“This Is the Way to Build Railroads”: Slavery and Railroads in Antebellum America

The American South is often imagined as the home of agricultural slavery, but the transportation revolution of the mid-nineteenth century was underwritten by slave labor.  Some enslaved railroad workers earned wages through overwork.  Those wages both blurred distinctions between them and free workers and in some cases exceeded wage laborers’ earnings. Faced with economic decline in the early nineteenth century, business leaders of Charleston, South Carolina turned to an untested form of transportation to buoy their fortunes. They constructed a 136-mile railroad from Charleston to modern-day North Augusta, hoping to capture the trade of the upcountry. At the time of its completion in 1833, the South Carolina Railroad was the longest railroad in the world.  Slave labor was critical not only to the South Carolina project but in the southern transportation revolution as a whole.  This paper focuses on two aspects of that slave labor.  First, it charts the debate over the use of slave labor.  That debate centered not on whether slaves would be used – that was assumed – but whether the railroad companies should buy or rent slaves.  Debate turned on the relationship enslaved people would have with corporations, and in particular how corporations of men substituted for a master.  Would corporate ownership deny the benefits to the slave supposedly received from an individual master?  Second, this paper examines the wages that slaves received for work done above and beyond their regular duties. While slave owners received an annual payment, the slaves themselves were often compensated for overwork.  Using a rare complete set of payroll data available for the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad, I will demonstrate that slave “earnings” occasionally equaled or surpassed that of their white counterparts.