Reviewed by: Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South by R. Scott Huffard Jr. Steven E. Nash Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South. By R. Scott Huffard Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 324.) Generations of scholars have debated the degree of continuity or discontinuity in the South’s transition from “Old” to “New.” Railroads are a critical part of this story of industrial transformation, and they are the focus of [End Page 56] R. Scott Huffard Jr.’s Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South. Building on a current historiographical reassessment of the capitalistic nature of the pre–Civil War South, Huffard sees the railroad boom of the 1880s and 1890s as an expansion of earlier practices. In the post-Reconstruction South, railroads served as tangible capitalist development that Huffard analyzes in some unique ways. Moving beyond track mileage and corporate ledger books, Huffard blends top down sources like political correspondence, company records, and newspapers with “mentalities, mores, and stories” to show how the South embraced the capitalist ethos of the railroad while utilizing the region’s deep-rooted racial hierarchies to paper over capitalism’s more destructive elements (4). Huffard roots his argument in the New Orleans Exposition of 1884–85, where the South displayed all its “commodities” to investors. He calls the exposition’s vision of reunion through capitalist development the “phantasmagoria,” a sort of waking dream of capitalistic standardization, creative destruction, and consolidation. For all its bluster and bravado, the southern railroad phantasmagoria was fragile. White southern boosters used it to preach reunion and court outside investment. By portraying everything as for sale in the South, these boosters constructed narratives that excused the failures and excesses of this capitalistic fever dream as well. Newspaper editors deflected criticism of higher accident mortality in the South, due to cheaper, and often inferior, construction methods as the work of often fictive train wreckers. When trains linked new towns and previously marginalized regions of the South to a national capitalistic system, they often brought diseases such as yellow fever with them. The proliferation of express routes laden with wealth sparked the rise of outlaws. White New South boosters went to great lengths to absolve the railroad and capitalism of any fault in these developments, but Huffard argues that these unintended and dangerous consequences were products of the railroad system. The destruction of space and time that made labor, passengers, and goods more mobile also threatened to destroy the railroad phantasmagoria. One of the crucial elements of Huffard’s analysis is the issue of race. Railroads had a profound impact on southern race relations, notably in terms of labor, mobility, consumption, and segregation of public spaces, in the 1880s and 1890s. On the one hand, railroad companies employed African Americans and offered them the type of well-paying jobs that no other southern industry would. White southerners met these challenges by reshaping notions of black criminality (fears of anonymous, mobile Black men) and pushing Black workers into railroad jobs that conformed to their racial imagination (manual laborers and porters). Most importantly, the New Orleans Exposition’s vision of all the South’s resources as commodities included [End Page 57] African American bodies. Black convict laborers laid mile upon mile of railroad track across the South. In his reassessment of the South’s capitalistic development in the late nineteenth century, Huffard connects the convict labor system, which commodified Black men’s bodies, to slavery. Viewing convict labor as capitalism taken to its extreme, Huffard forges new links between the Old and New South. Engines of Redemption is a strong piece of historical scholarship that carefully blends and interprets a variety of sources. Some readers might question why the author devoted little attention to the railroad work of Reconstruction. Other readers might wish that Huffard explored the issue of boosterism further, comparing the rhetoric and effort of railroad companies to other industries such as textiles, coal mining, and other manufacturing endeavors. Railroads may have been the common thread in regional industrialization, but a stronger comparison may have demonstrated the pervasiveness...