
Iron Confederacies
Southern Railways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction
Scott Reynolds Nelson(Author)
The University of North Carolina Press
Published on 31. May 1999
Book
Paperback/Softback
272 pages
978-0-8078-4803-6 (ISBN)
Description
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. |Focusing on the Reconstruction era, this book links the expansion of Southern railways by Southern planters and northern capitalists to issues of State's rights, racial violence, and big business.
More details
Edition
New edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Chapel Hill
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Edition type
New edition
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 237 mm
Width: 159 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
408 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8078-4803-6 (9780807848036)
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Additional editions

E-Book
10/2005
The University of North Carolina Press
€29.49
Available for download
Person
Scott Reynolds Nelson is assistant professor of history at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.