historian, author, film producer

Tag: Union Pacific Railroad (page 1 of 1)

AMC’s Hell on Wheels: a brief review

AMC’s premier of Hell on Wheels aired last night, and it included beautiful scenes of the Union Pacific railroad building and the Nebraska Territory. The close-up view of the steam locomotive–the behemoth–and its cowcatcher, the explosions blasting the cut through the prairie, the soot and steam pouring forth from the engines, the lines of spike drivers and graders pounding the rails, all gave a visceral sense of what it took to build a railroad. The series offers great promise. And it is admittedly taking on big issues: race, expansion, corruption, and the aftermath of civil war. We should applaud AMC, the cast is terrific, the scenes gorgeous.

But three scenes in particular struck me as ones that raise problems for history and how we remember and understand 1865. These were matters of concern not because such individual behaviors did not exist–there were people like this–but because they run against the broader historical record, so much so as to be questionable. In many ways AMC is creating complex characters against type, a positive move. I hope the complexity is less one-dimensional in the coming episodes, and we can see more nuanced characters. I am only going to sketch what I consider to be the matters of concern. These are not critiques as much as questions.

  1. When the main character Cullen Bohannon (Anson Mount), the ex-Confederate guerrilla, admits that he was a slaveholder, he also declares that he freed his slaves one year before the Civil War broke out. And further that his “Yankee” spouse led him to this morally right decision. So, we have a man, our hero, who both freed his own slaves and fought for the Confederacy’s claim to protect slavery. The contradiction seems to make Bohannon more sympathetic, but it does so at the expense of larger questions. A braver move might have been to make him a slaveholder period, yet one searching through the aftermath of war and emancipation for away forward, one willing to take risks across the racial divide.

    We’ve seen this before with Mel Gibson’s character in The Patriot, although in the Revolutionary age manumission was much more prevalent and therefore plausible, if strained and sappily rendered in that film. In 1860 the idea that Bohannon freed his slaves and employed them on his farm as wage-laborers is more fanciful–with slave prices at their highest in history, with slavery expanding across the South, and with pro-slavery opinion in the white South unopposed. This portrayal is a matter of concern.

  2. Immediately before Bohannon’s revelation about manumitting his slaves, the former Union soldier, now paymaster for the Union Pacific construction crew, is the first man to utter the n-word. Here too, we are meant to understand that Northerners were equally or more racist than their Confederate counterparts. Their racism is blind, unthinking, and at a distance. He’s the one who acts like the slave driver and beats and whips a freedman from his high horse. Yet, here too the scene runs counter to the volumes of Union soldier letters and diaries which clearly indicate growing appreciation for black soldiers and workers and disdain for the slaveholder class. Men who fought with Sherman came away from the war with mixed emotions. It is true that few wanted freedmen to move north and some reacted violently, usually over labor. It is also true that employers in the railroad industry were particularly segregationist and repressive–most railroads in the North hired absolutely no black men. But, this scene does something more. It puts racism–the electrifying n-work–in the mouth of the North and seems to disregard the widespread white supremacy of the Confederacy.
  3. When Bohannon, our heroic white ex-Confederate, tells the freedman Elam Ferguson (played by Common) to “let go of the past,” we have to pause and say, really? Just who had trouble letting go of the past? White former Confederates. This scene complicates our understanding–a good thing–but does so in a potentially damaging way. The ex-slave freedman is in his tent, sharpening the knife of vengeance, for all the past wrongs and now for the wrong perpetrated by the white Northern former Union solider paymaster. The feelings of frustration among some freedmen with the post war world of labor was plain–it looked like slavery. Yet we have few instances in the written records of history of former slaves acting with murderous vengeance, much less being talked out of it by former Confederates who tell them to “let go of the past.” Southern whites in December 1865 were, it should be pointed out, fearful of a massive plot by former slaves, one in a long line of nightmarish visions Southern whites had about slavery.
  4. I’ve written in The Iron Way about a more typical scene of racial conflict in 1865. Here’s a selection that might put some of what Hell on Wheels portrayed in perspective:

    “The riot at Aquia Creek on the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad. In Virginia at the end of the war, the volatile mix of black and white workers, former Confederates, and Union soldiers combined in August 1865 to produce one of the first post-war race riots. A simple altercation between a freedman and a white worker who was a former Confederate escalated quickly. Organized mobs of whites and blacks with shovels and clubs threatened one another. The Fifth Maryland, a Unionist but nonetheless Southern regiment, was called in to break up the conflict. Led by an overaggressive lieutenant, the Union soldiers turned first on the black railroad workers and, according to newspaper accounts, began to “break in the doors and windows, and drag the negroes from their beds.” One black man was killed, shot down by the white mob armed with shotguns. Later, after other army units intervened, forty white workers–all of them discharged Confederate soldiers–were arrested, tried, and sentenced to the chain gang for sixty days. According to The Chicago Tribune, a radical Republican paper, “the negroes have been sent back to their work, confident of protection in their rights, and encouragement in their industry.” But the Aquia Creek Riot was a sign of a less secure future. Even The Tribune a few days later repeated an overblown rumor about the Aquia Creek incident: that the freedmen were plotting to “assassinate all the white laborers employed on the railroad” and that they had gathered up “scythes” and “knives” to carry out a massacre. In the fall of 1865 rumors flew around the South among Confederate whites that blacks were preparing for a major uprising in the new year. When Christmas 1865 came and went without an insurrection, nervous whites found other bogeymen.”

    I’m eager to see more of AMC’s Hell on Wheels. There are other questions the series raises about the portrayal of the railroad, its builders, and Native peoples. Of particular interest last night is Colm Meaney’s Thomas C. “Doc” Durant. We’ll take these up in a later post.

Waiting for Hell on Wheels: AMC’s new drama on 1865 and the building of the transcontinental

I have to admit that I have been eagerly anticipating Sunday night’s premier of AMC’s “Hell on Wheels.” What could be better than the unheralded Anson Mount, one of the best Southern actors of our day, playing an ex-Confederate guerrilla looking for his wife’s killer after the Civil War in Nebraska, in and around the building of the Union Pacific Railroad and its rolling town of “Hell on Wheels”?

Nearly ten years ago, Mount played an FBI undercover operator in ABC’s short-lived Line of Fire. That show was set in Richmond, Virginia, and featured a mix of Southern characters much as Justified has done recently. Mount was simply excellent in Line of Fire, and so were the others (especially Leslie Hope), but the slow pace of the show and perhaps its Southernness did not connect with the audience. The Wire was able to capture for Baltimore much more of that city’s quirky and tough street life than Line of Fire could Richmond’s.

Hell on Wheels has already generated some controversy over what exactly the scene of the building of the Union Pacific might have been like and over the plausibility of the show’s mix of Union and Confederate veterans, freed slaves, Native Americans, immigrants, company executives, and town boosters. The Los Angeles Times reviewed Hell on Wheels and mistakenly referred to Colm Meaney’s character as Thomas “Doc” Duncan–it was Thomas C. “Doc” Durant. The picture of so many freedmen in the scene has prompted questions.

One controversy has erupted over whether Chinese laborers worked on the Union Pacific. The answer is no, at least not according to the Union Pacific records. Jeff Yang’s Wall Street Journal piece, “Do Chinese Pioneers Get Railroaded in AMC’s ‘Hell on Wheels’?”, examines the problem of what one commenter called “Asian invisibility.” I have found no records of Chinese laborers on in the Union Pacific payrolls in the 1865-68 period. The U.S. Census, while not the most reliable in counting some populations, recorded no persons of Chinese birth in Nebraska in 1870, nor any Chinese persons living along the counties of the Union Pacific Railroad. Yet, the U.S. Census counted even small populations of individuals, listing sixteen Chinese in Mississippi, two in Michigan, and seven in Colorado Territory that year. In 1870 the census listed 49,310 Chinese persons in California.

On the other hand, there is evidence of freedmen working on the Union Pacific as early as 1863. The U.S. Secretary of the Interior, John P. Usher, reported that year that 300 “free colored laborers” had moved to Council Bluffs, Iowa, to begin working on the Union Pacific Railroad. His office had been “repeatedly urged to use its influence to cause as many colored laborers as can be procured to be employed on this work.” (see John P. Usher, Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 1863, p. xix, in Annual Report of the Department of the Interior)

AMC’s promotional material includes photos from the premier, and we see the black freedmen prominently in them. It would help if we could gain a renewed sense of the vast displacement and movement that came from the Civil War and its immediate aftermath. Freedmen moved all over and even out of the South. Historian Leslie A. Schwalm has described the movement of freedmen into the Midwest during the war in detail (see Schwalm’s Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest). It should be no surprise that racial conflict simmered just below the surface and broke into the open at Memphis and other places, including in the North. One white former Confederate’s railroad trip in 1865, and his persistent racially bigoted views, can be found in Stephen Ash, A Year in the South: : 1865: The True Story of Four Ordinary People Who Lived Through the Most Tumultuous Twelve Months in American History (New York, N.Y.: Harper Collins, 2004). Ash traces the story of John Robertson out of Tennessee in 1865 on his way to Chicago and then to Iowa, who finds freedmen in the depots at Nashville and Louisville and stewed that they “had forgot to get out of the way of white people.” Robertson’s annoyance at the changes all around him were further confirmed by his racial prejudices.

Whatever AMC does with this series, the Confederate gunslinging guerrilla played by Anson Mount should prove complicated. Given the recent scholarship on guerrilla warfare in the Civil War–which places the guerrilla action more at the center of the conflict and at the center of the Confederate national commitment–we might expect Mount’s character to carry the resentments and repressed loyalties of his lost cause forward. T. J. Stiles’s biography of Jesse James, for example, indicates how much of the Confederate national project came out of Missouri and continued to burn in the hearts of these men. Mark Geiger’s terrific book on Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War shows just how the motivations of Confederate guerrillas worked. Whether AMC will deal with the complex motivations and histories of race, white supremacy, and Confederate nationalism remains unclear. We will have to watch to find out!

In the meantime our Railroads and the Making of Modern America project includes some useful documents to put some of the AMC’s Hell on Wheels premier in perspective:

  1. Incidents of Guerrilla Warfare along the Railroads in the Civil War–Timeline and Map
  2. Incidents of Black Labor on the Railroads in the Civil War–Timeline and Map
  3. Photographs of black laborers in 1861-1865
  4. Payrolls record of the Union Pacific Railroad, 1864-1868
  5. Letters to and from Thomas C. “Doc” Durant” regarding the Union Pacific Railroad and Credit Mobilier

National Railway Historical Society Banquet: Great Plains Chapter

Last night I had the great pleasure to be with the Great Plains Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society. We were in Grand Island, NE, in the historic Burlington depot at 603 Plum St. Over forty railroad enthusiasts and historians showed up on a snowy Saturday evening for the banquet. Of course, the depot is no longer in service but it still sits right next to the Burlington tracks, which have been elevated, and the coal trains came by regularly throughout the proceedings, rumbling south toward Lincoln and then on to Kansas. The local railroad modeling club has turned the old baggage room in the depot into a fantastic railroad model of both the Burlington local scene and the Union Pacific, complete with reconstructions of historic buildings, 50s cars, and landscape backgrounds. These rail lines intersected and crossed in Grand Island, making one of the most colossally congested intersections in American railroading.


With James L. Hanna, the president of the local chapter, February 26, 2011.

Not surprisingly, the participants in this society know a great deal about railroads, historic structures, and history, especially about the local railroads and old depots. Jim Reisdorf has published numerous books of history and photographs and old postcards of the local depots. Other experts were on hand as well. The Society is full of railroad history specialists who are concerned with historic preservation and sharing history with the public. I was pleased to be invited to talk with this group and to be part of the banquet. Everyone was generous and we had some great questions on how railroads shaped modern America.

In the old Burlington depot, 603 Plum St., Grand Island, NE, February 26, 2011.

No trip to Grand Island at this time of year is complete without stopping to see the migration of snow geese, Canadian geese, and the spectacular sand hill and whooping cranes. The cranes were farther west, but I managed to watch tens of thousands of snows and Canadians landing in a nearby field. An amazing sight and sound of the Great Plains.

Thousands on thousands of geese and cranes in migration, February 26, 2011, Grand Island, NE.