Why Were The Radical Republicans Radical?

[Thomas Thorne]

I won the book about Civil War railroads "The Iron Way:Railroads,the Civil War and the Making of Modern America" by William G. Thomas at a Lincoln Group of New York raffle.

I was always very uneasy about the Charles Ramsdell climate thesis which held that antebellum Southern slavery could not exist outside of cotton growing areas. Being Americans I feel they could be relied on to come up with some clever ideas to use slaves in an unconventional manner. Slavery antedated the cotton kingdom and in various often unsuspected ways persisted long after its demise in the United States-think of the Soviet Gulags.

Reading Thomas I discovered that Southern railroads rented and even bought slaves for railroad work. 14,000 slaves worked for railroads in 1860. No plantation at that date employed more than 1200 slaves. I might prefer being a slave at Tara to being a slave of the Virginia Central given the horrible treatment that railroad slaves endured. I wonder if intellectuals who justified slavery were cognizant of the industrial treatment of actual slaves when bemoaning the effects of yankee wage slavery.

We have the interesting paradox that the South increased its railroad mileage by a higher percentage than the North in the 1850's but was compelled to cannibalize its railroads when war came. The Confederacy when retreating often would destroy its own railroads not figuring on the demonic energies of the US Military Railroads which rebuilt the Confederate lines,converted them to their own gauge and used them to supply advancing Union armies.

I find it difficult to see how the Union could have won the war if a Southern rail network did not already exist.
Tom