The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America by William G. Thomas (review)

The subject of this book is modernity, national identity, and the railroads. It is divided into three parts. In the first part, exploring the building of the railroads in the 1850s, Thomas suggests that historians have underestimated the sophistication of southern railroads and their impact on the South. He builds on this argument in part 2, where he evaluates the strategic role of the railroads in the Civil War. In the final part of the book, he looks at the railroads in the war’s aftermath.

The first chapter begins with the story of Frederick Douglass’s escape from slavery on a railroad. Within a few hours, Douglass rode to the North and freedom. “Yet . . . Douglass claimed that slavery ‘has an enemy in every bar of railroad iron, in every electric wire, in every improvement in navigation’” (19). To Douglass, it seemed inevitable that free exchange of commerce and information would eventually undermine the essential conservatism of slave society.

By the word “yet” above, Thomas refers to the tendency to think of railroads as inherently antislavery. This tendency, he argues, blinded Douglass from seeing how southern railroads and slavery thrived together. Thomas’s extensive endnotes carry the weight of the historiographical debate. He may not necessarily refute the corrosive impact of modernity on master-slave relationships, however, so much as suggest that it reflects a northern version of modernity. In this sense, perhaps secession was in part an effort to defend the southern version of modernity from that of the North.

Thomas also disagrees with assessments of historians and geographers that the South’s railroad network lagged behind that of the North. He does not think the southern railroads were more focused on shipping agricultural products to the sea. He sees a similarly disingenuous spiderweb in northern and southern railroad maps, with both networks separated by hidden gaps and differing gauges. To him, both North and South were building similarly dynamic, modern economies based on exchange and two-way traffic. Full railroad cars rolled up to the sources of cotton and other products, and full cars were shipped back. In his online addendum to the book (http://railroads.unl.edu/views/item/Charts), Thomas notes that the value of nonagricultural goods often equaled that of agricultural goods on southern railroads. If other historians see the North’s economy as a more exchange-based, increasingly east-west corridor, rapidly solving its problems of differing gauges, and streamlining trunk lines to link the Atlantic with the Midwest, Thomas sees a similar type of network in the South. He challenges the view of the South’s railroads in 1860 as largely separated state by state and more extractive than exchange based—receiving more empty cars than full, shipping raw agricultural commodities off to market, sharing little nutritive value to the southern economy on the way—and, in a word, diarrheal.

Thomas argues that the South’s railroads were comparable to those of the North. He marshals data from geographic information system (GIS) surveys and other statistics to make his case. For example, he shows that the South’s “density of railroad structures . . . per 10,000 free residents” and its concentration of railroad tracks within fifteen miles of the population per ten thousand free residents in 1861 were comparable to those of the North (28). (“North” refers here to Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Iowa.)

In part 2 of his work, which examines the role of railroads in fighting the Civil War, Thomas connects the strategic importance of railroads to their symbolic, nation-building nature. He writes, “Ironically, Lincoln would never admit that the Confederacy had national aspirations that deserved serious respect, yet he saw most clearly the operational advantages that railroads offered” (104). Thomas sees irony here because even though Lincoln comprehended the strategic implications of the railroads, he missed the ways that they had...