Fighting the Octopus

This chapter focuses on the creation and expansion of the Southern Railway corporation and the ways in which the corporation overcame anti-monopoly sentiment in the South. While the company styled itself as an embodiment of the New South, northern capitalist J.P. Morgan financed its reorganization, and its expansion engendered resistance in Georgia and North Carolina. This chapter traces the origins of this company in the economic depression and wave of railroad bankruptcies in the 1890s and notes the attempts to brand this new company as a southern enterprise under the leadership of its first president Samuel Spencer. The chapter then traces resistance to the new company in Georgia and North Carolina, two states in which the Southern Railway tried to purchase other railroads. Foes of the railroad, which formed a broad coalition of Populists, Democrats, and other anti-monopolists, labelled the road as an “octopus” for its monopolistic tendencies. In two case study states – Georgia and North Carolina – appeals to white supremacy and elections marked with violence, as in the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, defeated the anti-monopoly critique and preserved the power and size of the Southern Railway.