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A Total Loss.
The Contract Said They Would Not Be Used for Blasting
That was not mercy. It was property insurance. Four months later two of the men were dead anyway, and the Commonwealth of Virginia paid their owners.
On December 23, 1853, two men named George A. Farrow and David Hansbrough put their names to a single page of business. The agreement runs about four hundred words. It promises forty to fifty able-bodied men for work on a railroad and its tunnel in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. It sets the rate at one dollar and twelve and a half cents per day for each man. It provides two white superintendents at thirty-five dollars a month apiece. It allows for blacksmiths at a dollar forty a day. It gives the tunnel contractors the right to examine each man and accept him or refuse him.
Near the end, the contract states that the men shall not be employed in loading or blasting.
Ask yourself why that clause is there
It is not there because anyone cared whether these men lived. It is there because the men who supplied them owned them, and a man killed at a tunnel face is a total loss. Blasting was the work most likely to destroy the asset. So the asset was written out…
