The Rivanna was hardly the most impressive of Virginia's many rivers, nor the most commercially viable. In the heat of the summer the Rivanna sometimes became little more than a trickle; in spring and fall heavy rains often caused floods that damaged mills and inundated fields. However great these obstacles, residents of central and northern Albemarle perceived the river in terms of commercial promise: a source of power for local mills and a means of cheap transportation for tobacco and other crops. Thomas Jefferson, whose Monticello estate was a stone's throw from the Rivanna's banks, organized the first of many attempts to tap the river's economic potential. After surveying the Rivanna in 1765, Jefferson concluded that clearing a series of small obstructions could convert the stream into a navigable waterway. The young planter secured an act from the colonial assembly that authorized a trusteeship to undertake the “laudable and useful” enterprise. Jefferson and other prominent gentlemen became trustees, collecting voluntary subscriptions and then paying local contractors to remove the obstructions. The trusteeship was not a complete success – a series of navigation and canal companies would attempt to build more permanent improvements over the next 100 years – but Jefferson took considerable pride in his public-spirited efforts.

Most statistical appendixes serve as a refuge for tables and topics too dull for the main text. The reason for their lackluster state is not hard to surmise. Historians eagerly devote page after page to the latest theoretical concepts, but often gloss over the nuts and bolts of archival research and statistical methods. This appendix tries to be a bit different. Although arranged topically, it narrates the many mistakes and occasional discoveries that I made in the seven years of researching and writing this book. Much of what follows will strike many as pedestrian and commonsensical. But however simple-minded this discussion may be, it at least highlights a question that often receives little attention: How do historians produce new knowledge? The emphasis on the mundane and the practical, I hope, will not only save fellow researchers the many hours that I wasted following dead-end leads and wrong-headed techniques, but also help demystify social science history.

Let us begin with the very basics: computer programs. After spending hundreds of hours entering in names and numbers, I began to see the computer as an essential tool for accomplishing my task. The program that I used most often for entering data and performing computations was Microsoft Excel. I stumbled onto Excel by accident, but the program has proven effective for my needs, especially as it improved over the years. As a spreadsheet, Excel allows one to sort a large number of records alphabetically, a particularly useful function when linking names from census records and tax lists to business records.

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that America was a “house divided.” The political agitation over the extension of slavery into the western territories had convinced Lincoln that America was at a crossroads. “Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new – North as well as South.”

The latter possibility terrified many Northerners, and not only because of the growing conviction that slavery corrupted republican politics and undermined Christian morals. Many believed that the institution had stripped the South of entrepreneurial vigor and enterprise, leaving in its wake unprofitable plantations, stunted cities, and widespread poverty. When New York politician William Seward visited Virginia, he found nothing but “[a]n exhausted soil, old and decaying towns, wretchedly-neglected roads, and, in every respect, an absence of enterprise and improvement.” Seward and other Republican spokesmen contrasted the degradation of the slave South with the well-kept farms, growing cities, and technological advances of the free-labor North. Northern pessimism about the South's economic prospects was so widespread that historian John Ashworth has argued that “the Republicans fought the Civil War primarily because they deplored the economic effects of slavery.” Ashworth may overstate the point, but the rapid economic divergence of the North and South undoubtedly provided fertile ground for the ominous predictions and stark dichotomies outlined in Lincoln's “house divided” speech.

The Cumberland Valley Railroad immediately changed the commercial world of John Lefever. When the railroad was under construction in 1836, the Cumberland farmer recorded more than a dozen times that he “hewed,” “drew,” or “hauled” wood for the railroad, a task that he would periodically perform for many years. More importantly, the railroad made it more convenient and less expensive for Lefever to market his crops – instead of long wagon journeys to Baltimore and Philadelphia, Lefever now made short trips to the railroad depot. In January of 1840, for example, Lefever reported that he “[c]ame to Newville Depot. Sold my rye to Swoyer at 45 cts.” Over the next few weeks, he would continue hauling rye to Swoyer's mill until he had sold more than 250 bushels. It would be an exaggeration to say that the railroad revolutionized Lefever's life – Cumberland's farmers had been selling surpluses to Philadelphia markets for many decades – but now the railroad had brought national and international markets to the doorsteps of Cumberland's farmers.

Railroads had a similar impact on Albemarle residents such as T. L. Jones. A moderately prosperous yeoman farmer, Jones steadfastly recorded the details of farm life during the tumult of the Civil War. Even in the war-ravaged Virginia economy, frequent travel was an essential part of Jones's routine. Within a single year, Jones took dozens of trips to villages such as Warren and Scottsville, and traveled to larger towns such as Charlottesville, Richmond, and Lynchburg about once a month.