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the
    Cot ingham clan. The war years were a con icted 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. Yet at the same time, slaves were also servants and
    protectors of their white masters. In the woods near the Cot ingham
    home, slaves guarded the horses and possessions of their white
    owners, hidden there to avoid raids of northern soldiers. Some
    slaves took the opportunity to ee, but most stayed at their posts
    until true liberation came in the spring of 1865.
    The foundry and arsenal at Selma and the simple mines and
    furnaces around the Cot ingham farm that supplied it with raw
    materials had taken on outsized importance as the war dragged on.
    The Alabama manufacturing network became the backbone of the
    Confederacy's ability to make arms,25 as the Tredegar factories were
    depleted of raw materials and skil ed workers and menaced by the
    advancing armies of Ulysses S. Grant. Preservation of the Alabama
    enterprises was a key element of a last-ditch plan by Je erson
    Davis, the southern president, to retreat with whatever was left of
    the Confederate military into the Deep South and continue the
    war.26
    For more than a year, Union forces in southern Tennessee and
    northern Alabama massed for an anticipated order to obliterate any
    continued capacity of a rump Confederate government to make
    arms. Smal groups of horse soldiers made regular probing raids,
    against minimal southern resistance. In April of 1864, Alabama's
    governor wired Confederate Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk, commander of
    rebel forces in Alabama and Mississippi, imploring him to send
    additional troops. "The enemy's forces …are fortifying their position
    with their cavalry raiding over the country…. It is certain that the
    with their cavalry raiding over the country…. It is certain that the
    forces wil work way South and destroy the valuable works in
    Central Alabama…. Can nothing be done?"27
    Final y in March 1865, a mass of 13,500 Union cavalrymen
    swept down from the Tennessee border, in one of the North's
    penultimate death blows to the rebel ion. Commanded by Gen.
    James H. Wilson, the Union army, wel dril ed and amply armed,
    split into three huge raiding parties, each assigned to destroy key
    elements of Alabama's industrial infrastructure. Moving
    unchal enged for days, the federal troops burned or wrecked iron
    forges, mil s, and massive stockpiles of cot on and coal at Red
    Mountain, Irondale, and Helena, north of Bibb County. On the
    morning of March 30, Union soldiers slogged down the rain-
    drenched roads into Columbiana, destroying the machinery of the
    Shelby Iron Works, shoving its equipment into local wel s and
    streams, and freeing the slaves critical to its operations.
    Against nearly hopeless odds, Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former
    slave dealer who had become the South's most storied horseman,
    met the blue advance at a point south of the town of Monteval o.
    Skirmishing along Mahan Creek, just miles from the Cot ingham
    farm, Forrest's disorganized command could only harass Wilson's
    advance. Northern troops took the Brier eld furnace on March 31,
    and left it a ruin.
    Outmanned and outfought, with ooding creeks blocking his
    maneuvers, Forrest, himself slashed by a saber in savage ghting on
    April 1, retreated for a nal stand at Selma. The next day, Wilson's
    troops charged the fortified industrial complex in Selma, and routed
    Forrest's remaining four thousand men. The Confederate general
    slipped away with an escort of one hundred soldiers, massacring as
    he made his escape most of a contingent of twenty- ve sleeping
    Union scouts he stumbled upon in a field.
    Federal forces captured nearly three thousand of Forrest's men,
    along with more than sixty pieces of eld cannon, scores of heavy
    artil ery guns, nine factories, ve major iron forges, three foundries,
    twenty locomotives, immense quantities of military supplies,