By the time a business society is labeled “materialist,” the battle slogan has already rallied what must once have been mere squads of private frustrations. To begin with, somebody's conscience must have been upset by the great business mastery of circumstance, or there would be no need to complain about “materialism” or anything else. Since a case of upset conscience can cover a variety of aches and pains, it might be worth investigating some of the particular frustrations before we draw conclusions about business in general. Fortunately, we have data that isolate some aspects of the problem where we can observe and enjoy it—in the roots of an occurrence, with real people living the issues.

In contrast to the practice followed in most corporate business enterprises, the position of president in a textile company is generally of secondary importance. The treasurer is usually the chief executive officer. It is he who makes the managerial decisions, and it is he who is responsible only to the board of directors. In the nineteenth century, all the mills established by the Boston capitalists adopted this nomenclature for their leading officers; curiously enough, the mills at Lowell continue this practice today. The treasurer of each company directs its operation from his office in Boston while the agent supervises production from his counting room at Lowell; very much in the background is the president. It is the purpose of the present study to investigate the origin of this usage and to discover what were some of the functions and characteristics of the presidents of these textile companies in the nineteenth century.

Many American historians have stressed the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 as a turning point in the expansion of commerce across the Appalachian barrier from the seaports of the Atlantic coast. Less attention has been paid to the Erie's competitors, perhaps because they were uniformly less successful than their prototype. Yet they have a certain interest. In this article we shall be dealing with only one of these competing projects—the Welland Canal in Upper Canada, the by-pass for Niagara—and with only one aspect, namely the financial. Nevertheless, we shall perhaps be able to draw some general conclusions as to the reasons why the Erie Canal succeeded so brilliantly, while other projects, at least in a relative sense, failed.

It would be impossible within the brief compass of this paper to give even a fraction of the chronological developments in the complicated story of the close inter-relationships of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad with the mining and manufacturing interests of northern Alabama in the formative years of the 1870's and 1880's. Instead, this paper is intended to show in somewhat broader outline how that railroad entered the Birmingham region after the Civil War and something of the scope of information relative to that region's development that can be obtained from the business records of this railroad. It is also the intention of this paper to give some insight into the importance of the role of the railroad outside of its usual part as a carrier only. In the encouragement of traffic peculiar to its own region it was expedient for a railroad to favor some industries over others, some areas over others, some businessmen over others. It was important for the flow of traffic that certain communities be encouraged at the expense of others. Although the physical presence of the railroad itself may account for some alteration in the established patterns of regional economy, the conscious, active, and deliberate attempts of the railroad management to influence the direction of regional growth may well be considered as determining factors.