Because John Henry was a prisoner, he and his colleagues could be forced to work in conditions which others refused; namely, to be pushed back into a tunnel filled with fine dust from a dynamite blast, and to work alongside dangerous early steam drills. (Huntington had earlier used Chinese indentured laborers on another project for the same reason.) In the 1870s, there was no competition between hammer crews and steam drills on either account — on the one hand, steam drills were unreliable and often broke down, and so were easily outpaced by a well-coordinated team. On the other hand, steam drills produced high volumes of silicon dust, which caused silicosis (or “tunnel fever”), a quick and almost certainly fatal lung disease. This is how Scott Reynolds Nelson believes John Henry died, along with hundreds of his fellow workers.
It’s unsurprising, given the reliably inhuman nature of Reconstruction in the South, that the C.&O. hired a number of ex-Confederates as “captains,” or overseers. One such man, Claiborne R. Mason, was hated by both black and white—the former for his ability to capture runaway slaves, and the latter for his brutal suppression of Confederate desertions. Even though free black workers could and did strike for better pay, there is no doubt that the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad was a racist enterprise, and the Virginia State Penitentiary a willing collaborator.
In 1873, John William Henry disappears from the Virginia State Penitentiary records. Had he been paroled, pardoned, or released, it would have been noted. Instead, argues Scott Reynolds Nelson, it’s probable that he died. His body would have been sent back to the prison that leased him (because the C.&O. was contractually obligated to pay $100 “for each prisoner not returned”), buried in an anonymous mass grave on penitentiary grounds, and forgotten.
Forgotten except in song.
Given the fact that John Henry was black, probably a convict, and existed in the unrelieved racism of Reconstruction-era South, the first people to sing about him were almost certainly African Americans. And so there is a hidden history to “The Ballad of John Henry,” in which the protagonist demands to be treated like a man, not a slave, and who may very well have murdered some of his white overseers. A slight but telling version of the lyric quoted above—one which circulated privately in the black community—goes like this:
John Henry told his captain,
A man ain’t nothing but a man
Before I’d let you beat me down
I’d die with the hammer in my hand