205.]
[Footnote 35: South Carolina Railroad Company _Reports_ for 1860 and 1865.]
The Brandon Bank, at Brandon, Mississippi, which was virtually identical
with the Mississippi and Alabama Railroad Company, bought prior to 1839,
$159,000 worth of slaves for railroad employment, but it presumably lost
them shortly after that year when the bank and the railroad together went
bankrupt.[36] The state of Georgia had bought about 190 slaves in and
before 1830 for employment in river and road improvements, but it sold them
in 1834,[37] and when in the late 'forties and the 'fifties it built and
operated the Western and Atlantic Railroad it made no repetition of the
earlier experiment. In the 'fifties, indeed, the South Carolina Railroad
Company was almost unique in its policy of buying slaves for railroad
purposes.
[Footnote 36: _Niles' Register_, LVI, 130 (April 27, 1839).]
[Footnote 37: U.B. Phillips, _Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt_,
pp. 114, 115; W.C. Dawson, _Compilation of Georgia Laws_, p. 399; O.H.
Prince, _Digest of the Laws of Georgia_, p. 742.]
The most cogent reason against such a policy was not that the owned slaves
increased the current charges, but that their purchase involved the
diversion of capital in a way which none but abnormal circumstances could
justify.
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