Dungeons and Dragons and Gaslights

Antebellum ruling classes debated the role and relationships of states, commerce, industry, and slavery surrounding gaslight. For boosters in New Orleans and other Southern cities industrial slavery was the sine qua non of their gaslit modernity. For Northern industrial heralds, it was the automation and absence (or invisibility) of labor that made gaslight systems at once so attractive and so contentious. But it was in the spaces of production that slavery, freedom, and industry were most violently configured. Frontiers of bituminous (gas) coal accumulation multiplied deep underground, and in the eastern seaboard, that meant Richmond mines. There, planters and industrial slaveholders used slave life insurance policies and safety lamps to recruit and compel mixed armies of slaves and wage laborers to work ever-more dangerous coal mines, while all struggled to assert some control over this antebellum empire of light and energy. When it came to light, the arrow of change in the antebellum United States seemed to point towards an increasing role for slavery within processes of industrial capitalism rather than its displacement by free labor regimes. Looking at the production and consumption of gas coals changes how we must think of the making of the “modern” or “liberal” city.

Rock Oil, Civil War, and Industrial Slavery Interrupted

This chapter examines how the contingently timed and combined onslaught of Pennsylvania petroleum and the Civil War radically reoriented the possibilities and geographies of light in North America. On the eve of war, free-labor western Pennsylvania and industrial-slavery western Virginia were both poised to capture and launch fossil fuel revolutions in power and light. This chapter uses business, court, and military records along with newspapers and trade journals to explore how one of these revolutions—that based on free-labor and ownership of a mineral liquid “distilled by nature free of charge”—came to triumph over the other—that based on industrial slavery and capital-intensive coal oil—and how that triumph was understood then and subsequently as an inevitable stage of “progress.” As military clashes interrupted and destroyed turpentine camps, whaleships, and southern coal mining, the reservoirs of American light shifted their center of gravity markedly northward and westward. A period of widely increased access to illuminants, it was also a time of deepening monopoly control over the means of light. This chapter explores the centrality of political economy and organized violence to any true understanding of the histories of labor, energy, and technology.