Jailing John Henry- Reconstruction, Unequal Justice, and Mythmaking: A review of Scott Nelson's "Steel Drivin' Man"
“John Henry was a newborn baby, sittin down on his mama’s knee, said that Big Bend Tunnel on that C & O road, is gonna be the death of me….”
Selected lyrics from “John Henry,” recorded by Lead Belly, released through The Smithsonian Folkways collection.
From the time I was young, the heroes of American myths were truly larger than life; Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, Mike Fink, Pecos Bill, the Mighty Casey, and of course, the greatest of all, John Henry. But of course, even at a young age, we understood that they were simply myths created to communicate great tales of people they represented. The stories were passed around the fire at scouting events, circulated in song, teaching lessons that with honest hard work, sacrifice, and even heroic achievement, success was within our grasp.
The story of America is a complex set of competing narratives crafted by individuals and groups as memory, history, and myth. What we collectively agree upon as “history” can change, and one of the ways that this is accomplished is through the dogged efforts of trained historians in excavating records which may have been overlooked or unavailable to prior researchers. Another method is to drill into a topic at a different angle, to subject sets of “facts” to new interpretations. One of the most exciting (or frustrating, depending on your mood at the time) events for a historian is to come across unique archival records while on the hunt in another assignment. If a researcher is fortunate, there will be enough time to collect the new treasures and squirrel them away for the future. Isaiah Berlin, in his assessment of the skills for a professional historian, noted that one must be both a “fox and a hedgehog.” To paraphrase Berlin, the fox organizes his view of the world by knowing many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing. For a historian working against time, budget, and access restraints, the competing strategies of mining files carefully or racing through as much material as can be read or digitized inside these constraints are reminiscent of John Henry’s duel between muscle and steam.
So, when I was tasked with designing and teaching two courses of American history surveys to 300 college students, there was only one book to merge between the Early and Modern American periods of history, broken up by the end of the Civil War and the Post-Reconstruction period. In Scott Reynolds Nelson’s Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend, the problematic period known as “Reconstruction” in the gap between 1865 and 1876 in American history is treated to an examination that is both personal and mythic in its telling. The reason I selected the work is that the story Nelson crafts is very relevant to us today – when the terms “systemic racism” and “social justice” fill the headlines surrounding a larger number of issues in our society, it might be helpful to use the past as a reference to test these claims. If we want to understand America today, a glimpse into the record of history and its efforts, successes or failures in making social change possible is the natural place to start.
Connecting scraps and dots, maps and names, Nelson uncovers a fascinating tale which crosses a wide variety of interests and disciplines. If you are interested in the development of American music from oral tales to bluegrass, folk, blues, and rock and roll, the story Nelson weaves of John Henry, as told in nearly 200 verses in variations of songs by a diverse roll of artists, is compelling. Should you want to learn about the geologic formations of the Appalachians as a challenge to the first successful tunnels drilled through the mountains, it’s a good book as well. If you are interested in the use of popular culture in the political turmoil of the early 20th century, where John Henry is manipulated by both sides of the debate over capitalism, progress, and justice, it is a great book. For my purposes, it painted a picture of the early failure of the Reconstruction period in Virginia to achieve any form of social justice for Black Americans and the efforts the federal government made through new structures of control of civil society.
Nelson shares his journey into the story of John Henry as he accidentally uncovered archival material in the records of the Virginia State Penitentiary and the Southern Railway system in the post-Civil war period, and most interestingly, the analysis of the many verses of the songs about John Henry. For students of history, reading texts “against the grain” and in new contexts and perspectives can open up important discussions. Nelson uncovers an intriguing story that unfolds to include themes on race, justice, labor, technology, and the power of myth in political and cultural power. The early struggles of the newly-created Freedmen’s Bureau in Virginia, the imposition of “Black Codes” in local and military courts is related to the personal stories of several important individuals who may have impacted Black Americans (specifically one very famous hammer-swinger) as they tried to survive in a new position of “freedom” with few assets or experience in negotiating their labor values in the market.
Nelson makes a case that he has found the “real” John Henry, (John William Henry) a young black American ex-slave who was convicted of trumped-up charges of “Housebreak and Larceny” in the Virginia court system in this seam between military jurisdiction in the new Freedmen’s Bureau and the civil system which lingered at the close of the war. Nelson digs into the Library of Virginia archives, finding an archivist who, “crossed out the line in the finding aid that declared the records sealed.” (1) With this one fortuitous indiscretion by one of the institutional guardians of the past, Nelson was able to connect the convict to the railroad, as those records showed him as a resident of the Virginia Penitentiary, leased out to the C & O Railroad in 1868. By cross-referencing facts from several different archives that trace what happened to John William Henry, Nelson is able to construct a reasonably supported set of theses.
The Americanologist Book Review: Scott Reynolds Nelson’s Steel Drivin Man
.They took John Henry to the white house, and buried him in the san’…
From Nelson’s search into the history, he builds a fascinating tale about the period of early recording technology and the recognition of John Henry as a symbol for critiques of the impact of modernity, the rise of socialism in early 20th century America, and the labor movement. The popular adaptations as recorded take on their own meanings, moving away from short verses used by track-liners and convicts, designed as hammer songs, instead intentionally infused with political messaging utilizing the heroic and tragic stories of John Henry and men like him. Everyone claimed him, either as a hero of a local community, a cause, or a belief in American ideals. To a socialist, the story was about the degrading impact of a capitalist system that denied humanity, and for a capitalist, it was the tale of a man selling his enormous talents to care for his family, command a prime wage, and make progress human.
Does Nelson make a strong enough case that he has found THE John Henry? There are good arguments for and against his assertions, and I will leave it to you to judge. I will say that he has offered an interpretation of the contemporary context of the time in which the original story appeared, the explanation for the evolution of the story into one of the first truly American songs, and its importance in much larger debates about humanity, modernity, economic systems, justice, and politics in America. You can find the book at its original publisher, Oxford University Press, or at nearly any book retailer, as well as some of the used book markets online.
For a listen to my playlist “HammerSongs” celebrating songs inspired by the ballad of John Henry (there are too many to list, from Aaron Copeland to Joe Bonamassa) just click on the Spotify button at the top and search for my library at The Americanologist” where I have several playlists open to the public.
