If John Henry was a Black man working in the 1870s, he likely had been enslaved just years before. After the Civil War, many freedmen, or formerly enslaved African Americans, migrated from the South to the North and Midwest in search of work, becoming part of the large labor force needed to build modern America.

In 1871, more than 5,000 African Americans worked as laborers for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway and its contractors. They often worked 10 or more hours a day for less than a dollar. They cleared pathways, hauled rocks and debris, prepared the roadbed, built tunnels and bridges, and laid track. The crews included convicts leased from prisons, and some think John Henry may have been among these men.