The Roots of Modern America Blog

July 7, 2009

Re-examining South Carolina’s Secession–the story of the Blue Ridge Railroad

Filed under: Civil War, U. S. South, slavery, technology — Tags: , , , , , — wthomas @ 10:14 am

If we are to explain South Carolina’s secession in 1860, we might look more closely at its fractious legislative struggle over railroad development. South Carolina, like Virginia and Georgia, embarked on major railroad projects aided by state finances and backing. These projects aimed to break the mountain barriers separating them from the rest of the South and fulfill the idea that Nature favored their region, a persistent theme in the late 1850s among Southern expansionists. It became an important refrain in the years leading up to secession. The political implications of the notion could not be ignored: they hinged on what Nature bestowed and how people reconfigured Nature to their own advantages. The basis for most of these claims came from the experience with railroads. Up and down the mountainous chain separating the seaboard from the interior, projects got underway in the 1850s to break through Nature’s barriers and substitute for them a second Nature of rails, tunnels, embankments, grades, and structures.

The South Carolina Blue Ridge Rail Road, for example, was planned to connect Charleston to the west across the mountains, much like the Virginia project to tunnel through the Blue Ridge and the Baltimore and Ohio’s effort to break through the Alleghenies. For South Carolina the stakes placed on the Blue Ridge Railroad were especially high and so were the expectations. The road’s new president, Edward Frost, a Charleston attorney turned railroad investor, argued that once built the railroad would reshape the geography of the state and that “Charleston will then be 46 miles nearer to Knoxville than Richmond and 96 miles nearer than Savannah.” Both of these rival cities with their railroads had drawn off the trade from the West and left South Carolina imprisoned by its mountains. He urged that stockholders and legislators to look at a map and they will see that “without the Blue Ridge Road, Charleston and South Carolina have little opportunity of sharing in the advantages of a commercial connection with the navigable waters of the West.” In fact, Frost argued, the neighboring states constructed railroads that “belt” South Carolina and once North Carolina completed its work “then the cordon of railroads around South Carolina will be complete and close.”1

If the state was about to be shut off from the modern commercial economy developing on its very borders, enabled by the railroad’s capacity to conquer nature, then South Carolina, according to Frost, had the opportunity to open itself up. He would not predict the Blue Ridge Railroad’s earning potential once it was completed because the importance of the road would be measured “by the trade which it will, in time, attract.” He pointed out instead that other railroads outperformed even their most optimistic projections and he concluded that a maxim could be drawn from these comparisons: “railroads create the trade they need.”

The idea was alluring. It went beyond confidence or optimism. It was understood as a kind of natural, economic, and technological law whose operations were in effect whether the citizens of a state or city wished it or not. Frost pointed out that wheat traveled 456 miles from Knoxville to Richmond, and much of it further to Baltimore. “Why may not Columbia, having advantages of water power greater than Richmond, and as favorably situated, not manufacture wheat, with a carriage from Knoxville of 321 miles?” Frost asked.

South Carolina’s isolated position on the ever-changing map of railroad growth in the 1850s worried Frost. He cautioned his stockholders as well as the public and the legislature that the state was one of the smallest “in territory and one of the least in white population, while it is one of the wealthiest, of the Southern States.” Only “moral force and character” had allowed it to remain a leader, but railroads and the reconfiguration of the South with them threatened South Carolina’s position, and presumably its wealth. The Blue Ridge, he argued, was too large in scale for private capital to complete. The railroad was a “great national highway, uniting the geographical divisions of the continent, across the great mountain barrier which separates them.” And railroads of this magnitude, including those already built by neighboring states and others under construction, “superseded” every other mode of trade. “Commerce is no longer dependent on the natural advantages of sites at the estuaries of large streams,” Frost maintained, “Even the Mississippi cannot protect New Orleans from the successful rivalry of railroads.”2

Despite the excitement and progress on the Blue Ridge tunnels and tracks in 1858, the road again needed more capital by the end of the year. Frost and the company’s directors appealed to the state legislature to amend the original charter and authorize another one million dollars in state aid and bonds. The fight in the Legislature over the Blue Ridge Railroad funding grew heated and intense debate followed. Men who had supported every other railroad in the state turned against the Blue Ridge. They maintained that the road was too expensive and too speculative, that it could never pay for itself, and that if private capital could not be raised then the state should not built it. Supporters held that the state debt would not be materially affected by an additional two million dollars, that the state could (and probably should) raise taxes, and that other southern states were taking on similar levels of state aid. They pointed to Georgia which invested $5 million in the Western, and Virginia which spent $3 million on its Blue Ridge Railroad and Tunnel and was busy undertaking a $12 million project on the Covington & Ohio. Besides, the bill’s proponents argued, the State legislature was already spending $3 million on a lavish new state house widely seen as an extravagance.3

When the legislature of South Carolina voted to withhold continued public support for the Blue Ridge Rail Road in late 1858, all of the work on the railroad and the tunnel stopped. The Charleston Mercury mocked the legislature and the railroad’s critics as shortsighted and foolish. Who would not “feel ashamed” of the “inconsistency and irresolution” that the state “has exhibited before the world?” the Mercury asked. Too many of the state’s leaders, it argued, were measuring the impact of the railroad “by the little pocket rule of immediate dividends.” Instead, “we look upon it as a project on a grander scale, and destined to confer measureless benefits–social, political, and commercial.”4 In the South Carolina House, Christopher Memminger argued that “modern nations,” like the ancient Greeks and Romans before them, build monuments to “their genius and enterprise,” but the abandonment of the Blue Ridge left “half finished tunnels,” “crumbling bridges, and ruined cuts through hills and mountains” as a monument to the state’s “inconstancy and feebleness.” Whether South Carolina could avoid isolation and encirclement and join the rapidly evolving Southern railroad commercial network remained an open question after 1859. In the coming years South Carolina’s desperate need for a unified South only grew more pronounced.5

The prominent railroad engineer and friend of John C. Calhoun, A. H. Brisbane was appalled at the turn of events. Brisbane asked his South Carolina readers what Calhoun would think if the state did not support the railroad to connect to the rest of the South. Calhoun was its first visionary and “to the hour of his death its unceasing supporter.” Brisbane appealed to those who voted against the state support to reconsider their position and to ponder Calhoun’s legacy. Could it be, he wondered, “they have already forgotten the man whose reputation, even now when he is dead, is defending them in their dearest rights.”6

To white South Carolinians, Brisbane’s reference to rights could mean only one thing: the right to hold slave property. To be sure that they understood Calhoun’s linkage between these rights and the railroad economy he hoped to develop in the South, Brisbane conjured up the Calhoun who had walked the passes of South Carolina and Georgia and who in planning the route with Brisbane circled Rabun Gap on a map and exclaimed: “There is your gap, there is the great pass; there the mountains recede . . . as though they invited the States of this great confederacy to pass and repair them.” Calhoun had great faith that the railroad would bring the South to “the gates of Cincinnati” and that even though “we may fail sir, in our endeavors now, but the result must come, and our industrial independence be secured by this boon of Providence–this inexplicable pass, through a mighty range of mountains, unless for some great moral purpose, such as is now proposed.”

In this context South Carolina had a choice, according to Edward Frost, the railroad’s president. It could go forward with the Blue Ridge Railroad, bore through the mountains, and reap the potential advantages of altering nature’s barriers, or it could “recede from the position of moral eminence she has heretofore occupied, and be reconciled to a diminution of her political power and consequence proportioned to her territorial area.”7

The choice was implied for the South as well. The language, ideas, and practices of the local conflict could jump tracks and become an important resource in the South’s claim to nationhood. City and state rivalries within the South translated arguments easily to the sectional or national competition. South Carolina’s leading men were aware of the consequences of their state’s isolation. And although conservative Democrats remained suspicious of state development schemes, enough to finally block the Blue Ridge’s financing in 1859, the questions raised by the railroad projects were profoundly significant for South Carolina. They indicated the ways railroads were reconfiguring the nation’s borders, geography, and commerce. The debates in South Carolina coming as they did on the eve of the 1860 presidential election, moreover, rehearsed a series of arguments that would emerge in the following year over the best means to ensure the South’s future wealth and independence. They also revealed the slow process of reshaping identities. Because the railroads connected places, linked subregions, and crossed natural barriers, their potential prompted a series of questions for those who supported and opposed them: what is our region, who are our allies, and where are we going?

Notes and Sources:

1 “Report of the President and Directors and of the Chief Engineer to the Annual Meeting of the Stockholders of The Blue Ridge Railroad Company, in South Carolina, held in Charleston, the 10th of November 1858,” The Charleston Mercury, November 13, 1858, Issue 10,388, Col. B.

2 “Report of the President and Directors and of the Chief Engineer to the Annual Meeting of the Stockholders of The Blue Ridge Railroad Company, in South Carolina, held in Charleston, the 10th of November 1858,” The Charleston Mercury, November 13, 1858, Issue 10,388, Col. B.

3 For a collection of criticisms, see the series of articles by “Nolumus” in The Charleston Mercury in “The Blue Ridge Railroad” Special Collections, University of Virginia Library. “The Blue Ridge Railroad Enterprise,” The Charleston Mercury, December 30, 1858, Issue 10,427, Col. C.

4 “The Blue Ridge Railroad Enterprise,” The Charleston Mercury, December 28, 1858, Issue 10,425, Col. C.

5 “Speech of C. G. Memminger, Esq. In the House of Representatives, of the Bill to Afford Aid to the Blue Ridge Railroad,” The Charleston Mercury, January 10, 1859, Issue 10,436, Col. C.

6 “General Brisbane’s Compliments to the conductors of the Press,” Charleston Mercury, June 1, 1859, Issue 10,558, Col. D in Nineteenth Century U. S. Newspapers. See also, Betty L. Plisco, The Rocky Road to Nowhere: a History of the Blue Ridge Railroad in South Carolina, 1850-1861 (Salem, SC: Blue Granite Books, 2002): 69-73.

7 “Report of the President and Directors and of the Chief Engineer to the Annual Meeting of the Stockholders of The Blue Ridge Railroad Company, in South Carolina, held in Charleston, the 10th of November 1858,” The Charleston Mercury, November 13, 1858, Issue 10,388, Col. B.

January 9, 2009

Civil War Loyalty Tests on the Railroads

Filed under: Civil War, technology, women — Tags: , , , , , — wthomas @ 8:30 am

On July 12, 1864 an anonymous letter was forwarded to the military commander of the Union forces around Nashville, Tennessee, and then on to Colonel A. Anderson, the General Superintendent of the United States Military Railroad (U.S.M.R.R.) in that district. Because the U.S.M.R.R. was such an important link to General William T. Sherman’s army as it fought its way south and east toward Atlanta, and because southern guerrillas were constantly endangering the vulnerable rail lines, Anderson and his superiors could take no chances. He was directed to “have the loyalty of all his employees tested.”

Loyalty to the Union was declared through an oath and the swearer simply signed a statement, but the idea that loyalties were not only tested but also monitored in the Ciivl War is one that we have sometimes lost sight of. The boundaries between North and South seem to us so clear and incontrovertible that such measures would appear unnecessary. Yet, in the Civil War, especially in East Tennessee, the boundaries were blurred. Huge armies fought in the war, but at the local level the conflict was more personal.

The anonymous letter seemed to include plans for spying on the Union Army, and outlined the “best way to get to the rebels news.” Specifically, the recipient was directed to go to the “Huntsville Depot” and contact the letter writer’s mother. Because the Union  Provost Marshall boarded with her, she had never been denied a pass–or one for her friends. From there the spy was directed to go 7 miles where there “lives a woman who permits the rebels to go to and from her house at will.” 

He also provided directions on “how to save self when the guerrillas shoot into the Rail Road trains.” The man worked on the railroad and generally “knows when they [the guerrillas] are about.” Through signals and some advance warning, he knew when the attacks would occur. So, his protocol was to fill the engine furnace full of wood then lay down “behind the wood in such a way as to be safe.” Whenever he saw a guerrilla he recognized but does “not want to speak” for fear he would be exposed, he would shake his head.

Angry and tired of working on the railroad for the Union forces, this man expected to run off and join a Confederate cavalry unit. He cheered the work of the guerrillas, especially John Hunt Morgan, and was pleased to report that “there is scarce a nightbut what there are more less union men killed along the railroad.” As for the woman who provided the safe house for spies: ”Mrs. Holman is a true woman of the Confederacy,” the man noted.  

The Union Army faced a significant counterinsurgency challenge in large parts of the Confederacy. The railroads, however, because of their size and complexity were run by thousands of civilians rather than controlled directly by military commanders. The railroads were quasi-military operations, necessary to control and manage but beyond the capacity or expertise of any given regimental officer. Few men in the Union Army needed loyalty testing, but the civilians associated with the railroads were another matter. So, the response to this intercepted communique to test the loyalty of the employees on the railroad was not unexpected, but the use of the rail system in war brought a new dimension of scale, reach, and vulnerability and made the conflict a more modern one. 

[The letter is from: National Archives and Records Administration, Letters Received by A. Anderson, Gen. Sup.  Record Group 92 subgroup 1674 Box 2.]

June 3, 2008

On Terrorism, Guerrillas, and the American Civil War

Filed under: Civil War, social experience, technology, women — Tags: , , , , , , , — wthomas @ 6:03 pm

When United Flight 93 crashed in the fields of Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, the battle for control of the plane’s cockpit became almost immediately an iconic scene for Americans. The bravery of the passengers prompted widespread sympathy, awe, and appreciation. The story of their close confrontation with the terrorists, their grasp of the wider situation developing on that day, and their patriotic rush to overpower the hijackers defined what appeared to be a new form of warfare, one in which citizens might play major roles in meeting the enemy, one where civilians stood on the front lines.

The roots of this type of warfare and the widely felt terror that accompanied it can be found in the American Civil War when southern guerrillas and partisans struck fear in the Northern public. Significantly, the setting for this citizens’ form of warfare was, and continues to be, an important aspect of the encounter with terror. After 9/11, of course, the setting for this violence seemed to be the confined quarters of an airplane. In the Civil War the setting was the cramped cars of the railroad. Both settings have inspired fear in large part because the machine had the potential to become the instrument of war, a hurtling bomb, incredibly dangerous and shockingly terrifying to its passengers. These spaces made people feel anonymous and the violence appear random, as well as starkly opposed to the order and efficiency of the machinery.

During the Civil War something about the tight space of the railroad car and the possibility of attacks instilled fear among the Northern public. When southern guerrillas attacked railroad cars, stripped the passengers of valuables, set fire to the trains, or shot captured men, Northern civilians all along the border appeared at risk in a new way. Soldiers too might be caught in these circumstances.

Ephraim C. Dawes, a 1st Lt., went into the South with the 53rd Ohio Infantry, fought at Shiloh in 1862, and guarded the Memphis and Chattanooga Railroad in 1863. His unit tracked southern guerrillas in Tennessee and Mississippi during these years. The destruction his army produced was something he tried to convey to his family members back in Ohio: “you don’t know what war is. You can’t appreciate it. Wait till an army overruns the country. till all the male population are in arms till your fences are all burned orchards and barns and chicken roosts robbed, Houses entered and valuables stolen–gardens wantonly destroyed and all manner of excesses committed–not so much by the army as by loose craracters [sic] taking advantage of the unsettled condition of affairs to enrich themselves at everybody else’ expense. It may be the worse picture but it is very like things in the West. Tenn. District.”

Dawes’ family in Ohio, however, seemed unconcerned about the escalating chaos afflicting southern civilians and instead worried much more about the mounting threat of guerrilla raids into Ohio and on unsuspecting Northern soldiers and civilians. Dawes tried to calm their fears: “you need not go crazy or trouble yourself at all if I should be captured by guerrillas as they were never known to hurt anybody. All they do is to capture a man, steal all he’s got about him, make him ride a mule bareback 40 or 50 miles parole him and let him make his way afoot to the nearest civilization.”

But the Northern fear of guerrillas could not be so easily set aside. We might consider the role of the new technology of the railroad and the telegraph in structuring those fears. When Confederate partisan rangers brought telegraphic signaling boxes on raids and took control of Northern-run trains and stations, the sophisticated machinery appeared vulnerable in a surprisingly new way.

Moreover, the modern, refined, and enclosed space of the railroad car was also especially important in shaping these fears. The campaign to counter the insurgency of the southern partisans and guerrillas took the Union army years to organize and understand, and it played out differently in Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, and Virginia. By October 1864, however, the guerrilla warfare and the counterinsurgency efforts of the Union Army had taken an unexpected turn. Union forces were using local Confederate civilians as human shields on the trains in Northern Virginia to prevent John S. Mosby’s men from attacking them. In Richmond the Confederacy’s leading newspaper editors were confident that Mosby would attack the trains anyway, even if he “knew that all who were dear to him were on a train.” They believed Mosby would not hesitate for a second “provided he were assured that the good of his country demanded the sacrifice.”

Such self-sacrifice and, indeed, the sacrifice of family, friends, and fellow citizens was tolerable, it seemed, in the service of the national cause. Northern newspapers routinely disparaged the Confederate guerrillas and partisans as lawless banditti, but Confederate newspapers just as vigorously defended them as legitimate forces in a modern struggle. Of course, the terms encompass a wide range of characters–from the elite and educated but ruthless Mosby to the vindictive and bloodthirsty William Quantrill whose raid on Lawrence, Kansas, indicated to many Northerners the madness and terror of guerrilla warfare.

Their actions, and especially the quite modern setting of their violence (and the fear it sparked), give us a different picture of the Civil War. The war encompassed types of violence well beyond the large-scale set piece battles we are familiar with, such as Gettysburg, and included forms of terror, hostage taking, random violence, and recrimination we have largely forgotten.

May 20, 2008

Railroads, Time Zones, and Interfaces

Filed under: Uncategorized, social experience, technology — Tags: , , , , , — wthomas @ 2:21 pm

Our present time zones (Pacific, Mountain, Central, and Eastern Standard) descend from railroads and the need to coordinate traffic across vast systems that developed in the United States after the Civil War. The official date for the U.S. adoption of standard time zones was November 18, 1883. But the railroads changed the ways we thought about time before that.Time was difficult to measure and assess with its variation across so many new networks that railroads established. An early device for measuring time, a sort of time map, was developed to aid such calculations. Here is an early example from A. J. Johnson, Johnson’s New illustrated (steel plate) family atlas : with physical geography and with descriptions geographical, statistical, and historical… (New York: Johnson and Ward, 1864): 

thumb.time
 

With Washington, D.C., in the center of the time atlas, a series of concentric rings of time extend outward through the world. If the time in Washington was 12:00 noon, then the time in Dover, Delaware, was 12:06 p.m., London, England, 5:08 p.m., Vera Cruz, Mexico, 10:43 a.m. All sorts of U.S. places appeared on this time atlas side by side with Paris, London, Berlin, Calcutta, Constantinople, Rome, and the Cape of Good Hope: including Little Rock, Nashville, Galveston, Omaha, and Iowa City, among others. This diagram of time was also a statement on geography–these places were important. Of course, one could not travel on an American railroad from Dover, Del., to St. Petersburg, Russia. But the imagined space could be traversed and the network, however imperfect, was rapidly being assembled. If one could travel from Dover, Del., to Santa Fe or San Francisco, then the rapid expansion of the rail network had wider implications that Americans could easily conjure up in their projections of what lay ahead in the future. Railroads put out elaborate time tables in the 1850s to organize their schedules for passengers. At first for many lines under one hundred miles, the time tables were simple affairs–a list of a dozen depots and their stop times. On railroads running north and south, such as the Philadelphia, Wilmington, & Baltimore, there was little variation in time. But as railroads broke through the Allegheny Mountain barrier to the west, such as the Baltimore and Ohio, time tables became considerably more complex.

The 1850s marked a major shift. Americans had to read these tables and convert them as well into prices and financial costs. Here’s the rate table for the Baltimore and Ohio in 1858:

borr.sm
  

[National Archives, Record Group 92, U.S. Military Railroad Records]

Time tables were equally complex. With over two hundred miles of rail to the Pittsburgh, the B and O represented one of the first major arteries to the Ohio River and the west. The Pacific railroad, though not begun until 1864, was discussed in the 1850s as the logical next step. All sorts of implications flowed from the idea of proximity and time. “If it had been built ten years ago,” one supporter of the transcontinental railroad wrote to President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, “we should not have had a Southern Rebellion. If finished a year since, the whole road would have already been [used] in transporting troops and supplies.”  

Proponents of the transcontinental spoke also of the closing of distance and time as compelling in its own right. “In fifty hours this Capitol can be reached from the most remote parts of the country, east of the Rocky Mountains,” one Congressman explained in 1854. If the nation would construct the Pacific Railroad, the trip to San Francisco would take just six days and, he pointed out, the “entire circuit of the earth” could be traversed in 93 days. Indiana built 1,400 miles of railroad by 1856 and another 1,000 miles were projected before the close of the decade. Indiana’s Congressman cited the ingenuity of the people as the first reason for Indiana’s transformation from “an unbroken wilderness, inhabited only by the red man of the forest.” But closely and inextricably woven into his explanation was the railroad. The railroad made possible ingenuity’s promise. He was sure that “settlement and cultivation” would follow the railroad, and “civilization, enterprise, and wealth” would be the natural result. Such confidence came hand-in-glove with railroad expansion in these years and the widening sense that time could be mastered and controlled.

Long before time zones ordered and regularized the American landscape into discrete sections, the railroads actually created interfaces to their growing networks: elaborate time tables, rate tables, and time atlases for the public to visualize their place on the network and their relationship to others. These abstractions were an important break in how Americans thought of time and geography and of themselves.    

May 1, 2008

Southern Slavery and Modernity?

Filed under: Uncategorized, technology — Tags: , , , , , — wthomas @ 12:10 pm

When The Railroad Advocate, a trade journal published out of New York, wanted to assess the state of southern railroads in 1855, the editor, Zerah Colburn, sent a special correspondent on a tour of the South. What’s surprising is just how different these reports were from the classic and well-known travel account of Frederick Law Olmstead, A Journey In the Seaboard Slave States (1856). Olmstead’s view was that southern roads were poorly built and inefficiently run, a symbol of wastefulness that he thought characterized much of slavery-based southern society.

But Colburn’s correspondent reported a different story. On the Seaboard and Roanoke, a road Olmstead traveled too, he found it “well managed” and “well constructed.” The locomotives were built by the nation’s finest manufacturer, the shops were equipped with “the best tools.” The entire enterprise was impressive. On the North Carolina Central, a road over 200 miles long and without a grade exceeding 50 feet and laid with the best 60 pound iron rails available, he discovered “one of the best constructed [roads] in the country” running locomotives from the very best manufacturers. Indeed, they were the most “beautiful machines in the country.”

When he arrived in Savannah, Georgia, moreover, the railroad station there stunned and surprised him. “To say that Savannah, Georgia, is likely to have the most complete and elegant railroad station in the country (besides being one of the very largest) may be a matter of some surprise to northern and western railroad men.” The building was 800 feet long and 63 feet wide, designed in a modern style and rivaled only by a few stations in the nation, the ones in Boston and Baltimore. The road was equipped with engines exhibited at the New York Crystal Palace Exhibition. The yards included 6 parallel tracks, with over three miles of railroad, a remarkably large and extensive facility. The shops held the best work benches and lathes in the business, “the best we’ve seen.”

All of these railroads were both worked and made possible by slave labor. According to Colburn’s journal, Southern railroads had achieved through slavery an extraordinary level of quality construction at half the cost of northern and western railroads. And the low cost of construction through the use of slaves prompted “astonishment in more northern communities.” There was much to admire about these southern efficiencies, Colburn wrote: no contractors scamming the roads for high profits, no inflated costs and padding of contracts, no secretive promoters keeping the public at arms length while they engineered a boondoggle.

In 1855 then the South’s railroads appeared the envy of the nation, built at a level of efficiency no northern line could manage and equipped at the very highest levels of quality. Although Olmstead was critical of southern trains, the rates of delay and inconvenience were not so different from travel in the North.

Historian Mark Smith (Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the Antebellum South, University of North Carolina Press, 1997) has examined the ways that slaveholders adopted modern technology and time keeping techniques for their bound labor. In every respect Smith argues that the South was adapting these devices at the same rates and with the same effects as the North.

So, we need to revise our view of the South as a place resistant to modernity because in many ways it makes it too easy to dismiss the antebellum South as doomed to extinction or incompatible with modern America. The South wanted modern progress, was complicit in it, and embraced it. That it did so with slavery at the core of its economic and social structure should give us pause. Slavery probably would not have died out on its own in the South, at least not because of modernity and its progress in the form of railroads, telegraphs, and cities.

Although we must consider more evidence than Colburn’s The Railroad Advocate and recognize the biases of these pro-railroad development journals, we should at least understand that southern modernity appeared quite differently to Americans in 1855. When the best engines in the world were outfitted on Southern lines, when the longest tunnels in the world were excavated with slave labor, when the greatest and most modern architectural designs were drafted for Southern railroad stations, few observers probably missed their significance for the way the white South understood itself. We should try to recover this lost sensibility of the South’s commitment to modernity, because among other reasons it will make us see the Civil War, when it did come, in a different light.

April 10, 2008

Moby Dick and the Problem of Slavery

Filed under: Civil War, Uncategorized, art, literature, social experience, technology — Tags: , , , , , , , , — wthomas @ 2:47 pm

Deep in the midsection of Moby Dick (1851), in chapter 55 to be precise, on “Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales,” Herman Melville takes his readers on a little tour of the various blunders that scientists, painters, and sign makers have made in attempting to represent the whale accurately. They have all erred, Melville suggests, because the “living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait.” In fact, to see a whale out of the water accurately enough to represent it would be impossible. “Mortal man” can’t lift the whale out of the water “so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations.” The only way for men to hoist the whale out and to get a look at him is to kill him first, and, of course, then all of the whales “undulations” are lost.

In a startling summation, Melville tells you that “there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.”

So, what does this whale symbolize? Is it the modernity of capitalism and industry, which we can only glimpse in parts? Is Captain Ahab’s ship the United States heading toward sectional break up in the pursuit of wealth, power, and violence? Is Ahab John C. Calhoun, bent on taking the U.S. down in a twisted quest of revenge, pride, or self-loathing?

Early on in Moby Dick, we learn that the whale and the whaling industry has extended its network across the seas to distant lands. It has created wealth and power and shaped lives far beyond those who set out at sea to harpoon the creatures. “Nowhere in all America,” Melville’s narrator tells us, “will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford. Whence came they? How planted upon this once scraggy scoria of a country? Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty mansion, and your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.”

The wealth of America, then, was extracted, pulled out of the ocean, or the soil, or the forest, or the mine. Melville was up to something new here with his vision of the ships of the whaling fleet and the homes of New Bedford as part of a vast, complex, dark system, a network extending to the far corners of the earth.

While Melville was writing Moby Dick, a New England merchant born in Massachusetts, named Asa Whitney, was lobbying Congress to pass legislation to promote the building of a transcontinental railroad. In his detailed treatise on the subject, A Project for the Pacific published in 1849, Whitney emphasized the global networks of trade that seemed to him to be governed by Nature. To explain the “geographical division formed by nature” that kept the Pacific’s economy distant from the Atlantic’s, Whitney turned to whaling as his chief example.

Like Melville, Whitney sensed that whole economies were shifting in the wake of capitalism, but unlike Melville, Whitney had unbounded optimism in the modern changes all around him and in technological progress specifically. In fact, Whitney’s faith in the railroad and telegraph technology was so deep that he thought the transcontinental railroad would work exclusively to the United States’ advantage. Technology would fundamentally alter the dominant geographies that Nature determined–the flow of rivers, the aridity of certain zones, the mountainous barriers between regions.

Whitney saw Nature’s limitations all around him. With the opening of California as a base of operations, whaling as an industry, “that important branch of commerce,” would inevitably pick up and move to the Pacific coast. Whitney predicted the whaling fleet would shift wholesale from New Bedford to the Pacific for ease of access to the whales, and the East Coast would lose a powerful industry to the natural arrangement of geography and commerce. By 1849, he argued, the transition was already underway. Only through a planned and massive intervention–a transcontinental railroad–could Nature’s hold be broken and the flow of change be redirected, not just in whaling but in other industries as well.

Whitney’s brief mention of whaling, however, was less significant than his outright defense of free labor. Whitney thought that the railroad would create an independent class of free men, citizens who were not dependent on anyone or any institution–in other words, who were not enslaved. The railroad workers would be laborers for a transitional period only, as they would inevitably set up in homesteads along the railroad line. Working on the railroad would be a stepping stone for immigrants to move toward independence. Whitney’s long commentary to assuage any concerns about the problem of immigrant laborers, especially Irish and Germans, reveals just how widespread these concerns were. White Americans, especially Northerners, thought that racial difference, dependency, and destitution spawned slavery and threatened government.

The Pequod sets sail with a crew from all corners of the earth. With Captain Ahab at the helm the ship plunges forward into the seas with one overriding purpose, to hunt the one white whale in the ocean and exercise vengeance on it, casting aside all concerns for individuals who might alter this course. The crew includes Ishmael, the New England adventurer, his bunkmate Queequeg, a dark-skinned South Pacific islander, a man who came from a place “not down on any map.” As well as Pip, the young cabin boy, possibly born a slave, possibly free born.

“Who ain’t the slave,” Melville’s main narrator and protagonist Ishmael reminds us. Andrew Delbanco’s recent biography of Melville (Melville, His World and Work, Knopf 2005) stresses the importance of slavery for Melville’s outlook in the years he wrote Moby Dick. The Pequod’s labor system was not terribly different from slavery in its force, brutality, danger, and punishment. Delbanco compares it to the American army and the construction crews used to build the American railroads and canals of the 1850s and earlier. Melville in Moby Dick tells us of the terrible consequences of enslavement and power. What Ahab wants are tools, to do his work and to bend to his indomitable will. What he has on his ship are men, of course, but they are used in Ahab’s service nonetheless.

Like the leviathan, slavery proved remarkably difficult to render accurately. It was almost impossible to paint a portrait of such a diverse, global, exploitative, and complex institution. Killing it would lose its “undulations.” Nevertheless, the only way to get a fair picture of the whale–or perhaps slavery–was to go “a whaling yourself.”

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