| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend. By Scott Reynolds Nelson. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 214 pp. $25.00, ISBN 978-0-19-530010-9.)

Scott Reynolds Nelson found someone no one thought was lost: John Henry, the man who beat the machine in the 1870s and then died from exhaustion. Five-foot-one, born in New Jersey, John William Henry was nineteen years old when arrested for petty theft while looking for work in the post–Civil War boomtown of City Point, Virginia. Sentenced to ten years to set an example for the state's black codes, Henry was soon rented out as convict labor to the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad under a corrupt Republican government. Nelson's compelling first-person search for this iconic worker provides a useful overview of industrialization, Reconstruction politics, railroad history, African American oral tradition, and Jim Crow.

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