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Reviewed by:
  • Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society
  • Mark Aldrich (bio)
Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society. By Aaron W. Marrs. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Pp. xvii+268. $55.

This short, deeply researched volume by Aaron Marrs represents the first modern treatment of antebellum southern railroads. Although the essay on sources reveals a wide reading of the secondary literature, the book is based largely on primary materials, especially company archives and annual reports, diaries, and much personal correspondence. This is not a nuts-and-bolts history of technology; rather, the focus is on the ways in which southerners conceived of, constructed, and interacted with the new technology. The first chapter ("Dreams") begins with the advocates; the book then progresses to railroads as engineering and construction projects. Chapter 4 ("Sweat") discusses labor. The remainder of the work covers the carriers as business enterprises, then discusses operating practices, travel, and the railroads' interaction with communities.

Readers will find much that is familiar. The book's strengths are the richness of the evidence and the author's imaginative extraction of meaning out of the everyday events that often fill personal papers and diaries. Thus passengers' comments on "the roar and rattle of the railroad cars" demonstrate that railroads were a "complete sensory experience,"while observations on the scenery reflect the "visual impact . . . closely associated with modernity" (pp. 141, 140). The discussion of slavery is richly detailed and reveals that some slave laborers received incentive pay for their work in addition to the compensation paid their owners.

Marrs stresses the many similarities between southern lines and those in the rest of the country. Because engineers drew from a common pool of knowledge, "there were no substantial differences between North and South when it came to engineering practice" (p. 53). Yet, while northern and southern engineers ordered their technology from the same menu, they must have made different choices given the sharply lower construction costs that characterized southern lines; one wishes that Marrs had probed the sources of this disparity a bit more deeply.

This rejection of "southern exceptionalism" (p. 25) constitutes the book's major theme. The South was not committed to a "pastoral ideal," and Marrs claims that southern railroads were not "beleaguered" nor were they constrained under the slave system to be "haulers of cotton and little else" (pp. 3, 5), arguments he associates with the work of Ulrich B. Phillips, A History of Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt to 1860 (1908), Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (1964), Eugene Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital (1983), Gavin Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development (2006), and others. Instead he investigates the "tension" between the social order and modernity, arguing that "white southerners sought to [End Page 510] make . . .modern technology compatible with slavery" (p. 198). And Marrs does provide an effective counterweight to claims that the South's commitment to a "pastoral ideal" retarded railroad progress. Readers see a sufficient number of progressive, entrepreneurial promoters and planters to make such a claim dubious in the extreme. Nor by the 1850s were southern lines simply cotton haulers; by then, on a number of lines, 40-50 percent of freight revenues stemmed from backhauls.

But while southerners may have wanted to combine modernity and railroads, Marrs is less successful in refuting the argument of Wright, and of John Majewski in A House Dividing (2000), that the slave system hindered railroadization because it retarded immigration and urbanization.

He claims that the burst of construction in the 1850s demonstrates that the South "embraced railroads" (p. 8). True, but as John Stover noted in 1978 in Iron Road to the West, even in 1860 southern lines remained inferior in many ways. Moreover, the deleterious effect of the slave system cannot be refuted by appealing to evidence of modernizing slave owners any more than the claim that the market system promotes pollution can be countered by noting that some businesspeople support the Sierra Club. Despite this caveat, readers will find Railroads in the Old South an informative and lively social history. [End Page 511]

Mark Aldrich

Dr. Aldrich is professor emeritus of economics at Smith...

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