- Essay on Sources
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- Johns Hopkins University Press
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ESSAY ON SOURCES
Primary Literature
One of the best sources for railroad history are the annual reports generated by the corporations. While the language in these reports is usually upbeat and attempts to present a positive assessment, companies also revealed a fair amount about their failures. These reports can be found in repositories across the South; I principally used reports located at the South Caroliniana Library in Columbia, the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, and the Virginia Polytechnic and State Institute in Blacksburg. While these reports have often been mined by historians for the financial data contained therein, they are often rich in social and cultural material as well.
The manuscript minutes for boards of directors meetings are also extant for several companies. These minutebooks provide information about the daily operation of companies and debates on topics such as slavery, time management, worker compensation, landownership, cooperation with other corporations, and the other topics discussed throughout this book. The most important collection that I consulted was held at Virginia Polytechnic and State Institute in Blacksburg, which contained the materials relating to predecessor companies of Norfolk Southern. After I completed my dissertation, the collection was returned to the Norfolk Southern Corporation in Norfolk, Virginia. I am grateful to Kyle Davis of Norfolk Southern for helping me adjust my citations; researchers should be able to locate the materials I used in the new archive. I was able to do important comparative work on northern railroads thanks to the extensive business history collections at the Baker Library of Harvard Business School. One collection there, the Stone and Harris collection, also contained material on the company’s southern operations.
Two other major manuscript collections are worthy of note. The Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad Company Records (1833–1909) at the Virginia Historical Society are remarkably detailed. Small scraps of paper and receipts allow for the reconstruction of slave labor and community relations for this particular corporation. The letterbooks of John McRae, held at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison, offer a thorough run of letters from a civil engineer who spent a significant portion of his career in the South and retired there when he stopped working as an engineer. Finally, travelers’ descriptions of travel and railroads that I quoted in the text were culled from a range of manuscripts and printed diaries and letters.
The scholarly literature on southern railroads dates back to Ulrich Bonnell Phillips’s A History of Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt to 1860 (1908; reprint, New York: Octagon Books, 1968), which, despite Phillips’s racial blinders, remains a useful work on railroads in South Carolina and Georgia. Other scholarly works of note from the pre–World War II period include Cecil Kenneth Brown, A State Movement in Railroad Development: The Story of North Carolina’s First Effort to Establish an East and West Trunk Line Railroad (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1928); Thomas D. Clark, A Pioneer Southern Railroad from New Orleans to Cairo (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936); Samuel Melanchthon Derrick, Centennial History of South Carolina Railroad (Columbia, S.C.: State Company, 1930); Balthasar Henry Meyer, ed., History of Transportation in the United States before 1860 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institute of Washington, 1917); and N. P. Renfro, The Beginning of Railroads in Alabama (Auburn, Ala.: n.p., 1910).
General works on railroad history, and its economic history, include Robert Fogel’s Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Economic History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964); Albert Fishlow, American Railroads and the Transformation of the Ante-Bellum Economy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965) and his more recent essay, “Internal Transportation in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” printed in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 2, edited by Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); John F. Stover, Iron Road to the West: American Railroads in the 1850s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); and George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York: Rinehart, 1951). Two other important works are James A. Ward’s Railroads and the Character of America, 1820–1887 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986) and Eugene Alvarez’s Travel on Southern Antebellum Railroads, 1828–1860 (University: University of Alabama Press, 1974), which survey the travel experience, including attention to time, accidents, car construction, and other topics. Examinations of individual southern states or corporations include Wayne Cline, Alabama Railroads (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997); Kenneth Noe, Southwest Virginia’s Railroad: Modernization and the Sectional Crisis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Merl Reed, New Orleans and the Railroads: The Struggle for Commercial Empire, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966); Allen W. Trelease, The North Carolina Railroad, 1849–1871, and the Modernization of North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); and Gregg Turner, A Short History of Florida Railroads (Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2003). Many graduate students have also adopted individual corporations as subjects of study in their master’s theses and doctoral dissertations. I have relied heavily on their expertise, as will be clear from individual citations in the notes.
In recent years, historians are beginning to survey a wider range of topics than simply economic performance. Although many of these books focus on the postbellum era, their insights can be fruitfully applied to the antebellum years. Mark Aldrich’s Death Rode the Rails: American Railroad Accidents and Safety, 1828–1965 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) is a fascinating analysis of accidents and includes some material on the pre–Civil War years. John E. Clark Jr.’s Railroads in the Civil War: The Impact of Management on Victory and Defeat (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001) is a comparative study of northern and southern management techniques during the war. The essays in Maury Klein’s Unfinished Business: The Railroad in American Life (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994) include a call for historians to consider the impact of railroads on society. Two recent works have examined railroads and gender: Barbara Young Welke’s Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Amy G. Richter’s Home on the Rails: Women, the Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
A number of historians have also begun investigating more closely the relationship of railroad development and politics. Robert G. Angevine’s The Railroad and the State: War, Politics, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004) discusses the relationship of the military with railroads through the nineteenth century, including the role that army engineers played in early railroad projects. Colleen A. Dunlavy’s Politics and Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States and Prussia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) is an outstanding example of comparative history and explores how different political systems affect railroad development. James W. Ely Jr.’s Railroads and American Law (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001) is a wide-ranging study that examines land grants, regulation, liability, accidents, and a host of other topics. John Lauritz Larson’s Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001) is a compelling study of the relationship between republicanism and public works. The challenge of regulating new technologies is analyzed in Steven Usselman’s Regulating Railroad Innovation: Business, Technology, and Politics in America, 1840–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Although they do not necessarily discuss the South in detail, important works on technology and American culture include Richard D. Brown’s Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600–1865 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976); John R. Stilgoe, Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983); John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776–1900 (rev. ed., New York: Hill and Wang, 1999); and Leo Marx’s classic The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (rev. ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
The nature of the southern economy has long been the topic of historiographic debate. Many scholars have argued that the South’s reliance on slavery prevented it from modernizing. I have found more compelling the work of scholars who attempt to draw out the complexity of the southern economy, both its capitalistic acquisitiveness and reliance on slave labor. Any investigation of the southern economy must necessarily grapple with the works of Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. In writing this book I found myself turning most often to Genovese’s The Political Economy of Slavery (2d ed., Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989) and The Slaveholders’ Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820–1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), as well as the jointly authored Fruits of Merchant Capital (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). In Slaveholders’ Dilemma, Genovese presents the argument that slaveholder’s sought their own “alternate route to modernity.”
Other historians have resisted an “either-or” distinction for the antebellum economy; refusing to paint the “capitalist North” and “slaveholding South” as polar opposites. Joyce E. Chaplin’s An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993) lays the groundwork in the eighteenth century for how antebellum planters would continue to press for advanced and creative solutions to their problems. Walter Johnson has demonstrated the links of commodification, markets, and slavery in Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). Tom Downey has illustrated the web of agricultural, commercial, and industrial development in antebellum South Carolina in Planting a Capitalist South: Masters, Merchants, and Manufacturers in the Southern Interior, 1790–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006).
Other works critical to my understanding of the southern economy include Peter A. Coclanis’s The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss, A Deplorable Scarcity: The Failure of Industrialization in the Slave Economy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); Sean Patrick Adams’s Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth: Coal, Politics, and Economy in Antebellum America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); John Majewski’s A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia before the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Gavin Wright’s Slavery and American Economic Development (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); and Peter Kolchin’s A Sphinx on the American Land: The Nineteenth-Century South in Comparative Perspective (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003). Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), edited by Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie, is the first volume in the New Currents in the History of Southern Economy and Society series, which promises to publish newer scholarship on the southern economy.
One particular portion of the antebellum southern economy—slavery—has an enormous literature all of its own. The works listed above on the history of individual southern corporations generally include information on slavery on those particular railroads. I have also relied on works that focus on nonagricultural slavery. Robert S. Starobin’s Industrial Slavery in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970) is a wide-ranging study of industrial slavery in a variety of contexts, including railroads. Charles B. Dew’s Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge (New York: Norton, 1994) is a remarkably detailed study of slave labor, which provides fascinating information about how individual slaves were remunerated for their labor. Theodore Kornweibel Jr.’s article “Railroads and Slavery” (Railroad History 189 [2003]: 34–59) gives an overview of the use of slave labor on antebellum railroads. Jonathan D. Martin’s Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004) is a long-overdue study of this important topic.
Some theoretical works have been important to my understanding of the history of technology. Although I have not necessarily incorporated their terminology into my own writing, their ideas have proved useful. In particular, I relied on Wiebe E. Bijker’s Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995); Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, eds., Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992); Wiebe Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History and Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987); and Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds., Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994). Historical works on early civil engineering include Daniel Hovey Calhoun, The American Civil Engineer: Origins and Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: Technology Press, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1960); Raymond H. Merritt, Engineering in American Society, 1850–1875 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1969); Elting E. Morison, From Know-How to Nowhere: The Development of American Technology (New York: Basic, 1974); and Terry S. Reynolds, ed., The Engineer in America: A Historical Anthology from Technology and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
I have benefited a great deal from the work of historians and social scientists who study time. Barbara Adam’s Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity, 1995) provides a theoretical framework for the history of time. Mark M. Smith’s Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997) has been an enormously important work for my own study, not only for its particular information about time management in the South, but also for its articulation of the South’s creation of an “alternate route” different from that in the North. Two other useful studies are Ian R. Bartky’s Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) and Alexis McCrossen’s Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000).
I have depended on three comprehensive books by John White Jr. for much of my technical knowledge about early railroads: American Locomotives: An Engineering History, 1830–1880 (2d ed., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); The American Railroad Freight Car: From the Wood-Car Era to the Coming of Steel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); and The American Railroad Passenger Car (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
Finally, my understanding of railroads has been informed in part by reading literature on railroads in other countries and time periods. Historians of Europe have long been discussing the social impact of railroads in more depth than historians of America. In addition, reading about topics such as labor relations and engineering challenges helped me understand that the South was not necessarily unique in suffering from these problems. Works of particular interest include Colin Divall and George Revill, “Cultures of Transport: Representation, Practice and Technology,” Journal of Transport History, 3d ser., 26 (March 2005): 99–111; Günter Dinhobl, ed., Eisenbahn/Kultur = Railway/Culture (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2004); Matthew J. Payne, Stalin’s Railroad: Turksib and the Building of Socialism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001); Ralph Harrington, “The Railway Journey and the Neuroses of Modernity,” in Pathologies of Travel, edited by Richard Wrigley and George Revill (Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000); and Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey (New York: Urizen, 1979).