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The entrepreneurs of the Blue Ridge trod a rugged business terrain. Like their counterparts in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, they contributed to the dizzying growth of American industry. Yet they also lived in and supported a society that countenanced slavery, and they defended it with hands-on brutality. The Civil War freed the slaves yet set back aspects of Blue Ridge industrialization. Nonetheless, at the war’s conclusion, the entrepreneurial energies of native white residents, newly reliant on wage labor, mingled with a fresh, stronger influx of northern capital. Old patterns continued, but with new intensity. Geological study grew more precise, the investments larger, the web of infrastructure tighter, business networks more important, environmental destruction more substantial, and profits more attractive. The corporatization of America, powered by changes outside the South but welcomed by many within it, engulfed the Blue Ridge in full force. The full price of slavery and the plantation system became clear only after the war. Like northern corporate pioneers, antebellum southern elites had shaped laws conducive to their economic interest. Even in the midst of political democratization after the American Revolution, businessmen above the Mason-Dixon Line maneuvered around all obstacles in the way of their profit-oriented corporations.1 Southerners likewise turned to corporations when the occasion demanded, but in the region at large the predominance of plantations and the lack of major cities meant that the need for and experience with corporate business life remained relatively rare. Entering the post–Civil War period, the corporate form of business organization showed its true national potential, but the South had to take a junior role; white men’s concentrations of capital in slaves had vanished. New York City’s banks and financiers—with the aid of an excellent harbor, the Erie Canal, the demise of the Second Bank of the United States, the blossoming Wheels and Rails in the New America Chapter 3 74 Wheels and Rails in the New America 75 of the railroad industry, and Civil War profits—surpassed even their peers in Philadelphia. In the postwar era, the financial and corporate leaders of both cities—on Wall Street and Chestnut Street—continued to wield great influence in the South. Something new had sprouted in the form of large private corporations, but they grew most quickly under the northern sun because the South had focused on exploiting its comparative advantage in commercial agriculture. Thus, even along the New River, where industry had dug in from the beginning of European settlement, northern companies came to dominate. Slave and Free By 1859, America’s mounting sectional tensions had brought some uncertainty to the businessmen working back and forth across the Mason-Dixon Line to develop the region’s minerals. In fact, residents of the upper New River valley had long encountered the debate about free labor and slave labor that occupied all Americans caught up in the expansion of market relationships . The New River counties had a good view of part of that expansion as slaves from Virginia and Maryland moved southwestward down the mountain turnpikes. In the early 1840s, British geologist G. W. Featherstonhaugh saw slave traders preparing to force a group of slaves to cross the New River in, likely, Wythe or Pulaski County. He recalled, “Just as we reached New River, in the early grey of the morning, we came up with a singular spectacle, the most striking one of the kind I have ever witnessed. It was a camp of negro slave-drivers, just packing up to start; they had about three hundred slaves with them, who had bivouacked the preceding night in chains in the woods; these they were conducting to Natchez, upon the Mississippi River, to work upon the sugar plantations in Louisiana. . . . The female slaves were, some of them, sitting on logs of wood, whilst others were standing, and a great many little black children were warming themselves at the fires of the bivouac. In front of them all, and prepared for the march, stood, in double files, about two hundred male slaves, manacled and chained to each other. I had never seen so revolting a sight before!”2 Most white New River residents did not share the revulsion.3 In his account books, David Graham and his managers marked down emotionless remnants of both the quotidian rhythms of a nineteenthcentury iron-making enterprise and the extraordinary moments that changed black workers’ lives. For instance, on August 20, 1828, a man “got [18.191.108.168] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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