Iron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction

Front Cover
Univ of North Carolina Press, Oct 12, 2005 - History - 272 pages

During Reconstruction, an alliance of southern planters and northern capitalists rebuilt the southern railway system using remnants of the Confederate railroads that had been built and destroyed during the Civil War. In the process of linking Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia by rail, this alliance created one of the largest corporations in the world, engendered bitter political struggles, and transformed the South in lasting ways, says Scott Nelson.
Iron Confederacies uses the history of southern railways to explore linkages among the themes of states' rights, racial violence, labor strife, and big business in the nineteenth-century South. By 1868, Ku Klux Klan leaders had begun mobilizing white resentment against rapid economic change by asserting that railroad consolidation led to political corruption and black economic success. As Nelson notes, some of the Klan’s most violent activity was concentrated along the Richmond-Atlanta rail corridor. But conflicts over railroads were eventually resolved, he argues, in agreements between northern railroad barons and Klan leaders that allowed white terrorism against black voters while surrendering states' control over the southern economy.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Introduction
1
An Iron Confederacy Surveyed and Graded
11
2 The Confederacy Serves the Southern
27
Political Reconstruction and the Public Fiction of the Air Line 18651871
47
4 The Pennsylvania Railroads Consolidation and the Return of the Confederacy
71
A Trenchant Blade
95
The Railway Corridor in South Carolina
115
7 Public Fictions
139
8 A Railway Redemption
163
An Ironic Confederacy
179
Notes
183
Select Bibliography
225
Index
251
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Iron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction
Scott Reynolds Nelson
Limited preview - 1999
Iron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction
Scott Reynolds Nelson
Snippet view - 1999

Common terms and phrases

ABAP Alamance County American Andrews Annual Report Atlanta & Richmond Augusta Baltimore banks bonds capital Carolina Spartan cars Chapel Hill Charleston Charlotte Observer charter cities Confederate Congress conservatives corporations corruption cotton Democrats directors economic federal freed freight Georgia governor Greensboro Patriot History Holden Ibid Inland Air Line interstate Iron Confederacy James James Henry Hammond Jefferson Davis John Josiah Turner KKK hearings Klan violence Klansmen labor legislature Mahone merchants Moncure Robinson NCRR North Carolina Press North Carolina Railroad northern olina Pennsylvania Railroad planters political rail railway corridor Railway Security Company Raleigh & Gaston Reconstruction Republican Richmond & Danville Richmond Air Line Richmond Dispatch Richmond Enquirer road Rufus Bullock Scott Seaboard Inland Air slaves Southern Express southern railroads Southern Railway Security Spartanburg Spartanburg County SRSC tobacco Tom Scott trade traffic transportation University of North University Press upcountry upper piedmont Virginia William William Mahone York

About the author (2005)

Scott Reynolds Nelson is Georgia Athletics Association Professor of History at the University of Georgia.

Bibliographic information

TitleIron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction
AuthorScott Reynolds Nelson
Editionillustrated
PublisherUniv of North Carolina Press, 2005
ISBN0807876100, 9780807876107
Length272 pages
Subjects ›  › 

History / United States / 19th Century
  
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