The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America by William G. Thomas

The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America by William G. Thomas published by Yale University Press (2011) $22.00 Paperback $15.99 Kindle.

First off, this is not a choo-choo book. Not that there is anything wrong with choo-choos. I rode on my first steam train up in Oneonta back when the DEW Line was still operating in Upstate New York and I have traveled coast to coast by rail. But you will find little mention of engines or rolling stock or even engineers in this interesting look at the ways the railroads helped shape the politics and economics of pre-war America, the strategies of the armies during the Civil War, and the societies of the Reconstruction Era.

I have not read many books devoted solely to the railroads in this era, so I can’t offer you a comparison to other works on this subject. I can tell you that I enjoyed reading the book and found some of the author’s interpretations challenging.

One aspect of the book that I had not thought much about was the way the railroads transformed the geography of the theaters of conflict. Rivers and mountains were important aspects of geography, but so were railroads. Another was the way that the railroads helped create a national consciousness among white Southerners. Finally, the modernity of Southern railroads had escaped me before I read this book.

Author William Thomas begins by refuting the notion that Southern railroads were less modern than those in the North. Southern lines used up-to-date equipment and engineering. Southern state governments were firmly committed to the linking of the region through the development of rail transit, and those governments were heavily involved in subsidizing the rail systems before the war.

Contrary to the commonplace that slavery was a medieval relic, the railroads were heavy users of slave labor, purchasing slaves right from the start. Slaves also collateralized loans to the lines.

According to Thomas;

Slave labor built thousands of miles of railroads in the South. This work went forward with picks and shovels, axes and wheelbarrows, mules and carts. Even more surprising, if not very well known at the time, southern railroads were quick to begin purchasing slaves to help operate and maintain their lines. And because the hard labor of construction was never finished…Far from being inconsistent or antimodern, therefore, white Southerners were committed to slavery as the central principle of their society’s modern development, and they used railroads to extend this vision. (p. 5)

Using slaves dramatically cut the cost of building railroads. By one estimate, slave-built roads cost half what Norther railroad miles cost to build.

The Southern states were much more likely to invest taxpayer money in the railroads than Northern states. While only about 20% of Northern railroad funding came from government, Thomas writes that “The southern states spent more than $128 million in state aid on railroad building before 1861. Government bonds and stock purchases paid for over 57 percent of the South’s total railroad investment.” (p. 26)

The railroads linked together most of the areas of the South with denser populations, helping to create a commonality of feelings among white Southerners. Thomas believes that the ability of well-to-do and middle class Southerners to travel about their region helped foster the sort of Southern white nationalism that was important in justifying their 1861 rebellion against the United States.

Of course, slaves were not the only workers on the Southern railroads. They typically made up less than 20% of a railroads operating force in the South. Even on slave-heavy construction crews, half the workers were likely to be Irish immigrants, the ubiquitous track layers of the North. The main disadvantage of Irish free labor, however, was the immigrants’ ability to strike or simply leave their jobs if wages were too low or conditions too dangerous.

In the North the railroads were bringing rapid changes, particularly in the peopling of the Midwest. Thomas writes that for every new mile of Midwestern railroad “brought about 32 Germans, 19 Irish, 7 British, and 200 (largely northern) Americans into the Midwest.” (P. 45)

The Northern railroads helped create a new kind of worker in America. Prior to the development of railroads, most American businesses were located in one city or one state. Many railroads had operations that extended through many counties, villages, cities and even states. Thomas writes about the way this new industry created a new labor force:

In one of the most important developments for northern society and politics, a new class of American workers emerged across the northern states with the rapid expansion of the railroads. While the southern railroads hired and bought slave labor, the northern companies turned to recent Irish immigrants and native-born laboring men from the cities and towns along their lines, and these workers were the vanguard of a modern, systematized, large-scale labor force. At first, the railroad companies employed dozens of workers, but by the 1850s the northern roads had hundreds, and then thousands, on their payrolls. One historian has estimated that the number of railroad workers tripled between 1840 and 1860, with the greatest surge in the 1850s. Most estimates suggest that there were about 15,000 railroad workers in 1850 and 75,000-100,000 by 1860. The B & O alone, for example, employed 6,467 workers in 1857 at its shops, construction sites, and stations. The company was the largest private employer in the city of Baltimore, one of the largest cities in the nation at that time. (p. 45)

In many way this new railroad workforce challenged the Republican conception of free labor as a man who worked in order to own. Republican manhood assumed an independent citizen who at some point in his maturing owned his own means of production, whether a farm or a workshop. The railroad worker was never going to own the railroad. He might advance within its ranks, he might even come to earn more than the independent farmer, but he was was always going to be an employee.

The Northern railroad worker, overwhelming white and often immigrant, would form a distinct class of men, different from both the Northern farmer and the Southern railroader.

The Northern railroads were literally “manned” by white men. Thomas writes that very few women were employed by them, except to clean bathrooms and stations, and these women were almost always Irish immigrants. He also notes that the railroads appear to have actively discriminated against African Americans. While the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O), for example, employed thousands of workers, only a dozen or so were black. The B&O boasted that it did not use slave labor, but it also did not use free black labor. Railroad work in the North was white work.

Railroad work was unique in its highly specialized division of labor. The B&O’s workforce of 6,500 was divided into over 300 job categories. Most of the categories involved men who did not operate the trains. Laborers, machinists, and carpenters all outnumbered engineers, brakemen, and conductors. Thomas writes that:

The diversity of the railroad jobs was remarkable in itself, but the geographic diffusion of them was wholly unprecedented. The B & O employees covered three states and stretched across dozens of counties at over 115 different work locations. Baltimore, not surprisingly, held the most workers—962 men worked the yards at Camden Station. But the top ten largest sites of the company’s workforce included Piedmont, Virginia, with 210 employees, and Martinsburg with 259. In remote, mountainous Marshall County, Virginia, a place farther west than westernmost Pennsylvania, the company had 340 workers, mostly carpenters, masons, and laborers, relining the Board Tree Tunnel. Over 200 employees were doing the same to the Welling Tunnel, located in Littleton, Virginia, just a few miles shy of the Pennsylvania state line. These tunnels and the men who were camped there working on them stood over 250 miles west of Baltimore. (p. 48)

If railroads helped create a sense of Southern white nationalism, they also played an important role in the creation of Southern armies. How miraculous it must have seemed to Virginians in the Spring of 1861 when they saw troops arriving from Texas and Louisiana just weeks after their own state had declared its independence from the United States. The coming together by rail of regiments from all over the South into the great Confederate armies fostered a sense that the Confederacy was a real and modern country that could stand on its own against “the North.”

This consolidation by rail was not limited to the South, of course. It was the nearly ubiquitous experience of new troops in 1861 to assemble at some local field, now called “Camp Scott” or some other name, march around until rail transit became available, and then march, with fanfare, to a local depot to embark on a train trip to the assembly points of the great armies. They would then travel hundreds of miles, across state lines, being met at station after station by cheering civilians. These trips convinced recruits that their’s was a national cause, and reassured civilians that the nation had the resources to get the job done.

The military commander with the most pre-war railroad experience was George McClellan, yet appears to have had few new insights into how railroads were transforming warfare. Thomas writes that during his Peninsula Campaign, McClellan and his subordinates rarely discussed the railroads in their reports. His objectives were cities, Richmond in particular, and not the railroads that were so vital in knitting together the South.

Thomas contrasts him with Sherman, the most railroad savvy warrior. Sherman’s lines of movement always took the rails into account and his objectives aimed at first cutting Southern railways to cripple the Confederate armies, and restoring them to allow for his own resupply.

Sherman’s prowess was more than just a result of his command taking place later than McClellan’s. Thomas argues that Sheridan, whose rise was also in 1863 to 1865, showed a much lower appreciation of the role of rail.