So, I would say for structuring this guide, you could do analysis for each part, then do chapter summaries for each chapter/ I might combine the intro with Part 1, and the Epilogue with the last part. #Plot Overview Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II is a 2008 work of African-American history by Douglas A. Blackmon. Blackmon describes how, despite the Emancipation Proclamation’s outlawing of slavery, many of the southern United States continued to effectively enslave black people though state-sponsored trickery such as arrests on trumped up charges, excessive fines and other means. Blackmon’s argies that the popular idea that slavery ended when the North won the Civil War is completely false and that through practices like convict leasing, slavery continued until World War II when the federal government finally began prosecuting offenders. #Chapter Summaries and Analysis ## Part 1 The Slow Poison (Introduction - Chapter4) ### Introduction Blackmon open the book with the story of Green Cottenham, who was arrested by the sheriff of Shelby County, Alabama on a charge of "vagrancy" a crime "reserved almost exclusively for black men" (1). After being fined, and unable to pay the fines, Cottenham is leased (effectively sold) to the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, which gives $12 a month to pay off Cottenham's fine and fees charged by Shelby County. "What the company's managers did with Cottenham, and thousands of other black men they purchased from sheriffs across Alabama, was entirely up to them." (1). Cottenham is sent to work in a coal mine, where he, along with many of his fellow slaves, will be worked to death. "Most of the broken bodies, along with hundreds of others before and after, were dumped into shallow graves scattered among the refuse of the mine. Others were incinerated in nearby ovens." (2) Blackmon leaves the story of Cottenham before his death and jumps into a recollection of his work as a journalist for the Wall Street Journal. After running across what he calls "one of the only tangible relics of what Green Cottenham endured," (3) sunken pits in the ground marking the graves of men who died working in the nearby mine. Blackmon says he began with the question, "What would be revealed if American corporations were examined through the same sharp lens of historical confrontation as the one then being trained on German corporations that relied on Jewish slave labor during World War II and the Swiss banks that robbed victims of the Holocaust of their fortunes?" (3) In an article published in 2001, Blackmon wrote a piece exposing how American corporations used the slave labor of black people in the South well after the Civil War. The article was generated a massive positive reaction, and that, combined with what Blackmon sees as historians ignoring the massive and widespread nature of the system, inspired Blackmon to expand the initial article into a book. Blackmon then outlines his narrative device, which is to follow, as best he can with the incomplete historical record, the story of Green Cottenham. "His voice, and that of millions of others," writes Blackmon, "is almost entirely absent from the vast record of the era. Unlike the victims of the Jewish Holocaust, who were on the whole literate, comparatively wealthy, and positioned to record for history the horror that enveloped them, Cottenham and his peers had virtually no capacity to preserve their memories or document their destruction." (16) Blackmon orients the narrative of the book toward one family and its descendants, and to one forgotten black man, Green Cottenham, "absence of [whose] voice rests at the center of this book." (18) ### Chapter 1 The Wedding To tell story of Green Cottenham alongside the larger story of continued slavery after the civil war, the book starts with Green Cottenham's grandparents, who married a few years after the end of the Civil War, in January 1868, "hardly... an auspicious time to marry. It was raw, cold, and hungry." This beginning sends Blackmon back even further, tracing the story of the man who owned Henry Cottenham, Elisha Cottingham. The book traces the story of Elisha from his arrival in the Cahaba River region of Alabama (later Bibb County) in 1817, with three brothers, two who left shortly thereafter and one who stayed. Elisha and his brother clear the land and establish a farm, using slave labor. Blackmon starts off with some sympathy for Elisha noting that stories existed of him being a hard, but fair man and contrasting the farm slaves' status, as (potentially, on some farms) a lesser part of the family, and the humanity that provided, with the more brutal existence of industrial slaves rented out to work the various iron and coal mining operations in the area. At the same time Blackmon notes that Elisha never "lost sight of their fundamental definition--as cattle. They were creatures bought and bred for the production of wealth." (23) As time goes on and the valley in which Elisha's farm has been carved out of the wilderness becomes increasingly tame, others begin to come. A Methodist minister named Rev Starr arrives and buys some of Elisha's land. Starr will later marry Green Cottenham's grandparents after the end of the Civil War. With the taming of the landscape comes the first stirrings in industry, with iron mining and forges opening nearby in the 1840s. Still, it wasn't until the outbreak of war that industrial production took off. During the war, "a dozen or more iron furnaces were put into blast in Alabama" (25) all of them powered by slave labor, and most of the slaves leased from the surrounding farms. During the war the confederacy even allowed "slave owners willing to transport their black workers to the new mining regions of Alabama and dig coal to avoid conscription into the southern armies." (26) As the war went on the need for slave labor in the iron works increased. Agents from factories like the Shelby Iron Works, just a few miles from the Cottenham farm, "scoured the countryside to boy or lease African Americans." (27) The book traces the rise of slave labor in industrial use through the story of a slave named Scipio, or Scip for short. One of the first slaves on the Cottingham farm, Scip sees the transformation of the land and then later his own existence when he is leased to the ironworks at Brierfield during the war. Also at Brierfield is the Rev Starr, still preaching, which sends Blackmon on another hostiry, tracing the life and times of Rev Starr, touch on his preaching of one message to white settlers and another to black slaves. Starr and Scip work at their respective tasks at the Brierfield ironworks until the Union army arrives, destroying the ironworks and shortly thereafter ending the civil war. After the war, with Alabama in ruins, tensions between whites and the newly freed black slaves increase. The large farms are no longer profitable and most the countryside and industry in in ruin. For Henry Cottinham though the change is significant. Freedom means, among other things a name "on a piece of paper 'Henry Cottinham.' No more was he one of the 'Cottingham niggers'." (49) Shortly thereafter Henry marries Mary, the Rev Starr proceeding. And that, notes Blackmon, is the beginning of what might be freedom. "Henry Cottinham was a man, with a name, spelled just the way he had always said it. Freedom was an open field, a strong wife, and time to make his mark." (49) "Surely, that was freedom." (49) ### Chapter 2 And Industrial Slavery ## Part 2 Harvest of an Unfinished War (Chapter 4 - Chapter 12) ## Part 3 The Final Chapter of American Slavery (Chapter 12 - Epilogue) While Blackmon focuses his analysis on the history of convict leasing, he acknowledges two additional forms of de facto slavery post-Civil War, peonage and sharecropping. Slavery by Another Name has been acclaimed by social and legal historians for its scrupulous investigation of a wealth of historical evidence that suggests “slavery,” in its essential definition, persisted long after its official criminalization. Blackmon begins with an introduction recalling his time working as a journalist for the Wall Street Journal. While reading a number of articles analyzing German corporations’ enrichment from the enslavement of Jews during the Holocaust, Blackmon wondered whether the same kind of analysis could be applied to the plight of African-Americans in the twentieth century. He wrote a piece exposing corporations’ exploitation of the forced labor of black people in the South after the Civil War. The article was met with a huge volume of reactions, which encouraged Blackmon to expand it into a book. Blackmon’s historical survey pivots around the life of a young black man, Green Cottenham. The record of Cottenham’s life is incomplete, but Blackmon recognized that such elliptical narratives are powerful in that they raise questions about the fact that history is constructed and how it is often concealed. Cottenham was born sometime in the 1880s to two freed slaves. In 1908, he was arrested on the formal charge of vagrancy, which was often a legal mechanism for imprisoning black people who wandered the country without white accompaniment. Alabama sold Cottenham’s labor on a recurring basis to the U.S. Steel Corporation, which sent him to work in a coal mine. He perished in the same mine. Blackmon contextualizes Cottenham’s tragic fate in the framework of what he calls “industrial slavery.” This framework used economic arguments to enslave convict laborers in mines and factories, a departure in setting from the cotton fields commonplace throughout the centuries of legal slavery. Although the Thirteenth Amendment ostensibly “freed” the slaves, the Reconstruction era in the South saw the introduction of a set of laws called the Black Codes, which made it very easy for black people to be criminalized and subsequently enslaved for simply existing. These codes involved the imposition of unaffordable fees for menial “crimes” that whites were not subjected to. If an individual could not pay the fees, he or she was sent to jails, which leased prisoners’ labor to mines, plantations, and lumber camps. These laws personally enriched white people, including Joseph E. Brown, Georgia’s governor, who helped legislate them in the first place. At the beginning of the 1900s, a number of federal lawyers, including Eugene Reese, fought the Black Codes on the grounds that they were forms of debt bondage. They lacked popular support in the South and little in the North, for their arguments, since the regions’ constituents personally benefited from black disenfranchisement. This resistance to change was compounded by the distractions of World War I and questions of immigration policy. When World War II began, the convict lease system was finally outlawed. Blackmon attributes this sudden resolution to the United States government’s desire to unify its people across political lines to support the war effort. At the end of the book, Blackmon exhorts his readers and modern historians to acknowledge the reality of forced labor, as well as the fact that rights to slavery can be encoded in law without being legalized outright. Though de facto slavery is, in his view, extinguished, he calls for a reinterpretation of this period of United States history that acknowledges its crimes.