Southern Railroads Research Articles

Fresh Fruit and Rotten Railroads

AbstractGeorgia fruit growers embodied the intelligent, business-minded mentality about which New South boosters preached. Rather than stubbornly adding to the already glutted cotton markets, these modern farmers diversified. In supplying urban markets with fruit and truck, growers drew the attention of northern capital southward. Queen Peach and her cousins would supplant King Cotton and bring prosperity to the prostrate South. Yet it was with the New South's critics that many growers allied themselves in the 1890s. Despite epitomizing scientific agriculture and virtuous industry, Georgia growers asserted the near impossibility of squeezing profits from fruit. Railroads, they argued, hindered the promised progress and liberation through extortionate freight rates. Consequently, growers became leaders of Georgia's Populist revolt. Their story challenges notions of Populism as backward-looking while revealing the inefficiencies, failures, and precarities of corporate capitalism exemplified by southern railroads. Moreover, it demonstrates the Populists' distinct threat to the rising corporate order.

Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South by R. Scott Huffard Jr

Reviewed by: Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South by R. Scott Huffard Jr John Majewsk (bio) 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. 305. Cloth, $90.00; paper, $32.50.) Engines of Redemption is an innovative and imaginative work that seeks to put late nineteenth-century southern railroads into the framework of the new history of capitalism that Edward Baptist, Sven Beckert, and Walter Johnson have formulated for the antebellum era. While capitalism figures prominently as an organizing principle in the book, Engines of Redemption is not so much an economic history as a cultural history. The result is a fascinating blend of stories that cover booster rhetoric, Jim Crow segregation, railroad accidents, train robbers, yellow fever, and anti-monopoly sentiment. In the end, though, it is not clear how these stories, however interesting in themselves, come together into a coherent whole. Huffard’s starting point is the magical thinking that railroads promoted. Boosters portrayed railroads as agents of prosperity for large cities and small towns alike, while the speed, size, and power of locomotive cast a “spell” over travelers. Huffard argues that railroad rhetoric and experiences often constituted a “phantasmagoria” that created a momentary illusion of prosperity and modernity. He uses the metaphor of magic throughout the book; words and phrases such as “casting the spell,” “phantasmagoria,” “netherworld,” and “spectres” appear in section and chapter titles. Huffard’s invocation of magical speech highlights the irrational elements of capitalism that are often overlooked. No amount of magical thinking, however, could hide how railroads adapted to the violence and racism that permeated the New South. Undercapitalized railroads lobbied for the use of cheap convict labor, which the corporations often used for the most difficult and demanding jobs. State regulators demanded that railroads comply with new Jim Crow laws that compelled segregated waiting rooms and cars. Southern railroads [End Page 588] blamed railroad accidents on mythical sabotage (often casting suspicion on innocent African Americans) to escape legal liability for shoddy construction and careless engineers. Train robbers, who received sensational press coverage, came to highlight the relentless and amoral pursuit of profit that increasingly defined the New South. If railroads were somehow magical, they represented capitalism’s worse devilry. Perhaps the chapter that best speaks to our own historical moment focuses on railroads and yellow fever epidemics. Yellow fever epidemics periodically struck coastal cities such as New Orleans, which offered an inviting climate for the mosquitoes that spread the disease. Railroads allowed it to spread to upland railroad towns. These terrifying yellow fever epidemics led to disrupted supply chains, fragmented and ineffective government responses, protracted debates about the efficacy of quarantines, and racial disparities in who could leave afflicted communities and who had to stay. Such issues are now frighteningly familiar to twenty-first-century Americans. The other chapter that stands out focuses on efforts to break up the Southern Railway. The rapid expansion of the southern railroad network in the 1880s created a number of struggling, undercapitalized lines. Many financiers and railroad executives believed that the only solution was to consolidate these lines into a coherent system that eliminated ruinous competition and further rationalized the system. The Southern Railway Corporation, formed in 1894 with the backing of J. P. Morgan, began consolidation primarily in Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, but with lines running throughout the South. Business leaders in cities such as Macon, Georgia, began to fear that the Southern would ignore their city’s interest in favor of northern financiers. An antimonopoly movement to break up the Southern, with strong support from both jilted boosters and the Populist Party, began in Georgia and North Carolina. The movement ultimately failed, but it exposed two different visions of railroad capitalism: one focused on regional and national consolidation and integration, and the other based on service to local interests. The antimonopoly chapter dispenses with the framework of railroad magic that is so prominent in the rest of the book, suggesting the limitations of such conceptual metaphors. The emphasis on “railroad magic” captures the sense of fantasy and...

Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South: A Reevaluation by Michael S. Frawley

Reviewed by: Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South: A Reevaluation by Michael S. Frawley James Sanders Day Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South: A Reevaluation. By Michael S. Frawley. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi, 195. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7068-7.) Asserting that southern industry was well developed before the American Civil War, Michael S. Frawley contends that historians who compare northern and southern industry miss the mark. In fact, industrial development in the South lagged behind the North by a decade. Nevertheless, southern industry, when evaluated on its own merits, represented a viable industrial base by 1860. Debunking traditional views that slave labor compromised the basic tenets of free enterprise, Frawley posits that slaves “served as both labor and capital for antebellum southern industry” (p. 92). The combination of plantation-based [End Page 470] agriculture and industrial production constituted “pure and simple” capitalism (p. 95). Consequently, entrepreneurs invested money in whatever would earn a profit. Citing DeBow’s Review, Frawley notes that the slave population eventually exceeded the number of agricultural jobs, thus creating the need for industry. Cotton production generated profits, and planters invested those proceeds in land, slaves, and manufacturing. Although industrial output always ran second to “King Cotton,” the development of southern industry proved significant. Addressing several historiographical arguments, Frawley confirms that former studies tended to corroborate preconceived notions—the institution of slavery was incompatible with industrial development; industry disrupted the agrarian way of life; and industry was not integrated into southern society. In contrast, he argues that the Panic of 1837 prompted planters to invest in industry to counter agricultural slumps, thereby leading to a diverse southern economy. Frawley examines A Deplorable Scarcity: The Failure of Industrialization in the Slave Economy by Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss (Chapel Hill, 1981), one of the first cliometric studies of southern industry. This work, grounded in the 1860 manufacturing census, arrived at conclusions that Frawley describes as inconclusive and unrepresentative. He argues that census marshals failed to record approximately 20 percent of all manufacturing firms in the Gulf South. Therefore, in addition to the 1860 census, he considers “all available sources” using a “geographic perspective” (p. 17). For example, applying Geographical Information System (GIS) software, he charts and maps the combined effects of physical environment, technology, and social institutions. Moreover, he consults newspapers and journals, city and county directories, R. G. Dun and Company credit reports, and local histories to determine that industry was more widespread in the South than previously thought. Having created a vast database of Gulf South industrial firms operating in 1860, Frawley concentrates on Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas, three states that constituted the richest part of the Gulf South region. He also presents five major themes: location, organization, and ownership; resources and raw materials; transportation and markets; capital and labor; and production and scale. As the southern economy expanded, a growing transportation network connected roads, rivers, and railroads. Rivers were the dominant transportation routes, facilitating trade both upstream and downstream. Railroad construction complemented river traffic by connecting remote areas to outside markets and by linking interior points to nearby rivers or to the coast. Consequently, southern industry developed along railroad lines and in areas rich in raw materials. Ultimately, Frawley constructs a convincing argument. Refusing to evaluate southern industry by looking backward through the lens of the Civil War, he uses maps, tables, and charts to present data in digestible form. Too extensive for publication in book form, his Appendix C (located on a personal website) provides 140 additional pages of pertinent information. Although he seems to ignore the reality of nonstandard gauges, he concludes properly that southern railroads were designed to support local and regional trade, not to provide logistical support for a major war. Configured for a peacetime economy, much of southern industry was “worn out or destroyed” by the Civil War’s end [End Page 471] (p. 125). In summary, Frawley suggests that southern industrial development before the Civil War might have represented “the beginning of the ‘New’ South” (p. 127). James Sanders Day University of Montevallo Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

De Bow’s Review: The Antebellum Vision of a New South by John F. Kvach (review)

De Bow's Review: Antebellum Vision of a New South. By John F. Kvach. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013. Pp. 270. Cloth, $50.00.)Reviewed by Jason PhillipsOn February 27, 1867, southern nationalist and economic visionary James D. B. De Bow died while visiting his brother in New Jersey. An antebellum crusader for southern railroads, De Bow became president of the Tennessee Central and Pacific Railroad months before his death. Northerners placed his remains on a southbound train. But the Civil War that De Bow had zealously promoted ruined the transportation system he labored so long to develop. morass of postwar southern rail lines lost his body before it reached his home in Nashville. No tombstone or monument marks his grave.The disappearing body of James De Bow demonstrates the paradoxical life of an Old South economic booster. Despite living during the cotton boom, De Bow championed diversification, urbanization, and industrialization. He earned readers' trust with objective statistical analysis that encompassed the region, but when sectionalism intensified De Bow discarded factual writing and penned passionate screeds that favored narrow interests. When he abandoned his prophetic vision of a diversified southern economy in favor of King Cotton's empire, his powers of foresight failed to appreciate the South's economic weaknesses and its impending doom. After his cause lost, this notorious fire-eater embraced Confederate defeat as an opportunity for economic reformation. Instead of wallowing in nostalgia like other prominent southerners, De Bow resumed his antebellum fixation on the future. While peers published histories of the Confederacy, De Bow titled his first postwar article The Future of the United States. A rare, repented rebel, he publicly admitted his mistakes.Paradoxes also marked De Bow's memory and historical legacy. timing of his death, after defeat but before Radical Reconstruction and Redemption, branded him as an Old South figure who vanished with the vanquished Confederacy. His vision anticipated the New South Creed of Henry Grady and other boosters, but De Bow did not live to assert the precedent of his vision. Even New South editors in Nashville, where De Bow had worked and lived, misremembered De Bow and misspelled his name when they recalled him at all. Historians have also neglected the first southerner to promote a regional economic plan, because De Bow's career defies scholars' neat periodization of Old and New South. As a result, historians have paid more attention to De Bow's southern nationalism and his pro-slavery writings of the 1850s than to his advocacy for southern industry and cities. Many scholars quote De Bow's Review, but few of them have studied the man behind the magazine. Only one outdated biography of De Bow had existed, until now.John Kvach addresses all these paradoxes in a refreshing biography of an important antebellum intellectual. His fine work contributes to recent scholarship that complicates our understanding of the Old South's economy. Beneath the veneer of moonlight and magnolias, historians are uncovering bustling cities, middle-class entrepreneurs, and self-aware professionals who transformed the southern economy before the Civil War interrupted the region's modernization. …

Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society (review)

Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society. By Aaron W. Marrs. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2009. Pp. xi, 268. Cloth, $55.00.)Reviewed by Angela LakweteDriving a nail into the coffin of southern exceptionalism, Aaron Marrs argues that southerners differed little from their northern counterparts in their embrace of the railroad. He confronts a historiography that has overemphasized the faults and downplayed the achievements of southern railroads. With evidence ranging from annual reports of railroad companies to interviews of former slaves, Marrs finds that while southerners laid fewer miles and invested less capital than northern lines, they anticipated the modern firm structure, attracted competent civil engineers, and effectively integrated slave labor. With rolling stock built in the South and North, they shipped out cotton, shipped in an array of consumer goods, and sped passengers, free and enslaved, to their destinations. In 1833 and again in 1845 the world's longest lines ran on southern soil. Far from spurning the new technology and the modernity it signified, southerners, Marrs concludes, pursued both while sustaining the institution of slavery.The analysis begins in a stagnating Charleston in the late 1820s. Boosters imagined that a railroad to Hamburg, across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia, would reinvigorate the city. Others across the South joined them in appealing to state legislatures to charter railroads. Idealistically, they claimed that railroads would unify the fledgling nation. Realistically, they sought an alternative to existing turnpikes and steamboats, increasingly perceived as slow, unreliable, and politically entrenched. Marrs measures enthusiasm by the few lawsuits from planters who lost land under the law of eminent domain, concern by the complaints of citizens fearful for the safety of their property, and caution by the warnings of fiscal conservatives like William Gregg and James Henry Hammond. State legislatures listened to enthusiasts and invested in private railroad companies at twice the national average.Boosters imagined and legislators chartered but civil engineers and enslaved men built southern railroads. With few schools of engineering in the United States, ambitious men traveled south for on-the-job experience, undeterred by slavery. Marrs tracks John Edgar Thomson, chief engineer on the Georgia Railroad, better known for his association with the Pennsylvania Railroad. The Pennsylvania-born Thomson routinely bought men for the Georgia Railroad in 1830s. That he purchased instead of hiring the men reflected a vacillating position of southern companies on slavery. Companies debated not the use of slaves but rather the profitability of owning against hiring them, Marrs explains. Whether they were hired or purchased, enslaved railroad workers constituted a labor force larger than the largest plantations. While some white workers occupied management positions, most worked alongside enslaved men on the track and in the machine shop. Particularly valuable is his analysis of wage rates. Using an 1845 payroll from a Virginia line, Marrs shows that the wages the company paid to a slave owner and to the slave for overwork totaled less than the wages it paid to an equivalent white worker. The arrangement rendered white labor expensive and less employable. In a brief but effective section Marrs describes the work the men did. In the South as in the North, men prepared the roadbed, laid timber and crossties, and drove in strap-iron rail for hundreds of miles. …

Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society (review)

Reviewed by: Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society Mark Aldrich (bio) Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society. By Aaron W. Marrs. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Pp. xvii+268. $55. This short, deeply researched volume by Aaron Marrs represents the first modern treatment of antebellum southern railroads. Although the essay on sources reveals a wide reading of the secondary literature, the book is based largely on primary materials, especially company archives and annual reports, diaries, and much personal correspondence. This is not a nuts-and-bolts history of technology; rather, the focus is on the ways in which southerners conceived of, constructed, and interacted with the new technology. The first chapter ("Dreams") begins with the advocates; the book then progresses to railroads as engineering and construction projects. Chapter 4 ("Sweat") discusses labor. The remainder of the work covers the carriers as business enterprises, then discusses operating practices, travel, and the railroads' interaction with communities. Readers will find much that is familiar. The book's strengths are the richness of the evidence and the author's imaginative extraction of meaning out of the everyday events that often fill personal papers and diaries. Thus passengers' comments on "the roar and rattle of the railroad cars" demonstrate that railroads were a "complete sensory experience,"while observations on the scenery reflect the "visual impact . . . closely associated with modernity" (pp. 141, 140). The discussion of slavery is richly detailed and reveals that some slave laborers received incentive pay for their work in addition to the compensation paid their owners. Marrs stresses the many similarities between southern lines and those in the rest of the country. Because engineers drew from a common pool of knowledge, "there were no substantial differences between North and South when it came to engineering practice" (p. 53). Yet, while northern and southern engineers ordered their technology from the same menu, they must have made different choices given the sharply lower construction costs that characterized southern lines; one wishes that Marrs had probed the sources of this disparity a bit more deeply. This rejection of "southern exceptionalism" (p. 25) constitutes the book's major theme. The South was not committed to a "pastoral ideal," and Marrs claims that southern railroads were not "beleaguered" nor were they constrained under the slave system to be "haulers of cotton and little else" (pp. 3, 5), arguments he associates with the work of Ulrich B. Phillips, A History of Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt to 1860 (1908), Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (1964), Eugene Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital (1983), Gavin Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development (2006), and others. Instead he investigates the "tension" between the social order and modernity, arguing that "white southerners sought to [End Page 510] make . . .modern technology compatible with slavery" (p. 198). And Marrs does provide an effective counterweight to claims that the South's commitment to a "pastoral ideal" retarded railroad progress. Readers see a sufficient number of progressive, entrepreneurial promoters and planters to make such a claim dubious in the extreme. Nor by the 1850s were southern lines simply cotton haulers; by then, on a number of lines, 40-50 percent of freight revenues stemmed from backhauls. But while southerners may have wanted to combine modernity and railroads, Marrs is less successful in refuting the argument of Wright, and of John Majewski in A House Dividing (2000), that the slave system hindered railroadization because it retarded immigration and urbanization. He claims that the burst of construction in the 1850s demonstrates that the South "embraced railroads" (p. 8). True, but as John Stover noted in 1978 in Iron Road to the West, even in 1860 southern lines remained inferior in many ways. Moreover, the deleterious effect of the slave system cannot be refuted by appealing to evidence of modernizing slave owners any more than the claim that the market system promotes pollution can be countered by noting that some businesspeople support the Sierra Club. Despite this caveat, readers will find Railroads in the Old South an informative and lively social history. [End Page 511] Mark Aldrich Dr. Aldrich is professor emeritus of economics at Smith...

Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society. By Aaron W. Marrs. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. xx, 268 pp. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8018-9130-4.)

Aaron W. Marrs has written a useful, important, and timely book for southern and business history. His account leads us to reconsider not only the importance of railroads in the region but also the dynamic character of the South's economy and society. Marrs's narrative is crisp, clear, and informative, and his story of the “dreams, … communities, … sweat, … and structure” that surrounded the railroads reveals a South that was hurtling forward in the 1850s rather than holding back. Marrs's social history of the railroads in the South builds on the recent work of scholars interested in revisiting the South's capitalist slave economy. Scholars such as Diane Barnes, Steven Collins, Tom Downey, John Majewski, Mark Smith, Frank Towers, and Gavin Wright have emphasized the adaptability of the South's slave system to modern practices and technologies. Marrs contributes persuasive evidence that southern railroads fit with slavery, and he challenges the idea that southern planters resisted industrial enterprises. Railroads, Marrs contends, are “an ideal prism through which to view how white antebellum southerners married conservative social ideals with forward-looking technological advancement” (p. 7).

The Iron Horse Turns South: A History of Antebellum Southern Railroads

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The Iron Horse Turns South: A History of Antebellum Southern Railroads

The Iron Horse Turns South: A History of Antebellum Southern Railroads

Northern Naval Superiority and the Economics of the American Civil War. By David G. Surdam. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. Pp. xxiv, 286. $34.95.

The contribution of the blockade to Union victory during the American Civil War has long been controversial. Among those historians who have questioned the blockade's efficacy are Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, William N. Still Jr., Raimondo Luraghi, Frank Lawrence Owsley, and Stephen R. Wise. They note that, until the war's last year, the blockade remained a leaky sieve and that the agrarian South never lost a major battle for lack of arms and ammunition. The blockade's scholarly advocates, including Edwin B. Coddington, Bern Anderson, and Stanley Lebergott, stress in contrast such indirect impacts as the disruption of internal trade, the over-taxing of southern rail-roads, and the dislocation of the Confederate economy overall.

Half a Career: Discrimination & Railroad Internal Labor Markets

This paper examines the causes and consequences of the racial structure of railroad internal labor markets in the American South. By 1900, many southern railroads hired blacks almost exclusively for middle‐level occupations on their trains but did not permit their promotion to top‐level positions. This institutionalized bias in promotion helps explain the employment of whites and blacks at identical jobs but different wages. It also explains why it was impossible for some southern railroads to adopt the seniority‐based promotion ladders that had become standard on railroads elsewhere in the United States.

Rails to the Mid-Columbia Wheatlands: The Columbia Southern and Great Southern Railroads and the Development of Sherman and Wasco Counties, Oregon

Journal Article Rails to the Mid-Columbia Wheatlands: The Columbia Southern and Great Southern Railroads and the Development of Sherman and Wasco Counties, Oregon Get access Rails to the Mid-Columbia Wheatlands: The Columbia Southern and Great Southern Railroads and the Development of Sherman and Wasco Counties, Oregon. By Due John F. French Giles. (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1979. vi + 297 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, appendix, notes, index. $13.50, paper.) David C. Jones David C. Jones University of Calgary Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 12, Issue 1, January 1981, Pages 72–73, https://doi.org/10.2307/969184 Published: 01 January 1981

Travel on Southern Railroads, 1828-1860 (review)

Travel on Southern Railroads, 1828-1860 (review)

The Strategy of Southern Railroads

TO contemporary observers and historians alike the amazing expansion of southern railroads after the Civil War seemed an economic miracle of the age. The wonder of it all lay not merely in rapid growth itself; northern and western railroads had extended themselves with no less alacrity. But expansion in the North derived from an already sizable and flourishing network that had grown considerably stronger during the war. The South, on the other hand, emerged from combat with its roads in ruins, the victims of systematic destruction and four years of unallayed wear. Where northern roads continued to grow the South had first to rebuild, and it faced the task shorn of most of the necessary resources for doing so. Capital was lacking, labor proved exceedingly scarce, and plant, tools, and equipment could be obtained only in the North or abroad. In addition, its shattered economy offered little hope of supporting the renovated lines for some time to come.' Yet in less than thirty years the South more than tripled its railway mileage, and the worn, disconnected roads of i865 were transformed into a cohesive network dominated by a handful of giant systems. The following figures trace the ratio of southern growth compared to the nation as a whole :2

The Strategy of Southern Railroads

The Strategy of Southern Railroads

Were the Southern Railroads Destroyed by the Civil War?

Were the Southern Railroads Destroyed by the Civil War?

The Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac, 1861-1865

THS RICHMOND, FREDERICKSBURG AND POTOMAC, 1861-1865 Charles W. Turner The War between the States was the first of four wars in which the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad played an outstanding role. Chartered in 1835, the road ran from Richmond to the Potomac River via Fredericksburg. It not only provided transportation between Washington and Richmond but also connected with major lines running south and west of Virginia's capital. Moreover, the railroad was a vital north-south approach to the capitals of the opposing governments, and afforded almost ideal means for carrying troops and supplies to and from the strategic area through which it passed. From the outset of the war both sides realized the value of the R. F. & P. In 1861 eleven locomotives of the line pulled 134 cars of various types over a seventy-five-mile track. The railroad had a capital of more than $2,000,000. Virginia controlled 2,752 shares of the company's stock; the city of Richmond owned 2,300 shares. The remaining stock was in the hands of London financiers and out-of-state residents. A president and four directors, elected annually by the stockholders, were the chief officers of the line. Prior to 1861, the R. F. & P. semiannually paid a 3 per cent dividend to its stockholders.1 The road had able leadership from its inception. The Robinson family (ofAshland) furnished presidents, engineers, and superintendents prior to the War between the States. Peter V. Daniel, Jr., was president when the war started. His re-election throughout the war years reflected his ability. His spirit was best shown in 1861, when he declared: "Whatever sacrifices of profit or convenience we may be called upon to incur either as a company or as citizens it is not doubted that they will be cheerfully borne at the price of the independence and welfare of counCharles W. Turneris professor of history at Washington and Lee University. He is the author of Chessie's Road, a history of the Chesapeake b- Ohio Railroad . !Charles W. Turner, "Virginia Railroads, 1727-1861" (Unpublished dissertation , University of Minnesota, 1946 ), p. 185. 255 256charles w. turner try and future peace and prosperity."2 He labored tirelessly to keep the line open for business, and in the process suffered drastic reduction in personal income. The next most important positions were those of superintendents of transportation and upkeep, held in the war years by Samuel Ruth and William Bragg, respectively. To them came countless complaints over lack of service and high rates. When the war ended, Major E. L. D. Myers served as civil engineer in rebuilding bridges and track beds. Myers was no novice, for in the 1850's he had worked with Claudius Crozet in the construction of the Virginia Central's Blue Ridge tunnel —the largest tunnel in the United States at the time. So well did Myers serve the R. F. & P. that the company subsequently named him general superintendent and president. Other personnel included the faithful treasurer, C. W. MacMurdo, and 190 individuals who served as conductors, train engineers and firemen , baggage men, mechanics, inspectors, carpenters, unskilled laborers, and depot agents at Fredericksburg, Guiney's, Milford, Pole Cat, Chesterfield, Junction, Ashland, and Richmond. The question of securing skilled and unskilled labor was an important problem for Southern railroads in 1861-65. Besides the demand for higher wages, raids took off the Negroes while conscription drained off the white labor supply. Railroad employees were not excused from military service, and the usual procedure was to replace all types of help with disabled veterans. This continued until President Peter V. Daniel, Jr., presented to the Confederate Congress in January, 1864, a remonstrance against indiscriminate conscription of railroad employees. The War Department was asked to take up the matter and grant the railroads some measure of relief. The Confederate Congress passed an act in the spring of 1864 exempting from military service a certain number of skilled laborers for railroad duty, but with a provision that these men might be called back into service if an emergency arose.3 This problem of insufficient manpower remained in spite of this act, and many were the advertisements for help published in local newspapers...

Corrective Action under the Antitrust Laws

For several years prior to March 26, I945,1 a widespread controversy raged in and out of Congress over the applicability of the antitrust laws to private companies operating public transportation services, particularly railroad companies. This controversy arose out of investigations instituted by the Department of Justice, through its Antitrust Division, into certain alleged restrictive practices in the transportation field. These investigations culminated in the filing of a number of antitrust suits, the largest of which is the Association of American Railroads conspiracy case.2 Fuel was added by the filing of an original suit in the Supreme Court of the United States by the State of Georgia against eastern and southern railroads, charging a pricefixing conspiracy in violation of the antitrust laws.3 Practically all railroads in the United States, and their principal associations, are involved in these antitrust suits. Under the circumstances, it was not surprising that the railroad industry produced the most ardent objectors to antitrust enforcement in the transportation field. The arguments of their spokesmen can be thus summarized: Decisions of the Supreme Court at the turn of the century, holding that railroads were subject to the antitrust laws and that noncompetitive rate-making was prohibited by those laws,4 have been deprived of their initial vigor by subsequent amendments to the Interstate Commerce Act-that these decisions have become patent anachronisms.5 Giving little or no consideration to subsequent decisions of the Court affirming these earlier decisions,6 they reasoned that the Interstate Commerce Commission's jurisdiction

The Southern Passenger Fare Case

The Commission's order had directed that intrastate railway passenger fares in Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee be raised from 1.65 cents per mile to 2.2 cents, that round-trip coach rates be proportionally raised, and that sleepingand parlor-car fares in some of the states also be increased. The regulatory bodies of the four states asked for injunctions to set aside the increases. The Stabilization Director, through the Office of Price Administration, intervened in behalf of the states, and the various railroads involved in behalf of the defendant Commission. Since the decision of the Supreme Court in this instance apparently runs counter to a long line of decisions reaching back to the so-called Shreveport Case4, the facts, the reasoning of the Court (including that contained in the dissenting opinion), and the possible implications, appear to warrant brief review. Prior to 1936 the basic passenger fare in coaches on Class I railroads was 3.6 cents a mile. Some roads maintained lower intrastate fares. From December 1, 1933 through November 14, 1937 a number of southern railroads experimented with an interstate fare of 1.5 cents for one-way trips and 1.35 cents for roundtrips. Certain other roads tried a 2-cent interstate fare. In 1936 the Interstate Commerce Commission ordered the basic interstate coach fare reduced to 2 cents, effective June 30,5 at which level it remained until February 10, 1942 when a 10 per cent increase was granted to be in effect for the duration of the war and for six months thereafter.6 However, it should be noted that the Commission order lowering the basic rate to 2 cents did not disturb the experimental rates in effect in the South as these fares were held to be not unreasonable or otherwise unlawful (p. 257). The experimental rates were increased to 2 cents one-way and 1.8 cents roundtrip through January 14, 1939 when they were again dropped to the former 1.5 and 1.35 cents level, at which point they remained until February 10, 1942 when

Race Prejudice and Intolerance--A Distinction

The assigning of Negroes to separate (Jim Crow) coaches on southern railroads, although attacked on several fronts during the war years, remained at a standstill. The Jim Crow accommodations, however, were improved on most southern roads as a result of the Supreme Court's ruling in Congressman Arthur Mitchell's (Negro) case in 1941, when the court held that separate accommodations for Negroes must be equal to those for whites, and that Negroes paying first-class fares must have first-class accommodations. Abiding by the letter of the law, most of the railroads now serve Negroes in the dining cars either after the whites have been served or at separate tables, which are shut off from the rest of the diner by curtains. An effort to break down this practice was made by 18 Negro seamen in 1943, but they met without success. The Interstate Commerce Commission held that the railroad's refusal to serve them in the diner while white people were eating did not constitute discrimination.