CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by The University of North Carolina at Greensboro PETERSEN, KERI T., Ph.D. The North Carolina Railroad, Industrial Slavery, and the Economic Development of North Carolina. (2017) Directed by Dr. Watson W. Jennison. 241 pp. During the first half of the nineteenth century, western North Carolina leaders fought a sectional political battle against an eastern-led legislature to gain political power and construct the North Carolina Railroad (NCRR) through the Piedmont. Over the course of westerners’ push for internal improvements and the successful construction of the NCRR, western leaders grew from a marginal group on the periphery of North Carolina’s economy to controlling the future trajectory of the state’s economic development. The NCRR Company’s directors and contractors employed thousands of hired slaves to construct the railroad from 1851-1856, and hundreds more to maintain and operate trains, tracks, and facilities from 1856 through the end of the Civil War. The economic benefits of the new railroad combined with the opportunity to profit from regular slave hiring, extended the benefits of slavery to all classes of North Carolina’s slaveholders, and created jobs and economic opportunities for all white North Carolinians. The enslaved men who were hired out to the NCRR performed all of the hard labor that made the NCRR a reality. Slave hire contracts between masters and the company ripped these men away from their home farms and plantations, and sentenced them to a brutal existence in the NCRR’s labor camps—a place void of slave families and communities, and characterized by inadequate food, shelter, clothing, and medical attention. THE NORTH CAROLINA RAILROAD, INDUSTRIAL SLAVERY, AND THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF NORTH CAROLINA by Keri T. Petersen A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2017 Approved by Dr. Watson W. Jennison Committee Chair To Mary-Gray ii APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation written by Keri T. Petersen has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair _________________________________ Watson W. Jennison Committee Members _________________________________ Charles Bolton _________________________________ Mark Elliott _________________________________ David Zonderman ____________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee _________________________ Date of Final Oral Examination iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express the deepest appreciation to my mentor and committee chair Dr. Watson W. Jennison for his tireless guidance, patience, and encouragement throughout this long project. His scholarly wisdom and enthusiastic support for my research helped me to persevere through the many obstacles and challenges I encountered along the way. I would like to thank the members of my committee, Dr. Charles Bolton, Dr. Mark Elliott, and Dr. David Zonderman, for their generosity, guidance, and sincerity in helping me to make a significant contribution to the historiography of slavery in antebellum North Carolina. I would especially like to thank Dr. Linda Rupert, Dr. John David Smith, and Dr. David Zonderman for their generous and unwavering support of my scholarly and career goals. They have always been steadfast and enthusiastic cheerleaders of my work and infallible scholarly and personal role models. In addition, this project would not have been possible without the generous financial support from the United Negro College Fund/Mellon Faculty Doctoral Fellowship. To my Mom, Dad, husband, daughter, and my beloved sister and friends, I give my deepest gratitude. You have all inspired me, held me up when I needed it most, forced me to believe in myself, and refused to let me quit. Thank you. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................ 1 II. INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS AND THE RISE OF THE WEST IN ANTEBELLUM NORTH CAROLINA ......................................................... 21 III. MASTERS, CAPITALISTS, AND THE NCRR ................................................ 74 IV. WORKING FOR THE RAILROAD: HIRED SLAVE LABOR ON THE NCRR ......................................................................................................... 109 V. FROM PLANTATION TO RAILROAD ......................................................... 157 VI. CONCLUSION ................................................................................................. 214 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 222 v CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION In 1849 former North Carolina Governor, John Motley Morehead, addressed the North Carolina General Assembly to argue for increased funding for the construction of a state-financed North Carolina Railroad. Morehead declared, Let the North Carolina Railroad like a huge tree, strike its roots deeply into the shores of the Atlantic, and be moistened by its waters, and at last stretch its noble trunk through the center of the State, and extend its overshadowing and protecting branches through the valleys and along the mountain tops of the west, until it becomes indeed, the Tree of Life to North Carolina. Morehead’s prediction for the future of the North Carolina Railroad (NCRR) proved correct. After the road’s completion in 1856, the North Carolina Railroad did indeed become the “Tree of Life” to North Carolina as it quickly became the state’s original engine for economic development. The state legislature approved the company’s charter in 1849 and construction of the 223-mile railroad connecting Goldsboro and Charlotte, via Raleigh, Greensboro, and Salisbury began in January 1851.1 The significance of the 1 "The Tree of Life: A History of the North Carolina Railroad," (Raleigh: The North Carolina Railroad Company, 1972), 7, 9 -11. Presently the route of the NCRR extends from Charlotte to the port at Morehead City as a result of a merger with the Atlantic & North Carolina Railroad Company in 1989. 1 NCRR to North Carolina’s history is not a new story. The railroad was the first major east-to-west transportation route in the state and the key internal improvement allowing the state to transition from the “Rip Van Winkle State” of the early nineteenth-century to a successful, prosperous, and progressive state in the twentieth century. The NCRR opened the western part of the state to trade, increased commercial farming, and stimulated future transportation improvements, industrialization, urbanization, manufacturing, and cultural exchange. The lesser-known tale is that the NCRR was a product of elite western initiative that was conceived in and built through a fierce commitment to the institution of slavery as a capitalist, profit-making endeavor. From the mid-1850s through the end of the Civil War, the NCRR served as the foundation for the economic development of the state and ensured the spread and diversification of slavery in western North Carolina.2 This study focuses specifically on the founding, construction, and operation of the NCRR from the beginnings of a western-led movement for a centralized plan of internal improvements in the early nineteenth century through the Civil War and argues that 2 For this study “western” North Carolina and “western” North Carolinians refers to all counties or residents located in the Piedmont west of the coastal plain through the mountain counties. This term has been chosen because it reflects the usage of antebellum North Carolinians. With initial colonial settlement to the east, anything west of Johnston County was referred to as “the west.” “Eastern” North Carolina and its residents refers to the Coastal Plain and the region east of the boundaries of the following counties: Granville, Harnett, Cumberland, and Robeson. See Thomas E. Jeffrey, “Internal Improvements and Political Parties in Antebellum North Carolina, 1836-1860,” North Carolina Historical Review 55, no. 2 (April 1978): 155; Allen W. Trelease, The North Carolina Railroad and the Modernization of North Carolina, 1849-1871 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 12-14, xii, xiii. For more about the use of slave labor to build railroads throughout the South see Aaron W. Marrs, Railroads in the Old South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2009), 6. 2 through the creation of the NCRR, western leaders demonstrated that their vision for North Carolina’s modern future would not only include slavery, it would be built with it. This study also examines the impact of the NCRR on the lives of the enslaved men who built and operated it.3 Throughout the NCRR’s construction, the company and its contractors employed over 1800 enslaved men, and over 400 slaves made up the bulk of the railroad’s repair, maintenance, and operational labor force.4 Most of the NCRR’s enslaved laborers were rented from their owners who sent them off for a year or more at a time to work far from their home farms and plantations and to live and work in all-male, often isolated environments, removed from their friends, families, slave neighborhoods, and their owners. For those thousands of enslaved people who were forced to work for the NCRR, slave-hire and trading were not simply economic transactions; for each transaction