- The Iron Horse Turns South:A History of Antebellum Southern Railroads
When I was writing my dissertation and thinking about how to frame it, I was particularly struck by two pieces of evidence that I had discovered in my research. The first was a memoir, written in the 1870s, by a Kentuckian named Ebenezer Hiram Stedman. Thinking back to the 1820s, Stedman recalled some of the stories that he had heard about railroads. "For More than two years we heard most Remarkable Storyes about Rail Roads. Some People Said that They had Seen Cariges drawn on a Rail Road by Steam. He was put down as a Munchawson." Some of the stories were so fantastical that locals were probably right to doubt them: "Another Said he had Road on a Coach that went so fast that he had to Breath Through a Brass tube made on purpose So that the Speed woold not take their Breath away. & Some told Such Storyes that people woold not Believe anny Thing they woold Say."1 [End Page 784]
The second piece of evidence was the diary of Samuel Edward Burges of South Carolina. Burges rode the railroad network of that state to oversee his agricultural holdings, work as a collector for several newspapers, and attend horse races. During the first 9 months of 1860 he was carried all over the state by seven different railroads. Yet, upon reading Burges's journal it became clear that his encounters with railroads were very different from Stedman's. Instead of describing his travels in breathless language, he perfunctorily recorded the distances traveled and time required. On February 9, he wrote: "We reached Gourdin's T.O. a little before 2 A.M. . . . took the down train about 4:30 A.M. reached Charleston at 8 A.M. Stage 42 miles; N E R R 78 miles." Eleven days later he traveled on two railroads: "W & M R R 22 miles; C & D R R 40 miles." On June 14: "Left on N. E. R. R. at 2:30 A.M. reached Charleston at 8 A.M. N E R R 102 miles."2 No other details were worthy of his attention—the railroad simply did its job of carrying Burges around the state, at speeds and distances unimaginable by Stedman just a few decades previously. In less than 40 years, the railroad went from a curiosity that excited the imaginations of Kentuckians to an unquestioned, almost banal, part of the southern landscape.
I was intrigued by this transition from Stedman's experience to Burges's in part because it contrasted so remarkably with the standard historiographical accounts of the antebellum South and technology. Older accounts of modernization in American life have generally cast the South as resolutely premodern. For many historians, slavery's role as the South's economic foundation prevented the region from reaping the benefits of modern life because slavery is not a "progressive" or "modernizing" institution.3 Compared to the antebellum North or the Midwest, southern slavery and land use patterns restricted the growth of markets that would help drive industry.4 Slave owners did not generally invest their capital into the industry or infrastructure [End Page 785] that characterized more modern parts of the world.5 Such lack of investment meant that railroads—although acknowledged to be present—are generally portrayed as less important in the antebellum South than they were elsewhere. In his classic work on the power of technology in the American imagination, The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx argued that the locomotive constituted "the leading symbol of the new industrial power" in antebellum America. But Marx did not believe that the railroad's development had any particular meaning or impact for the southern states. Rather, the South remained enamored with a preindustrial, premodern "pastoral ideal," which southerners used as a "weapon against industrialism."6
As a result, the South has been partly excluded from the story of the economic and technological transformations taking place in antebellum America: southerners rejected "innovation, enterprise, and reform," while their northern counterparts pursued these goals enthusiastically.7 One early historian of modernity in American life, Richard Brown, wrote that...