The Great Railroad Revolution (12 page)

Locally, though, the railroads were welcomed by one and all. The arrival of the iron road was a cause for celebration, and the railroad companies would invariably try to build on that goodwill by outfitting a special train for the local notables and throwing a party for the residents. Brass bands, fireworks, and lavish banquets were held for their benefit, an early example of public relations, which could be said to have been invented by the railroads. There was no shortage of attempts to capitalize on the event. Local potters and glass blowers would hastily produce commemorative china and glassware, often, to save themselves the services of a designer, using the same much-copied pattern showing a basic engine of the early teapot design hauling a single car and with the singularly unoriginal motto “God Speed Thee.” In what would turn out to be presciently accurate reporting, local newspapers would print laudatory articles representing the event as epoch making. There was negative coverage too, often focusing on the potential dangers of the railroad, since many of these early lines went down the main street, already full of horses, carts, and pedestrians, many of whom were utterly unaware of the perils posed by even a slow-moving locomotive. But the railroad was greeted by most people with open arms: “Generally, though, when the iron horse made its first appearance, the reception was one of breathless expectation and delight. The backers and planners of all the early railroads saw to it that their first demonstration runs were occasions of festivity.”
³⁰

In general, these early railroads did not change the American way of life. They might allow travel to the nearest big town and allow some produce to be taken farther, but they were in no sense a national network. The next couple of decades, however, would change all that, as the beast of the iron road was finally unleashed—with extraordinary consequences for America.

In the twenty years running up to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, the railroads became an unstoppable force, conquering the whole of the Eastern Seaboard and making major inroads westward. From an experimental technology with a precarious base, railroads became mainstream and ubiquitous, sweeping through the country with the support of the population. The love affair was becoming a marriage, a symbiotic relationship that was to last almost a century. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Americans take to this contrivance, the railroad, as if it were the cradle in which they were born.”
¹

The impact of such a major invention took time to sink in. At the beginning, the railroad was “mostly an object of awe, excitement and mild trepidation.”
²
It was unclear whether the railroads were merely a novel form of amusement, a grandiose fairground ride, or an invention that would change people's way of life. By the start of the 1840s, everything needed to build railroads quickly and cheaply was coming together—the technology, the labor, the financing, and the legal framework. Galvanized by its promotion funded by a combination of private and public money, and now supported by just about everybody apart from those whose vested interests were directly threatened by the spread of the new technology, railroad fever spread dramatically across America. The brief financial downturn caused by the panic of 1837 proved to be barely a hiccup in the onward march of the iron horse. Although the subsequent downturn following the panic finished off dozens of putative rail schemes, some of
which would never have been viable anyway, and delayed many others, the railroads recovered far more quickly than the rest of the economy, and indeed helped to stimulate the subsequent boom. The panic, though, caused rather longer-term damage in terms of the creditworthiness of both states and railroads, since several states, notably Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Michigan, defaulted on their debts as a result of the panic, making it more difficult for future railroads to raise funds for investment. Manufacturers suffered, too, with several bankruptcies, a list that would have included Baldwin but for the leniency of his creditors and his foresight in entering into partnership with several other manufacturers to spread the risk in what was a difficult business.

Initially, “few Americans thought of the railroad as being a harbinger of an industrial revolution or of any drastic change in the social order.” Quite the opposite. The Boston & Lowell, for example, was “built because people in Lowell wanted ready access to Boston [and] the same kind of need had given birth to the Camden & Amboy, the Philadelphia, Germantown & Norristown, the New York & Harlem, the Pearson & Hudson River Railroad . . . and so on.”
³
The early railroad promoters, like the inventors of the World Wide Web, could not have had any notion of the dramatic changes that their conception would bring about. Their initial philosophy was parochial, but, by the mid-1840s, as the number and extent of the railroads spread, and the notion of the iron road as a unifying national force took hold, they developed a wider, more ambitious vision of its potential. There was no central plan. In contrast to the growth of the railroads in a number of European countries, where governments dictated the shape of the network in accordance with a central plan, in America there was no such scheme. In the United States, the emphasis on states' rights—the assumption that power resides primarily with the states rather than the federal government—would never have allowed that, but several states that funded or supported railroads strongly influenced their routes. Indeed, government of all levels by and large made a point of keeping out of the railroads, which was to have implications for safety and passenger comfort.

New England enjoyed much of the postpanic growth. Indeed, for a brief period, its capital, Boston, could boast of being the best-connected city in America. By 1850, it was possible to travel from Boston to most of the cities
of Massachusetts, as well as north to Portland, Maine, and even to Montreal in Canada and west to Albany, in New York State, and down to New York City itself. The majority of railroad lines, however, were still relatively short. Longer journeys required a complex series of interchanges and— since stations belonging to different companies were invariably and, at times deliberately, built well apart—the occasional trudge or carriage ride through towns.

Even America's first truly long-distance railroad,
⁴
the Erie, had its origins as much in local interests as regional or national considerations. The line, conceived as a link between the Hudson River and Lake Erie, or in other words, like the Erie Canal, as a connection between the Atlantic Ocean and the Great Lakes, was inevitably opposed by canal owners. Support from local people, however, enabled the promoters to overcome these narrow interests. According to railroad historian George Douglas, “Numerous communities along the way, communities that had no transportation at all, created such an uproar that the canal interests had to back down and allow the Erie Railroad to be chartered.” It was to be a direct rival to the highly profitable Erie Canal, whose owners did manage to ensure that several restrictions were placed on the railroad to protect the canal's interests.

Despite its parochial roots, the Erie was a different kind of railroad from anything that had been envisaged before. It was a
grand projet
of its day, a line stretching nearly 450 miles to link Lake Erie with the ports of the Atlantic. Its origins stretched back to 1829, when the idea of linking the ocean with the lakes had been first touted by a farsighted pamphleteer, William Redfield, who later became the inaugural president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He published a map of a proposed railroad from New York to the Great Lakes, and his pamphlet led to the granting of a charter to the New York & Erie Railroad, as it was initially called, by the governor of New York in April 1832, but it would take nearly two decades to bear fruit.

Right from the start, the Erie, which would eventually suffer no fewer than five bankruptcies, struggled. Construction of such an ambitious line, which would, briefly, be the longest in the world, had inevitable difficulties. It might have been broadly welcomed by people in the communities through which it passed, but there was no shortage of smallholders directly
on its path who saw the opportunity to make a fast buck by demanding excessive amounts for small parcels of land. These were frontiersmen and hillbillies, early settlers who had migrated westward in a haphazard way to carve out a subsistence living from the relatively poor land and who had no truck with the railroad. Cannily, they would wait until the railroad's work-force was all ready to cross into their field and then suddenly up their demand for cash. Even the local Native Americans got in on the act. One oft-reported tale describes how, when the Erie sought to cross the Seneca reservation in Cattaraugus County, in western New York State, the local chief demanded ten thousand dollars for the right-of-way. Appalled at this demand, the railroad manager blustered that the land was no good for anything else, such as growing corn or potatoes, and that it had no good timber on it. The sage paused and then said, “It pretty good for railroad.”
⁵
His tribe got the money.

The construction of the Erie is an epic story that has been largely forgotten in American railroad folklore, having been overshadowed by the much-recounted tale of the transcontinentals a couple of decades later (see
Chapter 5
).
⁶
In fact, the Erie merits an equally prominent place in railroad history, as the line was built at a time when the railroad pioneers were still feeling their way with the technology, and fully deserved its appellation as “the work of the age.” The Erie's reputation, too, has suffered because of the numerous mistakes made during its construction and its later role as the plaything of the railroad barons (see
Chapter 8
), but the building of the line was the greatest achievement of the early railroad entrepreneurs, as the scale of the construction dwarfed all other contemporary schemes.

To support the construction of the Erie, the State of New York put up a loan of $3 million, and the company tried to raise $1 million, but faced immediate difficulties when, a few weeks after the ceremonial turning of the first sod in 1836, New York's financial district was razed to the ground in a catastrophic fire that bankrupted many of the putative investors in the railroad. This was just the start of a string of financial problems that would not only delay the construction of the Erie but call its very existence into question. Work proceeded in fits and starts, as money was made available by pressuring stockholders and persuading local rich residents to commit
themselves to the scheme, but there were long periods when the work camps were quiet. Following the company's default on its interest payments in 1842, construction ceased altogether and would not recommence for three long years. Remarkably, the citizens of Middletown, New York, succeeded in persuading the promoters to complete a nine-mile stretch of line from the neighboring town of Goshen before construction ceased to ensure they would enjoy the benefits of being the Erie's western terminus until work could resume. At this stage the Erie stretched barely forty miles from the Hudson, less than one-tenth of its planned length, and there were doubts as to whether it could ever be completed. The stoppage proved especially damaging, since stockpiles of material, such as ties and stone, left on uncompleted sections of the track, were purloined, often by the very farmers who had supplied the material but not been paid for it. Many local farmhouses would subsequently boast solid timber frames hewn from wood originally intended to support the railroad rather than their roofs.

Somehow, though, New York State was prevailed upon not only to cancel the original $3 million debt, but also to allow the railroad to issue new stock to raise a further $3 million to ensure work could recommence. This time, there was a new powerful president at the helm of the railroad, Benjamin Loder, who had made his fortune out of dry goods. Though having no knowledge of the railroads, he was just the sort of man the Erie needed, because he had the ability and strength of character to drive through construction of the line despite all the obstacles, financial and practical, in its path. He made the Erie into an unstoppable force, helped by thousands of Irish laborers who fled their native country during the long potato famine that started in 1845 and who consequently were grateful even for the low wages offered. The Irish were not, though, always a happy bunch, given the perilous nature of their work. It was remarkably similar to that of the laborers building India's first major railroad through the Western Ghats outside Bombay at around the same time, who were forced to hang down from the tops of cliffs in flimsy baskets to drill holes in which they placed gunpowder.
⁷
An almost identically risky technique was used in the hilly region around Port Jervis, on the Delaware, where the cliffs rose almost straight up from the river. The brave fellow in the basket with the task of setting the charge would signal to be rapidly hoisted to safety before the fuse burned
down. Inevitably, at times ropes got snagged or instructions misheard, and the consequent explosion would send the hapless man to his doom. Many of the dislodged rocks plunged into the neighboring Delaware & Hudson Canal, leading to a series of lawsuits between the two companies.