Southern Antebellum Railroads

Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. A History of Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt to 1860. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011. 432 pp. $16.95, paper, ISBN 978-1-57003-965-2. Reviewed by Brian Schoen Published on H-Southern-Industry (September, 2011) Commissioned by Tom Downey (Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Princeton University) In 1908, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips followed up work builds on and revises the scholarship of his dissertation on Georgia politics with A History Phillips and others regarding railroads and their of Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt to place in southern economic life. 1860. The work was well received and helped In its original form, History of Transportation launch Phillips toward a prominent career as a contains an analytical introduction and conclu‐ leading scholar in the feld of slavery and south‐ sion that frames eight chapters tracing early ern history. For decades, historians retreated into canals and turnpikes in the South Carolina and the image of the pastoral South that Phillips--espe‐ Georgia low country at the end of the eighteenth cially in his later works--helped create. Yet in the century through the building of various railroads last few decades, scholars have begun to examine emanating from Charleston and then to Georgia’s the antebellum period with an eye toward non- various projects, which ultimately placed it at or agrarian aspects of southern society, such as in‐ near the top of southern railroad mileage and dustry, the rise of an urban middle class, and edu‐ profits. A penultimate chapter deals with smaller cational structures in the South. The University of projects and roads. Methodically using newspa‐ South Carolina Press’s reprinting of Phillips’s pers, railroad convention reports, and company work in its Southern Classics Series is usefully records, Phillips traced the ways that boosters en‐ timed to provide an opportunity for us to think visioned projects, how they sought to implement about where we have been and where we now them, and toward what ends. Today, these de‐ are on this important subject. A very insightful tailed chapters remain a useful entry into the new introduction by Aaron W. Marrs helps guide projects they describe. Phillips concluded that the way. Author of Railroads in the Old South: some, like Georgia’s Western-Atlantic line, were Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society (2009), Marrs successful because of their ability to tap into west‐ is ideally suited to the task as his own important ern plantation regions by moving cotton to east‐ H-Net Reviews ern commercial towns and ports. For the most a noted Mississippi cotton planter, tax collector, part, however, Phillips argued that results “were a historian, and racial theorist. Stone’s influence disappointment” and “failed to enlarge greatly the and Phillips’s prejudice help explain why, over the volume or the scope of industry.” That failure was protest of the press’s editors, he dedicated the due in part to a lack of manufacturing and diver‐ book to the “Dominant Class of the South: who in sification as well as the “greatest obstacle,” name‐ the piping ante-bellum time schooled multitudes ly, “the dependence upon negro labor and the white and black to the acceptance of higher stan‐ maintenance of slavery as a system for its con‐ dards who in the war time proved staunch and trol” (p. 388). Phillips’s assessments reveal much who in the troublous upheaval and readjustment about the particular time period in which he which followed wrought more sanely and more wrote, but also his own unique background as a wisely than the world yet knows” (p. xxxvi). That Georgian who styled himself as a translator of remarkably revealing--and insensitive--symbol‐ southern history to a national audience. ism comes as little surprise to historians who now Although Phillips is often placed alongside associate Phillips with his advisor, William Dun‐ other Progressive Era historians, this particular ning, and his “school” of southern history that of‐ study reveals the voice of a New South booster as ten ignored and in other instances fattened and much as a capitalist critic. Frank Norris’s scathing even denigrated people of African descent. critique of the Southern Pacific Railroad’s monop‐ Though slavery is scarcely discussed in the body oly, The Octopus, had been published in 1901, yet of this work, which is concerned primarily with Phillips rejected such a harsh assessment of ante‐ the economics of the railroad business from the bellum precursors. His railroad executives were perspective of profits and mileage, Phillips gave it “sane”; there “was no stock jobbing in the feld”; causal power in explaining what he saw as the re‐ and their focus remained on making money with‐ gion’s relative lack of success in the railroad busi‐ in a primarily agrarian society and serving civic- ness. minded goals, including an overriding desire to Indeed, History of Transportation anticipated “foster the success of the South in its race with the some of the views about slavery and race that North” (p. 387). This conclusion may result par‐ Phillips worked out in subsequent books, most fa‐ tially from the work’s limited source base. mously, in American Negro Slavery and Life and Through the lens of leaders and promoters, rail‐ Labor in the Old South (1918). For starters, slav‐ roads offered an unalloyed benefit for society, and ery “locked up” capital--limiting industrial and to a great extent Phillips shared their attitudes to‐ railroad development--and ensured that railroads ward progress for the late nineteenth- and early served almost exclusively agricultural interests. twentieth-century South in which he was raised Secondly, Phillips believed that “Negro labor was and would return in 1908, leaving the shadow of as a rule inefficient for any tasks but those of Frederick Jackson Turner at the University of Wis‐ crude labor” (p. 388). Thus, to Phillips, the South consin to accept a teaching position at Tulane. He did not have a class of labor capable of building also had an underlying sympathy for what he per‐ railroads as successfully as their northern coun‐ ceived to be the plight of antebellum elites. terparts. Finally, Phillips’s presumption of African As Marrs’s introduction reveals, Phillips had American passivity led him to conclude that rail‐ difficulty getting this book published. Columbia roads had little effect on slaves or slavery. Rail‐ University Press agreed to print it only at the au‐ roads, he noted, made slaves “more easily mobi‐ thor’s expense, and that required Phillips to have lizable by their masters, but otherwise affected the book underwritten by his friend Alfred Stone-- them very little in slavery times” (p. 395). 2 H-Net Reviews Recent work, including Marrs’s own book, and benefited Georgia’s budding industrial class have significantly revised and in some instances and suggest that their services reached a broad overturned Phillips’s conclusions, while opening swath of that state’s population.[6] Appreciating new areas for future scholarship. For example, the various groups who competed to build rail‐ much new research reveals that what Anthony E. roads or sought to benefit from them undermines Kaye has called “the second slavery” extended another of Phillips’s conclusions: that railroads well beyond agricultural pursuits. Newer studies generally united white southern society and poli‐ of southern railroads show that slaves were tics. It appears that, as in the North, the pragmatic known by contemporaries to provide valuable and political processes of designing and building skilled labor for railroad companies.[1] Whether railroad systems generated both class conflicts purchased by railroad companies or hired from and severe competition between localities that local slaveowners or private contractors, slaves knew the outcome could make or break their eco‐ were used by over three-quarters of the 118 nomic and political future. Far from leaving the southern railroads in operation before the Civil South static, southern railroads introduced new War.[2] Marrs and others provocatively suggest ideas; new technologies; new ways of doing busi‐ that slavery, “far from standing in the way of ness; and for many, the reorientation of daily life southern progress, facilitated progress.”[3] Cast‐ around train timetables.[7] ing slaves as actors, and often as resistors, also al‐ Recent scholarship also begs the question of lows us to appreciate how dramatically railroads how unsuccessful southern railroads really were. affected their lives: as a means to accelerate their When compared to the North they seem inferior, forced migration westward; as a means to provide though the gap may have been closing somewhat an under-examined information network; or, as in the 1850s. Global comparisons, however, sug‐ in the case of Frederick Douglass, as a means for gest an even more complicated view. Richard Gra‐ escape. ham, for example, shows that the Deep South’s For Phillips, southeastern railroads served victory over Brazil in capturing global cotton mar‐ planters’ interests and thus had little transforma‐ kets had a great deal to do with its superior trans‐ tive effect on the South’s economy. Yet more re‐ portation networks.[8] Contemporaneous British cent studies of non-planters and the growth of manufacturers who were frustrated with India’s southern towns have shown that more than just slow development as a raw cotton source made planters invested in railroads and that they were the same point. However, many southern railroad designed for more than just agricultural reasons. boosters pointed to Cuba’s fast developing trans‐ Yet as Tom Downey’s study of upcountry South portation network with some degree of envy. Carolina has shown, by 1860 “corporations ... as Phillips’s narrow regional and national ap‐ well as the rambunctious merchant class ..

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