R. Scott Huffard Jr.’s debut monograph emphasizes the role of northern railway corporations and industrial technology in the hardening of violence and white supremacy in the Jim Crow era. Huffard argues that the railroads and their white, Southern boosters employed the South’s raw racial tensions to ameliorate the dark side of capitalist expansion and ensure the persistence of a New South narrative. Instead of viewing both railroads and capitalism solely in an economic light, Huffard frames these twin forces in a cultural and social context, allowing him to trace how white and Black southerners reacted, adapted, and interpreted the expansion of capitalism. In so doing, he complicates the long link between railroads and regional progress and underlines the power wielded by corporations and racial fear at the turn of the twentieth century.

The first part of Huffard’s work takes a broad look at the railroad’s magic—or “phantasmagoria”—as he calls it—in the postwar South. He shows how white southerners harnessed the railroad’s power to bring capital, personnel, and commodities to a single location, demonstrating through free-flowing capital the creation of order from chaos, the progress of the region, and the grand engineering of white men. Likewise, Huffard demonstrates how Black southerners also tried to harness the railroad’s magic. They viewed the iron horse as a means of escape: a way to find work or family members, an avenue to obtain citizenship, and a way to turn Black laborers into household heroes through music such as the ballad of John Henry.

More and more Black men and women either found employment on the railroads or traveled along their lines as passengers, and white southerners—seeing multitudes of unfamiliar Black faces at depots and on railroad cars—experienced confusion, consternation, and fear. Such supposedly dangerous racial mingling, Huffard contends, convinced southern boosters that the white South would only find the railroad and its magic attractive if Black men and women could not wield it. As a result, white southerners created archetypes specifically for the railroads. For example, they considered the Black men and women who labored in chain gangs building the lines “unredeemed” due to their criminal behavior, and, because they worked in remote areas unseen by the public, they were not a great loss to humanity. The African Americans who worked directly in the railroad cars could not be so easily sequestered, however, so white southerners reduced them to jobs that demanded subservience and obedience, such as Pullman porters and brakemen. White southerners, meanwhile, labeled Black men and women who rode the trains as “wanderers” or “idle,” removing all purpose from their movements, or, worse, as potential “rapists,” coding Black men as criminals, and Black women as “smelly” or “vicious,” classifying them as unfeminine. These stereotypes not only ensured that Blacks, whether as laborers or consumers, would remain outside of modernity, capitalism, and the railroad’s magic but also helped bolster the broader narrative of white supremacy.

The second part of Huffard’s work questions the popular narrative of New South progress. Using four case studies—disease, train wrecks, violent robberies, and monopolies—he details how the railroad and its capitalistic advances created and enabled these nightmares, exacerbated their effects, and contributed to the hardening of white supremacy. Northern capital infused into Southern rail lines allowed for increased rail speeds, regulated schedules, and growing connections to distant regions, contributing to the railroad’s magic, but also, Huffard contends, creating monsters. While yellow fever typically brought misery to areas near water, the increasing connections of railroads across the South, in conjunction with the building of new tracks to smaller towns and outposts, meant that this potentially fatal disease could ride the railroad and create epidemics further inland. Railroad robbers such as the infamous Railroad Bill closely followed railroad schedules so they could know not only when and where to attack a line, but also what other trains would be passing by in order to make a swift getaway. Capitalism created a regulated and consolidated environment ripe for predators to wreak havoc on southerners, but these nightmares moved within white supremacy and created unequal experiences for whites and Blacks. For example, when yellow fever came to a town or city, many well-off whites could flee, but many poorer African Americans could not. When trains wrecked, the poorly constructed second-class cars where Black men and women typically rode witnessed more fatalities than first-class cars.

These unsavory aspects corroded the idea of railroads as progress. To salvage this image of a bright New South, Huffard argues, railway corporations and white southerners tried to take control of these disastrous narratives by utilizing white racial fears. As damage claims blaming railway corporations for wrecks piled up, companies tried to deflect blame (and any assessed damages) by employing a new archetypical image—the “train wrecker.” Although this faceless archetype did not really exist, railway corporations personified the wrecker as a working-class African American man, someone already on the outskirts of society to be the scapegoat. Huffard’s work, like Stephen Kantrowitz’s Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (2000), reminds us of elites’ central role in enabling white supremacy.Footnote ⁴

Huffard’s final chapter on monopolies emphasizes a main point woven throughout his narrative: the power of railway corporations, whether through finger-pointing, stereotyping, or legislative action, overcame whatever unsavory events occurred along their lines. Wrecks and robberies never destroyed the phantasmagoria of the line, and, more importantly, the perception of railroads and capitalism as the South’s saviors.

Owing to his focus on railroads and capitalism, much of Huffard’s sources necessarily come from the top down. But Huffard is upfront about the nature of his sources and incorporates as much material as possible from Black passengers. His analysis of folk songs and ballads is particularly interesting, for example, for not only allowing a window into Black perceptions of the railroads but also how such songs bolstered resistance to Jim Crow. Taken as a whole, Huffard’s Engines of Redemption allows the reader to better understand how the power of railway corporations contributed not only to the narrative of the New South, but also, more broadly, how it helped to solidify white supremacy in the South.