent into Creek clans. In contrast, before they conquered the Valley, white Americans and their mostly British forebears had already spent at least three hundred years puzzling out meanings for white and black, free and slave, in the context of New World slave empires. No sensible adult in the Valley in 1840 needed to be told that Negro, unless specifically preceded by free, meant slave. Judging by their own usage of words, considerable numbers of white Valley slaveholders had no slaves, not even any servants, just Negroes. Enslaved peoples of African descent had, over the same long period, developed understandings and terminology that increasingly lumped together whites and recognized blacks or Negroes as a coherent group in ways that would not have made much or any sense to their ancestors in Africa nor to their progenitors farther back in southern history. Inherited but not entirely static racial ideas thus structured consciousnesses in the antebellum Valley in diverse ways. Above all, the conflation of race and slavery served the interests of Valley masters. Racial fears and prejudices helped bind together slaveholding and non-slaveholding Valley whites, despite disparities in wealth, and minimized possibilities that aggrieved poorer whites would seek allies in slave quarters. At the same time, though, shared experiences of white oppression fostered solidarity among the enslaved and shaped a shared African American history and culture.⁶

Its unusual genesis explains some of this book's characteristics, starting with its geographical focus. Auburn, Alabama, which my family and I called home for sixteen years, is located in the Chattahoochee Valley. My active interest in African American history dates back considerably farther, to a graduate seminar on slavery that I took with August Meier at Kent State University in 1984–1985. Professor Meier, more than any other single person, influenced my decision to go to Emory University, where I had the good fortune to study the Old South and slavery under the guidance of James Roark, my major professor, and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, among other outstanding scholars. My first book, on antebellum Georgia politics, had a lot more to do with the impact of slavery on white Georgians and white Americans generally than it did with the lives of the enslaved.⁷ But studying the institution of slavery itself, all its features and contradictions, has long been my main scholarly passion. While teaching the Old South at Auburn and working on other projects, including serving several years as an associate dean in the College of Liberal Arts, I often thought in a vague way that some day I would write a book on slavery. The man who turned the vague to the specific and put a deadline on it was Douglas C. Purcell, the executive director of the Historic Chattahoochee Commission. His organization was looking for someone to do a book on slavery in the Valley, and Wayne Flynt, a distinguished Auburn colleague, suggested that I might be interested and capable. I was the former, at any rate, and the Historic Chattahoochee Commission has generously supported my work. My thanks to Doug and Wayne for handing me a great idea and helping me bring this book to completion—even though I missed more than one of the deadlines that Doug set for me.

Although primarily designed for students and general readers and for those interested in the Chattahoochee Valley, this book will, I hope, contribute to the voluminous literature on American slavery and attract the attention of professional historians as well. I have done several things to make it more accessible and enjoyable for laypersons and local historians. The book has more of an empirical than a postmodern bent. People and stories occupy prominent places, and theorizing is minimized. A great deal of fascinating, challenging, and theoretically sophisticated work is being done on slavery. I have, as acknowledged in notes, profited greatly from reading others, and I have a lot of fun teaching the newest scholarship in Old South seminars. I would not always call cutting-edge work user-friendly, however, from the perspective of a reading public whose familiarity with discourse on constructions, identities, tropes, and such is likely limited. While I cite sources for all primary materials and provide many references to secondary literature, I have mentioned in the notes only a small fraction of the books and articles that might in some way be deemed relevant to the topics discussed. The historiography of slavery is truly enormous and growing exponentially; this book is not the place for an attempt at bibliographic inclusiveness. I have looked at and found unhelpful far more manuscripts, local histories, genealogies, and other sources than are cited in notes. Also excluded from notes are a large proportion of the books and articles that might be cited as background or further reading on various aspects of slavery or the history of the Valley.⁸

This book is written overwhelmingly from primary sources. I have mostly avoided drawing conclusions about the Valley based on the findings of other historians for other places, although some reliance on extrapolation for subjects on which the Valley sources are silent or nearly so proved inevitable. Manuscript material available on slavery in the Valley is adequate but not notably rich. The basic sources for Creek history, such as colonial government documents, travel accounts, and Benjamin Hawkins's writings, have largely been published, and I rely on those materials. By necessity rather than design, for the period from the 1820s to Emancipation this is largely a history of plantation slavery and its incidents: labor, resistance, family life, and many other topics. While I assiduously collected available evidence on urban slaves, slave hiring, slave artisans, and so forth, the bulk of testimony from whites and blacks about Valley slavery relates to agricultural operations that engaged at least a dozen or more slaves. The words of small slaveholders barely appear in archival records. A few collections used herein—the journals of Barbour County planter John Horry Dent, for example—are widely familiar to historians of the South and slavery. Dent's and other planters' diaries provide details on the type of day-to-day work that engaged a majority of Valley slaves. Among other things, I used lists originally made for management or tax purposes to reconstruct slave family relationships and trace communities over time. Agricultural journals document plantation routines, proslavery arguments, and medical opinions, to name just three matters. Major farming periodicals were published in or near the Valley, and letters from Valley slaveholders appeared regularly. Columbus, Georgia, and Tuskegee, Eufaula, and Opelika, Alabama, newspapers provide abundant information on fugitive slaves and slave sales, both through advertisements, and on slavery-related issues in politics. Otherwise, substantive nuggets on slavery are few and far between in newspapers. Extant issues of papers outside Columbus are quite limited—nonexistent for early years. Court records are important sources for unauthorized activity of the enslaved, ranging from curfew violations to murder, and provide glimpses at white behavior that challenged laws and color lines or outraged other whites; offenses included slave stealing, assisting fugitives, illicit trading with slaves, and brutal punishments that ended in deaths and murder trials. Extensive use of church records, primarily Baptist, distinguishes my work from many other studies of slavery, and minutes of monthly meetings for discipline, admission of new members, and other matters shed much light on relationships and lives that otherwise would remain obscure. Last but not nearly least, several dozen narratives of ex-slaves who lived in the Valley around the time of the Civil War provide a foundation for my understanding of enslavement. These narratives, collected by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s and available in volumes familiar to all historians of slavery, are simply indispensable.

Letters, diaries, newspapers, church minutes, and all sorts of other primary materials contain spelling or grammatical errors. Capitalization and punctuation in letters can be incredibly random, and newspaper editors then as now battled typographical errors. When quoting material, I have silently supplied capitalization and punctuation as necessary, and I have silently corrected what are clearly mistakes. I have retained, however, distinctive spellings or means of expression—overseers' letters come to mind—that reveal something important about the writer. The goal of this manner of presentation is to render the sources accessible for the reader without distortion and without intrusive sics' WPA narratives present special problems. These documents are records of oral interviews, which were edited to a greater or lesser—sometimes, one suspects, to a massive—extent by the interviewers, most of whom were white. This is a bell that cannot be unrung; we can never know how pure transcriptions of these conversations would read, much less know what interviewees would have said given unlimited time and assurances that candor would not prove costly. Given these realities, I considered rendering into standard English the offensive pseudo-dialects in which interviewers often composed these narratives. What is the audible difference between wuz and was, between duz and does? When must a the appear as a de and a that show up as dat? Did the white interviewers write as they spoke? As a purely practical matter, the interviews as presented in dialect sometimes require several readings to make sense of them. Still, in the end, I decided to leave the WPA interview material as it appears in the sources and let readers mentally retouch the language to suit themselves.

Terms related to race are freighted with difficulties and emotions. Keeping things relatively simple on a matter that is anything but, I use white to describe any non-Indian person with no recognized African ancestry and black to describe any non-Indian person with recognized African ancestry. Native Africans appear at some places in the text, as do names of African nationalities or ethnicities. African American and black are basically used as synonyms, as are Euro-American and white. As indicated by the clumsy phrase non-Indian, persons with Native American lineage represented distinct cases, which are discussed in detail elsewhere. The overwhelming majority of blacks appearing in this book were enslaved. There were thousands upon thousands of light-skinned slaves in the Valley, some with blond hair and blue eyes, just as there were whites whose African ancestry passed unnoticed. Racial identities for individuals and groups were, in short, constructed and mutable. Whites in the antebellum Valley used negroes most regularly (capitalized or uncapitalized, and sometimes both in the same piece of writing), darkies less often, blacks less often yet, Africans when the context seemed right, and occasionally sable race or a similar phrase. Whites also employed servants and slaves as synonyms for blacks. Whites considered all of these usages polite and proper. Judging from difficult and scattered evidence, it seems that Valley blacks largely shared this lexicon. The commonplace race-related word from the past that most grates on ears in twenty-first-century America is nigger. Whenever I reasonably could, I edited my way around the word, but the truth is that it was integral to white discourse on slavery and race, and the word appears innumerable times in ex-slave narratives. Few words packed as much power and meaning, then or now, and its occasional retention in quoted materials in this book preserves that impact.

The book begins with a largely chronological chapter on the long history of Creek involvement with slavery. I distinguish sharply between the kind of slavery practiced to a small extent among Southeastern Indians prior to and for a long time following European contact and the large-scale, race-based, plantation-oriented chattel slavery that eventually developed in European colonies in North America. Creeks were integral to the early blossoming of slavery in the Deep South; they hunted African fugitives and enslaved other Indians for sale to South Carolina, as well as at times being taken as slaves themselves. The market complex that made the deerskin trade vital among the Creeks also nurtured slavery, which expanded rapidly in the mid-eighteenth century on the peripheries of Creek country and very slowly with the Valley itself.

The American Revolution inaugurated a new era in the Creeks' relationship to slavery. Tumult and American independence unleashed expansionist impulses in seaboard slave areas, creating increasing demand for Indian land cessions and carrying masters and slaves farther into the southern interior. As agent to the Creeks, Benjamin Hawkins assiduously pushed the federal government's plan of civilization, which aimed at diversifying the Creek economy and emphasized market production. More and more Creek leaders, especially those of combined Creek and Euro-American ancestry, embraced slaveholding, and the market and slavery over time transformed many cultural characteristics of the Creek nation and contributed to internal stresses. Even as slavery became more prominent in Creek life than ever before, southern whites grew impatient with continued Creek control of the Valley and surrounding territory. Civil war, military defeat, and dispossession scarred Creek history from the 1810s through the 1830s, and removal sent most Creek slaveholders and their chattels to new lands beyond the Mississippi River.

After proceeding chronologically through the Creek era, the book's organization becomes topical for the antebellum period. Sources do not exist to present a detailed chronological account of Valley slavery from the 1820s to the 1860s. Ex-slave narratives and manuscript collections of white Valley residents, for example, are heavily weighted toward the 1850s and 1860s. Continuity, in any case, predominated in many areas of life once Americans created and settled Valley counties. Methods of growing and harvesting corn, planting and picking cotton, or raising and killing hogs changed little over decades, especially when viewed from the perspective of the majority of enslaved workers who, small shifts in routine notwithstanding, spent the daylight hours year round in hard outdoor labor. Overall, then, a topical organization with attention paid to change over time in various subject areas best captures the complexity and range of slavery's history in the antebellum Valley.

The second chapter lays out essentials: the migration of people and the trade in slaves that formed the antebellum Valley. The Valley's population grew from under 30,000 in 1830 to more than 200,000 in 1860. One-third of Valley residents were slaves in 1830 and nearly one-half were slaves in 1860. Among the most important implications of these and other statistics was the dislocation and heartbreak suffered by tens of thousands of enslaved people moved or sold in the process of developing the Valley. Holding property in people was the essence of slavery. Valley whites found nothing disreputable about treating slaves as things; they chatted about slave prices and participated regularly in slave sales, whether it was the liquidation of an estate, the addition of a few hands, or the disposal of a troublesome character. I therefore put first things first in discussing how Valley masters acquired and jettisoned the laborers whose value constituted the bulk of their fortunes. The enslaved tried to avert or to shape sales, but their power was limited, and being engulfed in the market was a nightmarish experience that few avoided entirely.

Valley slaves mostly spent their waking hours working. For a considerable majority, working meant making a large farm or plantation run, and labor and material conditions on such enterprises are the subject of chapter 3. Slaveholders' theories on the nature of African Americans and on proper agricultural and management techniques structured routines. The parameters of plantations and the cycles of seasonal work in the Valley varied little from that in other areas of the cotton kingdom. Overseers supervised large numbers of slaves, and they generally drew poor reviews from both employers and enslaved. Food, housing, clothing, medical care, and the like were provided to slaves, and the adequacy of quarters and allotments was one way that the enslaved rated masters. Historians familiar with slavery in the cotton South will not find much in this chapter startling, although the bulk of the evidence presented has seldom or never appeared in previous scholarship on slavery. The major argument of the chapter is that slaves and slaveowners battled constantly to define conditions of labor and material life, and that profits more than paternalism shaped master-slave relationships.

Slave hiring and the market activities of the enslaved highlighted the nature of struggles over work and its fruits. Slave hiring was ubiquitous in the Valley. Many slaves worked in Columbus, the biggest hiring market, or other towns, but most worked in the countryside in agriculture or on projects, such as building railroads. Despite numerous problems associated with hiring, the practice was too convenient and lucrative for slaveholders to give up or even to regulate seriously; hiring provided crucial flexibility in an economy in which slaves were expensive to buy but free labor was scarce. Experiences for hired slaves ran the gamut. Some found their own work, prospered, and lived as nearly free people. Others suffered and even died at the hands of callous hirers who had no long-term interest in their welfare. Hired slaves ran away more frequently, seeking freedom or just relief, than other slaves.

The internal economy of slaves involved the production and consumption of goods and services by slaves as actors in the marketplace. Buying and selling by slaves occurred despite laws that rendered slaves incapable of holding property and restricted market access. Slaves with their masters' permission raised everything from chickens to cotton and sold their produce to make purchases that improved their lives. Many masters paid in cash or credit for extra work or exemplary performance—prizes for good cotton picking, for example. Without the permission of owners, slaves disposed of property legally defined as stolen. A trade in pilfered and forbidden goods, poorly concealed but hard to suppress, was carried on across the Valley and depended on the connivance of whites who were willing to dispense liquor to slaves or to hand over cash for sides of bacon and pecks of corn. My findings regarding the significance of slave hiring and the slaves' economy in the Valley dovetail with recent historiographical trends. Scholars now realize how frequently slaves worked for people other than their owners, including for themselves, and that slaves purchased food, clothing, and personal items far more often than historians have traditionally acknowledged.

Chapter 4 makes clear that however much day-to-day latitude slaves seized or masters allowed, slavery ultimately rested on force, on the whippings, sales, rapes, and executions that were manifestations of slaveholders' power. The resistance of the enslaved mitigated the power of masters, but the balance of power was nonetheless dramatically unequal. Whites controlled the government, the military, and the courts; they monopolized the official use of force and devised laws to buttress slavery. Punishment and resistance were means to ends. Discipline, as masters often called it, was designed to promote effective work and to inculcate habits of subservience. Obedience without chastisement was the ideal of all but sadistic masters. Slave resistance, which ranged in the Valley from wasting seed to flight to murder to incipient rebellion, aimed at the opposite. Slaves were interested in preserving or enlarging boundaries. Greater assertiveness and autonomy—a sick day taken here, a fugitive sheltered there—exacted a measure of revenge, withheld assent to the owners' regime, and bolstered the spirits of individuals, families, and communities. Resistance was constant, and the fear, doubt, and irritation it caused troubled white psyches and contributed more than a little to their aggressive ideological and political defense of the peculiar institution. Smaller battles the enslaved won in abundance, but slaves they remained until the defeat of the Confederacy overthrew their captors.

In chapters 5 and 6 I demonstrate that the resiliency of slaves owed much to families, communities, and religious lives that sustained love and hope amidst sore trials. To smile at a child's play, to laugh at a spouse's joke, or to feel God's presence was to transcend enslavement and to partake of joy. The Valley's enslaved were not, despite their condition, grim or solemn people; they treasured holidays, time with friends, and the support of family. Ex-slave testimony, plantation records, and other documents testify to the depth and breadth of familial connections and to how stories, songs, and rituals replenished spirits. African American culture itself was formed in slavery and constituted a significant mode of resistance to the potentially soul-destroying effects of bondage. A substantial element of that culture, evangelical Protestantism, was shared with whites. The expansion of evangelical churches and their missions to the enslaved was one of the most important developments in the antebellum Valley, although one should not overlook the large numbers of blacks and whites who remained predominantly unchurched even past midcentury. The implications of conversion and churchgoing for whites and black were profound, and profoundly complex. The same Bible furnished texts for proslavery arguments and passages that promised abolition and equality. African American evangelicals found in churches a measure of respect and inclusion in interactions with whites that they encountered nowhere else, and shared religiosity placed whites and blacks on a level plane as supplicants to a higher power. Still, elements of black religion remained opaque to whites; surreptitious nighttime worship and a black preacher's cloaked meanings concealed a spirituality of deliverance not fit for masters' ears. Family and faith grounded African American communities at Emancipation and supported what turned out to be a long freedom struggle thereafter.

Sectional conflict and Civil War revealed the strengths and weaknesses of the Valley's slave society before eliminating its foundation: rights to property in people. There is not much in this book about political parties, slavery-related issues, or secession in the Chattahoochee Valley; I have basically said my piece on those subjects elsewhere, and I never intended to reproduce evidence and discussion from that work in this volume. Readers have available, in any event, plenty of accounts of electoral politics and the coming of the Civil War. The current volume also makes a long story short on the Confederacy, Emancipation, and Reconstruction; not because of a lack of sources or interest, but because I have concluded that that story constitutes another book. I have collected large amounts of material on the 1860s, and I have not yet tapped remotely near all of the sources available. Furthermore, Susan O'Donovan's brilliant new book on southwest Georgia and David Williams's interpretation of the Confederacy, as well as other historiography on the Civil War and Reconstruction in and around the Chattahoochee Valley, already provide more and better coverage for the war years and afterward than exists for the antebellum period, even though I disagree with some of the conclusions reached in existing works. There are more than enough stories, developments, and controversies for another book, one that can do justice to the end of slavery and the beginnings of African American freedom in the Chattahoochee Valley. I intend to write that book in coming years, rather than try to append half a dozen or more additional chapters to this one.⁹

Many people have made either this project or me better; not one of them is responsible for any defects remaining in either print or person. My opening debt of thanks needs to be to the anonymous readers at The University of Alabama Press for their helpful and encouraging criticism.

The Department of History at Auburn University contains about the most wonderful group of people it has ever been my pleasure to know. It was very hard to leave the Plains, harder even than it is to single out certain former colleagues for mention here. Several friends (especially Kathryn Braund, Patience Essah, Charles Israel, Angela Lakwete, and Ken Noe) spent time reading manuscript pages and talking with me about slavery and southern history. Wayne Flynt has taught me much about many things. Robin F. A. Fabel was always kind to a young professor. Jeff Jakeman and I spent years working together on all sorts of Alabama history projects. Bill Trimble was a successful department chair whose advice and support I always appreciated. Larry Gerber's wisdom extends well beyond American history. Donna Bohanan and Jim Hansen—well, what can I say? Dozens of graduate students over the years challenged me—you know who you are—and helped me refine my ideas about southern history; their achievements make me proud.

Dean Rebekah Pindzola in the College of Liberal Arts put up with me in the office for several years and provided encouragement for all of my work. The late Joseph Ansell, artist, department head, museum director, dean, and dear friend, is missed every day.

I knew the late Dennis K. Ruth, a famous architecture and design professor at Auburn, all too briefly. But we had great fun working together with Andy and Mac Moye, Leo Goodsell, and the rest of the folks at Historic Westville in Lumpkin, Georgia. Over the course of a couple of years, we constructed a replica slave house and expanded interpretation of slavery in Westville. The process helped refine some of my views on Valley slavery, and watching D. K. work with his graduate students in the Design/Build MA program was an inspiration. Along the way, Andy Moye also strongly suggested several times that I get going and finish this book.

I have not been a professor and a vice provost for faculty affairs at Appalachian State University long enough to acquire too many substantial debts—or to do too much damage. My boss, Provost Stan Aeschleman, and many others in the university leadership have welcomed and encouraged me. My colleagues in the history department are a distinguished and dedicated bunch.

My father passed away when I was thirteen, and my mother did not live to see me obtain gainful academic employment, but they contributed to this book nonetheless. My three sisters and one brother live far enough away to keep me from becoming too annoying. Occasionally they may think that I turned out okay. Thanks for all that they have always done for me.

For our immediate household, a move to Boone, North Carolina, seriously disrupted the completion of this book and nearly everything else about our lives. My wife, Layne McDaniel, also a