Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society

• Introduction
• Chapter
• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. 1-10
• View Citation
• Additional Information

Introduction

While writing his memoirs in the 1870s, Kentucky papermaker Ebenezer Hiram Stedman recalled the rumors spread about railroads in the mid-1820s: “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.”¹ 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.” To Stedman’s neighbors in the 1820s, such rumors were beyond belief.

But in 1828 the doubters saw proof they could not deny when a model railroad arrived in Kentucky. Stedman reminisced about its effect on the community:

If i Rember Right This Summer, Cox, of Louisville of the Firm of Cox & Bridgford, Made a Small locomotive & portable Rail Road to Exhibit through Ky. He Come to Frankfort then to Georgetown. He laid his Rail Road in the old Masonick lodg Room & had it on Exabition for Sevral days. “Admitance one dollar to Se the Great wonder.” The Rails ware laid So that one Person Could Ride Round the Room. Evry one Must Ride By Steam & Such talk & Excitement at this time about Rail Roads. From hear he went to Lexington. The Excitement Got up By this little Moddle of a Rail Road In Lexington did not Stop till a Company was formed & a Charter obtained for the Lexington & Louisville Rail Road. A Flying Maching in this Day woold not cause one half the Excitement that [the] Rail Road [did.]

While Stedman would not live long enough to see a “Flying Maching,” he captured the wonder and excitement that accompanied the railroad. Rumors of an incredible machine had become a reality.

Just over thirty years after the “Moddle” caused a sensation in Kentucky, Samuel Edward Burges rode the railroad network of South Carolina to oversee his agricultural holdings, to work as a collector for several newspapers, and to attend horse races. During the first nine months of 1860, he was carried all over the state by seven different railroads: the Cheraw and Darlington, Wilmington and Manchester, South Carolina, Charleston and Savannah, Greenville and Columbia, Northeastern, and Blue Ridge. Yet Burges’s journal makes it clear that his encounters with railroads were very different from Stedman’s. Instead of describing his travels in breathless language or being mesmerized by a “Great wonder,” Burges 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 Other details were not worthy of his attention—the railroad simply did its job of carrying Burges around the state, at speeds and across distances unimaginable by Stedman just a few decades previously. In less than forty years, the railroad went from a curiosity that excited the imaginations of Kentuckians to an unquestioned, almost banal, part of the southern landscape.

This transition from novel to normal took place in a region that has not always been noted for its technological transformations. For many historians, the Old South’s foundation—slavery—prevented the region from reaping the benefits of modernization in the early nineteenth century. Modernization and progress are terms found throughout the historical literature, although they can be problematic because of the potential value judgments attached to them. These judgments stem in part from the course of American history: as Eugene Genovese has noted, the North’s victory in the Civil War “sealed the triumph of the association of freedom and progress over an alternate reading,” with slavery characterized as neither “progressive” nor “modern.” Thus, modernization, a term with a positive, forward-looking connotation, is more easily applied to the winners than the losers in the Civil War. And historians often use the general rubric of modernization to describe the transformations in politics, communications, social attitudes, technology, and transportation that were under way in the antebellum era. Broadly speaking, the South has not fared well compared to the North under such points of comparison. The North’s Civil War victory, combined with its innovations in these areas, helped lock in the meaning of modernization in the way that Genovese described. With its comparative lack of industry and an economy based on staple agriculture, the antebellum South seems underdeveloped. Perhaps most important, because the South’s wealth was in labor, successful planters plowed their money back into purchasing more slaves instead of investing capital in infrastructure or other industries that would create a diversified economy. Such lack of investment meant that railroads—although acknowledged to be present—are generally portrayed as less advanced and less important in the antebellum South than they were elsewhere in the United States.³

Some historians have argued that the comparative economic “failure” of the Old South extended into the realm of southern imagination as well. 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 for the southern states. Rather, the South remained enamored of a preindustrial, premodern “pastoral ideal,” which southerners used as a “weapon against industrialism.” Putatively poor economic performance and supposed ideological conservatism have combined to exclude the South from the story of the economic and technological transformations taking place in antebellum America. Southerners, so the argument goes, rejected “innovation, enterprise, and reform,” whereas their northern counterparts pursued these goals enthusiastically. One early historian of modernity in American life, Richard Brown, wrote that the Civil War provided “unexpected liberation” for southern whites as they were set free to join the North on the road to modernity. Thus, slavery in the South not only damaged the millions of African Americans who toiled under the slave regime but also prevented white southerners from enjoying the full fruits of technological development that were blossoming in the North.⁴

Such an analysis appears borne out when comparing northern and southern railroads by several statistical measures: southern railroads are the laggards. Tables 1 and 2 demonstrate how nonslaveholding states outpaced their southern colleagues. The states of the future Confederacy contained railroad companies that built fewer miles, hauled fewer goods, and earned less money. The South certainly played an important early role in the country’s railroad development with the advent of the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company, but economic depression in the early 1840s slowed growth substantially. As a result, construction in the 1840s took place mostly in the North while that in the South stagnated. Contemporaries noticed the comparatively slow construction in the South during the decade: Ralph Waldo Emerson criticized slavery in 1844 by declaring that slavery was “no improver; it does not love the whistle of the railroad.” The result was that southern states fell behind. By 1850 Georgia had the most mileage of any southern state, with 643 miles of track. This placed Georgia fourth nationally, behind New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. But it was a distant fourth, far behind Massachusetts’s 1,035 miles. Tiny Rhode Island had nearly as many miles (68) as all of Mississippi (75). Taking a cue from the comparative performance of northern and southern railroads, most accounts of southern railroading have concentrated on the poor performance of southern railroads. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips’s account of railroads as haulers of cotton and little else has remained the dominant interpretation for decades and is now conventional wisdom.⁵

TABLE 1
Comparative Statistics on Railroad Output by Region, 1839–1859

TABLE 2
Railroad Mileage by State

This image of beleaguered southern railroads seems odd when juxtaposed with the excitement that Stedman and his neighbors felt over the railroad’s arrival or the routine travel that Burges undertook on the eve of the Civil War. While in a broad comparative sense the South’s economy was underdeveloped compared to that of the North, historians have long wrestled with contrary evidence in terms of both economic performance and planter ideology. Some of this evidence comes from railroads, which underwent remarkable transformations in the 1850s. From 1850 to 1860 southerners began committing more money to railroads, and an explosion of mileage resulted. Here, the southern experience was closer to that of the Old Northwest, which also saw a dramatic increase in mileage. Ohio and Illinois displaced New York and Pennsylvania as the states with the most mileage in 1860; Virginia and Georgia leapfrogged Massachusetts to claim sixth and seventh place and Tennessee’s 1,253 miles trailed Massachusetts by only 11 miles. If the mileage gains were impressive, so were the percentage increases. Florida’s percentage increase was the most spectacular among southern states, from 21 miles in 1850 to 402 in 1860, a 1,814 percent increase. Like every state in the Old Northwest, every southern state more than doubled its mileage in the 1850s, a feat accomplished only by New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware outside of those two regions. State aid continued to flow throughout the decade, a successful one for southern railroads.⁶

Southern railroads’ extraordinary expansion during the 1850s demonstrates that the South’s ideological landscape contained more than a simple commitment to a “pastoral ideal.” Southerners themselves were embracing, demanding, and funding this development. Historians seeking to reorient our understanding of the southern economy have recently explored this different perception of southern attitudes. Enough acquisitiveness and industry were present in the South to spark a lengthy historiographic debate over how capitalist or noncapitalist the Old South was. Historians are now beginning to reframe the question: Walter Johnson, for example, has argued that historians need to stop treating capitalism and slavery as wholly distinct entities and to recognize their “dynamic simultaneity” in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic economy. Slave labor in America produced cotton, which was transformed into cloth by wage laborers and then purchased with those wages. Slavery and wage labor were not antithetical but were part and parcel of a larger system that called on the strengths of both when required.⁷

Framed in this way, the dichotomy of a “modernizing North” versus a “premodern South” holds less currency. Southerners certainly recognized that the times were changing and that they would need to alter their behavior to fit the times. “If we are content to remain stationary, while all others are on the advance,” railroad boosters warned Charleston residents in 1835, “we must of course be left far behind.” Historians have demonstrated that such attitudes stretched back for decades. Planters in the late eighteenth century, for example, formed societies to acquire and disseminate knowledge about agriculture. After the turn of the century, planters experimented with steam mills for processing the rice that their slaves grew. Planters refined their management methods, embracing the discipline that time management encouraged on southern plantations and northern factories alike. Merchants and other “men of capital” flourished in unlikely places, successfully “sculpting the agrarian landscape” to meet their own needs. Southern reformers eagerly adopted such traits as “system, uniformity, technology, organization, and bureaucratic control” in their quest for economic excellence, and progress extended into the social arena as southerners pursued moral reform movements such as temperance. Although moral reform obviously never extended to the abolition of slavery, planters in the early nineteenth century did begin reorienting their relationships with slaves from one of pure force to a more “organic” vision that led them to consider slaves as members of their extended family. In sum, southern planters were seeking their “own vision of a healthy modernity” throughout the antebellum era. Slaveholders adapted to keep pace with the changing economy in which they operated but held free wage labor at bay. We, of course, do not characterize slavery itself as modern or progressive, but white southerners did not see it in the same way. White southerners were interested in modern developments, either on a large scale such as railroads or a small scale such as management techniques on individual plantations. Yet they took these steps on their own terms, accommodating both slavery and their agricultural economy.⁸

Such an understanding of southern planters—one that allows for a willingness to reform coupled with an unwillingness to sacrifice slavery—alters our view of southern railroads and, in turn, our understanding of the Old South. Rather than simply functioning as markers of the South’s relative economic success or failure, railroads constitute the ideal prism through which to view how white antebellum southerners married conservative social ideals with forward-looking technological advancement. Although most historians have seen the South’s reliance on agriculture as preventing the region from pursuing innovation, the very success of cotton production drove planters and businessmen to push for the development of railroads, the most modern form of transportation available. To be sure, contemporaries were well aware of problems with southern railroads: civil engineer John McRae once complained that the South Carolina Railroad’s “Depots and workshops would be a disgrace to any company & ought to be burnt & would be if the present vigilance were not used.”⁹ But McRae’s lament—to the exclusion of other narratives—has prevailed in the limited historiography and left us with a warped and incomplete view of railroads in the antebellum South. Railroads had a far deeper meaning to southerners and southern society than as simple haulers of goods and people. As Stedman’s account demonstrates, railroads also excited southern imaginations. They could create or break communities, transform the ability of southerners to travel, bring white families together, shatter slave families, or carry sons off to war. Moreover, the presence of railroads in the antebellum South, as well as the ease with which slavery was integrated into railroad development, reminds us that modernity and progress cannot automatically be associated with freedom. Statistical analysis may allow us to understand some aspects of the South’s railroad history, but it cannot capture the full impact that railroads had on southern society. To fully appreciate the braiding of premodern and modern that the railroads represented in the antebellum South, we need to move beyond the traditional framework of business and economic history.¹⁰ Whatever financial problems may have plagued southern railroads, the expansion of the 1850s makes clear that before the Civil War southerners were on a trajectory that embraced railroads. In overemphasizing the economic troubles that railroads faced, historians have slighted their very real impact on the society that they served.

A fuller investigation of southern railroads can help illustrate the tension between the modern goals of antebellum slaveholders and their determination to achieve those goals while retaining and even bolstering their conservative social order. In order to understand southern railroads on their own terms, I explore four major themes. The first theme is that, to a large degree, southern and northern railroad experiences paralleled each other. Although one region based its labor system on wage labor and the other on slavery, when it came to the experimental technology of railroads both the North and the South found themselves in similar situations. Both regions of the country experimented with a new technology that they jointly imported from England. Both regions had a shortage of labor, skilled and unskilled, to build these massive works. Both regions faced engineering challenges and opposition to railroad development. Civil engineers were in short supply in the early republic, and qualified men moved around the country in search of employment without regard to the region in which they worked. Although there were unique challenges to construction in each region (on matters such as labor and topography), both were linked to a national framework of internal improvements, one that consciously excluded politics at an early date in order to preserve unity.

Although northern and southern experiences paralleled each other in important ways, one critical difference was the presence of slavery in the South, and this labor option forms the second theme. Upon close examination, railroads fit well with what Joyce Chaplin has termed the South’s “yes-and-no response to the modern age”: southerners pursued railroads vigorously but integrated this modern development into their slave society. While the broad range of reactions to the railroad means that it makes little sense to speak of an explicitly “southern” way of understanding the railroad, it does make sense to emphasize that the white South desired to modernize on its own terms. Slaves were integral to every aspect of railroad operation in the South, excluded from only a small minority of skilled positions, such as engineer or stationmaster. Slaves also rode the railroads and, in so doing, threw into relief southern norms over race. Despite the South’s commitment to racial slavery, railroads demonstrated that racial barriers were not entirely stable. Certain slaves, such as female slaves accompanying a mistress, were allowed to travel in coaches with white passengers, whereas others, such as gangs of agricultural laborers, were forced into seatless boxcars.¹¹

Third, southerners had a variety of responses to the railroad’s introduction. There is no single “southern” response to railroads because multiple groups of southerners encountered them in multiple ways. Religious leaders condemned trains as violators of the Sabbath. Whereas planters saw railroads as a boon to business and land values, horse-cart drivers viewed freight trains as competition for carrying goods between cities. To pedestrians, train tracks provided a well-marked path (albeit a potentially dangerous one). And to travelers, trains offered convenient routes to their destinations. Railroads were an integral part of southern communities, but it is important to remember that members of these communities interacted with the railroad in different ways. Southerners may have worried about the railroad’s implications or its potential for changes in social relations, but railroads themselves remained popular in the antebellum South, mimicking the reaction of the nation at large to machines. At bottom, the attempt to discern a “southern”—or, for that matter, “northern”—way of understanding the railroad obscures the diversity of reaction found in antebellum America.¹²

One of the crucial ways of understanding these reactions is by examining time, and the importance of time forms the fourth theme of this study. Railroads have a firm place in the historiography of time as the exemplars of scheduling and timetables.¹³ Yet the railroad’s time was far more complex. Railroads promised regularity but were unable to fully overcome the constraints imposed by nature. Railroad companies, never in full control of their own time, argued about the value of time with outside groups such as the U.S. Post Office Department (which demanded that trains run on Sunday) and Sabbatarians (who demanded that they did not). Workers in this ostensibly clock-driven enterprise found that their work was managed by the task at hand as well as the clock. Time was not simply a way to manage the safety of trains but also figured prominently in the elaboration of power relationships within the corporation as well as between the corporation and the communities it served.

By exploring railroads through these four themes—the parallelism of northern and southern experience, slavery, community relationships, and time—we reach a better understanding of southern railroads and of the complex society that they served. While these four themes inform the entire study, the seven chapters are arranged in a roughly chronological fashion. The first chapter, “Dreams,” recounts how southerners encouraged the development of railroads and also places southern railroad development in the context of the national internal improvements movement. “Knowledge” describes the engineering efforts that went into railroad development and investigates the work done by civil engineers and contractors to begin the construction process. “Sweat” examines labor arrangements during construction and charts the widespread use of slave labor on southern railroading projects. “Structure” details the corporate hierarchies of southern railroads. “Motion” looks at the challenges that railroads met in operation, in particular their handling of accidents. “Passages” investigates the travel experiences of southerners, white and black. The final chapter, “Communities,” looks at the different constituencies that railroads created, influenced, argued with, and even destroyed. The epilogue, “Memory,” assesses the place of railroads as a marker of the antebellum era in the memories of southerners after the Civil War.

A comprehensive look at railroads, one that encompasses both Stedman’s excitement and Burges’s indifference, will move us substantially beyond our current superficial understanding of this critical technological development. More important, railroads in the South illustrate the dual nature of the Old South’s society: striving for technological advancement while wholly committed to slavery. Indeed, the Old South was neither fully premodern nor modern but interwove aspects of both conservatism and modernity into its social fabric.