A Place Called Appomattox

2. The Railroad

2 THE RAILROAD Colonel McDearmon had taken a sabbatical from politics, leaving his seat in the House of Delegates to Henry Flood. During his sojourn at home, McDearmon funded the construction of a substantial building on an acre of land just south of the village, across the Prince Edward Court House Road. He carved the lot off from the Clover Hill parcel for a joint stock company that evidently hoped to found an academy there. No private school ever seems to have occupied the building, but eventually the overseers of the county poor took it over: here, probably, is where the most indigent Appomattox children learned their letters. Barbara Wright, a young local woman who suffered from skeletal deformities, devoted herself to their education from the inception of the new county. Even with major construction projects, the county seat soon proved too idle for McDearmon. He evidently felt that his own economic interests were not being satisfactorily addressed by his successor in the House of Delegates, and during the first fortnight of 1850 the former delegate announced that he would challenge the incumbent. Come spring, he beat Flood nearly four to one.1 While McDearmon conducted this campaign, the fruits of national policies he had espoused five years before were threatening the very unity of the federal government. The first of the territory won during the Mexican War, California, had applied for admission to the union as a free state: Southerners, most of whom wished to see slavery expanded into the Mexican cessions, rankled at what they perceived as an abridgment of their own manifest destiny. As the fateful year of 1850 began, there came a call for a convention of Southern delegates in Nashville—where, many feared, the main topic might be the dissolution of the United States. Hinting broadly Map 2. Appomattox Court House, 1850 at secession if the slave states’ rights were not recognized, the Richmond Enquirer maintained that the fate of the nation hung in the balance. Somehow things did not go that far, at least just then. The most radical slave power advocate, Senator John C. Calhoun, and the most stubborn foe of the radicals, President Taylor, both died within a few weeks of each other. That freed Henry Clay, a slaveowning Kentucky Whig, to forward a five-point compromise measure that acknowledged the constitutionality of slavery and promised the South a fugitive slave law (which would enable slaveowners to retrieve their property in free states) in return for allowing California into the union, forbidding the sale of slaves within the national capital, and prohibiting slavery anywhere north of Missouri’s long Arkansas boundary all the way to the Pacific. The compromise deflated the Nashville convention, and soon at least Whig newspapers in Richmond had returned to more fraternal descriptions of the Northern states.2 Secession, slavery, and compromise may have dominated much of the daily conversation at Clover Hill’s taverns and stores, and Samuel McDearmon raged against Northern ‘‘aggression’’ as loudly as anyone, but the issue that most concerned Appomattox citizens—and their new delegate to Richmond—was internal improvements. By 1850 an old plan to build a railroad from Petersburg to Lynchburg seemed to have come to life, and its route would take it right through Appomattox County; in { t h e r a i l r o a d } 25 early December (just as McDearmon resumed his legislative seat in Richmond ) the chief engineer of the Southside Railroad advertised for bids on grading and masonry along another sixteen miles of the road. That would bring it almost to Farmville by the first day of 1852. McDearmon would have wanted a hand in not only supporting that line but, if possible, in directing its course; he also harbored a special interest in building a plank road from Clover Hill to the James River canal at Bent Creek, all of which would require his attendance in the state assembly.3 No sooner had McDearmon arrived in the capital than he lent his support to a bill authorizing the state to subscribe to 60 percent of the Southside Railroad stock. Under previous incarnations that company had failed for lack of funds, and McDearmon was not about to let it happen again. The bill passed in February, and a few weeks later McDearmon met success in his campaign for a state-funded plank road to the county seat; plank roads...