20 “Hell in Harness”college.cengage.com/history/us/oates/portrait_america/9e/...288 20“Hell in Harness”: The Iron Horse and the Go-Ahead Age The development of steam power

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20 “Hell in Harness”:The Iron Horse and the Go-Ahead Age

The development of steam power was one of the great technological accomplishments ofthe late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In an age of giant rockets, space shuttles,and satellite probes of other planets, we tend to forget that the “advanced” steam engine,patented by England’s James Watts in 1769, fostered myriad technological innovationsthat came to characterize industrial society.

A significant improvement over an earlier “atmospheric” engine, Watts’s machinetransformed the textile industry in Europe as well as in America. The steam engine hadan equally profound effect on the history of transportation. As train historian DavidPlowden said in the August/September, 1989 issue of Timeline magazine, “The rail-road builder and the locomotive shattered a fixed distance-time equation for overlandtravel” that had existed for centuries. Until the advent of the steam engine, people hadrelied on nature for locomotion—on wind, water, and animals. In the “turnpike andcanal eras,” which lasted from around 1790 to the 1830s, Americans tried to alter na-ture by creating roads and waterways, but nature still furnished the power for the boatsand barges, wagons and stages. The emergence of the steam-powered locomotive in the1820s and 1830s was a quantum leap forward. In Plowden’s words, “It was a symbolof man’s will to rise above nature.” Soon a locomotive driven by the steam engine couldpull a train of cars at thirty miles per hour, doing so with a chugging roar and puffs ofblack smoke that would thrill generations of Americans.

The early railroad promoters, however, found themselves in a bitter struggle with canaland steamboat interests for transportation supremacy. But with the advantages of speed,year-round operation, and location almost anywhere, the railroads were the way of thefuture. By the 1850s, the age of the iron horse had arrived: thousands of miles of rail-road track, shining beneath iron wheels that transported the cargo of a nation, lay acrossa bustling land. The railroads tied the East to the Middle West; they caused astonishinggrowth in existing cities such as Chicago that lay along their routes; they spawnedfoundries, machine shops, new tools, and “a dizzying proliferation of inventions andimprovements,” as Page Smith says in this selection. Railroads also inspired the Ameri-can imagination, as poets and storytellers heard America singing in the music of thetrains, in the clang of their bells, in the hum of their wheels, and in the throb of their en-gines. The train even attracted a new breed of artist—the photographer. Railroads wereto become America’s principal form of transportation, remaining so until the interstatehighway system replaced them in the middle of the next century.

Yet, as Smith notes, there was a down side to the railroad boom: along with it camean insatiable American need to “go ahead,” to travel faster and make more money

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G L O S S A R Y

BALTIMORE & OHIO RAILROADEstablished in 1828 by Baltimore merchants tocapitalize on the western trade; by 1830, a horse-drawn “train” was operating on thirteen miles oftrack heading west; the company later switched tothe newfangled steam-powered locomotives,designed the passenger car, and went on to becomeone of the country’s leading railroads, with lines thatreached clear to St. Louis, Missouri.

COOPER, PETER Glue maker and inventorwho built America’s first steam-poweredlocomotive, a crude little machine that performederratically; George Johnson and James Milhollandproduced an improved version called the TomThumb.

DAVIS, PHINEAS A watchmaker who built thesteam locomotive, the York, which won an awardfrom the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad for being “themost improved engine.”

DEWITT CLINTON Built by the Mohawk andHudson Railroad, this improved steam locomotivemade a historic run in 1832, pulling three cars atthirty miles per hour.

GO-AHEAD AGE “The age of technologywherein any ambitious and dexterous farm boy mightdream of becoming as rich as [fur-dealing mogul]John Jacob Astor or Peter Cooper”; the age pro-duced “the disposition to see the world in terms ofpractical problems to be solved.” Americans in thego-ahead age became preeminent problem solvers.

PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD Led otherrailroads in building “a ‘through line’ with a

uniform gauge” and “in dressing its train ‘captain’ orconductor in a uniform.”

STEPHENSON, GEORGE British engineer whodeveloped the first passenger railroad locomotive.

THUMB, TOM America’s first steam-poweredlocomotive, built by Peter Cooper and improved byGeorge Johnson, a skilled mechanic, and hisapprentice, James Milholland; on its maiden run in1830, the little one-horse engine raced a real horse,attaining a speed of eighteen miles per hour; alas, thelocomotive blew its safety valve and lost the race.Nevertheless it inspired confidence in the steamlocomotive and dreams of building railroads “withimmense stretches of very rough country to pass.”

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regardless of the consequences to human life. In truth, the locomotives smoking up thesky presaged an industrial society with pollutants and destructive forces that would even-tually imperil humankind itself. But all that lay in the future. For Americans of themid-nineteenth century, the train was the supreme example of the illimitable aspirationand resourcefulness of the human spirit.

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Tracks preceded trains. Enterprising entrepre-neurs began laying crude tracks in the 1820sto carry horse-drawn carriages. The advan-

tages were that a horse could pull a much heavierload faster and passengers much more comfortablyon tracks than on the commonly rutted and unpavedroads of the time. Rails were usually made of woodwith bands of iron on top. In Maryland experimentswere conducted with stone “rails” covered withiron. The iron-covered wooden rails proved unsatis-factory as soon as the first steam engines were intro-duced; they had a tendency to tear loose and curl up,especially at the high rates of speed that the steamengines were soon capable of attaining—as much asfifteen miles an hour.

In England, steam engines at first seemed mostpromising in carrying passengers over ordinary roadsand turnpikes. The Duke of Wellington’s barouchewas drawn by a steam engine and attained a speed ofmore than twenty-five miles an hour. English exper-iments in the use of rails were confined primarily tothe hauling of heavy loads by horse or mule and,more and more frequently, by the use of some kindof steam engine.

In America, Peter Cooper, a successful business-man, saw the possibilities of combining rails andsteam engines. While Cooper was neither an engi-neer nor an artisan, he did not hesitate to involvehimself in the design of a locomotive, buying up un-mounted gun barrels to use as tubes in the engine’sboiler. When the locomotive failed to perform satis-factorily, Cooper turned the job of making a betterone over to George Johnson, the owner of a ma-chine shop and a skilled mechanic, who set to workwith his young apprentice, James Milholland. WhileJohnson and Milholland were working on an im-proved version of Cooper’s train, the Stourbridge

Lion, imported from England, arrived in New York,followed by several other engines which were ea-gerly studied; the best features were quickly incorpo-rated into the American machine.

Fourteen miles of railroad had meanwhile been laid between Baltimore and Ellicott’s Mills, allowinghorse-drawn carriages to make the trip in recordtime. The run to Ellicott’s Mills was made by thehorse carriage three times a day at a charge oftwenty-five cents.

By May 30, 1830, Cooper’s steam engine wasready to be tested. Cooper himself took the throttleof the Tom Thumb, with the president and the trea-surer of the Baltimore & Ohio Company besidehim. The Tom Thumb had a fourteen-inch pistonstroke, weighed barely a ton, and developed slightlymore than one horsepower, but it drew a weight ofmore than four tons at the rate of fifteen miles anhour. To draw attention to this new machine,Cooper advertised “a race between a Gray Horseand Tom Thumb.” The race took place on August28, 1830, and a passenger on the coach drawn by thelocomotive wrote: “The trip was most interesting.The curves were passed without difficulty, at a speedof fifteen miles an hour. . . . The day was fine, thecompany in the highest spirits, and some excitedgentlemen of the party pulled out memorandumbooks, and when at the highest speed, which waseighteen miles an hour, wrote their names and someconnected sentences, to prove that even at that greatvelocity it was possible to do so.” It was on the wayback to Baltimore that the famous race occurred. Atfirst the horse, with quicker acceleration, raced outahead but as the engine got up steam it overtook andpassed the gray. Just at that moment the safety valveon the engine blew open and the train lost pressureand fell behind, despite Peter Cooper’s frantic effortsto repair the damage.

George Stephenson, the great British engineer,had been working for almost a decade to perfect apractical engine. He had, in the process, built adozen locomotives of various types in the well-

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Page Smith, “Hell in Harness: The Iron Horse and the Go-AheadAge.” Extracts from A People’s History of the American Revolution,Vol. IV, The Nation Comes of Age, pages 262–282, McGraw-HillPublishing Company. Used by permission of the author.

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equipped workshops of the Liverpool and Manches-ter Railroad and he had the stimulus of half a dozenactive competitors. The United States had enteredthe field late and with far more modest resources,but within two years Cooper had produced the firstpractical passenger railroad locomotive. Engines de-signed by Stephenson soon outstripped the TomThumb, but American railroad building was on itsway. When the Baltimore and Ohio offered a four-thousand-dollar reward for the most improved en-gine, Johnson and Milholland had one waiting. Itsmost serious rival was one designed and built byPhineas Davis, a watchmaker. Three other engineswere also entered, each with important original fea-tures and all differing greatly in design. The York,built by Davis, won the first prize and Davis becamean employee of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Itsoon seemed as though every ambitious young engi-neer in the United States who could round up a fewfinancial backers was making a locomotive. A year

after the Tom Thumb made its historic run, the Mo-hawk and Hudson Railroad was completed and anengine named the DeWitt Clinton drew three cars atspeeds that at times reached thirty miles an hour.

The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company hadbeen formed on July 4, 1828, and the cornerstonelaid by ninety-year-old Charles Carroll of Carroll-ton. But the course of the railroads, as they weresoon called, proved far from smooth. They were op-posed by the farmers, through whose lands theirright-of-ways must run, in an alliance with the offi-cers and stockholders of canal and highway compa-nies (who rightly saw the railroads as dangerouscompetition), and by the teamsters (whose jobs werethreatened). The engines themselves were so unpre-dictable that teams of horses had to be kept at waystations to pull broken-down trains to their destina-tion. . . .

By 1832—two years after Tom Thumb’s famoustrip—Pennsylvania alone had sixty-seven railroad


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tracks from a few hundred yards to twenty-twomiles in length, many of them constructed of wood.When the Baltimore and Ohio built a passenger car-riage with seats on either side of a center aisle, therewere strong objections that such an aisle would sim-ply become an extended spittoon, but this seatingarrangement soon became standard on most lines.(Davy Crockett was widely reported to have ex-claimed at his first sight of a train: “Hell in harness,by the ’tarnal!”)

Locomotives proved easier to build and to im-prove in efficiency than rails. Many rails were im-ported from England at an exorbitant cost. The sixmiles of railroad between Philadelphia and German-town, for example, cost some thirty thousand dollarsper mile and the rails, weighing thirty-nine poundsto the yard, were English-made.

On his way from Quincy to Washington in thefall of 1833 to take his seat in Congress, JohnQuincy Adams rode on the Amboy railroad fromAmboy to Philadelphia. The train consisted of twolocomotives, “each drawing an accommodation car,a sort of moving stage, in a square, with open railing,a platform and a row of benches holding forty orfifty persons; then four or five cars in the form oflarge stage coaches, each in three compartments,with doors of entrance on both sides.” Each trainended with a high-piled baggage car, in which thepassengers’ luggage was covered with an oilcloth.The train sped along at almost thirty miles an hour,but after ten miles it had to stop to allow the wheelsto be oiled. Despite this precaution, in another fivemiles a wheel on one of the cars caught fire andslipped off, killing one passenger and badly maiminganother. Of the sixteen passengers in the coach onlyone escaped injury.

Boilers on the early trains were wood-fired and,like steamboats, trains had to stop frequently to takeon fresh supplies of wood. The remarkable thing isthat in spite of all these difficulties—the constraintsimposed by state legislatures under the control of thecanal and highway interests, the scarcity of money,

the inadequacy of the rails themselves, the constantlitigation, the restrictive municipal ordinances thatfor a time forbade the building of railroad stations incities, the disastrous accidents that plagued everyline, the barns and fields set afire by sparks thatshowered from primitive smokestacks—the buildingof engines and railway tracks went inexorably on.

Boston, which had seen the greater part of the vastcommerce with the Mississippi Valley West go toNew York with the construction of the Erie Canal,took the lead in developing railroad links with theWest, thereby regaining much of its lost financialeminence. New York, anxious to protect the invest-ment of the state and its citizens in the canal, did allit could to impede the development of competingrailroads.

By 1850 there were some three thousand miles oftrack running from Boston to the principal cities ofNew England and westward to Ohio, representingan investment of seventy million dollars. Of evengreater significance was the fact that most of the linesmade money. . . .

The railroad mania exceeded, if possible, the earliercanal mania. Canals still continued to be built, ofcourse, and fierce competition developed betweencanals and railroads, but an extraordinary amount oftechnical skill and ingenuity was channeled into thedevelopment of railroads and the locomotives and thecars that passed over them. Hardly a month passedwithout some important innovation which, as soon asit had proved itself (and often before), was adopted byother designers and builders. It was as though a partic-ular quality in the American character, until nowmore or less dormant, had been activated. For fortyyears—from 1789 to 1830—the canal, the steamboat,and the bridge had been the primary fields of engi-neering development. Now, with the “discovery” ofthe railroad, the machine shop claimed equal impor-tance with the farm or factory and Americans revealedmore dramatically than ever before their astonishingfacility for marshaling human energies and materialresources to meet a particular challenge. Barns became


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foundries, warehouses were converted into machineshops. New tools were built and old tools improved.Moreover, the primary activity of building locomo-tives spawned a host of subsidiary and only indirectlyrelated undertakings. Farmers with a bent for me-chanics began working on an improved plow. Longerand stronger bridges had to be built to carry heavierand heavier trains, and there were tunnels to be builtthrough mountains that blocked the way. It was clearthat principles developed in making locomotives—such elements as pistons and valves—were adaptableto other processes. So there was a dizzying prolifera-tion of inventions and improvements. Dedicated fromthe first moment to finding labor-saving methods andbuilding labor-saving tools, thereby improving theratio between work and its monetary return, a newbreed of Americans—men like Peter Cooper andMathias Baldwin and thousands of their less well-known compatriots—ushered in the “go-ahead age,”the age of technology wherein any ambitious anddexterous farm boy might dream of becoming as richas John Jacob Astor or Peter Cooper. A disposition tosee the world in terms of practical problems to besolved was both the condition and the consequence ofsuch a habit of mind, and it certainly contributed di-rectly to the optimistic strain in American character.Wherever one looked he or she could see signs of“progress” and improvement in man’s long waragainst nature. Everywhere “nature” was inretreat and civilization in advance. The Indian was na-ture, the natural man, and he was giving way to thedetermination of the American to cultivate the landand obey the biblical injunction to make it fruitful andto be fruitful himself, the determination to organizespace and apply ideas to landscape with such single-minded zeal and unwearying industry that the land-scape must succumb. Philip Hone noted proudly inhis diary: “There was never a nation on the face of theearth which equalled this in rapid locomotion.” Amessage had been carried from President Tyler inWashington to New York, a distance of some 225miles, in twenty-four hours.

In the face of every obstacle the promoters of therailroads pushed ahead, raising their capital primarilyby public subscription. A train of seventeen cars ranfrom Baltimore to Washington in 1835 in two hoursand fifteen minutes, carrying relatives of Washing-ton, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. But antirailroadteamsters still waylaid trains and shot at crews fromambush, and two years later the Depression of 1837brought railroad building to a virtual halt. It waseleven years before stockholders in the Baltimoreand Ohio got any return on their investment andthen it was a mere 2 percent. Construction had goneon during that period to connect Baltimore with theOhio River commerce at the cost of $7,500,000,and only the intervention of the famous Britishbanking house of Alexander Baring made it possibleto avoid bankruptcy.

The biggest impediments to the railroads werelaws designed to protect the investors in canals. TheChesapeake and Ohio canal, for example, cost$60,000 a mile to build and took twenty-two yearsto complete, by which time many of the original in-vestors had died. The most notable feature of thecanal was a tunnel 3,118 feet long which requiredthe use of headlamps on barges through it, and de-spite the fact that the Baltimore and Ohio Railroadran its tracks parallel to the river, the transportationof Cumberland coal down the canal brought in sub-stantial revenues for years, although not enough topay its enormous costs. Protracted and expensive asits construction was, the canal was by any standardone of the great engineering feats of the century,second only to the Erie Canal. Legislators wereunder enormous pressure to protect such a huge in-vestment.

A number of states passed laws requiring the rail-roads, after they had recouped the cost of their con-struction, to pay all profits above 10 percent to rivalcanal companies. Other laws prohibited trains fromentering into or passing through the incorporatedareas of cities and towns. Some states included inrailroad franchises the requirement that railroads sell


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their tracks and stock to the state after twentyyears—at the state’s evaluation. Other provisionslimited the carrying of freight by train to those timesof the year when the canals were frozen. Freight andpassenger rates of trains were frequently tied to thoseof canal transportation to keep the trains from draw-ing off business. A more practical obstacle was thefact that virtually every railroad company, many ofwhich ran no more than fifty to a hundred miles,had a different gauge, so that freight and passengershad to be unloaded and loaded again at the boundaryof every company. Everything in America wasbound to have a moral dimension; the railroads mustbe seen as not merely having a remarkable effect oncommerce but as improving morals. In this spirit theWestern Railroad Company of Massachusetts sent acircular to all the clergy of the state pointing out“the moral effects of rail-roads” and urging them “totake an early opportunity to deliver a discourse be-fore your congregation, on the moral effect of rail-roads on our wide extended country”—thereby,presumably, encouraging investment.

Since nature and morality (and, indeed, religion)were intertwined, the railroad train must be some-how reconciled with nature. [Ralph Waldo] Emer-son, who believed that everything worked for thebest, had no trouble in effecting the reconciliation.He was entranced by the technological revolutionushered in by the train. In 1834 he wrote in his jour-nal: “One has dim foresight of the hitherto uncom-puted mechanical advantages who rides on the rail-road and moreover a practical confirmation of theideal philosophy that Matter is phenomenal whilstmen & trees & barns whiz by you as fast as the leavesof a dictionary. As our teakettle hissed along througha field of mayflowers, we could judge of the sensa-tions of a swallow who skims by trees & bushes withabout the same speed. The very permanence of mat-ter seems compromised & oaks, fields, hills, hithertoesteemed symbols of stability do absolutely dance byyou.” The railroads had introduced a “multitude of

picturesque traits into our pastoral scenery,” Emer-son wrote, “the tunneling of the mountains, thebridging of streams . . . the encounter at short dis-tances along the track of gangs of laborers . . . thecharacter of the work itself which so violates andrevolutionizes the primal and immemorial forms ofnature; the villages of shanties at the edge of thebeautiful lakes . . . the blowing of rocks, explosionsall day, with the occasional alarm of a frightful acci-dent.” These all served to “keep the senses and theimagination active.”

The train, Emerson believed, would complete theconquest of the continent, carrying Americans toevery corner and making the United States “Na-ture’s nation.” The ambivalence of Emerson’s ownview of nature is suggested by his remark that “Na-ture is the noblest engineer, yet uses a grindingeconomy, working up all that is wasted to-day intoto-morrow’s creation. . . .” Thus nature was a goodPuritan after all, a hard worker who wasted nothing.

In fairness to Emerson it must be said that, visitingthe industrial midlands of England, he had secondthoughts about the happy union of nature and tech-nology. “A terrible machine has possessed itself ofthe ground, the air, the men and women, and hardlyeven thought is free,” he wrote. Everything wascentered in and conditioned by the omnipresent fac-tory. In 1853, no longer rhapsodic about railroads,he wrote: “The Railroad has proved too strong forall our farmers & has corrupted them like a war, orthe incursion of another race—has made them allamateurs, given the young men an air their fathersnever had; they look as if they might be railroadagents any day.”

By the early 1840s the railroads had an irresistiblemomentum. Small lines constantly consolidated inan effort to increase their access to capital and im-prove their service. New lines were established andas soon as they proved themselves (or went bank-rupt) they were taken up by larger lines and incorpo-rated into a “system.” This process of consolidation


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was noted by Sidney George Fisher in 1839. “Thewhole route from Washington to N. York,” hewrote, “is now owned by gigantic corporations,who of course manage the lines solely with a view toprofit, without reference to the convenience or ac-commodation of passengers. Heretofore the line onthe Chesapeake has been unrivalled for speed, clean-liness, civility of officers & servants, and admirableaccommodations of every kind. Secure now fromany competition, & sure that all persons must travelby their conveyance, they charge what they please,and the fare & accommodations will I doubt not beas wretched as that of the line to N. York.” Britishcapital and the labor of Irish immigrants were twoessential ingredients in the extraordinary expansionof the railroads in the decade of the 1840s. The prizewas the produce of the Mississippi Valley, the greatbulk of which had to be carried down the Mississippiand its tributaries to New Orleans. To carry it by railto New York and the large East Coast cities andports would generate enormous profits. The Penn-sylvania Railroad took the lead in building a“through line” of uniform gauge (this meant a shiftfrom primarily passenger service to freight and pas-senger) and in dressing its train “captain” or conduc-tor in a uniform with blue coat and brass buttons.Coal was the principal freight on short hauls withinstates. Wheat and lumber were common loads onlong hauls. Perhaps most important were the changesin the patterns of urban and rural life that the build-ing of innumerable feeder lines brought about.Farmers within a radius of a hundred miles or moreof a city could now ship fresh produce—milk, eggs,fruit and vegetables—to city markets. The farmerwas thus disposed to specialize, to raise cash crops insufficient quantity to make it practical to ship themto city markets. Dairy farms and one-crop farms thusbegan to replace general farming. As the farmercame to depend on distant city markets, he also be-came vulnerable to the operations of middlemen orwholesalers, who offered the lowest possible price

for his produce, and from fluctuations in demand re-sulting from economic cycles. The farmer thus lost ameasure of his cherished independence in return formore hard money. In turn the city, guaranteed asupply of essential foods, was able to grow at an un-precedented rate.

Much of the capital required to build railroads anddevelop coal mines as ancillary to them came fromEngland. An English family named Morrison startedthe Hazelton Coal Company at Hazelton, Pennsyl-vania. Sidney George Fisher’s brother Henry was theAmerican representative for the coal company andfor the Reading Railroad, which the Morrison fam-ily also owned. “The railroad,” Sidney wrote, “is ex-cellent, you roll along with great speed and greatsmoothness, and there is very little jar or noise, thecars are very comfortable, and there is but onesource of annoyance, the cinders & smoke from theengine.” The mining town of Tamaqua, not farfrom the Hazelton mine, was “a miserable village,wretched houses & population, produced by and de-pendent on the Little Schuylkill mines which are allaround the town & make the whole place black withcoal dust.” Hazelton was a pleasant “new town” lo-cated in a pine forest under which lay “immense andrich veins of coal.” The ground was undermined formiles around with diggings and the Morrisons,Fisher reported, owned “1800 acres of the finest coalland in the state, the buildings, mines, railroad & ma-chinery.”

In time the legal impediments to railroad buildingwere struck down by courts or repealed by state leg-islatures. The emphasis now shifted to providing in-centives for building railroads, especially in the Mis-sissippi Valley region, where vast expanses of landswere unsold and unsettled because of their distancefrom markets. Most settlement took place alongrivers and waterways that provided access to markets.Illinois set aside eleven million dollars in 1837, theyear of the depression, to build a railroad that wouldrun through the center of the state down to the


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Ohio River, but the state was in such desperate fi-nancial circumstances that it was fourteen years be-fore any substantial progress was made in buildingthe Central Illinois Railroad to link the Great Lakeswith the Ohio and the Mississippi, making Chicagothe terminus for the proposed route. Irishmen againprovided the workers, and the death toll from diseasewas a heavy one. Cholera was especially deadly inthe crowded and unsanitary work camps. “Our la-borers,” an engineer wrote, “numbered from 5,000to 8,000 men. We had to recruit in New York andNew Orleans paying transportation to Illinois . . .but the men would desert when the cholera epi-demics broke out and scatter like frightened sheep.Men at work one day, were in their graves the next.. . . It was dangerous during the summer months toeat beef, butter, or drink milk. Our difficulties wereincreased by the groggeries and whisky that got inour camps. Drunken frolics ended in riots, when acontractor was murdered and state troops called out.One hundred and fifty laborers left in a body afterthe riot.” . . .

The Central Illinois cost ten million dollars moreto build than its projectors had estimated. The stategave the company 2,595,000 acres of land along itsright-of-way. Abraham Lincoln was an attorney forthe railroad; when he submitted a bill for $2,000 forhis services and the railroad protested that that wasmore than Daniel Webster would have charged,Lincoln raised his fee to $5,000, took the railroad tocourt, and won his claim. Land through which therailroad passed rose in value from sixteen cents anacre to ten dollars an acre in a five-year period and adecade later to thirty dollars an acre.

The South now lagged behind the North andWest in railroad building. All told, the feverishdecade of building in the forties resulted in quadru-pling the number of miles of railroad. This was allaccomplished at enormous cost (the better part of itnever recovered) and great loss of life (primarilyIrish). When Alexander Mackay visited the United

States in 1846 he found “an unbroken line of railwaycommunication extending from Boston . . . to be-yond Macon in Georgia, a distance of upwards of1,200 miles.” Lines reached out from Philadelphia toPittsburgh, and the Baltimore and Ohio was pushingthrough the Cumberland Gap into the MississippiValley. Over 5,700 miles of railway had been com-pleted, 2,000 of it within New England and NewYork state, and more than 4,000 miles of additionalrailway were under construction. In the 1850s therailroad mileage of the nation quadrupled oncemore.

Of all those who profited from the incredible ex-pansion of the railroads none rose as dizzily as the cityof Chicago. As Gustaf Unonius wrote in 1860, “Theweb of railroads which Chicago has spun around itselfduring the last ten years is the thing that more thananything else has contributed to its wealth andprogress.” The first locomotive reached the city in1851. Seven years later it was the terminus of morethan a dozen trunk lines. Three lines ran fromChicago to New York in less than thirty-six hours (itonce had taken ten days to make the trip). Daily 120trains, some of them hauling as many as forty freightcars, arrived and departed from the stations in variousparts of the city. “It should be mentioned,” Unoniuswrote, “that all these railroads, altogether measuringfive thousand miles in length, which radiate fromChicago as a central point in that immense iron web,the threads of which cross each other everywhere inthe extensive Mississippi Valley, are private undertak-ings.” Private undertakings, as we have noted, withconsiderable public encouragement.

The passion to “go ahead,” the endless emphasison speed, exacted a heavy price in lives and seriousinjuries. In 1838 alone 496 persons died and manymore were seriously injured in boiler explosions, notto mention those killed or injured in wrecks. SidneyGeorge Fisher noted in his diary that there had beenan accident on the North Pennsylvania Railroad inwhich thirty-nine persons had been killed and sev-


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enty-two wounded. One of the cars had caught fireand seventeen people had been burned to death.“These horrible scenes,” he added, “are constantlyrecurring, and there seems no remedy.” And PhilipHone wrote: “I never open a newspaper that doesnot contain some account of disasters and loss of lifeon railroads. They do a retail business in humanslaughter, whilst the wholesale trade is carried on(especially on Western waters) by the steamboats.This world is going on too fast. Improvements, Poli-tics, Reform, Religion—all fly. Railroads, steamers,packets, race against time and beat it hollow. Flyingis dangerous. By and by we shall have balloons andpass over to Europe between sun and sun. Oh, forthe good old days of heavy post-coaches and speed atthe rate of six miles an hour!”

Captain Marryat ascribed such American “reck-lessness” to “the insatiate pursuit of gain among apeople who consider that time is money, and whoare blinded by their eagerness in the race for it. . . .At present, it certainly is more dangerous to travelone week in America than to cross the Atlantic adozen times. The number of lives lost in one year byaccidents in steamboats, railroads, and coaches wasestimated . . . at one thousand seven hundred and fifty!”To Hone such disasters were “a stigma on our coun-try; for these accidents (as they are called) seldomoccur in Europe. . . . But we have become the mostcareless, reckless, headlong people on the face of theearth. ‘Go ahead’ is our maxim and password; andwe do go ahead with a vengeance, regardless of theconsequences and indifferent about the value ofhuman life.” His reflections were prompted by a re-port of the burning of the Ben Sherrod. The boat’screw, according to newspaper reports, was drunkand the wood took fire. “Out of 235 persons, 175were drowned or burned to death.” By the end ofthe year fifty-five steamboats had blown up, burned,or run aground and sunk on the Mississippi Riveralone; thirteen sunk on the Ohio and two on theMissouri.

When Marryat ventured by rail around the UnitedStates in the 1830s he wrote: “At every fifteen miles ofthe railroads there are refreshment rooms; the carsstop, all the doors are thrown open, and out rush thepassengers, like boys out of school, and crowd aroundthe tables to solace themselves with pies, patties, cakes,hard-boiled eggs, ham, custards, and a variety of rail-road luxuries, too numerous to mention. The bellrings for departure, in they all hurry with their handsand mouths full, and off they go again, until the nextstopping place induces them to relieve the monotonyof the journey by masticating without being hungry.”By the time Isabella Bird traveled west twenty yearslater there were numerous conveniences not availableto Marryat. Bird reported that “water-carriers, book,bon-bon, and peach vendors” were “forever passingbackwards and forewards.” Baggage could be checkedwith metal checks, which was a novelty and a greatconvenience. Bird also discovered “through tickets,”a single long ticket bought at the station of origin, foran entire trip of fifteen hundred miles on a dozen dif-ferent lines.

Since Americans traveled so perpetually, travelers’accommodations were generally excellent, clean, andcomfortable and virtually interchangeable. Marryatobserved that “the wayside inns are remarkable fortheir uniformity; the furniture of the bar-room is in-variably the same: a wooden clock, map of theUnited States, a map of the state, the Declaration ofIndependence, a looking-glass, with a hair-brush andcomb hanging on it, pro bono publico; sometimes withthe extra embellishment of one or two miserablepictures, such as General Jackson scrambling upon ahorse, with fire and steam coming out of his nostrils,going to the battle of New Orleans, etc. etc.” . . .

The feverish railroad building of the 1840s and1850s opened up a large part of the still undevelopedland of the Mississippi Valley and provided a tremen-dous stimulus to business activity, although it did notprevent the devastating Depression of 1857. Perhapsmost important of all, it had tied the Old West or


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the Near West to the Northeast and thereby laid thefoundation for preserving the Union.

One can only attempt to convey the nature ofthe railroad boom by such phrases as “reckless en-thusiasm” and “extravagant passion.” The Americanpublic, which had so recently fallen in love withcanals, now made trains the objects of its collectiveaffection. Canals suddenly seemed hopelessly pokeyand out of date although they continued to be animportant part of the transportation network. Theloss of money and loss of life attendant upon themarvelous new invention seemed to most people anin-no-way unacceptable price to pay for the intox-icating sense of speed, of being drawn along as fastas the wind. So began a hundred-year-long love af-fair between Americans and railroads. If any one in-vention or device can be said to have had a deter-mining effect on the history of a people, it wascertainly the railroad train on the history of thepeople of the United States. In the beginningeverything was [by water]. Water was the elementon which Americans moved—lakes, rivers, andcanals provided the initial circulatory system ofAmerican travel and American commerce. Now itwas iron and soon it would be steel. The canal wasan adaption of nature to human needs. The train,with its relentless disposition to go straight and levelto its destination, was the subjugation of nature,man’s greatest triumph over a world of curves anddeclivities.

Q U E S T I O N S T O C O N S I D E R

1 Even more than the factory, the railroad is a sym-bol of mid-nineteenth-century America, for it wasthe railroad that linked the agricultural heartland tothe industrial cities. How did the growth of the rail-road change the way farmers farmed? How did it in-fluence changes in industry?

2 What effect do you think fast travel to practicallyeverywhere may have had on family life? What ef-fect would increased mobility via railroad have hadon westward expansion and on immigration?

3 Where does the railroad fit into nineteenth-cen-tury America’s long philosophic love affair with na-ture? What did people dislike about the railroad?

4 Which technologies in our own day do you thinkhave expanded with the rapidity of railroads in themid-nineteenth century and with similar effect?

5 It seems ironic that in present-day America trainsevoke nostalgia for a way of life that was slower,safer, and more gracious than our own, for safety andgraciousness were the very qualities that nineteenth-century people thought the railroads had destroyed.What do you see as the future of railroads in theUnited States? What advantages do trains haveover airplanes and automobiles? what disadvantages?In a world clouded by pollution and threatenedwith a scarcity of fossil fuels, what role might therailroads play?


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Documents

20 “Hell in Harness”college.cengage.com/history/us/oates/portrait_america/9e/...288 20“Hell in Harness”: The Iron Horse and the Go-Ahead Age The development of steam power