Date of Graduation

2006

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

In the early twentieth century, the men who had led North Carolina's mountain counties through Civil War and Reconstruction were praised by those who followed them for two "accomplishments:" bringing much-needed railroad service to the mountains and preserving white rule in North Carolina. The completion of the Western North Carolina Railroad to the Tennessee line in 1882 was, indeed, noteworthy for the perseverance it showed over physical and political obstacles. The preservation of white rule was equally if not more noteworthy for the suffering it brought to African Americans statewide. However, both railroad service and white supremacy were seen at the time as the two main things that enabled North Carolinians west of the Blue Ridge to become participants in the New South. White North Carolinians, even those in the state's mountain counties, were far from unanimous in their support for the Western North Carolina Railroad. Geographical differences led to differences among North Carolina's political leadership about the path the road should take and the amount of state support the road should receive. Complicating those differences was the fact that outside of the state, powerful railroad owners themselves held a lot of interest in whether or not the WNCRR was built. At the same time, support for white supremacy was easy to find throughout mountain North Carolina, where whites made up the vast majority of the population. After emancipation, when the Republican Party was formed in the state, mountain white North Carolinians belonging to the coalition known as the Conservative Party and eventually as the Democratic Party fought Republicans, and Reconstruction itself, with the same zeal found in their Conservatives counterparts in the piedmont and coastal-plain. Reconstruction politics could be fierce in the mountains. Despite the partisan warfare that characterized Reconstruction, mountain Republicans and Conservatives in the General Assembly often found themselves in agreement on railroad matters that affected their home counties. Mountain Conservatives, however, held sway with mountain voters and played a major role in "redeeming" the state from the Republican Party. Nonetheless, white Republicans in the mountains had made it clear by 1875 that they were willing to accept the onset of Jim Crow. The two were enough in agreement to bring a railroad into the Blue Ridge and to help establish segregation statewide.

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