The Roots of Modern America Blog

July 15, 2009

Sen. James Maury Mason, Black Labor, and the Aftermath of the Civil War

Filed under: Civil War, Reconstruction, social experience — Tags: , , , , , , , , — wthomas @ 3:10 pm

On a recent research trip to the National Maritime Museum archives in Greenwich, U.K., I was working through the papers of William Schaw Lindsay, the M.P. who was the most vocal supporter of the Confederacy in Parliament. Lindsay traveled widely in the U.S. before the Civil War. Indeed, he was in America during the 1860 Presidential election and as a leading British businessman and representative he met many U.S. politicians. Lindsay corresponded with numerous Americans during the secession crisis. In 1861 he gave a speech at the North Shields Mechanic’s Institute on “America and the Americans” in which he argued that the separation of the North and South was permanent, that war was avoidable if Britain and others intervened, and that while slavery was abominable the North had no intention of eliminating or abolishing the institution. Taking Lincoln at his word, Lindsay thought slavery would not be touched in the states in which it existed. As for the future promise of America, it lay in the west. He traveled the Illinois Central Railroad in 1860 and observed first-hand “as far as the eye could see” the open lands on the prairie. This was a land of huge potential, he told his British listeners, and separation without war was preferable to a tragic national bloodbath. On his tour through America in the fall of 1860, Lindsay met Virginia’s leading U.S. senator–James Maury Mason. Then, during the war he hosted Mason who as the Confederacy’s lead diplomat sought British recognition for the Confederate States.

Header from James M. Mason December 21, 1869 letter to William Schaw Lindsay from "Clarens"

William Schaw Lindsay Papers, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, U.K.

 

The story of Mason’s failed diplomatic overtures is well known. His capture aboard the R.M.S. Trent prompted an international storm over the U.S. violation of Britain’s neutral rights. But Mason’s life after the collapse of the Confederacy was lived out of the public gaze.

I was surprised to see in the Lindsay papers a letter from Mason dated December 20, 1869 from “Clarens, near Alexandria.” Because I grew up at Clarens in the 1970s, the heading on the letter jumped out and caught my eye. I knew that Mason once owned Clarens. In fact, the legend of the place was that Mason never sat on the north-facing front porch because it looked out over the Potomac at Washington, D.C., the capital city Mason despised so much. Mason told Lindsay that while Clarens was a beautiful property, “the feature that mars all is that we are but eight miles distant from Washington, that nest of serpents + which is in full view but I have no communication with them.” So part of the Clarens legend had been confirmed–Mason had no love for the nation’s capital.

Mason’s home before the war broke out was in Winchester, Virginia, and, as he explained to his friend Lindsay, it was “destroyed, or rather obliterated, by the invaders.” After the war Mason stayed in Britain into 1866, a Confederate without a country, then went to Canada, where he and his family waited. Their waiting, according to his daughter Virginia Mason’s account, was an “exile” from their homeland–the South. But Mason, like Jubal Early and the other former Confederate leaders and officials waiting in Canada, waited because they were officially not extended amnesty until July 1868.

James Maury Mason, photograph, William Schaw Lindsay Papers, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, U.K.

James Maury Mason, photograph, William Schaw Lindsay Papers, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, U.K.

 

Deciding in 1869 to return to Virginia, Mason bought Clarens. The property adjoined that of his friend, the former Confederate General Samuel Cooper and was near the Episcopal Seminary, where other friends resided. “I gave for the whole establishment nine thousand dollars” in greenbacks, Mason told Lindsay in his letter about the purchase of Clarens. The greenbacks were his only remaining money, he confessed, and came from his wife’s family assets held in Pennsylvania through the war.

Mason described Clarens in this way: “an old residence, large + commodius home well built of brick + in good repair, ample lawns with venerable trees, and the garden (we call here the garden that which is appropriate to vegetables for the kitchen), good orchards of fruits pertaining to the South, including grapes with their trellises, The whole comprises nearly thirty acres of land. The side on the first high lands receding from the Potomac River distant two miles and of which on its summits commands a view of many miles. Our nearest town is Alexandria, one of the oldest towns on the Potomac, where there is good society and at the distance given above.”

Although he said nothing about whether he intended to rock on the front porch overlooking Washington or not, Mason did make a particular vow in his letter to Lindsay. “The poor negroes since they were manumitted are of course worthless, or rather worse than worthless,” Mason declared, “I have none of them in my service, and do not, however deeply I regret the necessity, intend to have.” Mason had brought “domestic servants (women) from Canada” and he intended to hire whites only. Negroes, he believed, were “the great curse of the country.” The fact that Reconstruction brought black voting particularly offended him; it was, he thought, the rule of the mob and the “end of the republic.”

With such convictions and with such vows, Mason lived another two years and died at Clarens in April 1871. Whether he rocked on the front porch or not, he likely did not employ any freedmen. Years later in 1906 Mason’s daughter Virginia compiled his letters into a published account of his life, and she passed on her father’s views to the next generation. She presented the plight of Southern whites as the main drama of the post war South–”their former homes reduced to ruins, and to be themselves reduced to the condition of quiet submission while ignorant and irresponsible negroes elected men to fill all the offices.” (The Public Life and Diplomatic Correspondence of James M. Mason, p. 589)

James M. Mason’s strongly-held convictions about Clarens and the all-white labor force he employed there after the war set in motion a range of stories and ideas that suggested the limitations of Reconstruction and the profound resistance to change many Southern whites would exhibit in the coming years and decades. The war itself had been fought over the control of black labor–in the form of slavery. The post war South too would fight over the control of black labor. Newspapers were filled in the years after the war with urgent pleadings from the white South that it must have black labor or its entire economy would not move. It may not have occurred to James M. Mason that with their emancipation Alexandria’s blacks might share similar convictions and make similar vows as well–that they might never work for him even if he wanted them to.

September 9, 2008

An Update from London

Filed under: Civil War — Tags: , , , , , , — wthomas @ 6:40 am

My posts will resume this week after a few weeks off to travel to the U.K.–next installments will be on American foreign policy in the Civil War, the subject of my current research in London at the British Library and The Rothschild Archive.The global capital market expanded in the 19th century and it was especially  important in the development of the American South and Midwest. It is striking that of the nearly 30,000 miles of railroad track in the United States in 1860, over 22,000 of it were laid in the 1850s, nearly all of it in the South and Midwest. These two regions dominated the boom of the 1850s. British and European capital financed a significant amount of this expansion. Their relative experience in these years and through the Panic of 1857 shaped their identities as much as the political crisis over slavery. In the coming weeks we’ll look at these questions in more detail. 

July 21, 2008

Top Five Summer History Tours–Virginia

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , — wthomas @ 10:50 am

Where do you go to find the best history? There are so many choices! Museums, battlefields, exhibits, galleries, and walking tours. It is summertime and that means a chance to explore American history sites and tours. Sometimes, we experience the past more directly when we walk through an old house or see a historical object or stand in a historical place. This feeling is something that children experience intensely as they begin to see that they are part of a continuous flow of time and space, and they are often especially willing to be “transported” in time through history. So, take your children and visit a historic place this summer. 

This week we feature Virginia. Next we will cover New England, and then the West.

Here are my top five places or sites this summer for an encounter with history that really means something (with a brief explanation why)–Jamestown, the Moton civil rights museum, Monticello, Chancellorsville battlefield, and the Tredegar Civil War Center and Museum: 

1. Jamestown

American colonial history really begins at Jamestown, the first permanent English colony, settled in 1607 (much earlier than Plymouth). Here, on the James River in the great Chesapeake Bay, English, Indian (Algonquian), and African societies encountered one another at the edge of what some are now calling “the Atlantic World.” The place is undeniably important and you can stand right in the ruins.

Go to the Island first, the original site of the fort: what is called Jamestown Rediscovery. Begin there not the Jamestown Settlement reproduction and museum nearby. The island is owned jointly by the National Park Service and the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA). The history-making archaeological dig underway at the island, led by William Kelso, has discovered the original Jamestown fort, and this work is transforming the way historians think about the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. You can tour the dig as well as the new, beautifully displayed artifacts at the “Archaearium” (that’s right). The Archaearium display is a powerful look at the work of archaeologists and features the process of what happened in the dig at Jamestown Fort.  Although the exhibit at the Archaearium downplays English-Indian conflict too much, and generally does not explain the Algonquian experience, children will be fascinated with the artifacts that Kelso and his team uncovered. The well, into which Jamestown’s first colonists seemed to have thrown everything, is a marvel.

The experience of standing in the original footprint of the fort along the James River is powerful. You can look right down the river and see where the signal posts were to guard the tiny colony from any approaching Spanish fleet. Because Spain’s military governor in Havana had sailed right into the Chesapeake in 1571 to search for a missing Jesuit mission and because Roman Catholic Spain was Protestant England’s enemy on the seas, the idea of a Spanish attack was not fanciful. The line of sight down the James River today from the fort is still remarkably unbroken by modern structures, so the effect of this view is well worth the trip. 

The Jamestown Yorktown Foundation’s site (The Settlement) and its museum and reproduction of the fort is near Jamestown Island, and its exhibits are also worth visiting. Although many visitors think this is the original site, you should bear in mind that the entire creation is a reproduction, and if you have visited the original site first you will not be confused about this. The Settlement exhibit includes a carefully reproduced Algonquian village. Living historical actors dress in Indian clothing and use Indian implements to cook, grow corn, and treat deer hides. Although children may find the site fascinating for this reason and although the huts and equipment are reproduced faithfully (largely based on the drawings by John White from 1585 and the writings of John Smith that describe Indian towns and structures in some detail), the site is placed so close to the fort that it appears as if Indians lived next door to and in feudal vassalage to the English fort’s colonists. They did not, of course. The best part of the Settlement is the reproduction ships, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery. 

Before any tour of Jamestown you might look online at the biggest archive of Jamestown materials, The Virtual Jamestown Project. Here you can read John Smith’s accounts, letters from the period, and important original documents.

2. The Moton Museum in Farmville, Virginia, Prince Edward County

This site is a historic place in the Civil Rights Movement, and the little museum is a gem. In 1951 students at the segregated, black Robert Russa Moton High School staged a strike to demand that the school board build a new black high school. The leader of the student strike, Barbara Johns, organized the student body to walk out of school down to the county building and make their demands known. The students did not go back to school for several weeks as they sat out “on strike.” The event prompted civil rights attorney Oliver Hill to visit the community, and he and the NAACP eventually took on the case. The case became one of the five included in the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. In reaction to the landmark Brown decision striking down segregated schools, local white leaders in Prince Edward County shut off all funding for public schools and closed the schools rather than integrate them. The schools remained closed for five years, from 1959 to 1964. These circumstances make the site especially important and dramatic. You can stand in the small, cramped auditorium where Barbara Johns rallied the students for the strike and see the “tar paper shacks” that the school erected because it had no funds. The effects of segregated schools become instantly clear and the improbable effects of the student strike of 1951 intensely felt.

You should contact the Moton Museum before going to make sure of its hours. You can walk from the museum on the same roads that the students took when they walked en masse in May 1951 down to the county office building. This one mile walk past the historic black church where NAACP meetings were held gives you an important view of the early beginnings of the civil rights movement. I encountered this story through the work on original films from local television stations–you can see these films too and look at the Prince Edward situation at: http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/civilrightstv.

3. Monticello

There are few places like this in the United States. Any summer history tour should visit the historic home of Thomas Jefferson. His epigraph says it all, or at least all he wanted to say about himself: “author of the Declaration of Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Founder of the University of Virginia.” President for two terms, Secretary of State, Envoy to France, Governor of Virginia, and political party founder, Jefferson could claim much more on his tombstone. He valued liberty, religious freedom, and learning above all. Of course, he designed his home at Monticello in the middle of all of this, and it is an exquisite statement of his values and aspirations for the nation.

Monticello has firmly placed slavery in the story of Jefferson and his life. The site includes tours of the slave living and working sites, and the team of archaeologists and historians are continually uncovering new evidence about this experience. Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemmings is clearly explained and affirmed in the tours. Slavery, freedom, and the political basis of the American republic were at the heart of Jefferson’s life and experiences. Jefferson’s wrestling with all three are on display in the design of Monticello and the material objects found there. Jefferson had great faith in us, the generations to come after him in the American republic. And it is humbling to be reminded just how much faith he had and how much trust he placed in our democracy.

4. Chancellorsville Battlefield

No summer history tour is complete without a Civil War battlefield experience. There are, sadly, many to choose from. The war tore through the heart of America and killed hundreds of thousands. It is far too easy to forget the consequences of war and to glorify set-piece battles as if they were played like a game. But when you visit a battlefield and see the ground on which armies fought, the war and its destruction take on a new meaning.

The great battlefields include Gettysburg, Petersburg, Vicksburg, Shiloh, Antietam, Manassas, and of course Chancellorsville. All are run by the National Park Service and have extensive, high quality historical interpretation. You will find expert park rangers and historians at all of them.

I chose Chancellorsville for several reasons. First, the battlefield landscape is rapidly changing, as housing developments, golf courses, and commercial strip malls have taken the place of farms, fields, and barns. It is increasingly difficult to see the battlefield, so go now.

Second, the battle was huge, extending over dozens of square miles and had tremendous importance in the flow of the war, giving the Confederacy vitality and energy at a key turning point. The best tour is to begin at Zoar Baptist Church where Stonewall Jackson’s troops first encountered Hooker’s Federal forces and in the first hours of the engagement changed the dynamic of the battle with an aggressive attack. Then, you can follow Jackson’s long march route around the Federal right flank and his surprise attack on the 11th Corps. You can do this in a car, but on bike is also fun. And if you take a car, stop along the way and get out to walk the route because the Wilderness effect is still there. Another good walk to do is the short distance from the Hazel Grove to the Chancellor House ruins. The high ground of the Hazel Grove and the open sight lines to the House give you a sense of the desperate stakes in the artillery battle there.

5. The American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar

Tredegar Iron Works cast iron before the Civil War for railroads and during the war supplied the Confederacy with much of its cannon and other armaments and ammunition. The works were extensive and have been preserved in downtown Richmond. Few sites give a feel for the work of nineteenth-century industry and how it operated. Tredegar holds added importance because so many slaves were employed in heavy industry here. The Civil War center has been dedicated to explain the experiences of Confederate, Union, and African-American soldiers and civilians in the Civil War. Few museums attempt such an interwoven set of exhibits. And few treat the experience of the U.S. Colored Troops with any degree of completeness, but Tredegar has made that effort its main mission. Although the exhibits are useful, informative, and interesting, the grounds, buildings, and equipment at Tredegar offer visitors a window into the nineteenth century and into the machinery that was at the heart of the Civil War and its destructiveness. You will not be disappointed.

So, enjoy these great sites. Next, we take a tour of New England and then the West for the best summer sites to visit.

July 2, 2008

Did U.S. Railroads Own Slaves–How Many?

Filed under: Uncategorized, slavery — Tags: , , — wthomas @ 11:25 am

The short answer to this important question is that Southern railroad companies owned many slaves and built most of their lines with enslaved labor. The question, however, has not been fully researched and for years we have known little about this experience or the scale of the railroads’ involvement in slavery. We know that southern slaveholders were the principal stockholders and directors of many railroad companies and that the South moved quickly in the 1830s to build railroads. Southerners built some of the earliest and longest railroads in the nation. By the 1850s southern railroad construction was in full swing, with crews grading thousands of miles of track.

Although historians, such as Allen Trelease, Robert Starobin, and Walter Licht, have acknowledged the presence of slave labor on Southern railroads, we have little sense of its overall dimensions or its relationship to southern expansionism of the 1850s. One historian, Theodore Kornweibel, has recently begun to research in detail the southern railroads’ use of slave labor. Kornweibel found documented evidence for slave labor on over 75 % of southern railroads. He has also estimated that over 10,000 slaves a year were working on the railroads in the South between 1857 and 1865. These figures seem entirely plausible and accurate.

A careful examination of railroad annual reports from the South begins to reveal the scale and diversity of the experience. Most of the slave labor on southern railroads was hired or rented from local slaveholders to grade the tracks. Enslaved women and children were also forced to work on the railroads, running wheelbarrows, moving dirt, cooking, picking up stones, and shoveling. Some skilled slaves, especially blacksmiths, were hired as well on these construction crews. 

But railroads began buying slaves outright in the mid-1850s. Only after the Civil War did these railroads have to reconcile their assets and liabilities to account for the loss of slavery. The Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad President, for example, reported after the Civil War on the railroad’s investment in slaves. “We find from the books,” he explained to the stockholders, “that there has been invested in negroes, in Georgia, the sum of $154,348 and negroes sold amounting to $32,805.25 leaving negro investment $121,542.71.” The investment, he noted, “is now, manifestly, a total loss.”

Railroads, it seems, bought slaves both in large groups and one at a time. The Richmond and Petersburg listed 114 “slaves” on its payroll of 191 employees in 1864. The railroad purchased its first slave in 1856 for $1,070, listing the expense in its annual report as “a negro man purchased.” By 1860 some railroads were buying slaves by the dozens. The Mississippi Central bought 21 slaves in one purchase and 31 in another in 1860. Mississippi Central Railroad, Contract for SlavesIts 1864/65 annual report from the company treasurer listed in the balance sheet on the liabilities side “Account and Bonds of C. S. and cost of Negroes now free  $585,237.” In an action that clearly indicated the intentions of the slaveholding railroads, the Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston directors authorized a large purchase of slaves in 1841. The chairman of the board, Alexander Mazyck, proposed a resolution that the Board “be authorized as soon as the means and credit of the Company will permit, to purchase for the service of the Rail-road, from fifty to sixty male Slaves between the ages of sixteen and thirty.” It was adopted without argument or amendment.

Railroads in the South owned and hired slaves on a scale we have generally forgotten. By the 1860s the Southern railroads were among the largest slaveholding and slave employing entities in the region, as a group they eclipsed the largest individual planters. Recent historical research has begun to uncover just how far the practice extended. The implications of this form of slavery, however, need further examination. We need to know more about the use of slaves by railroads, the jobs they performed, and their experiences.

June 24, 2008

How Slavery Ended in the Civil War

Filed under: Civil War, Uncategorized, slavery, social experience — Tags: , , , , , — wthomas @ 6:15 pm

In the Library of Congress’ Cornelius Chase papers there are boxes of carefully collected records of the activities of slave traders out of Richmond, Virginia. Chase was a Quaker and an abolitionist, and he pulled together evidence and materials wherever he could find them of the inhumanity of slavery. There are two remarkable aspects to this collection. The first is just how quickly the slave trade modernized around telegraphs and railroads (a subject for another post).

The second is that slave traders were busy in the South right up through the end of the Civil War. Who would purchase slaves in, say, late 1864, and for what purpose? Surely, with slavery collapsing all around them, white southerners must have thought twice about holding slaves, much less buying slaves. Were they concerned about the war, about the price of slaves? What explains the actions of whites, any one of whom might have been the last person to purchase a slave in the Confederacy?

Historians from Armistead Robinson to Ira Berlin and Barbara Fields have argued that slavery broke down in the war and in many areas black self-liberation meant that slavery was collapsing from within. The focus of this argument has rightly been on the slaves themselves. So many thousands appeared at Fortress Monroe that Union General Benjamin Butler took them in as “contraband” of war in 1861, beginning a process of self-emancipation and enlistment in the Union cause that led to the formation of the U.S. Colored Troops units with over 180,000 black men in uniform by the end of the war. Despite the widespread movement of African Americans in the areas around the Union Army to free themselves, many slaves remained on plantations well out of reach of any Union forces. In Stephen Ash’s brilliant 1865: A Year in the South the Agnew plantation operated largely intact with over fifty slaves on it until early 1865. Union soldiers had yet to appear in the county. This experience was common and explains in part why Union General William Tecumseh Sherman wanted to reach the “interior” (as he called it) of the South with his March to the Sea. Similarly, even in Rockbridge County, Virginia, as late as July 1864, Confederate civilians had never seen a Union soldier. There were vast reaches of the interior South where the war was a distant, if very important, event.

And so the slave trade went on.  Browning & Moore, E. H. Stokes, Betts and Gregory, Dickenson and Hill, and other slave trading partnerships carried on their business in the war. The war clearly had an effect on slaves even before the Emancipation Proclamation. In January 1862 one man wrote a Richmond, Virginia, slave trader that he wanted to sell “a very intelligent negro” about 32 years old who had been “a very useful servant.” He put the slave on the market because “I think he has ideas very prevelant [sic] in this part of the country since the war began which render it a disagreeable task to [unclear] him.”

In the same year E. H. Stokes, a busy slave trader in Richmond, defended himself to the Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon, claiming he had hired a substitute and was exempt from the draft. Besides, he claimed, he ran a 2,000 acre plantation in Lunenburg County that produced surpluses for the Army and, as important, kept slaves under control in the wartime environment: “I have no overseer nor other white persons than myself to manage them [60 slaves]. With my supervision they can be made to support themselves, and raise a considerable surplus for the Army. Left to themselves, they would make nothing of consequence for themselves, nor for any body else. On the contrary they would speedily destroy all my supplies on hand.”

Even if slaves clearly understood what the war meant and that they might have the opportunity to take matters into their own hands, Confederate whites like Stokes saw little prospect for an end to slavery anytime soon. The records of these traders indicate a high volume of buyers and sellers even into 1863 after the Emancipation Proclamation. Southern whites, it seems, assumed there would be some sort of compensation for any eventual plan of emancipation to work, whether war imposed or not. Such views could not have been unreasonable after years of discussion of colonization and debates over many decades about gradual emancipation. The idea of an end to slavery seemed to Southern whites an unthinkable one, except perhaps on terms they might control and determine.

Their own government, the Confederate States of America, built itself around the idea of slaves as property and it was no accident that the U.S. Congress used its Confiscation Acts to provide the opening for emancipation. In July 1864 a frantic telegram, typical of many such wartime queries, came over the wires from Augusta, Georgia, to Richmond, Virginia. The Confederate Quartermaster wanted a ruling from his superiors: if he hired “negro teamsters for the Army of Tennessee would the government be responsible to the owners if they are captured or killed.” The Inspector General rendered a brief reply: “The Govt. will be responsible.” 

Slavery ended in and with the Civil War both because slaves sought their own freedom and because the Union Army demonstrated that the Confederate government could not make good on its promise to protect the property rights whites held in slavery. The formal abolition of slavery laws was carried out in the terms of reconstruction for Southern states. But slavery as an idea vested in property rights persisted among many whites and proved durable, a burning ember stamped upon but still glowing during the long Reconstruction years. The Confederate government was ultimately responsible for those rights and lost them in the war, but the expectations of many Southern whites in the war was that these rights were in a sense inalienable–that they might be taken by force but conceptually they were not lost. That slave traders continued their business unabated, that Confederates demanded compensation from their government for the loss of slaves impressed in the war, and that many of these activities persisted through 1864 and into 1865, indicate that many southern whites could not fully contemplate the end of slavey in the war.

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.

March 27, 2008

“Killing Time” in the Civil War

Filed under: Civil War, Uncategorized, literature, social experience — Tags: , , , , , , , , — wthomas @ 10:55 am

If you pick up a Civil War newspaper, you might run into this rather modern-sounding phrase: to “kill time.” At what point did this notion enter common usage? What did it mean? Did Civil War soldiers “kill time” and what did they mean? Certainly, in the Civil War soldiers entered a massive bureaucratic machine in which they often found themselves adrift, with little to do, waiting for a movement, a march, even a skirmish or a battle to relieve the doldrums of army life. Diaries and letters were themselves efforts to pass the time.

Henry David Thoreau used the phrase in perhaps one of his most well-known passages from Walden (1854): “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.” Thoreau was outraged that people enslaved themselves to money, and he despised what happened “when you are the slave-driver of yourself.” He ridiculed the average “teamster on the highway” with his worries about his cargo and the inevitable trade-off between time and money along the route. These petty concerns, Thoreau thought, could never lead to “self emancipation.” Instead, they were the markers of a form of self-created prison. Thoreau’s use of the words “kill time” here, however, was sly. He meant certainly that the teamster and the “ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions” were wasting time in these thoughtless pursuits. Yet, Thoreau knew the phrase also meant passing time in leisure or play.

The phrase crops up in the newspapers even earlier, mainly in articles concerning the railroads or the leisure trips and vacation spots of the upper middle class. One of these places was Saratoga, New York, but there were others in the South, such as Warm Springs, Virginia. At these places of rest and recuperation, to “take the springs” was to literally soak in the great mineral baths there but also to meet people in the upper echelons of society and to have high conversation, dine well, walk, and get moderate outdoor exercise, all activities aimed at restoring the health of the body and mind. Nineteenth-century Americans considered such restorative times even more necessary in the world of cities and railroads, which seemed to them to break down and degrade the human body and mind.By 1860 the railroad, in fact, had given more and more people access to these somewhat exclusive resorts. At Saratoga The New York Times special correspondent reported that “those who are here do not represent so remarkably as heretofore the distinction of American society.” (July 23, 1860) What did they do at the springs? Read the newspapers, especially the advertisements, look into the latest fashions, and visit the railroad depot every day to see who might have come. They also “kill time” playing billiards or bowling. Only the relatively wealthy could actually afford to spend time in this manner.

But in the Civil War the phrase came to have a different significance as an expression of ironic detachment from the reality of war. Soldiers of all classes, not just the wealthy elite but enlisted men, began to kill time, at camp by playing games, cards, or other diversions. Although the idiom occurred somewhat infrequently, The New York Times reprinted a letter that used it and gives an indication of its wartime significance. The letter came from a Union captain who was a prisoner of war held in Charleston, South Carolina. The prison was terrible and his men and comrades were dying every week. Summer was coming, and he dreaded the hot season, the disease it would inevitably bring. One of their amusements was to sell to Confederates some trinkets and rings, literally whatever they had on them when captured. They called this the “bone business.” And this captain claimed that he had retired from that business and taken up a new diversion: “I ‘kill time’ now by writing.” (March 9, 1862)

If prisoners killed time by writing, soldiers killed time by killing. Basing his novel on interviews and close reading of veterans’ statements, Stephen Crane in The Red Badge of Courage depicted the compression and warping of time that came to soldiers on the battlefield.The expression also applied to any engagement not necessarily part of a major campaign, any kind of side or peripheral activity. The Chicago Tribune reported in early 1863 that Union forces took a break from trying to capture Vicksburg and “while killing time at Napoleon . . . amused themselves” by steaming up the Arkansas River to capture a Confederate fort at Arkansas Post. They took 5,000 prisoners. But the little battle was anything but easy or bloodless, as Union forces took over a thousand casualties in direct attacks on Confederate entrenched rifle pits. The Arkansas Post expedition, led by Major General John McClernand, diverted the Union Army from its main task of dislodging Vicksburg for a while and seemed to some a waste of time and resources.

During the Civil War, the subject of who should be able to kill time became especially relevant in the South as slavery collapsed and Northern commanders attempted to convert the region to free labor. In Louisiana General Nathaniel Banks instituted a contract labor system on cotton plantations, but the results according to some observers were a failure because former slaves killed time rather than worked for their former masters.According to a correspondent for The New York Times in New Orleans, slavery had ended but the Banks experiment with free labor was a disaster. The “crying evil” was the “incorrigable [sic] indolence of the negroes, and with it the lack of power to make the niggers work.” (October 30, 1864) This summary assessment came almost word-for-word from the lips of southern planters, who all of a sudden appeared even to some Northern Republicans as wise and correct in their forceful control of black labor.

The issue of freedom was whether black southerners could control their own time. The New York Times reported that between January 1864 and October 1864 black men on the Louisiana plantations had literally “lost ten hundred and ninety days” by “killing time.” Worse, the black women too had lost time, more than the men. Given what we know now about the role of enslaved women in plantation agriculture’s success across the South, the importance of black women withdrawing their time in 1864 becomes even more significant.

Emancipation, the self emancipation Thoreau wrote about, came down to freeing oneself from the constraints of seeing time as a commodity. To live with the acute awareness of the present was to step outside of time. The time that surrounded the moment of emancipation or that came with battlefield engagement were remarkably similar in their effects on former slaves and common soldiers. Killing time, which had been the somewhat exclusive luxury of the wealthy in the 1850s, was transformed in the Civil War as more Americans participated in time set apart from commercial value. Whether this emancipation would last and what effects it would have were unclear in 1865, only the aftermath of the war would tell.

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