Slavery and Southern Railroads Some of the first, longest and most ambitious railroads in the nation were built in the South beginning in the late 1820s. By 1860 the South's railroad network was one of the most extensive in the world, and nearly all of it had been constructed with slave labor. Moreover, railroad companies became some of the largest slaveholders in the South.

The 1877 Railroad Strike The Great Railway Strike of 1877 brought the nation's commerce to a screeching halt, and the violence that erupted in Baltimore and Pittsburgh shook the nation. In the aftermath of Civil War and Reconstruction, the great strike seemed especially ominous. Railroad workers led this first national strike in American history, exploiting the very network that was the instrument of national unity.

"Golden Spikes" and Celebrations In 1857 the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad became the first to break through the Allegheny Mountains and link up the Ohio River with the Atlantic Coast. "Golden spikes," celebratory dinners, and special excursions were all part of the B & O's Great Railroad Celebration, one of the first nationally covered technological events in American history. The transcontinental project culminated in May 1869 at Promontory Point, Utah, with a public ceremony linking the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific with golden spikes and silver hammers.

William Jennings Bryan's 1896 Presidential Campaign In an unprecedented move, William Jennings Bryan chose to use the new railroad system to travel during his 1896 campaign for the presidency. Through this strategy, Bryan was able to personally give speeches before thousands of people in hundreds of cities and towns during his seven month campaign. The railroad became a political issue, igniting protests from farmers, shippers, and workers.

Land Sales, Migration and Immigration The first land grant railroad in the United States was to the Illinois Central in 1850, and the company pioneered land sales, immigration, and advertising strategies that other corporations would adopt. The context, however, of the Illinois Central land grants was the deepening sectional crisis of the 1850s. Later, the coming of the railroads to western America had a profound impact on land ownership and land value. This Topic examines the effect that railroads, as well as other factors such as nationality and ethnicity, had on land sales in the West.

Railroad Work--Building the Railroads and the Transcontinental The construction of the transcontinental railroad brought engineers, survey teams, and Irish and Chinese laborers into the Plains and Mountain West at the same time as the Civil War was raging in the East. African Americans migrated across the network after emancipation finding work on railroads, in industries, and agriculture.

The Civil War and Destruction When Union commanders assembled their forces in ways that took full advantage of the technologies, and when they practiced a new form of war making we might call "railroad generalship," they demonstrated a nearly unassailable confidence in the modern nation. In the Atlanta Campaign William T. Sherman set out to destroy the Confederate railroads and bring the war into the South's "interior." This capacity for a massive army to operate in the "interior" became the ultimate modern form of war-making that railroads made possible.

Tourism and Mobility Mobility around the new networks of railroad, telegraph, and steamships sustained travel and tourism that transformed local spaces into imagined locations.

Representing the Railroad Artists, photographers, and illustrators drafted images of the railroad, seeking to represent the technology to a wide audience. Newspapers and magazines tried to characterize the technology. The railroads too participated in this effort, sending out artists' excursions, paying advertisers for slick brochures, and commissioning artwork. As a result competing images of the railroad circulated throughout the nineteenth century in different places and different times.

Hearing the Railroad(Coming Soon) The railroad whistle in the landscape in the early nineteenth century seemed to many to announce a new epoch of modernity. For Henry David Thoreau it signaled the loss of a close relationship to nature and the land. For enslaved African Americans the whistle called up various images--of dreaded hard labor on the tracks, of the potential for mobility and freedom, of the news of the war. The locomotive, both its whistle and its pumping steam engine, became woven into the fabric of American music.