American Experiment (78 page)

Challenged by the Jacksonians, the Whigs sought to unite all those who believed in the old kind of leadership, whether they were Calhoun nullifies or Clay nationalists. “In so doing,” according to Lynn L. Marshall, “they looked back longingly to a heroic era when leadership in politics was integral to leadership in society.…Thus was the party born dead in July 1832 and continued in that condition until 1836. Thereafter, however, a total transfusion of Jacksonian blood would bring it miraculously to life.” This miracle faded away as Democratic party leaders sought to build coalitions of voters even at the expense of older doctrines of liberty and equality, as new leaders of both parties calculated more in terms of a multiplicity of economic interests than of either republican or aristocratic leadership.

Sometime during the 1830s and 1840s—we will never know more exactly—the American polity underwent an almost invisible but pervasive sea change. During the first three or four decades of the republic, political leaders in Washington and the state capitals had made the key decisions that closely molded the shape and direction of people’s lives. The brilliant constitutional planners of 1787, the state convention delegates voting thumbs up or down on the new Constitution, Washington and Adams and Jefferson and Madison and their hundreds of associates, the state leaders who made key political and economic decisions about the first canals and turnpikes and other enterprises, the early party builders—these men acted far more on doctrinal, and on political and practical grounds, than on narrowly economic. Jackson’s bank veto represented one of the last of the great political intrusions into economic life; later, politicians more reflective of specific economic interest increasingly dominated national and state politics. At least at the leadership level, Economic Man seemed to take over from Political Man.

The change was not dramatic. Economic interests had affected public decision-making from earliest colonial days. And large political considerations would continue to impinge on economic policy long after the 1840s. But the nation went through a significant shift from a condition where
economics was a factor
in
politics to a condition where politics could be defined mainly
as
economic interest.

In short, the enterprisers—the go-getters, the boosters—were taking over. In earlier years a relatively few men had shown the way—men like John Jacob Astor in the fur trade and Eli Whitney in cotton ginning—and they had won their places in the history books. An entrepreneur like the “Ice King” of Boston would be lucky to occupy a footnote. Son of a wealthy Boston lawyer, brother of three Harvard men, Frederic Tudor in his teens had rejected academic life for business. When one of his brothers idly wondered at a Boston party why ice was not harvested from local ponds and sold in the Caribbean, the twenty-one-year-old Tudor took up the idea, invested in a huge shipment of ice to Martinique, and lost $4,000 when the cargo melted. For two decades Tudor set himself to buying up New England ponds and Caribbean icehouses; he promoted a demand for ice cream, iced drinks, and ice-preserved food; he tested a variety of insulating materials such as wood shavings, straw, blankets, and finally—and successfully—sawdust. Another young businessman, Nathan Jarvis Wyeth, invented a horse-drawn ice cutter, pulled on runners notched with saw teeth, that could gouge out parallel grooves, enabling men with iron bars to break the ice off in even chunks. The two men teamed up to de-ice Fresh Pond in Cambridge.

By the end of the 1840s, Tudor had achieved prodigious feats: trading in candles, cotton, claret, and a host of other commodities; digging for coal on Martha’s Vineyard off Cape Cod; devising a siphon for pumping out ships; designing a new hull for a ship; running a graphite mine; turning white pine into paper; setting up one of the first amusement parks in America; and bringing to New England the first steam locomotive, a toy affair of one-half horsepower. But above all, he remained the “Ice King” whose ships carried thousands of tons of packed chunks to the East Indies, China, Australia, India. He was a restless, flamboyant, imperious, aggressive promoter, no modest, prudent Horatio Alger hero, in Daniel Boorstin’s judgment, and he would pay for his recklessness by languishing in debtor’s jail. But he brought ice not only to equatorial lands but to millions of Americans; rid their homes of decaying meat and rancid butter; and permitted them fresh instead of dried food and salted meat, heavily spiced to disguise its age.

Other Bostonians were as resourceful with granite as Tudor was with ice. In earlier years they had built their stone churches by digging up huge boulders, heating them with fires, and smashing them with iron balls. Later they split off chunks of granite with gunpowder, and still later by drilling holes along a straight line and then splitting the stone along the holes.
Granite built the sixteen locks of the Middlesex Canal from Boston to Chelmsford, where the hard stone was mined. By the 1830s, Charles Bulfinch and other fine New England architects were designing churches and public buildings built of granite from Massachusetts quarries.

Solomon Willard, a jack-of-all-trades, became the king of granite. Son of a country carpenter, he made his way to Boston, and soon to success as a builder of spiral stairs, wood carver, and self-taught architect. Summoned in 1825 to design the Bunker Hill monument in Charlestown, he scoured the countryside for suitable stone until he came upon the granite of Quincy. To cut huge, monumental blocks of stone from this quarry he devised lift jacks, hoists, and other machinery, and to move the massive blocks to Charlestown, he used a crude wooden track covered with iron plates and resting on stone crossties. When Daniel Webster delivered a splendid address at the dedication of the Bunker Hill monument in 1843, the event celebrated granite as well as the Revolutionary battle. For the flinty stone was now being used in the most famous public buildings and hotels in the country, as well as in drydocks; and when tough paving stone became necessary for heavy transport, Willard had the satisfaction of laying blocks of Quincy granite in front of Boston’s famous Tremont House.

Some of the powder used in quarrying doubtless came from the Du Pont Company far to the south, near Wilmington, Delaware. The Du Pont mills, separated by buffer zones to keep one from blowing up another, were strung for miles along the swift-flowing Brandywine Creek. Stone dams formed shallow pools that diverted water from the creek into canals running to the power machinery. The Du Ponts made their black gunpowder and blasting powder out of charcoal from nearby willow trees, sulphur from Sicily, and saltpeter from India. Founded by the son of Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, the celebrated physiocrat who had fled revolutionary France to start a new life in America, the firm was already becoming a company town that owned the houses and dominated the lives of its employees.

Invention and innovation seemed to be accelerating during the thirties and forties. The electric dynamo in 1831, Cyrus McCormick’s reaper in 1834, John Deere’s steel plow in 1839, the magnetic telegraph in 1843, the sewing machine in 1846—all these and a host of other devices set off little agricultural and industrial revolutions of their own. One of the most remarkable inventors was Samuel Finley Morse, educated at Andover and Yale, a noted portraitist, as celebrated at home and abroad as he was underpaid for his paintings. He might have lived out his life as a professor of art in New York City had it not been for a chance conversation with a
fellow passenger on a voyage back from Europe in 1832, about work on electricity abroad.

Morse had been curious about electrical phenomena ever since he had attended Benjamin Silliman’s lectures and demonstrations at Yale; now, his interest reawakened, he went to work on a contrivance to combine a sending device that would transmit signals by closing and opening an electric circuit; a receiving device, operated by an electromagnet, to record the signals as dots and spaces on a strip of paper moved by clockwork; and a code translating the dots and spaces into letters and numbers. At first the magnet would not operate at over forty feet, but with the help of a university colleague, Morse worked out a system of electromagnet renewers or relays. The artist-inventor went through several years of poverty, frustration, and even actual hunger before Congress voted for an experimental line from Washington to Baltimore, and more months of waiting and preparation before he transmitted to Baltimore from the Supreme Court room in the Capitol his famous declaration, “What hath God wrought!”

The most striking and significant of all the enterprises of this period came to depend heavily on Morse’s invention. This was railroading. Few ventures have been so much the product of trial-and-error gradualism and innovation, over so many years. Rails and roads were pioneered long before boilers and pistons. For hundreds of years beasts and men, women, and children had hauled coal cars on wooden rails in English and German mines. Flanges had to be devised to hold wheels on the tracks, and wooden rails plated with iron to keep them from splintering. The French and English developed fantastic steam engines for land transport—mechanical legs were even devised to push a car from behind—until it was discovered that the weighty iron locomotives needed smooth rails on a smooth track. By 1829 the English engineer George Stephenson had achieved success with his famous “Rocket.”

Much earlier an American steamboat inventor, John Stevens, had been transfixed by the vision of American railway development. Squeezed out of Hudson River steamboating by Livingston’s and Fulton’s monopoly, Stevens appealed to state legislatures up and down the east coast to pave the way for railroading. He had the temerity to urge a railroad on the Erie Canal Commission as cheaper to build. Railroads, answered Chancellor Robert Livingston, would be too expensive, dangerous, and impractical. The canal went ahead. Finally, the New Jersey and Pennsylvania legislatures passed railroad bills, but things moved so slowly that Stevens in 1825, at the age of seventy-six, built an experimental locomotive on his
own estate in Hoboken. This, the first American-built locomotive, was never put into service on a railroad.

But all the while the tinkerers were innovating. When, in 1829, the Delaware & Hudson Canal and Railroad Company imported the “Stourbridge Lion,” a fine big English locomotive, to use at its western canal terminus, the machine ran forward and backward for a mile or two, amid the booming of cannon (one of which shattered a mechanic’s arm), but the six-ton “Lion” proved too heavy for American track and was hardly used again. Clearly, locomotives in America would have to be built lighter and more flexible, for frail wooden trestles and sharper curves. There were even experiments with locomotives decked out with sails and with a horse aboard working a treadmill to turn the wheels. Neither ran.

Then, in the winter of 1830-31, Horatio Allen, who at the age of twenty-seven had single-handedly operated the “Lion,” put the American-built “Best Friend of Charleston” into service between the South Carolina capital and Hamburg. The next year John B. Jervis brought in his locomotive, the “Experiment,” with a swiveling, four-wheel “bogie” truck under the front end of the boiler, allowing the machine to follow more easily the curves of the railroad. The “Experiment” worked.

American railroading was under way, with distinctly American problems. Unlike English locomotives, which ran on coal, the American engines feasted on the virgin timber cut down along the line. The wood-burners required a huge balloon stack, picturesque in etchings but menacing to dry forests, wooden bridges, and ladies’ parasols. The biggest challenge to American railroading was sheer distance. With a national mania for speed already evident, locomotives were invented that could cut through gardens, farms, and even towns—which meant in turn the devising of grade crossings, gates, bells, whistles, and cowcatchers. America’s technology of speed meant steeper grades, sharper curves, narrow gauges, fragile trestleworks—and hideous accidents.

The nation’s twenty-three miles of railroad track in 1830 multiplied over a hundredfold in the next ten years. As the inventors settled down to devising better wheels, pistons, cylinders, valves, steam boxes, boilers, couplings, roadbeds, a host of local boosters and big-city promoters plunged into the scramble for railroad extensions and rights-of-way. Rich Boston merchants, eager to head off the threat of New York and the Erie Canal to their western trade, pushed a railroad westward to Worcester and Springfield and through the sloping Berkshire Mountains to the Hudson. George Bliss, Jr., a Yale graduate and Massachusetts legislator, had to devise ways of securing rights-of-way, attracting customers, avoiding accidents, and maintaining discipline. Robert Schuyler, grandson of the great
manor lord Philip Schuyler, became president of the New York and New Haven line, and of the New York and Harlem. Despite competition from Hudson River steamboats, the New York City railroad magnates extended their lines up to Peekskill, Poughkeepsie, and Hudson. Other roads radiated from Manhattan up through Connecticut to Massachusetts. Railroad fever spread up and down the coast.

Extending out from the main cities, the railroads were not yet amalgamated into a system, or even fully connected. Local nabobs were still more interested in competing, or at least expanding, than in combining. When President Schuyler of the New York and New Haven advised President Charles F. Pond of the Hartford and New Haven that the New York railroad wanted to connect with Pond’s, in order “to form the most expeditious as well as the most comfortable lines which circumstances permit,” Pond evidently agreed only on condition of access by his company to the entire passenger business of Schuyler’s road between New Haven and New York. “We cannot accept such arrangement as you wish” was Schuyler’s curt answer to Pond.

Railroad expansion in the 1840s symbolized a people on the make and on the move. As hundreds of thousands of immigrants entered during the forties, the total population rose from 17 million to over 23 million. People were continuing to move westward in huge numbers, for the West alone gained almost half that increase, the South only a fourth. Agriculture was still the dominant enterprise by far, but it was declining relatively to mining, manufacturing, and construction. By the 1840s the United States had a “domestic market truly national in its dimensions,” and economic growth sharply accelerated. If the country had not yet reached the point of an explosive takeoff, it was nearing the edge. The rise of an “American common market,” in Stuart Bruchey’s words, resulted, not merely from economic change but also from deliberate political action.