Been Workin’ on the Railroad

Samuel Ballton was born into slavery on New Year’s Day in 1838 on Vincent A. Marmaduke’s plantation in Westmoreland County, Va., about 80 miles south of Washington. The county was home to the Washington and the Lee families, part of a Tidewater district made rich by bountiful wheat, tobacco and livestock. It was a rough, bucolic existence, to which the Civil War would bring wrenching, surprising change in the form of new technologies, change that meant new hardships for the region’s slaves — but also opportunities for escape from servitude.

When the war broke out, Marmaduke immediately sent all his “able-bodied slaves,” including Ballton, to work as section hands on the Virginia Central Railroad in the Blue Ridge Mountains, 200 miles to the west. Later, probably in early 1862, Ballton was transferred from the mountains of western Virginia to Fredericks Hall Station, 45 miles northwest of Richmond and a few dozen miles from his birthplace.

Ballton’s experience on the railroad was not unusual. Slavery is often thought of as a primarily agricultural phenomenon, but thousands of enslaved blacks worked on the railroads right up to and during the Civil War, grading lines, building bridges and blasting tunnels. They hauled timber, cut wood and shoveled dirt and stone. Skilled slaves, especially blacksmiths, stone masons and carpenters, worked on the railroads too.

Railroad companies and contractors hired slaves by the hundreds; they also purchased slaves directly, in lots of 50 or more. In fact, by the 1850s, the South’s railroad companies could be counted among the largest slaveholders in their regions. They even developed special accounting entries on their balance sheets to show the value of “the Negro Fund.” In the South Carolina Railroad’s 1857 annual report, for example, the company listed 57 slaves in its possession. In 1859, its holdings had almost doubled, to 90 slaves. Confederate railroads bought and hired slaves right up to the end of the war, even as slavery fell apart wherever the Union Army opened corridors of freedom: in 1863 the Virginia Central Railroad purchased 35 “negro men” for $83,484.60.

Ballton, in other words, was pitched into one of the fastest growing industrial settings in the South, one which the region’s leaders associated with the future and with modernity. The South pursued railroad expansion as fast as the North, laying as many miles of track in the 1850s as the Midwest, even exceeding the pace of construction in much of the North. And slavery was inextricably bound to the South’s railroad boom: slaves could be moved at the will of a slaveholder quickly from one part of the South to another, and whites could use slaves as collateral on loans to build railroads or purchase new farms. What’s more, railroads opened up new cotton frontiers in the interior South, expanding the need for slavery in agricultural contexts.

But the constant moving and confusion of the railroad boom also made escape easier. In April 1862, with Union forces outside Fredericksburg, Va., Ballton and a small group of men escaped their camp and struck out for the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad. They followed it north toward Fredericksburg, at one point meeting the road master who had hired them. Claiming to be on the job, they made their way along the railroad and then through to the Union lines, where they encountered the Sixth Wisconsin, a unit later made famous for its toughness on the battlefield.

Ballton wasn’t the only slave to utilize the lines cut by railroads to escape. The R. F. & P. and the Virginia Central Railroad connected some of the wealthiest slaveholding counties in Virginia. Nearly 80,000 enslaved people lived in the surrounding counties, almost a fifth of Virginia’s total slave population. This north-south axis, running from Richmond to Washington, became an avenue of freedom: tens of thousands of blacks used the railroad to guide them north to Union lines.

The Richmond Daily Dispatch reported 36 slaves had run away from the R. F. & P. in April 1862, almost certainly to the Union Army. One of them, “John Henry,” who was “owned by Mrs. B.B. Wright,” was 26 years old and described as “5 feet 10 inches high, black, [and] slow spoken.” Whether he became the John Henry of railroad legend on the C & O cannot be known, but the R. F. & P. was still looking for these former slaves three months later. None had returned or been recaptured.

In August 1862, when the Union forces retreated back up the line toward Washington, black families went with them. Col. W.W. Wright, the engineer and superintendent of the United States Military Railroads, witnessed the evacuation: “The contrabands fairly swarmed about the Fredericksburg and Falmouth stations, and there was a continuous black line of men, women and children moving north along the [rail] road, carrying all their worldly goods on their heads. Every train running to Aquia was crowded with them.” According to Wright, well over 10,000 contrabands walked or rode on the tracks north toward freedom in one week. Meanwhile, Confederate railroad operators took back the R. F. & P. The road superintendent immediately took out advertisements in the Richmond Daily Dispatch for the 36 slaves who had run away in April and put up an additional $5 reward for their recapture.

The skilled African-American railroad workers who had moved north with the Union troops proved a boon for the Northern war effort. Some of the earliest photographs we have of African-Americans in the Civil War come from Alexandria in 1861, where black railroad workers assembled at the Orange and Alexandria Railroad shops. They and thousands of others would soon return south, rebuilding sabotaged rail and ensuring the swift movement of troops and supplies.

Turning the Confederate railroads against the Confederacy was not only a military act but also a social and political one. It challenged the South’s vision of itself as an advanced modern society marked by railroads and slavery. In the premier industry of the age, slave labor on the South’s railroads stood in stark contrast to white labor on the North’s, and black railroad workers knew that the Confederate railroads relied on their labor and skill.

For his part, Samuel Ballton became a cook for the Sixth Wisconsin. Later, on Aug. 6, 1862, the Sixth Wisconsin marched to Fredericks Hall Station, where Ballton had once worked, and “destroyed bridges and railroad track, and burned a large amount of Confederate supplies.” We do not know whether Samuel Ballton guided the Sixth Wisconsin on this targeted raid or whether he provided the key intelligence about the location of Confederate material there; Rufus R. Dawes, the eventual commander of the Sixth and hero of Gettysburg, described this raid in his memoirs but made no mention of Ballton. Evidence suggests he played a crucial role, however: formerly enslaved railroad workers knew a great deal about the location and operation of the Confederate supplies and forces, and they served as guides for the Union Army throughout the South. In the official record of events for the Sixth Wisconsin, moreover, no other Confederate railroad station was so explicitly targeted in the summer 1862 campaign.

Ballton’s wife was still enslaved on the Marmaduke plantation, so he decided to risk recapture and go back into Confederate territory to help her escape. The pair safely came back through to Fredericksburg and then moved to Alexandria. Two years later Ballton left Alexandria and traveled to Boston to enlist in the Fifth Massachusetts Calvary, a regiment of United States Colored Troops. After the Civil War Ballton moved to Long Island, eventually became a prosperous farmer with $5,000 in real estate and a thriving business, earning a reputation as “the Pickle King.”

A whole generation of black railroad workers came out of the Civil War. Some continued to work for the railroads – over half of all railroad workers in Virginia were African-American in 1880. But others migrated across the South and out of the South, like Ballton, seeking opportunity and acting on what they heard. Their experience in the first months of the Civil War in 1861 and 1862 suggested an important truth: that they could turn enslavement on the railroads into freedom, that they could undermine, and even target, the Confederacy’s key military structures, and in so doing could challenge the Confederacy’s claim as a modern nation built around railroads and slavery.

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Sources: Long Islander, March 20, 1914; The Eagle, April 30, 1917; Betty DeRamus, “Forbidden Fruit: Love Stories from the Underground Railroad”; Proceedings of the Stockholders of the Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston Rail-Road Company, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library; Annual Reports of the Virginia Central Railroad, Kennedy Collection, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Special Collections; and Mississippi Central Railroad, Annual Report of the President and Directors, Library of Virginia; Supplement to the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Part III, Vol. 75; Rufus Robinson Dawes, “Service with the Sixth Wisconsin”; Chicago Tribune, April 3, 1862; Richmond Daily Dispatch, Aug. 7, 1862; Scott Reynolds Nelson, “Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, The Untold Story of an American Legend.

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William G. Thomas is a professor of history and the Angle Chair in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of “The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America” and a co-editor of “The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War.”
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