Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel of Prosperity: Aid Under the Radical Republicans, 1865-1877

by Mark Wahlgren Summers

Overview

This book describes the southern Republicans' post- Civil War railroad aid program—the central element of the Gospel of Prosperity" designed to reestablish a vigorous economy in the devastated South. Conceding that race and Unionism were basic issues, Mark W. Summers explores a neglected facet of the postwar era: the attempt to build a new South and a biracial Republican majority through railroad aid.

Originally published in 1984.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691640723
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #618
Pages:	378
Product dimensions:	7.10(w) x 10.20(h) x 1.00(d)

Read an Excerpt

Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel of Prosperity

Aid under the Radical Republicans, 1865â"1877

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By Mark W. Summers

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-04695-2

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CHAPTER 1

"Our Poor Distressed Country"

It betokens us not degenerated, nor drooping to a fatal decay, but casting off the old and wrincled skin of corruption, to outlive these pangs and wax young again, entering the glorious ways of truth and prosperous virtue, destined to become great and honourable in these latter ages. Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep and shaking her invincible locks.

John Milton, Areopagitica

The South that travelers saw at the close of the Rebellion was far different from the proud land that four years earlier had bade defiance to national authority. The war had left scars everywhere, even in towns miles from the front lines, and although the old leaders tried to rebuild Southern society, they lacked the material with which to achieve its economic reconstruction.

The first thing that observers noted was the physical devastation of the South, and they saw the most severe damage in the states along the Atlantic coast and in the border regions, where the fighting had been heaviest. While passing through South Carolina and Georgia, Union armies had inflicted heavy damage on major towns, partly out of military necessity and partly from spite. Retreating Confederate troops were just as destructive. But even if the towns had survived the war intact, they could never have thrived with so much hardship in the surrounding countryside. Southern merchants were pathetically dependent on a few cash crops which, because of the hazards of war and the effects of emancipation, the hinterlands found impossible to produce and transport. Four years of neglect had not left all plantations as badly off as those along the Mississippi, some of which had reverted to marsh and others to brush, but none were fit to produce as much as they had before the war. At best the Southern economy would remain unsettled for a time, and if pessimists were right, the hard times would last for generations.

Neither planter nor merchant could thrive without a dependable transportation system, but the war had wrecked that, too. Most roads were no more than ruts, and railroads were nearly inoperable. From Virginia to Georgia and in many areas north of the Alabama black belt, soldiers had torn up the rails, burned boxcars, dismantled engines. In some places rolling stock had vanished without a trace, but it would not be missed, since the stations had disappeared as well. If a train did manage to run, it would have to stop at a river's brink and ferry passengers across; both armies had burned bridges. If it took on freight, it might find delivery complicated by the lack of warehouses along the way: soldiers had burned these, too. The directors might wish to repair damaged engines, but often they had no repair shops left to do the work. After both armies had done their worst, the Mississippi Central had one locomotive left. Here, too, the necessities of war inflicted more harm on the railroads than did the armies themselves. The tracks needed repairs constantly, but for four years the companies had lacked sufficient manpower for such work. Rails were worn out, but the Confederacy could not spare iron for anything not related to ordnance. Even if the companies had been able to find supplies and manpower to keep the roads in shape, they could not have paid for them. Confederate money had inflated tremendously, and by the end of the war it had become worthless. In fact, the lack of a valid currency was one of the most serious shortages that the South suffered. Businessmen had little hope of obtaining credit. Farmers needed advances with which to buy seed and supplies to carry them through the harvests; railroads needed loans to renew their operations. Planters needed funding to rebuild the dikes and levees that would help them reclaim their lands. Although some found capital, many did not.

To survive the postwar years, Southerners needed hard work, good crops, and luck. Many simply gave up trying. All over the South, plantations were for sale, some for a pittance. One estate worth $24,000 went for the $80 in taxes that its owner could not afford to pay. In Florida, the entire town of Fernandina sold for $10,608. The federal government had established the Freedmen's Bureau to help destitute blacks, but its agents found thousands of whites equally desperate. By June 1865, one brigadier general was estimating that it would take eight hundred bushels of corn and thirty thousand pounds of meat a day to prevent starvation in just ten Georgia counties. In some places, the war seemed to have broken the Southern spirit to rebuild, a spirit which Northerners doubted had ever been very strong.

In this they were mistaken, just as they were wrong in their predictions that the South was ruined beyond recovery. Atlanta had hardly finished burying its dead before the rebuilding began, and by the end of 1865, as one visitor noted, a new city was rising from the ashes of the old. Other commercial centers also made rapid, impressive revivals. There are at least four partial explanations for what seemed an incredible recovery.

First, neither the wartime damage nor the economic recovery occurred in equal measure throughout the South. Despite outward signs of sectional revival, the immediate economic effects of the conflict could and would be felt for a decade in some areas. Second, for all the damage it had suffered, the South had advantages that assured it at least a partial recovery: the North's need for cotton, the large Negro labor force still dependent on the cotton grower for its livelihood, the social ties and sectional allegiance that made Southerners prefer to do business with each other than with Yankee interlopers. Third, the North proved a powerful friend; that is, it sent help, both public and private, though never as much as was needed. Northern philanthropists raised money to nourish the destitute, while Northern investors came south to get rich in business or planting. The federal government provided the railroads with materials they needed to resume operations. Under a presidential order of August 1865, companies were allowed to buy engines and cars that the government had brought down from Northern railroads. In fact, most of the $7 million in rolling stock thus transferred was never paid for. By 1866, as a result, most railroads were providing at least rudimentary service. A few had made remarkable gains. With one-fourth of its cars remaining at the end of the war, and with only fragments of track for them to run on, the Mobile & Ohio might have been expected to have done poorly. Instead, it turned a small profit in the last half of 1865; the government's aid helped it survive.

A fourth factor remains: the will of the Southern people and their vision of the South. Battered and beaten the former Rebels may have been, but they never lost their vision of sectional greatness, only of their political prospects. Indeed, they overestimated their advantages and their potential. They had great faith in their ability to regenerate the South, and even more faith in the riches the soil would yield, both mineral and agricultural. Nevertheless, the astonishing thing is how much Southerners seemed ready to give up of what they had cherished for so long. "I am tired of South Carolina as she was," said Governor James Orr. "I covet for her the material prosperity of New England. I would have her acres teem with life and vigor and industry and intelligence, as do those of Massachusetts."

Something had happened to the vision of the Old South. Even before the war, the vision was less a reality than an ideal; it had now become an ideal that even some old established figures found outmoded. They would not often use the term "New South" to describe what they hoped to replace it with, but in some ways it was a new South they were seeking.

Whether that garden world where banker, merchant, factory maid, and railroad contractor were alien figures had ever existed in the pristine sense declaimed by Southerners makes scant difference. They all conceded that it would be impossible to recreate such a civilization in the future. Too much had been lost, and too much had changed. The labor system was in shambles, the cotton market in jeopardy, the commercial elite bankrupt or in exile, and the Northern financial interests in control of national economic policies. When Southerners returned to the Union, they found that the Republicans had enacted a protective tariff, federal subsidies for a transcontinental railroad, a national banking system, income and excise taxes, taxes on cotton and tobacco, and homestead legislation. This federal policy of industrial development could not be repealed. Consequently, the postwar South had to adjust itself to the new order of things.

By "adjust," the proponents of a new South meant much more than the replacement of slavery with free labor. As one Arkansas correspondent remarked, the cry everywhere was "build! build!" No place had richer soil than the cotton states, polemicists argued, and the climate could allow anything to be grown from wheat to wine grapes to wool. A few writers even foresaw the subdivision of plantations into smaller farms which immigrants would cultivate. Rich veins of iron and coal simply waited for Southerners to exploit them. Little Rock, said one of its champions, could "smelt iron, run ingots, mould pigs, spin thread, weave cloth, make wooden ware — all but nutmegs."

To bring about this new South, a dependable transportation system and Northern support were crucial. The section must have railroads. "Don't talk of old ties," a newspaper upriver from New Orleans berated city merchants. "The ties of commerce must be iron ties — not a watercourse that swells into lakes here or narrows to canal-width there." But neither the railroads nor anything else could be built without the funds of Northerners, many of whom had profited immensely from the war. Financiers had funds to invest in less-developed areas, and no area needed development more than did the South.

The question was, How much would Southerners be willing to pay for Northern support? Postwar conditions gave the former Confederates little control over the financial conditions that outsiders might impose on borrowers. Even that limited discretion would be lost if Southerners did not act quickly to restore their own fortunes. If they did not rebuild and develop their own resources, Northern financiers and managers would do the job on their own and be in a position to dictate the economic future of the section. Therefore, only an effort on Southerners' part to make the former slave states economically self-reliant could preserve the South's sectional identity.

Self-reliance — that was the obverse side of the Southern appeal for renewal. The defeated people took on Northern desires for progress and industrialization for sharply different ends. Northerners may have hoped to create a second North, whereas Southerners saw in industrial improvement the means of reasserting their independence from the forces that had conquered them. They envisioned a self-sufficient South that would humble the arrogant millowners of New England and make them respectful of their fellow citizens in the South. No longer could planters dictate to the North, but someday, they hoped, they could keep the North from dictating to them. Self-sufficiency also made good sense as a means of keeping Southern self-esteem. It was galling to Southern pride to have to admit that out of eight million people left in the South after the war, not one was capable of reviving the section's prosperity, "or building a railroad, or a manufacturing establishment, without the money and personal presence of some man of the Northern Radical type.

Consequently, spokesmen for the New South were eager to obtain Northern money and economic principles, but they were not willing to give very much in return. The same ambivalences recurred in Southern responses to immigration. Although settlers were welcome, their social and political views were not. Even the West Baton Rouge Sugar Planter, which made appeals for emigrants from anywhere, described New Englanders as "those harpies who have fed and fattened upon our nation's woes" — a description not likely to inspire Yankees with a confidence that they would be welcome additions to Southern culture.

Thus, dependent though they were on outsiders for support, Southerners felt compelled to do all they could to work their own recovery with as little Northern aid as possible. This task, however, required more capital than they possessed. Planters and commercial men could make only modest improvements. Desire railway construction though they might — indeed, a passion for railroads swept the South in the years just after the war — the task was far beyond what Southerners could accomplish. They had too little money to repair all the tracks destroyed in wartime, much less to expand their railroad system. Their farms could not even produce enough to sustain the lines in existence, and the price of cotton fell too low to make an increase in freight rates practicable. As long as a railroad was only in partial operation, it could hardly earn the revenue it had collected in its completed form. When it lacked the rolling stock and locomotive power needed to carry what trade it had, its efficiency declined still more. The Memphis & Little Rock, for example, had as bright a future as any road, as a possible link with the West Coast. Memphis financiers backed its operations, but even they could not keep it running for long. In April 1867, the Memphis & Little Rock suspended operations. So did many other roads which had gone into bankruptcy and been sold. Others remained solvent only because the state governments helped them with interest payments on their bonded debts and eased the conditions under which they might sell their bonds.

If Southerners were to build and run the section's lines, they would need government assistance. This assistance was quickly provided by the Conservative authorities who ran the South between 1865 and 1867. Postwar legislatures passed general and special acts of railroad aid. For example, Alabama permitted any road which had completed 20 continuous miles of track to receive $12,000 a mile in government endorsements of its first-mortgage bonds. The actual rate was somewhat higher, since lawmakers made additional allowances for bridges and trestles. Georgia gave $10,000 a mile in endorsements to the Macon & Brunswick, and the Texas Constitution of 1866 gave legislators the right to make $15,000 a mile in guarantees. Other states gave various amounts.

Such aid, however, was hardly a break with tradition. Congressional largess had given the antebellum governments money for such promotions by remitting to certain states the federal lands within their borders, on condition that the proceeds from their sale go to internal improvements. In keeping with this stipulation, various states set up special funds and boards: the "2 percent fund" and "3 percent fund" in Alabama, the "5 percent fund" in Arkansas, and similar resources in Florida and Louisiana. From these funds Florida loaned railroads $10,000 for every mile of track laid and gave $6,000 a mile outright. Even before the war, states and cities had become major stockholders in railroad corporations. South Carolina ran the Blue Ridge Railroad, which had promise of breaking through the mountains and making Charleston the rival of New York for the Midwest trade. Georgia owned a project completed for the same purpose, the Western & Atlantic, which ran from Atlanta to Chattanooga. Conservatives simply built on the foundations their predecessors had laid. In doing so, they committed the governments to the advancement of railroad schemes more than ever before.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel of Prosperity by Mark W. Summers. Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Preface, pg. ix
• Acknowledgments, pg. xii
• Chapter 1. “Our Poor Distressed Country", pg. 3
• Chapter 2. The Necessities of State Aid, pg. 32
• Chapter 3. An Imaginative Reinterpretation of the Law, pg. 47
• Chapter 4. “Railroad Fevers” and the Party Line at the Capitols, pg. 63
• Chapter 5. The Enemy Within: Parochialism Run Amok, pg. 85
• Chapter 6. Winning Friends and Influencing Legislation, pg. 98
• Chapter 7. “Let the Representatives . . . Have a Hand in It.”, pg. 121
• Chapter 8. Testing the Gospel of Prosperity, 1870-1871, pg. 133
• Chapter 9. “They Must Stand Aside . . .”: The Republican Mission in Peril, pg. 146
• Chapter 10. Friends in Need on Capitol Hill, pg. 163
• Chapter 11. Friends in Deed on Wall Street? The Enemy Without, pg. 175
• Chapter 12. Railroad Ties and Bonds: Construction, Credit, and the “Consumptive Purse”, pg. 185
• Chapter 13. The Alabama & Chattanooga Catastrophe, pg. 213
• Chapter 14. “They Have Thus Prostituted . . .” : Republicanism Riven, pg. 237
• Chapter 15. “A War Now Begins between These Roads and the People,” 1873, pg. 250
• Chapter 16. “Men are Giting Desperate . . .”: The Panic, Collapse, and Survival of the Gospel of Prosperity, 1873—1880, pg. 268
• Coda “And Was Jerusalem Builded Here ?”, pg. 299
• Appendix. Could the Democrats Have Done Better?, pg. 303
• Abbreviations, pg. 307
• Bibliography, pg. 339
• Index, pg. 353