This essay takes this violent image from “O Susanna” as a starting point for reconstructing a technological racial logic which, I will argue, underlies and necessitates this violence. I flesh out the links between technology and race hinted at in Foster’s song by focusing on how the telegraph, the body, and race came together in a variety of cultural forms-Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, magazine descriptions of the telegraph, racial science, abolitionist rhetoric on progress and technology, and Walt Whitman’s poetry. By circulating through a number of texts from the 1840s and 1850s, I will argue that telegraphic discourse of the antebellum period repeatedly returned to a racialized understanding of civilization, as most extensively illustrated in American racial science, to describe technology’s role in the march of progress.
