Bittersweet Legacy: The Black and White 'Better Classes' in Charlotte, 1850-1910

BITTERSWEET LEGACY

BITTERSWEET LEGACY

THE BLACK AND WHITE BETTER CLASSES IN CHARLOTTE 1850—1910

JANETTE THOMAS GREENWOOD

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

CHAPEL HILL AND LONDON

© 1994 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Greenwood, Janette Thomas.

Bittersweet legacy : the black and white better classes

in Charlotte, 1850-1910 / Janette Thomas Greenwood.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2133-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Afro-Americans—North Carolina—Charlotte—Social conditions. 2. Social classes—North Carolina— Charlotte—History. 3. Charlotte (N.C.)—Social conditions. 4. Charlotte (N.C.)—Race relations. I. Title.

F264.C4G73 1994

975.6′76041′08622—dc20       93-32060

CIP

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

98 97 96 95 94 5 4 3 2 1

THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY MANUFACTURED.

FOR ELIZABETH AND SUSANNAH

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

ONE

A Magic Influence

TWO

The New State of Things

THREE

Black and White Together

FOUR

Industrialization

FIVE

Fusion Politics

SIX

White Supremacy

SEVEN

In the Wake of Disfranchisement and Jim Crow

Epilogue

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

William R. Myers 45

Rufus Barringer 50

Jane Wilkes 67

William C. Smith 82

Miss Poe 84

Daniel Augustus Tompkins 120

Southern Cotton Oil Company, 1910 122

Charlotte’s black physicians, ca. 1895 135

Black businesspeople, Queen City Drug Store, ca. 1900 136

Biddle University Class of 1894 149

Bishop George Wylie Clinton, ca. 1890 152

Heriot Clarkson, ca. 1920 168

J. W. Smith, 1898 192

Christmas reception at the home of Bishop and Mrs. George Clinton, ca. 1918 241

MAPS

1. Charlotte’s Rail Connections, ca. 1865 12

2. Mecklenburg Townships, ca. 1870 59

3. Charlotte’s Four Wards and Main Streets, ca. 1880 94

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The roots of this project are deep, and I have accrued many debts researching and writing this book. I wish to thank the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission, which, under the direction of Dr. Dan Morrill, first assigned me the task of researching Charlotte’s black history in 1983. That assignment turned out to be the beginning of a long-term relationship with Charlotte’s history, and I am deeply indebted to Dr. Morrill and the commission for their interest and support. Thomas Hanchett, my onetime colleague at the Landmarks Commission in Charlotte, also provided unbounded enthusiasm and interest in this project from its earliest days. In addition, he has generously shared his own research and ideas about Charlotte’s past with me. Professor William Bluford of Charlotte introduced me to many men and women who shared their memories with me. I am especially indebted to Rosa Smith, the daughter of W. C. Smith, a central character in this story. She generously shared her copies of the Charlotte Messenger with me, and without her help this book could never have been written. Jack Claiborne also proved to be an invaluable source of information, and I appreciated discussing ideas with him as this project unfolded.

A number of people at the University of Virginia critiqued this book in its dissertation form. My adviser, Edward L. Ayers, shepherded this study from its inception as a seminar paper through the dissertation phase and finally to its becoming a manuscript and patiently critiqued numerous revisions. I am deeply indebted to him for his insight and encouragement as well as for his humane and subtle approach to southern history. Cindy Aron, Stephen Innes, Armstead Robinson, and Daphne Spain all gave my dissertation a careful read and provided helpful suggestions for improvement. At the university, I greatly benefited from many conversations about southern history with the Dixie Diners, Larry Hartzell, Beth Schweiger, and John Willis, as well as with Patricia Minter.

I am especially grateful to the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, which supported me for two years as a predoctoral research fellow. The support of the institute greatly facilitated the completion of this work. I also benefited immensely from many informal conversations around the coffeepot in the Woodson Annex with colleagues Charles Dew, Terry Epperson, Julia McDonough, and Kay Mills.

At the University of North Carolina Press, Executive Editor Lewis Bateman, editor Pamela Upton, copyeditor Paula Wald, and outside readers Paul D. Escott and Raymond Gavins patiently read and reread my manuscript with great care. Their enthusiasm for this project buoyed my spirits through the long process of producing a book. They all offered me excellent advice for improving this work. Any shortcomings in this book reflect on me, not them.

At Clark University, Lisa Hauptmann and Michelle Reidel took time from their own hectic graduate studies to read the manuscript and offer suggestions.

I wish to thank the North Caroliniana Society for an Archie K. Davis Fellowship and the Clark University History Department for travel funds that expedited the completion of this book.

Numerous librarians and archivists deserve thanks for their aid over the years. I am especially indebted to the staffs of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room, Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County; Special Collections, J. Murrey Atkins Library, University of North Carolina at Charlotte; Southern Historical Collection and North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; North Carolina Division of Archives and History; and Goddard Library, Clark University.

I am grateful to my Charlotte friends who fed, housed, and entertained me during innumerable research trips to their city. I would especially like to thank John and Polly Andrews, who generously provided me with a home away from home; they made my research expeditions not only tolerable but lots of fun. Donna Stafford also provided me with a place to stay, numerous meals, and good conversation. Jennifer Johnston tracked down a number of key facts for me in Charlotte libraries.

Family and friends have provided everything from moral support to child care over the course of this project. I would like to thank my parents, Carl and Fern Thomas; my sisters, Jean Cober and Judy Swank; Merritt Greenwood; Mary Logan Greenwood and the late Walter Greenwood; Sallie Greenwood; Donna Alexander; Jim Alexander; Ken Bayse; Sally Deutsch; Debbie Merrill; and Marc Steinberg.

Finally, my daughters, Elizabeth and Susannah, insured that I would not lead the life of a lonely scholar. Neither of them remembers a time when this project did not exist; they have grown up with it, at times have competed with it, and too many times have had to put up with a preoccupied mom because of it. This book is for them.

BITTERSWEET LEGACY

INTRODUCTION

If you take a walk down Charlotte’s Tryon Street today, you will see the dreams of New South proponents come true, manifested in towering glass skyscrapers, the homes of regional banks and international corporations. A few streets away are two buildings practically rendered miniature by the massive First Union Tower that stands nearby. These small red-brick buildings, Grace African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church and the Mecklenburg Investment Company Building, are the last remnants of what was once the center of Charlotte’s principal black business and residential district, known as Brooklyn. Redevelopment forces leveled Brooklyn in the 1950s and 1960s, and its inhabitants scattered to a variety of neighborhoods in Charlotte.

Charlotte’s urban landscape, including the seemingly incongruous fragments of Brooklyn, is a monument to the city’s better classes of the nineteenth century, the focus of this study. The glass skyscrapers that house banks and corporations are the legacy of ambitious merchants, businesspeople, and cotton brokers who, with the aid of railroads, built their town into a regional trading center in the 1860s and 1870s and then parlayed their wealth into cotton mills, making Charlotte the center of the Piedmont textile industry by 1900. The remnant of Brooklyn reflects a different past, but a past inextricably linked to the white progenitors of New South Charlotte. Brooklyn was home to many members of Charlotte’s black business and professional classes. Members of the black better class shared many of the same values as their white counterparts. They, too, sought economic advancement in the New South and prized hard work, discipline, and ambition. Indeed, Grace AME Zion Church and the Mecklenburg Investment Company Building attest to the mixture of spiritual and economic values that the black better class embraced. But their agenda included a key element that their white counterparts never had to worry about: they aspired to be full-fledged participants in New South society, politically, socially, and economically.

In their attempt to achieve this goal, the black better class frequently interacted with the white better class, at times forming alliances that challenged the seemingly intransigent mores of southern race relations. For a brief period in the 1880s, their association suggested an alternative vision of race relations. The Byzantine politics of the New South, as well as generational shifts in leadership in the 1890s, ultimately shattered the cross-racial coalition of the black and white better classes. Although short-lived, the alliance of the better classes had significant consequences in the way that these men and women responded to and shaped the racial politics, Jim Crow laws, and disfranchisement of the late 1890s. The rise and fall of the interracial cooperation of the better classes created a bittersweet legacy for Charlotte and the New South that would weigh heavily on its citizens well into the twentieth century.

The better classes played a central role in the unfolding story of the South between 1850 and 1910. During that time the world of black and white southerners changed at a vertiginous pace. They weathered secession and a civil war as well as the reconstruction of their war-torn society. They experienced severe shifts in the social and economic order induced by emancipation and industrialization. Moreover, they participated in fierce political battles over the control and direction of the postwar South.

By focusing on these two groups in the context of a booming New South city, this study reveals a surprisingly complex portrait of race and class relations in the New South, a portrait of fluidity, of strange and sometimes unsettling alliances. Concepts of race and class changed significantly over the second half of the nineteenth century, reflecting volatile economic and political transformations in the New South. Race and class relations were a kaleidoscope of shifting alliances and strategies as men and women attempted to make sense of their rapidly changing world. At times, barriers of race and class were porous, at other times, they were impermeable. At some moments, the fluidity of race and class lines depended on gender. Social relations in the New South were far from static as blacks and whites, men and women, rich, poor, and middling forged a range of associations in their daily lives. Like many other aspects of life in the New South, issues of race and class were hotly contested, never settled, and not simply defined or easily understood.

My study of Charlotte’s better classes also suggests that class development followed a different pattern and proceeded at a different rate than in the North, despite some fascinating parallels. Whereas historians of the antebellum North have described how the middle class was made in a sequential process, class in New South Charlotte was constantly made and unmade with the changing economic and political landscape. Moreover, compared to the antebellum North, class development in the New South was both abbreviated and intensified, a reflection of the rapid economic changes in postbellum southern society, the timing of economic development, and the fact that by the 1890s definitions of class derived, in part, from northern examples. Issues of race also affected patterns of class formation in the New South. Class development followed different trajectories for whites and blacks in the New South, symbolized in the stark contrast between Charlotte’s corporate glass towers and the small redbrick Grace AME Zion Church and Mecklenburg Investment Company Building. Racial issues, grounded in the context of social reform and partisan politics in Charlotte, also served as an impediment that ultimately separated the black and white better classes, complicating the meaning of class in the New South.¹

In 1955 C. Vann Woodward in his now classic work, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, suggested that there was a window of time between the end of Reconstruction and the establishment of rigid segregation when race relations appeared to be more fluid. Although never a golden age for blacks in the South, the period from the 1880s through the mid-1890s nonetheless represented, according to Woodward, a season of forgotten alternatives in race relations. My study of Charlotte supports Woodward’s thesis and explores the forgotten alternatives implemented by the black and white better classes in Charlotte and why those alternatives broke down, ushering in the harsher climate of the Jim Crow South.

My examination of Charlotte also supports Woodward’s contention in his Origins of the New South (1951) that there was, indeed, much that was new about the New South. Woodward’s thesis has been challenged and revised by subsequent generations of southern historians, creating rival discontinuity and continuity camps that represent the division between those who contend that the New South represented change in class and power relations and those who argue that the New South continued to be dominated by Old South elites. Charlotte’s history between 1850 and 1910 lends credence to Woodward’s claim that one of the most significant developments in the New South was the emergence of what he called a middle-class new man who adjusted to his shoulders the mantle of leadership that had descended from the planter, shaping the region’s economy and its culture.²

While narrowing my study to a single New South town, I have also attempted to build upon, broaden, and give detail to Woodward’s portrait of influential new men and the New South that they built. First, I have explored how women of the better classes helped shape and build the New South. I have paid special attention to the way that women of both races helped define class in New South Charlotte and have examined how, at times, gender affected attitudes about race.

Second, my story of the New South includes the black better class, heretofore largely neglected despite being crucial players in the drama of the New South. Indeed, the emergence of the black better class represents much of what was new about the New South. Different from the aristocrats of color in older southern cities and Reconstruction-era black leaders, Charlotte’s black better class emerged in the 1880s as a new generation of self-defined race leaders. Not only did the men and women of the black better class, like their white counterparts, help build the New South, but they also engendered a strategy of race progress with long-term consequences, a moderate and flexible philosophy articulated long before either Booker T. Washington or W. E. B. Du Bois expounded competing racial strategies. Their ideology anticipated that of Martin Luther King, Jr., as they sought to not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. The better class’s attempts to convert the rest of the black community to their strategy engendered severe class-based conflict that manifested itself in fiercely fought battles for control of the black community.³

Finally, by tracing the activities and relationships of the black and white better classes in Charlotte, I have attempted to give names and faces to participants in this enigmatic period of southern history, to show the interplay of local, state, and national events in the lives of ordinary people and how ordinary southerners grappled with and shaped those events. The study of men and women in a single city over several generations also throws the significance of generational shifts into relief. Indeed, the seemingly puzzling trajectory of class and race relations in the New South cannot be understood outside of the examination of formative generational experiences, the lessons that blacks and whites of several generations drew from slavery and the Civil War, Reconstruction, Redemption, and fusion politics.

In reconstructing the story of Charlotte’s better classes, I have tried to be especially sensitive to the ways men and women talked about class. Because the New South’s economic and social transformation took place during the Gilded Age, the historical record teems with references to class. People in the New South, like other Gilded Age Americans, spoke openly and unapologetically about class. By paying attention to the class-related vocabulary and terminology of the men and women of the New South, we can begin to see how and when concepts of class formed—and were transformed—over the course of the late nineteenth century. Moreover, the fact that men and women in the New South talked so much, and so openly, about class suggests that concepts of class were contested and had no clear-cut definitions.

The better class is the term that both black and white business and professional people first used to describe themselves in the 1870s and 1880s. Not only does the term tell us a great deal about the sense of moral and social superiority these men and women presumed, but the common usage of this term by blacks and whites reflects a shared definition of class and an affinity that allowed the black and white better classes to build coalitions in the New South period.

Indigenous definitions of class also reveal the class-based bonds that existed between blacks and whites in the New South era, confirming the importance of studying both races concurrently. Not only were concepts of class dynamic in the New South, but they were also relational. Especially for the black better class, class identity depended in part upon their relationship with their white counterparts and the recognition the white better class afforded them.

Sensitivity to the vocabulary of class in the New South also helps avoid many problems surrounding the usage of the terms middle class and elite. To be middle class, as described in northern antebellum studies, is to be part of a class with significant economic and political power. But to describe the black professionals and business men and women of New South Charlotte as middle class ascribes a degree of power to this group that they did not have. Moreover, the term suggests a class in the middle, sandwiched between an elite and a working class. Yet Charlotte’s black community in the late nineteenth century did not reflect a tripartite division; rather Charlotte’s black society was two-tiered, divided between a small better class of businesspeople and professionals and their spouses and a large class of laboring men and women.

Likewise, the term better class fits the social and economic reality of white business and professional men and women in the 1870s and 1880s. A New South city that before the war was no more than a tiny trading town, Charlotte had no significant upper class in the decades following the war. Not until the 1890s did the town have a clearly recognizable manufacturing elite and a middle class that defined itself as separate from both the elite and the working class.

Charlotte, the focus of this study, is in many ways a quintessential New South city whose development parallels that of many other cities of the era. Until the coming of the railroad in 1852, it was little more than a small crossroads town and county seat. Linking Charlotte to the coast, the railroad suddenly transformed the town into a regional trading center, and in the ten years before the Civil War, the town more than doubled in size, to 2,000 inhabitants. Charlotte continued to grow during the war as local entrepreneurs engaged in war-related industry. After the war the town’s population surged, augmented significantly by war refugees and ex-slaves. By 1880 Charlotte had a population of over 7,000, six railroads, and a flourishing economy based on the cotton trade. In 1881 Charlotte entered a new phase of development when two local cotton merchants built the town’s first cotton mill; by 1900 it boasted more than a dozen mills and could claim to be the center of the Piedmont’s burgeoning textile industry. Ten years later, it was the largest city in the state, with 34,000 people, outstripping the older coastal city of Wilmington. Charlotte, then, seems representative of a type of New South city with relatively shallow antebellum roots that experienced rapid growth over the last half of the nineteenth century. Moreover, it epitomizes the dynamic development of inland cities in the New South that were built on railroads, commerce, and industry.

Charlotte stood in the mainstream of two of the New South’s most significant economic developments: the growth of cotton culture and industrialization. Both developments transformed social relations in the town. The origins of the white better class lay in the burgeoning cotton economy of the 1870s, which conferred both definition and power to Charlotte’s businesspeople and professionals. Less than twenty years later, by the 1890s, a second economic transformation—the establishment of the textile industry—threw class relations into flux again. Like other Piedmont cotton mill towns, Charlotte divided between town people and mill people, the poor, landless men and women who migrated from the countryside to work in the mills. But Charlotte’s town people also divided by class. The white better class bifurcated into a manufacturing elite and a middle class, often bitterly at odds with each other over issues relating to the mill people.⁴

Class formation followed a different trajectory among the town’s black residents. The origins of the black better class lay not in the cotton economy of the 1870s but in the churches and schools of the Reconstruction era that trained a generation of black teachers, preachers, and businesspeople. Born in the final decade of slavery, this generation of men and women came of age in the 1880s and asserted their leadership against an older generation of political leaders that had emerged during Reconstruction. The better class of blacks, as they referred to themselves, saw themselves as the new race leaders, promulgating a philosophy of race progress based on education, property ownership, and moral propriety. In the 1880s the black better class forged alliances with their white counterparts, alliances that helped define them as separate from the rest of the black community and Reconstruction-era leaders. In the 1890s whereas the white better class divided with the emergence of a manufacturing elite, the black better class found its economic opportunities circumscribed. Unlike their white counterparts, they remained economically weak, barred from the feast of New South industrial development.

While Charlotte stood in the mainstream of economic and social development in the South from 1850 to 1910, the town’s residents participated in the explosive politics of the era, much of which was generated and molded by social and economic upheaval. The politics of secession and the Civil War, the painful transition of Reconstruction, the angry revolt of Grangers—and later Populists—against Charlotte’s businesspeople, fierce battles over Republican party loyalty in the black community, the prohibition movement and experiments with nonpartisan reform, the rise of fusion politics, the white-supremacy campaigns, and progressivism were all played out in Charlotte. By examining the better classes’ participation in these events and the political alliances they formed, we can begin to unravel the often tangled and hidden connections that informed political engagement and gave rise to the complex and explosive politics of the New South.

The story of Charlotte’s better classes incorporates both the tragedy and the triumph of the New South. It is the story of unlimited promise reduced to bitter disappointment, of seemingly fresh beginnings stifled by eruptive racism. But it is also the story of men and women who had the courage to build bridges across the chasm of race, of black and white southerners who identified with each other across race lines and for a short time embodied an alternative vision of race relations. At the same time, it is the tale of the black men and women who, even after seeing their dreams of equality crushed at the turn of the century, managed to keep their vision alive until another generation of blacks and whites would once again join forces to restore their rights in the civil rights movement.

1

A MAGIC INFLUENCE

On the morning of 28 October 1852, the people of Charlotte and the surrounding countryside gathered to witness one of the most memorable events of their lives—the coming of the railroad. A crowd of about 20,000 people engulfed the tiny crossroads town, swelling the village to nearly twenty times its normal size. Men, women, and children jostled for position in the depot yard as a parade of Odd Fellows, the Sons of Temperance, and a brass band marched through the village. By mid-morning the steam engine from Columbia, South Carolina, roared into Charlotte, conveying passengers and freight and, most significantly, hopes for a prosperous future.

It was the most brilliant and glorious day that the history of Charlotte has furnished in seventy odd years, reported the local newspaper, describing the inspired addresses of local dignitaries, the sumptuous barbecue, the fireworks at the depot, and the dance in the long room of Williams’s dry goods store. The railroad celebration symbolized the beginning of a new era, and the enthusiasm generated that day gained momentum over the next few months as the people of Charlotte saw their town miraculously transformed. The completion of the railroad to this place seems to have exerted a magic influence over the energies and enterprise of our people, wrote the editor of the local newspaper. The streets of the town, which a few months ago presented the appearance almost of a deserted village, are now thronged with wagons and carts laden with the rich productions of our prosperous country, and strangers of every tongue are now in our midst seeking the profits of trade and active enterprise. The railroad linked Charlotte—an isolated backwater village only a few months before—to the urban centers of the East Coast, altering the significance of both time and space. Within only a few months, the railroad helped realize the wildest and most extravagant dreams of those who prophesied five years ago upon this subject.¹

Those who prophesied and diligently worked to bring about the coming of the railroad to Charlotte were motivated by both hope and fear. The fortunes of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County had been in decline since the late 1830s. Founded in 1768 at the crossroads of two ancient Indian trading paths—one of which became part of the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road—Charlotte served as the county seat of Mecklenburg. In its early days, the town housed a number of taverns for weary travelers and boasted a few stores and tradespeople. As late as 1791, according to the diary of one traveler, the village had about 300 residents and consisted only of a wretched Court House, and a few dwellings falling to decay. Spending the night in the village as part of his southern tour in 1791, George Washington referred to Charlotte as a trifling place.²

The discovery of gold in adjacent Cabarrus County in 1799, and later in Mecklenburg, breathed life into the region, and Charlotte suddenly found itself strategically located in the center of the Piedmont’s mining activity. Several gold mines were established in and near Charlotte, and the village attracted fortune seekers from both the North and abroad in what was at that time the United States’ most significant gold strike. Mecklenburg’s population jumped by nearly 4,000 people between 1820 and 1830, the largest ten-year increase it had ever experienced. The trifling crossroads village took on the trappings of town life as Charlotte got its first newspaper, the Catawba Journal, in 1824 and two banks opened in the 1830s. Property values increased, and new buildings were erected. Blacksmith shops and sawmills, taverns and stores proliferated, providing goods and services for the mines and the miners. Gold mining proved to be so successful in the region that in 1835 the U.S. Congress established a branch of the U.S. Mint at Charlotte. The halcyon days of gold mining ended with the panic of 1837, however, which closed down many mining operations and rendered others marginal.³

The decline in gold mining left a huge void in the region’s economy. Although Mecklenburg was one of the leading cotton-producing counties in North Carolina by mid-century, farmers found it difficult and expensive to get their crop to market. With nearly unnavigable rivers nearby, produce had to be transported over rough and sometimes treacherous roads to Fayetteville, over a hundred miles from Charlotte, and then shipped down the Cape Fear River to Wilmington. Flat-bottomed scows also carried produce down the Catawba River to Cheraw, South Carolina, nearly seventy miles away, where cotton merchants shipped the crop to Georgetown via the Pee Dee River. Some farmers hauled their crop on wagons directly to the Charleston market, over 250 miles distant. The difficulties faced by farmers in marketing their crop led many to abandon the Carolina Piedmont for greener pastures to the west. Mecklenburg County’s population dropped by 7,000 people between 1830 and 1850, making it one of many North Carolina counties that experienced a declining population.⁴

By the late 1840s several leading citizens of Charlotte and Mecklenburg began to search for new ways to rejuvenate the area’s stagnant economy. They seized upon the railroad as the panacea for the region’s economic ills. Railroad promoters were mostly businesspeople and professionals who lived in Charlotte and had seen their fortunes deteriorate in recent years. They were joined by some of the county’s wealthiest farmers who would benefit greatly by a direct rail link to a coastal market. Moreover, many of the most avid railroad promoters, such as physician Charles J. Fox and lawyers James W. Osborne and William Johnston, were ambitious young men in their twenties and thirties who saw their futures, and that of their town, inextricably linked to the railroad. Although many of the railroad men, such as Johnston and Osborne, were active Whigs, one of the most ardent boosters was Democrat Charles Fox. Thus railroad promoters joined forces above the din of partisan politics, fearful of the consequences of the region’s economic decline and confident about the ameliorative influence of the railroad.⁵

In 1847 promoters of the Charlotte and South Carolina Railroad, led by Fox and Osborne, organized a series of public railroad conventions in Charlotte and nearby towns to promote a rail line that would link the town to the Charleston market by way of Columbia, South Carolina. In a highly publicized report, the railroad boosters argued that a rail line was the only scheme by which a convenient Market can be afforded for our Agricultural products—the development of our Manufacturing and Mineral resources be promoted, and a participation be secured to our people in the improvements and advantages of the age in which we live. Although the people of the Charlotte area found themselves surrounded with natural advantages, such as a fertile countryside, the interests of our country are rapidly declining. Real estate prices had fallen by 50 percent in the last few years, and many farms are lying waste and desolate, all improvement is arrested. Moreover, enterprising citizens have left us in the thousands, especially young people. Scarcely a young man is commencing life in any branch of business, but is directing his attention to some other State, noted the promoters.⁶

The railroad, and the new markets it would bring, could provide the remedy for rehabilitating Charlotte and Mecklenburg. Prosperity, wrote the railroad promoters, depended on a town’s proximity to the sea. Although Charlotte could not be transplanted to the coast, the railroad annihilates distance and equalizes the advantages of all countries. Not only would Charlotte gain better access to markets, but the railroad would also allow diversification in the local economy as it would encourage the growth of industry. Railroads are designed as handmaidens to capital and labor and augment every source of prosperity. The boosters claimed that only the railroad could save the area from poverty and from ruin . . . and provide a home in which we and our children may participate in the enlightened spirit and social advancement in the age in which we live.⁷

The Charlotte promoters preached the gospel of the rail in the surrounding countryside, addressing gatherings in Lincolnton, Salisbury, and Concord, Rutherfordton, Monroe, and Jefferson, their altar call an opening of subscription books. In Mecklenburg County the farmers of the Providence section held a barbecue to champion the railroad, subscribing $14,000 for the road. By August 1847 well over $300,000 had been pledged for the railroad, with all but $28,000 from Mecklenburg. In September, with sufficient funds in hand, the Charlotte and South Carolina Railroad held an organizational meeting, elected directors, and began letting contracts for the road.⁸

When the railroad reached Charlotte five years later, linking the town to the up-country of South Carolina and Charleston, plans were underway for more rail lines. The largely state-financed North Carolina Railroad would link Charlotte to Goldsboro by way of Raleigh, Greensboro, and Salisbury. In September 1854 the road’s first passenger service trains steamed through Charlotte, and two years later the railroad was completed. Not satisfied with two railroads, boosters began organizing conventions to bring more railroads to the town. In May 1854 Charles Fox chaired a meeting to organize support for the ambitiously named Atlantic, Tennessee, and Ohio Railroad. Promoters envisioned the road connecting, by way of Charlotte, Wilmington by the most direct route with the Mississippi Valley, and promoters once again opened subscription books to raise funds for the effort. A year later, the Wilmington, Charlotte, and Rutherford Railroad was incorporated and subscriptions were enrolled (see map 1).⁹

The flurry of railroad-building activity that agitated Charlotte in the 1850s was part of a larger crusade in North Carolina and the South. Between 1835 and 1850, Whigs controlled state government in North Carolina and adopted an agenda of improvements, with railroad building the centerpiece of their program. The state’s first railroads were built in the east, but by the late 1840s legislators in the west demanded their own roads. The state then partially funded the North Carolina Railroad to connect east and west. In the 1850s North Carolina built over 641 miles of track, a 258 percent increase in railroad mileage in one decade. Southern states built railroads at such a furious pace that the South actually outstripped the North in the relative increase in railroad mileage between 1850 and 1860. Across the South, towns like Charlotte vied for railroads as the key to prosperity.¹⁰

Map 1. Charlotte’s Rail Connections, ca. 1865

Sources: Stover, Railroads of the South, 25; Powell, North Carolina through Four Centuries, 54.

It is little wonder that the people of Charlotte and Mecklenburg embraced railroad schemes so enthusiastically. They had seen their town and county transformed almost immediately by the railroad. The magic influence of the railroad seemed to leave nothing untouched. Our people seem to be inspired with new life and new energies amounting almost to intoxication, remarked the North Carolina Whig in December 1852. The railroad reversed the precipitous population drop of previous years. Mecklenburg grew by nearly 4,000 people in the decade of railroad building, and the town of Charlotte more than doubled in size, from a population of 1,065 in 1850 to 2,265 in 1860, making it North Carolina’s sixth largest town. Wilmington and New Bern still ranked as North Carolina’s most populous municipalities in 1860, reflecting the dominance of coastal cities in both the state and the rest of the country. But Charlotte’s growth demonstrated the power of railroads to stimulate the development of interior towns. Inland towns with new rail connections surged in population, outstripping coastal towns in growth. Fayetteville, which declined railroads in favor of plank roads, grew only negligibly during the 1850s (see table A.1).¹¹

Not only did Charlotte and Mecklenburg grow dramatically in the 1850s, but railroads transformed Charlotte into a regional commercial center. Just as one railroad promoter had predicted, new stores began to spring up as the railroad diverted the trade from this portion of the State from its old time worn channels. Instead of hauling their produce over hazardous dirt roads to distant markets, farmers flocked to the village of Charlotte to sell their harvest to the town’s merchants, who then shipped the crop to the sea by rail. The farmers, in turn, stocked up on food, dry goods, hardware, and clothing. Townspeople found the streets constantly crowded with wagons laden with cotton, flour, wheat, corn, meal, tobacco, potatoes, apples, poultry, and all manner of produce raised in the country, which was nearly all bought up by our Grocers and Produce Buyers, and shipped to Atlantic markets. Between 1850 and 1860 the number of merchants in Charlotte more than doubled, from twenty-four to fifty-three, and the number of professionals living in Charlotte more than doubled as well (see table A.2).¹²

Charlotte merchants zealously contended for the trade of the upper Piedmont. Appealing to our Mountain friends and our friends in the Country, they claimed that they could compete with merchants in older trading centers. The stores in Charlotte are literally groaning under the weight and pressure of new goods, the Whig claimed in 1853. By luring the region’s farmers to the village to trade, the railroad allowed merchants to improve their stock, selling items previously unavailable in the town. Moreover, merchants began to specialize in various goods and services. General merchandisers such as Elias and Cohen offered Foreign and Domestic Dry Goods, Gentlemen’s Ready Made Clothing, Ladies Dress Goods of All Kinds, and Negro Ware, while William W. Elms concentrated on groceries and E. Nye Hutchison sold pharmaceuticals. J. W. Sanders offered furniture at Charleston prices, and T. H. Brem and Company sold British, French, and American dry goods. The contest for trade sometimes grew bitter. Vying for the patronage of farmers to the North, Charlotte merchants accused the Salisbury newspaper of deliberately misrepresenting Charlotte’s market prices in an attempt to divert trade back to Salisbury.¹³

Because of the brisk, expansive nature of Charlotte’s commerce, local merchants organized a second bank in 1853 to finance even more economic development. Seven townspeople—five merchants and two lawyers—served on the Board of Directors of the Bank of Charlotte. Having the money of two Banks at their service, announced the Whig, our merchants and traders will be enabled to give the largest prices for country produce. Yet merchants and bankers found trade so vigorous in the fall of 1854 that our Banks find it difficult, without cramping their other operations to furnish the merchants money to buy produce.¹⁴

In addition to a bank, a number of other new enterprises, including manufactures, followed in the wake of the railroad, just as the railroad boosters had predicted. Charlotte entrepreneurs enthusiastically embraced small industry. In 1854 Taylor and Allison began manufacturing brick, and in January 1855 merchant Leroy Springs opened a steam flour mill near the railroad tracks in Charlotte on a scale commensurate with the capacity of the country to supply it with grain for manufacturing into flour. The Ozments established a furniture manufactory in January 1857, and that same year Rudisill and Whisnant opened a sash, door, and blind factory. In 1858 Captain John Wilkes, a native of New York, established the Mecklenburg Iron Works. The 1860 census also listed a tobacco factory.¹⁵

Not only did the town gain some small-scale manufactures in the 1850s, but new buildings improved the town’s appearance. With our citizens, the tide and the spirit of improvements are still as high as ever, bragged the Whig in 1853, commenting on the great improvement in architectural taste, as displayed in our buildings. Merchants invested their profits in expanding operations and improving their facilities. A group of shopkeepers, including jeweler Thomas Trotter and merchants Elias and Cohen, constructed Granite Row, five large shops on South Tryon Street that compared favorably with any stores this side of Charleston.¹⁶

At the same time that the town’s merchants and professionals expanded their business activities, they promoted town improvements through local government. Many of the same men who served as railroad and bank directors, invested in manufactures, and built large and prosperous businesses also served as town commissioners, using their influence to improve Charlotte. In 1854 the town macadamized the main streets, enhancing Charlotte’s appearance as well as making it easier for farmers to market their goods. That same year the telegraph linked Charlotte with the outside world, causing the Whig to marvel that we will . . . be able to hold sweet converse on wires with our neighbors in New York, and the rest of man-kind. Four years later, gas lights illuminated the streets, giving Charlotte the countenance of a well-established city.¹⁷

Like boosters in small towns across the mid-nineteenth-century United States, Charlotte’s leaders