American Experiment (96 page)

Many of these efforts were experimental, and not all ended well. Ephraim Bull of Concord spent years perfecting an early-ripening variety of the wild northern fox grape. After eleven years of planting, selecting, and testing his stock, he exhibited his “Concord grape” amid much acclaim in the Massachusetts Horticultural Hall. But Bull was better at inventing than profit-making, for commercial nurseries moved in on his trade in seedlings and bested him in competition. The embittered Bull at least had the last word. On his gravestone in Concord cemetery is carved the epitaph:
“HE SOWED, OTHERS REAPED.”

While northwestern farming surged, and northeastern agriculture adapted, much of southeastern farming lagged behind. A South Carolinian in 1857 summed up the situation in an address to his state’s agricultural society, in much the same words of warning used by other farm leaders: “Our present system is to cut down our forest and run it into cotton as long as it will pay for the labor expended. Then cut down more forest, plant in cotton, plough it uphill and downhill, and when it fails to give a support leave it….Then sell the carcass for what you can realize and migrate to the Southwest in quest of another victim. This ruinous system has entailed upon us an exhausted soil, and a dependence upon Kentucky and Tennessee for our mules, horses, and hogs, and upon the Northern States for all our necessaries from the clothing and shoeing of our negroes down to our
wheelbarrows
,
corn-brooms and axe-handles.
” The South was still self-sufficient in food, but already in 1859 the wheat and corn crops of Illinois and Ohio exceeded those of all seven states of the Deep South combined.

Slavery was keeping the South excessively rural, with an unbalanced economy dominated by dangerous speculation in cotton, tobacco, and sugar. Southerners could not break out of their economic prison, walled in by poor communication and transportation, depleted soils, limited capital, lack of diversification, a slower population growth, and, first and last,
a great sluggish under-class of poor whites and under-caste of blacks. Moreover, the large plantation owners lacked an incentive to break out of the pattern, for the prices of cotton and tobacco rose steadily between 1850 and 1860, even while production doubled. King Cotton brought prosperity—at least to a few—and made it possible to ignore the underlying problems.

The southern “rim states” were somewhat more successful in agriculture. Northwestern Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley produced heavy crops of wheat; small farms were thriving in Tennessee and Kentucky; Arkansas and Florida were boosting their cattle and hog production; the piedmont country of Virginia and North Carolina displayed agricultural diversity in its market gardening and livestock raising; Texas was rapidly becoming a livestock empire by itself. By 1856 Texans were driving their longhorns overland to the slaughterhouses of Chicago. By the end of the decade the “outer” South was, in agricultural diversification and innovation, leaving the “inner” far behind.

Agriculture North and South showed the defect of its own virtue of abundance—colossal waste. Land was depleted by inefficient plowing, waste or improper use of manure and other fertilizers, single-cropping of the same land year after year, heavy leaching. It was easy to squander a commodity that seemed in endless supply. Throughout the nation, however, were men aware of this waste and inefficiency. Long active in their own states, in 1852 they formed the United States Agricultural Society to represent and assist the nation’s agriculture and promote experimentation and education. As farm journals burgeoned—
Prairie Farmer
,
American Agriculturalist
,
American Farmer
,
Farmer’s Register
, and
Cultivator
—editors preached better fencing, fertilizing, plowing, draining, rotating. Greeley’s
Tribune
appointed an agricultural editor. The message was further spread at fairs and exhibitions. Scientific farming, however, remained in its infancy.

States began establishing agricultural courses, departments, and—in Michigan—a college of agriculture. The federal government largely stood aloof. Despite a tiny budget, the Patent Office promoted use of new seeds and new crops, such as sorghum cane, but bills to establish grants of public lands for higher education met a presidential veto. Agriculture—still the foundation of the American economy—was left primarily to private leadership and enterprise.

The British and Pennsylvania pig iron that helped mechanize much of the northwestern farmer’s work supplied also the thousands of miles of
rails that bound him closer to the markets of the East. The railroad fever and expansion of the 1850s was producing a virtual revolution in transportation. Hardly a town or large city did not harbor ambitions that the rails would come its way, bringing investors, buyers, jobs, and access to the whole railroad gridiron developing in the Northwest. The eleven thousand miles of railroad in existence in 1852 almost tripled in length by the end of the decade. The north-central states led the way in this expansion, followed by the Northeast, the south Atlantic states, and the old Southwest.

America’s hundred-year romance with the railroad was well under way, although some people did not love the iron horse. “The railroad will leave the land despoiled, ruined, a desert where only sable buzzards shall wing their loathesome way,” cried an orator. A state legislator waxed more evangelical than environmental: “Canals, sir, are God’s own highway, operating on the soft bosom of the fluid that comes straight from Heaven. The railroad stems direct from Hell. It is the Devil’s own invention, compounded of fire, smoke, soot, and dirt, spreading its infernal poison throughout the fair countryside. It will set fire to houses along its slimy tracks. It will throw burning brands into the ripe fields of the honest husbandman and destroy his crops.…”

But, as Bismarck once remarked, it is not by speeches and parliamentary resolutions that the great questions of the day are decided but by blood and iron, and the iron rails continued to chop through the countryside, at a national average of almost forty miles a week. Each mile cost from $20,000 to $40,000, but capitalists and civic leaders in the big eastern cities and the growing inland towns raised the money, with aid from European financiers. The local citizen helped out too; during the 1850s Wisconsin farmers mortgaged their property for almost $5 million to invest in railroad building. Politicians and capitalists and townspeople alike felt well rewarded when the first iron horse arrived in town. Church bells rang, bands played, and politicos gave speeches as the hissing monster rumbled into the new depot. And when the Erie Railroad completed its 450-mile main line stretching from the Hudson to the Lakes in 1850, President Fillmore and Daniel Webster themselves rode the train—Webster seated on a rocking chair fastened onto an open flat car—to the end of the line at Dunkirk, where they were greeted by a parade, a barbecue, and a twenty-one-gun salute from the U.S.S.
Michigan.

Cities wanted railroads—and railroads built cities. Chicago, perfectly situated at the center of the northwestern heartland, and at the southern tip of Lake Michigan around which east-west traffic to the north had to detour, had not a single railroad tie in 1850. Within five years it became
the terminus for 2,200 miles and had 100 big trains arriving and departing each day. Its grain elevators, trackside warehouses, lake and canal facilities meshed with its railroads radiating out like spokes in a wheel. Soon trains out of Chicago were jumping the Mississippi into Iowa, steaming down to Cairo and points south, invading Missouri, and linking with the great northern arms of the Father of the Waters.

Lake Michigan served as a broad seaway south to Chicago, lapping the wilderness to the north; two other nautical boulevards, Lakes Ontario and Erie, pointed directly at Chicago from the east. But these inland seaways were not connected and hence could not serve heavy transportation until man intervened. As the constantly improved Erie Canal disgorged people and freight from the east, more and more Lake Erie steamers navigated its shallow and frisky waters. The opening of the Canadian-built Welland Canal enabled steamboats to pass around Niagara Falls between Ontario and Erie. But the most momentous development for Chicago and all the other Great Lakes cities was the extraordinary feat, conceived and engineered by a young Vermonter named Charles T. Harvey, of building the Sault Ste. Marie Canal to bypass the rapids between huge Lake Superior and Lake Huron. Soon lake steamers were toting vast quantities of copper and iron ore from the mines on Superior’s shores to points east. By the late 1850s Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and scores of smaller cities were battening off this new lake commerce, and ships were carrying western products from Chicago to Liverpool over the thousand-mile seaway stretching toward the northeast.

Not only grimy ore boats plied the lake waters. Fine lake steamers were built to carry first-class passengers in style, as well as immigrants below-decks. “The handsomest of the lake vessels by the middle fifties,” Nevins wrote, “the
Western World
, was 348 feet long, with powerful engines and beautiful interior fittings. She and her peers, the
Plymouth Rock
, the
Western Metropolis
, and others, with several hundred staterooms each, competed in luxury and entertainment for those who could pay. Down the green lakes they slipped with dancing, gambling, flirtation, and feasting, the musicians in the ballrooms thrumming their guitars,” to the chant:

Old Huron’s long, old Huron’s wide,

De engines keep de time.

Still, nothing could compete for romance with the river-boating a thousand miles south, on the Mississippi. Nevins pictured the river port scenes: “The mile-long expanse of boats smoking and throbbing at the St. Louis and New Orleans levees; the motley crowds of passengers—fur-traders, immigrants, soldiers, cotton-planters, land-speculators, gamblers,
politicians, British tourists, Indians, and plain farmers; the avalanche of pork, grain, tobacco, cotton, and hides that the Illinois, the Cumberland, the Washita, the Arkansas, and the Red poured into the central Mississippi stream, cramming every deck; the lordly pilots, the hardbitten captains, the profane mates, the chanting roustabouts; the fierce races as the firemen tied down safety valves; the hands crammed fat-pine into the roaring furnaces, and the passengers cheered.…”

No lady, northern or southern, could ever forget those New Orleans riverboats—stepping down the long promenade deck with its view of hundreds of lights reflecting off the river water, or parading into the palatial dining saloon, with its glittering mirrors, shining candelabra, table settings of damask and silver, and bowers of fruits and flowers.

Romantic—but not altogether economic. The lower Mississippi was often a fickle and even faithless waterway as the water rose and fell unpredictably, channels silted up, and vessels grounded or waited for days in order to pass through. In St. Louis, crates, barrels, hogsheads of tobacco, bags of corn, and a great confusion of goods of all descriptions piled up for two miles along the winding riverbank, often delayed there by a water level that could rise or fall almost forty feet. St. Louis was far enough north to suffer from ice, far enough south to suffer from floods. Despite these difficulties the Missouri city, as well located among rivers as Chicago was among lakes, became by the 1850s one of the world’s biggest centers for breaking and transferring freight.

As northern canals grew wider and longer, northern steamers bigger and deeper, northern ports more mechanized northern capitalists bolder and richer, northern free workers more productive, the South fell behind in the competition to exploit the riches of the heartland.

Businessmen preferred economics to romance. They were making and selling and buying and importing their own cornucopia of goods. George W. Cable described a New Orleans wharf: “drays with all imaginable kinds of burden; cotton in bales, piled as high as the omnibuses; leaf tobacco in huge hogsheads; cases of linens and silks; stacks of rawhides; crates of cabbages; bales of prints and of hay; interlocked heaps of blue and red ploughs; bags of coffee, spices, and corn; bales of bagging; barrels, casks, and tierces; whiskey, pork, onions, oats, bacon, garlic, molasses, and other delicacies; rice, sugar—what was there not?…” Agriculture still dominated invention and production, but transportation and industry were becoming increasingly important. In 1854 the Patent Office issued fifty-six patents for harvesting implements, thirty-nine for seed planters, and
sixteen for plows; in 1856 it issued forty for sewing machines, thirty-one for looms, and nineteen for locks.

Products that would become household names were being manufactured now in quantity: not only the McCormick reaper but the Colt revolver, the Remington rifle, Otis elevators, Goodyear’s India-rubber fabrics, Baldwin locomotives. Cities were already specializing in their output. Cincinnati produced more than 125,000 chairs a year by the mid-1850s; Chicago about $2.5 million in ready-made clothes; Lynn, Massachusetts, about 4.5 million boots and shoes. Americans were ingenious in making machines that helped make machines—drills, saws, pumps, belts, milling machines, turret lathes. The American system specialized in interchangeable parts. By the end of the decade, manufactories were turning out 300,000 iron stoves a year, with interchangeable panels, tops, lids, fireboxes.

It was the age of iron—iron locomotives, ships, railroad rails, bridges, farm machinery, pianos—and buildings. Substituting iron beams for wood, Americans made the first multi-story iron building frames. Cast-iron beams were enormously heavy, however, and soon Trenton was using specially designed machines to roll wrought-iron ones. These beams were used in building Cooper Union and Harper Brothers’ new building after the old one burned. James Bogardus’ Manhattan foundry for making iron was made of iron.

Merchant princes were catering to family buyers, especially women. H. B. Claflin earned a fortune out of the dry-goods business. Charles L. Tiffany sold fine jewelry and silverware. Visitors in New York gaped at the huge department stores, with their plate-glass windows and marble pillars. There were a hundred piano manufacturers in New York City alone. But women produced for themselves—books, selling in the hundreds of thousands. “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to his friend the publisher William D. Ticknor, “and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash.”