Southwest Virginia's Railroad: Modernization and the Sectional Crisis in the Civil War Era
232
Southwest Virginia's Railroad: Modernization and the Sectional Crisis in the Civil War Era
232eBook
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Overview
A close study of one region of Appalachia that experienced economic vitality and strong sectionalism before the Civil War
This book examines the construction of the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad through southwest Virginia in the 1850s, before the Civil War began. The building and operation of the railroad reoriented the economy of the region toward staple crops and slave labor. Thus, during the secession crisis, southwest Virginia broke with northwestern Virginia and embraced the Confederacy. Ironically, however, it was the railroad that brought waves of Union raiders to the area during the war
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817392161 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 09/24/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 232 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Kenneth W. Noe is the Draughon Professor of Southern History at Auburn University and author of The Civil War in Appalachia.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
"The Railroad Is Completed to Bristol"
On October 4, 1856, John E. Gilmer, a twenty-year-old Southwest Virginian, wrote his parents a letter. Gilmer was enrolled at Emory and Henry College near Abingdon, the region's first institution of higher learning, and like nearly every other student since he was out of money and homesick. "I never wanted to hear from home so bad since I have been here as I do now," he begged, "wright. Wright, wright soon." Perhaps he exaggerated. He had after all waited a month to respond to his parents' last letter; his evenings were filled with preaching and social engagements, and only days before he had participated in an extraordinary event. "The railroad is completed to Bristol," he wrote, "and they had a great celebration at that place the day before yesterday. About fifty or sixty of the Students went to the celebration and I was one of the number."
After decades of disappointment, Southwest Virginia finally had a railroad. The engine "J. Robin McDaniel," named for the line's president, pulled the first Virginia and Tennessee Railroad train to travel the 204 miles from Lynchburg to the twin towns of Goodson, Virginia, and Bristol, Tennessee, themselves creations of the railroad. It ran over two cows and derailed before arriving late in Goodson on the evening of October 1, where over a thousand well-wishers waited. Gilmer rode down the next morning, overwhelmed by the speed of the locomotive, which he estimated to be an incredible twenty-five miles per hour. When he arrived, cannons were roaring, and two bands added to the cacophony. Speakers assured the lively crowd, now swelled to eight thousand, that the completed V&T made Virginia's economic and political renaissance a certainty. One, Carroll County planter William H. Cook, proclaimed the commonwealth awakened "like a giant from his sleep!"
A world away in New York City, the celebrated northern travel writer Frederick Law Olmsted increasingly expressed skepticism. In A Journey in the Seaboard States, also completed in 1856, Olmsted hoped for the best. "Rail-roads and guano seem, just now, to give life and improvement to Virginia," he wrote. Activity, punctuality, and intelligence should follow, as would better prices for imported and exported goods. A Journey in the Backcountry in the Winter of 1853–54 painted a more pessimistic portrait. An account of a trip that had taken Olmsted through southwest Virginia, it appeared in 1860. Virginia's railroads, Olmsted now concluded, were nothing more than pathetic panaceas. "No one has any gumption," he complained. "In every neighborhood, I found hope to center in something to come from without. A railroad or canal ... a copper or coal mine, or salt works." Virginia, he concluded, would never advance until it took a realistic look at itself and the institution that held it back: slavery.
In retrospect, it is apparent that both railroad boosters like William H. Cook and northern critics like Olmsted saw a part of the picture, the portion they wanted to see, but not the whole. In many ways, the reality of the railroad exceeded its supporters' hopes. The V&T did hasten the commercialization of regional agriculture, contributed to industrialization and town development, and breathed new life into African American slavery, just as its boosters said it would. As a result, Southwest Virginia in 1860 was a very different place than it had been ten years before. Yet, as Olmsted predicted, it did not bring about paradise on earth. Indeed, the railroad forged the final links between the region and the wider South, including eastern Virginia, just in time to drag Southwest Virginia into a civil war fought to defend the institution Olmsted begged Virginians to confront. In that war, class cleavages, already extant but widened as a result of the railroad, would fester and ultimately explode. Southwest Virginia would confront the postwar world divided physically between two states, impoverished, embittered, and bereft of many of its sons, like John Gilmer, who died in the war's early months. All of that, however, was in the future on October 2, 1856, a day for celebrations.
To comprehend Southwest Virginia, and its railroad, one must begin with geography. From the Atlantic Ocean roughly two hundred miles inland to the Blue Ridge Mountains, antebellum Virginia was well drained and relatively flat, rising gently above sea level from east to west. Past the fall line, which divided the coastal "Tidewater" from the central "Piedmont," the landscape grew more rolling but hardly mountainous. The Blue Ridge thus signaled an abrupt topographical change, the landscape suddenly transformed into a realm of high, wooded, hazy mountains divided by rich, deep valleys. This was "western Virginia." As Map 1 illustrates, Southwest Virginia, the southern half of the so-called "Trans-Allegheny Grand Division," stretched from the Blue Ridge westward to Kentucky, and northward from the North Carolina and Tennessee borders to the Kanawha River.
The geography of Southwest Virginia itself was not uniform. As Map 2 shows, three distinct geographical subregions comprised the whole. In the roughly triangular southeast corner of the region, the Blue Ridge Mountains at their most rugged passed through copper-rich Carroll, Floyd, and Grayson counties toward North Carolina. To the north and west of the Blue Ridge subregion, the "upper," or southern, section of the Valley of Virginia extended diagonally in a northeast-southwest direction to East Tennessee. More a series of interconnected valleys divided by high ridges, the valley subregion nonetheless offered fertile bottom land to farmers and easy transportation to travelers. The counties eventually located there, Montgomery, Pulaski, Wythe, Smyth, and Washington from east to west, were the first settled, the most populous, and the most commercially oriented, owing to their proximity to the region's main thoroughfare, the Valley Road. Finally, the Allegheny-Cumberland Plateau extended northward from the valley to the Kanawha and westward to the Cumberland Mountains and the Bluegrass State. In this, the largest of the three subregions, the mountains, generally, were steeper and sharper than those of the Blue Ridge, the valleys more narrow and irregularly oriented, and the soils thinner, with the exceptions the rich glades located at the heads of streams. As a result, the plateau was less conducive to agriculture and settlement. Indeed, as late as 1850, many sections of the plateau remained unoccupied. Two hallmarks of this subregion were its huge virgin forests, which supported an amazing array of hardwoods and softwoods, and its rich mineral deposits beneath the soil. Gypsum, iron ore, lead, manganese, salt, sandstone, and especially coal lay largely unexploited. In some locales, hot springs bubbled to the surface. By 1860, the plateau subregion contained sixteen counties.
The first documented exploratory party encountered the New River in 1671, but settlement lagged until the 1730s and 1740s. The mountainous topography certainly was one reason, but it would be incorrect to regard this as paramount. As Gene Wilhelm, Jr. demonstrated, mountains did not lead invariably to isolation; they were not walls. Other factors were just as important. Southwest Virginia's rivers, for example, hindered the westward movement. With one exception, the region's rivers all flowed north or west into the Ohio-Mississippi River system. The exception, the Roanoke, crossed the southern Piedmont and then dipped into North Carolina, finally entering the ocean at Albermarle Sound. Significant Native American opposition also delayed white settlement. While rarely establishing towns, the Cherokee, Iroquois, and Shawnee claimed the region for hunting and as a transportation corridor until roughly 1770, when a series of treaties lessened the Indian threat.
Getting from place to place in early Southwest Virginia was a major undertaking. Buffalo paths and Indian trails formed the region's first roads. First the colonial and later the early state governments left road improvement matters to county courts and profit-seeking entrepreneurs. The end result was a hodgepodge of badly constructed and poorly maintained roads. Many Virginians, notably Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and George Washington, understood the system's deficiencies, but the state did little to correct the situation until after the War of 1812. In the first flush of perceived victory, Virginia legislators, like their fellows in Washington, reconsidered their attitudes toward internal improvements. The financial promise of western trade, coupled with a fear of losing that trade to other states, finally convinced the General Assembly to act.
In February 1816, the legislature created the Fund for Internal Improvements and, to supervise the fund, the Board of Public Works. The act also empowered the board to employ an engineer, conduct surveys, and recommend projects for state aid, to be two-fifths of the total funds necessary. Later, the state's percentage grew to three-fifths. Internal improvement companies, chartered by the legislature, were expected to raise the difference through private investment. The act further divided the state officially into four "grand divisions," Tidewater, Piedmont, Valley, and Trans-Allegheny. The last named was divided into Northwest and Southwest only in 1860.
Fiscally conservative, the potentially powerful board nonetheless drew fire from the first in the Tidewater and Piedmont, especially after the Panic of 1819. The sole improvement with any widespread support in the east was the James River and Kanawha Canal, designed to connect eastern Virginia with the Ohio Valley. It did have supporters in the plateau subregion of Southwest Virginia, particularly in the Greenbrier Valley. That area benefited greatly from roads built to connect the Kanawha River to the James. A notable example was the Kanawha Turnpike, which ran from the Valley town of Covington to the mouth of the Big Sandy River.
Aside from the Greenbrier region, the board soon lost its western support as well, but for vastly different reasons. Viewed as a bureaucratic monster in the conservative east, the board seemed painfully inadequate west of the mountains. Higher construction costs, the result of the rugged mountain terrain, as well as a shortage of banks and capital, stymied transmontane construction projects. Western Virginians asked the board to make exceptions to the two-fifths rule and either increase the state's subscription or make projects entirely public works. The board refused, and continued to concentrate on the canal. The board's favoritism made the "ditch" an unpopular symbol of what the western counties perceived as their second-class status within the commonwealth. A public work from 1820 until 1835, the canal nearly bankrupted the state.
By then, mountain internal improvements had acquired critical symbolic overtones. The 1829–30 Constitutional Convention was the climax of nearly fifty years of campaigning for reforms in representation and suffrage. Representation in Virginia since the 1630s had been based on the county, each receiving two delegates. As eastern counties were smaller and more numerous, that area controlled the majority of seats. Reformers wanted to change this system to a more equitable one based on white population, the so-called white basis. Likewise, they wanted to broaden the electorate from the minority eligible under a freehold system to universal white manhood suffrage. At first, the controversy was hardly the sectional struggle Charles Henry Ambler later depicted. Reformers campaigned in the upper Potomac counties of the Tidewater, the southwestern Piedmont, the eastern shore, and among the artisans and mechanics of the eastern cities as well as in the west.
When the convention began in October 1829, however, it quickly degenerated into an sectional shouting match. Many of the state's fears and prejudices swept to the fore, as the debates ultimately concerned the future of slavery as much as they did constitutional questions. Who would rule Virginia, slaveholders or nonslaveowners? During the debates, mountain internal improvements came to be equated with opposition to slavery. Eastern conservatives branded their opponents as Yankeefied abolitionists and would-be tyrants, who would destroy slavery in their obsession with state-financed internal improvements. John W. Green of the Piedmont's Culpeper County, for example, proclaimed that the western delegates had "one great object of desire, and the whole history of our State Legislature will prove it, and that is the construction of roads and canals." Once in power, mountain Virginians would "tax the lowlands for the benefit of western interests." That heavy taxation, Green claimed, threatened the financial survival of planters already beset with soil depletion and a collapsing tobacco market. Bankrupt planters would mean the end of the entire slavery system.
In the end, the convention concluded infelicitously. With the votes of wavering Piedmont delegates, the majority approved a plan that reapportioned seats on the basis of the 1820 census. Transmontane Virginia gained thirteen legislative seats, but all but two went to Valley counties. To add insult to injury, the new constitution prohibited reapportionment at a later date. Reformers faced similar disappointments in regard to universal suffrage. Indeed, little of substance separated the new document from its predecessor. The convention approved the constitution by a vote of 55 to 40, with only one Valley delegate and no Trans-Allegheny representatives voting in the affirmative. While the electorate ratified the new constitution with a vote of 26,005 to 15,666, Southwest Virginians rejected it 4,792 to 832.
The Trans-Allegheny division as a whole reacted to ratification with bitterness. The angry and resentful mountaineers demanded redress. Some called for a new state of their own, and a few Virginians spoke openly of civil war, one that might spread into the backcountries of the Carolinas and Georgia. Prodded by western politicians like the new governor, John Floyd of Montgomery County, the legislature desperately turned to internal improvement legislation as a means of placating at least Southwest Virginia. "A crisis is approaching," advised the Winchester Republican. "The northern counties demand to be separated from the state ... the southwest counties go for a division of the state into two commonwealths. ... prosecute the improvements called for in the southwest, and that portion of our state ... would give up its desire for separation."
The legislature listened and responded. In April 1831, the General Assembly chartered both a "South-Western Turnpike Company" and a railroad to penetrate Southwest Virginia, the Lynchburg and New River Railroad. The railroad project, however, came to nothing, collapsing abruptly the next year. Nat Turner's slave rebellion convinced slaveowner Governor Floyd that only gradual abolition could prevent additional outbreaks. Floyd also believed that emancipation would revitalize the state's stagnant economy. Careful to conceal his true feelings, Floyd called on the legislature to reconsider slavery. In January 1832, debate began. Like the recent convention, the two-month-long debate rapidly developed along sectional lines. Mountain delegates endorsed gradual, compensated emancipation while easterners espoused the status quo. Among the West's leaders was the governor's nephew, twenty-six-year-old William Ballard Preston of Montgomery County. The West's support of even a weak plan of emancipation reinforced eastern stereotypes of mountaineers as traitorous abolitionists. After beating back the challenge to slavery, eastern delegates punished their opponents by denying necessary aid to the railroad and defeating a bill generally providing state loans for railroad construction. Without state aid, the railroad project quickly collapsed.
Eastern retaliation proved to be only temporary. Once tempers cooled, the legislature's cismontane majority revived its reluctant policy of purchasing Southwest Virginia's fidelity with internal improvements. Half-heartedness, however, prevented real success. Eastern legislators approached the topic grudgingly, and the results always fell short of hopes in the mountains.
One notable example was the Cumberland Gap Road. Authorized by the General Assembly of 1833–34, the completed road ran over 260 miles, from Fincastle to the Cumberland Gap. The financing derived from a combination of private and public sources, and it was an instant success, with stock drovers especially favoring the route. Not long after, however, the triumph began to sour. Squabbles between Richmond and Southwest Virginia counties over jurisdiction and maintenance, as well as outright fraud, eventually convinced the legislature that the road's benefits did not outweigh the headaches it created. In the mid-1840s, the General Assembly abandoned the road entirely to the counties. By that time, disrepair made it nearly useless.
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Excerpted from "Southwest Virginia's Railroad"
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Copyright © 1994 The University of Illinois Press.
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