Book Review of Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South

Review of: Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South. By R. Scott Huffard Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 324.) Excerpt: Generations of scholars have debated the degree of continuity or discontinuity in the South’s transition from “Old” to “New.” Railroads are a critical part of this story of industrial transformation, and they are the focus of [End Page 56] R. Scott Huffard Jr.’s Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South. Building on a current historiographical reassessment of the capitalistic nature of the pre–Civil War South, Huffard sees the railroad boom of the 1880s and 1890s as an expansion of earlier practices. In the post-Reconstruction South, railroads served as tangible capitalist development that Huffard analyzes in some unique ways. Moving beyond track mileage and corporate ledger books, Huffard blends top down sources like political correspondence, company records, and newspapers with “mentalities, mores, and stories” to show how the South embraced the capitalist ethos of the railroad while utilizing the region’s deep-rooted racial hierarchies to paper over capitalism’s more destructive elements [...