Railroads and Slavery...

[5fish]

Slavery is considered an agricultural phenomenon but southern railroads used and brought slaves... by the hundreds...

https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/been-workin-on-the-railroad/

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Ballton’s experience on the railroad was not unusual. Slavery is often thought of as a primarily agricultural phenomenon, but thousands of enslaved blacks worked on the railroads right up to and during the Civil War, grading lines, building bridges and blasting tunnels. They hauled timber, cut wood and shoveled dirt and stone. Skilled slaves, especially blacksmiths, stone masons and carpenters, worked on the railroads too.

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Railroad companies and contractors hired slaves by the hundreds; they also purchased slaves directly, in lots of 50 or more. In fact, by the 1850s, the South’s railroad companies could be counted among the largest slaveholders in their regions. They even developed special accounting entries on their balance sheets to show the value of “the Negro Fund.” In the South Carolina Railroad’s 1857 annual report, for example, the company listed 57 slaves in its possession. In 1859, its holdings had almost doubled, to 90 slaves. Confederate railroads bought and hired slaves right up to the end of the war, even as slavery fell apart wherever the Union Army opened corridors of freedom: in 1863 the Virginia Central Railroad purchased 35 “negro men” for $83,484.60.

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A whole generation of black railroad workers came out of the Civil War. Some continued to work for the railroads – over half of all railroad workers in Virginia were African-American in 1880. But others migrated across the South and out of the South, like Ballton, seeking opportunity and acting on what they heard. Their experience in the first months of the Civil War in 1861 and 1862 suggested an important truth: that they could turn enslavement on the railroads into freedom, that they could undermine, and even target, the Confederacy’s key military structures, and in so doing could challenge the Confederacy’s claim as a modern nation built around railroads and slavery.

 

[5fish]

Here are some more stories... lost the story of slavery and railroads...

https://www.nrrhof.org/single-post/2017/11/06/Stories-Lost-Slavery-and-the-Railroads

…nearly every rail line built east of the Mississippi River and south of the Mason-Dixon line before the Civil War was constructed or run at least partly by slaves.”[1]

Before the Civil War, railroads in the South were built almost entirely by African American slaves. The antebellum South built a grand total of 8,784 miles of track.[2]

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And while other industries preferred to purchase slaves, railroad companies preferred to ‘rent’ them from owners. This allowed the railroads to move their resources easily around large geographic areas. As Joseph Kornweibel, Jr., notes in his book, Railroads in the African American Experience: A Photographic Journey, “…the slave economy was flexible and elastic, just what the often capital-strapped new railroads needed.”[5]

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Slaves would have hauled timber, cut stone and blasted tunnels. If the slaves were skilled laborers, they would have been hired or rented to do stone masonry, carpentry and metalwork.[9] The slaves worked in incredibly difficult and dangerous conditions. Little regard was given to their wellbeing, and contractors would rather forego adequate housing for crude tents. From explosions to cholera to frostbite, owners who rented out slaves knew they might not get them back, which prompted them to take out insurance policies.[10] The slaves worked next to freemen who were paid—both black and white.[11]

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Conditions for these slaves only worsened with the advent of the Civil War… but for some, the knowledge they gained during this time would later prove essential during the ensuing battle between the Confederacy and the United States.

 

[5fish]

MORE!!!

Slaves "formed the backbone of the South's railway labor force of track repairmen, station helpers, brakemen, firemen and sometimes even enginemen," wrote University of Pennsylvania historian Walter Licht in the book Working for the Railroad.

http://usslave.blogspot.com/2011/02/rail-networks-own-lines-built-with.html

North America's four major rail networks — Norfolk Southern, CSX, Union Pacific and Canadian National — all own lines that were built and operated with slave labor.

Historians say nearly every rail line built east of the Mississippi River and south of the Mason-Dixonline before the Civil War was constructed or run at least partly by slaves.

Ted Kornweibel, a professor of Africana studies at San Diego State University, has documented use of slaves by 94 early rail lines. By his count, 39 now belong to Norfolk Southern, based in Norfolk, Va.; 36 are owned by CSX of Jacksonville, Fla.; 12 are part of Omaha-based Union Pacific; seven belong to Canadian National, headquartered in Montreal.

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Corporate records of the time show railroads bought slaves or leased them from their owners, usually for clearing, grading and laying tracks. Enslaved workers frequently appear in annual reports as line-item expenses, referred to variously as "hands," "colored hands," "Negro hires," "Negro property" and "slaves."

The president of Union Pacific's Memphis, El Paso & Pacific Railroad wrote to stockholders in 1858 that slaves were the "cheapest, and in the main most reliable, most easily governed" laborers.

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Railroad records contain thousands of lease agreements with slave owners. A single volume of records for the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad, now owned by CSX, covering just two months in 1850 contains 47 agreements with slave owners.

The link has photos of trains...!!!

 

[5fish]

John Henry...

John Henry said to his captain:
"You are nothing but a common man,
Before that steam drill shall beat me down,
I'll die with my hammer in my hand."

 

[Union8448]

Point well taken, that slaves worked on railroads. But the question is different. Did the railroads tie the paid labor states together? And did the mobility that they created heavily impinge on the practicality of slavery in the border states? It could be that reaction to the John Brown raid was so extreme because the southerners knew that similar raids, conducted more efficiently, were nearly inevitable?

 

[Union8448]

The other aspect of the railroads is that they made it much easier for the newspapers to share and steal each others content. And the also made the distribution of printed material cheaper.