Southern Railroad

A Southern Underground Railroad constitutes a powerful counter-narrative in American history, a tale of how enslaved men and women found freedom and human dignity not in Jefferson's "Empire of Liberty" but outside the expanding boundaries of the United States.

The transcontinental railroads of the late 19th century were the first corporate behemoths. Their attempts to generate profits from proliferating debt sparked devastating panics in the US economy. Their dependence on public largess drew them into the corridors of power, initiating new forms of corruption. Their operations rearranged space and time, and remade the landscape of the West. As wheel and rail, car and coal, they opened new worlds of work and ways of life.

The matter-of-fact descriptive title of this interesting little volume on railroading in the pre-Civil War South does not do justice to Alvarez's coverage of the subject. Along with his full account of trains and train accommodations, he manages to encompass a number of social, political, and even ideological subjects.

The year is 1835, and Carolina Adams finds herself enchanted by an unlikely suitor: the railroad. Frustrated by society's expectations upon her gender, she longs to study more masculine subjects and is thrilled when her father grants her a tutor. James Baldwin arrives to serve as Carolina's teacher, but of more importance, he is to court Carolina's beautiful older sister, Virginia. Will expectations - and Virginia's Southern charm - elicit the hoped-for proposal? Or will James and Carolina dare to acknowledge the mutual interests and feelings growing between them?

The Underground Railroad is one of the most taught topics to young schoolchildren, and every American is familiar with the idea of fugitive slaves escaping to Canada and the North with the help of determined abolitionists and even former escaped slaves like Harriet Tubman. The secrecy involved in the Underground Railroad made it one of the most mysterious aspects of the mid-19th century in America, to the extent that claims spread that 100,000 slaves had escaped via the Underground Railroad.