Passage To Union How the railroads transformed American life, 1829 - 1929 w/ DJ
Passage To Union How the railroads transformed American life, 1829 - 1929 by Sarah H. Gordon
Hard cover with dust jacket
403 pages.
Copyright 1996
Contents
Preface Introduction
PART ONE. Union Through Expansion, 1829-1861
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1..E Pluribus Unum
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2..The Lay of the Land
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3..Leaving Home for the West
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4..The Hometowns Left Behind
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5..The Legal Conflict Between Railroad and Government
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6..A Force for Good or for Evil?
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7..A Crowded and Uncomfortable Home Away from Home
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8..Private and Public Unions 9. Union Through Competition to. The State of the Union
Where Is This Train Going?
PART TWO. From Local Control to National Purpose, 1861-1890 1. The South Leaves But Returns
12. Now We Can Settle the Far West
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13..Poor Relations in the South
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14..The Traveling Public and Its Servants
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15.The Law Tries to Catch Up
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16.Why Bigger Towns Get Better Service
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17..City Slicker and Country Bumpkin
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18..Private Property in Public Places
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19..From Union to Uniformity Thomas Cooley and the Ghost of William Seward
PART THREE. An Urban and Commercial Union, 1890-1929
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13..Cities First and Foremost
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14.It's Too Crowded Here
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15..Plans, Power, and Population
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16.Touring the West and the South
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17.Hometowns and Nostalgia
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18..Lost Hometowns, Lost Lives
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19..No Service Without Profit
Looking Backward
Notes
A Note on Sources
Index
Preface
THE SEARCH FOR improved transportation from the eastern United States to the interior, in order to promote trade and unite the coungeographic regions, led to profound and unforeseen changes in the economic, legal, and social structures of American society. By raising hopes that trade and travel would bring economic betterment and unite a far-flung society, the railroads uprooted and reorganized populations, changed the size, structure, and purpose of towns, altered the distribution of wealth, created new national hierarchies, and ultimately raised a great many questions about the terms on which a diverse people would tolerate national unity.
Each of these consequences engendered considerable civil conflict. Townspeople felt the loss of control over their land and the welfare of their citizens; the South fought the loss of states' rights as they pertained to control over railroad corporations; and rural dwellers fought the tendency of the urban Northeast to drain the countryside of its wealth without adequate recompense. In their new relationship, passengers and railroad companies sought their own philosophy of unity. Should disturbing elements he excluded? Or were the boisterous drunks, gamblers, confidence men, ladies of the night, hoboes.
and others who found a home in the new public crowd all parts of the American democratic system?
The nation's distant parts were in fact brought into closer COMMUnitv, but in the process traditional units of social organization and established legal relationships lost much of their power to regulate the behavior of the American people. Transient crowds of strangers replaced local communities as a defining social experience. National markets and organizations with national membership replaced small, local markets and institutions as the cornerstones of social order. The size of the country, and an economy rooted in trade and exchange, determined the large role played by railroads in shaping the structure of American society and its institutions: all echoed the theme of trade and exchange.
This book had its origins in a paper I wrote while a sophomore at Smith College. Using the collections of Smith's Neilson Library and of the local history room at the public library in Springfield, Massachusetts, I wrote "The Connecticut River Railroad: Its Evolution in the Connecticut Valley" for a course on the Gilded Age taught by Professor David Allmendinger. My first thanks, therefore, go to him. I picked up the thread of my interest in railroad history at the University of Chicago, in a seminar on the history of transportation in the United States taught by Professor Neil Timis. With the excellent resources of the university's Regenstein Library, 1 wrote a paper enti"Ladies' Train Travel, 1848 to 1890: The Problem of Appearing in Public."
Neil Harris later became my adviser fir a dissertation entitled "A Society of Passengers: Rail Travel 1865-191o," which I completed in 1981. I owe a great debt to luny and to Professor Stanley N. Katz for reading and editing that manuscript. During my years in Chicago I also consulted material in the holdings of the Chicago Historical Society and the Newberry Library, and went to many of the city's antique stores to take pictures of luggage. Indeed I received help on the history of luggage from the family of Charles T. Wilt, one of the oldest luggage makers in Chicago. Material on train conductors I found in the Baker Library at Harvard University and I had access to the proceedings of the General Ticket Agents' Association in the collection of the John Crerar Library, now at the University of Chicago. Others who provided substantial help to me during my years in Chicago include the late Robert Rosenthal, director of special collecat the Regenstein Library, who, among other things, introduced me to Romaine's guide to trade catalogs; Vera Aronow, who has periodically sent me clippings and even alerted me to the presence of some very old trunks and suitcases waiting on a New York sidewalk for the trashmen; and Professor Martin J. Hardeman, whose knowledge of American history is apparently boundless and whose support for more than twenty years has been unflagging. Mary Ann Johnson, the curator at Jane Addams's Hull House, gave me much information about immigrants who came to Chicago by train, and she alerted me to an important book 011 railroad planning in the city. She also made it possible for me to present my research on women's train travel to the Chicago Area Women's History Conference. Beth Durham shared my endeavors in learning about nineteenth-century heating and ventilating, and photocopied letters on train travel from her own research. Robert Siedle brought me stacks of books about railroads. My sister, Ann D. Gordon, kept me supplied with information about the history of luggage from all points of the compass. Finally, Fannia Weingartner, who published one chapter of my dissertation in the Henry Ford Museum Herald, encouraged me to persevere as a writer of history at a time when few opportunities existed for me to do so.
This book took many years to write, largely because it required the collection of so many bits and pieces of information from so many different fields of historical scholarship. In providing a publishing conand the editorial support I needed, Ivan R. Dee has made this book possible. In taking me to sales of used and rare books in many parts of Connecticut and Massachusetts, librarian William K. Finley enabled me to write a much more complete and accurate book. James Goodwin, engineer for both the Valley Railroad and the Connecticut Central Railroad, introduced me firsthand to the technical side of railroading. And my brother, David Gordon, an authority on train routes and schedules, not to mention computers, has had answers for any number of questions. I also consulted materials in the Yale Law Library, the Seelye Mudd Library at Yale University, the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale, the Library of the Court of New Haven, the State Library of Connecticut, the Connecticut Historical Society, the New York Public Library, and public libraries throughout Connecticut. Requests for information have been answered by the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania in Strasburg and the Virginia State Library in Richmond.
Annette Hise provided information about railroad stations in Connecticut; John H. White, Jr., supplied prices of freight cars: Kathy Murphy, Pam Euerle, and the entire Lyons family provided years of moral support. Among those who have read and commented on porof the manuscript are Stanley N. Katz, Elizabeth Blackmar, Walter Licht, James Goodwin, Patricia Hipsher, Mark Johnston, Kathy Deierlein, Lynne Hodgson, Mark Wenglinsky. Neil Nelan, Rachel Ranis, and David Stineback.
Finally, my parents, Patricia Gordon Pollock and Herbert C. Pollock, supported my work throughout the writing of this book.
S. II. G.
North Haven, Connecticut July 1996
Introduction
MANY HISTORIAN'S have credited the railroads with unifying the United States by overcoming two situations not usually discussed in American history: textbooks. The first was the lack of communication among towns even along the Atlantic seaboard during the colonial and early national periods (1607 to 1846). At the time of the American Revolution, post roads for carrying the mail from Boston through Washington and into the South provided the only unifying means of land transport in the new country. Coastwise vessels carried on a sea trade from port to port and took on passengers only as space permitted. On interior rivers, keelboats carried a trade in manufactured goods and frontier products such as animal hides and lumber. Otherwise the United States had no ties of unity at all. Indeed, throughout the nation's history, efforts to secure and strengthen the bonds of union have met with stiff resistance.
The second situation not clearly defined in standard recountings of American history concerns the frequent threats of secession that dogged the country between 1781 and 1861, when the Southern states finally did secede. Familiar events such as Shays's Rebellion in Massachusetts, and the Whiskey Rebellion, both against taxes, take on their full significance in the context of a very loosely organized country without sufficient means-military, political, or economic-to hold itself together. The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1796, which attempted to place the power of the states over that of the federal government in determining the constitutionality of federal laws; the threat of federalist secession in New England; the South Carolina nullification crisis of 1832, which challenged the power of Congress to determine tariffs paid by all states; and the Southern land speculation that sought to create a new country in Louisiana-all contained at their root the threat of secession. In surmounting these threats the advocates of union depended in some measure on the suppression of local and regional interests.
The fragility of the government as a unifying, force deeply concerned men such as George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison, all of whom suggested in their writings that a program of internal improvements-meaning improved transportation to the interior of the country-would provide unity and at the same time increase prosperity by allowing more trade between the interior and the Atlantic coast. Thus was born an alliance between the new nation's trading interests and the interests of government.
This alliance faltered, however, when federal grants to local internal improvement projects were opposed as promoting private commercial interests rather than the general welfare. State governments therefore took over the task of chartering and helping to finance local internal improvements, including canals, bridges, and harbors but particularly railroads, and the drive for national unity came to have almost exclusively local origins and brought uncounted local interests to bear on the problem. The states then had to find a legal way to select and promote those private commercial interests they thought would benefit the public.
Under the guiding philosophy of the United States Supreme Court, state governments refashioned the legal system to accommodate an overwhelming interest in private commercial construction and investment. Between i 800 and 1840, governments made major changes in the laws affecting transportation and corporations: states began eliminating the charter requirement in favor of general laws of incorporation, because obtaining a charter required time and money for both the legislatures and those entrepreneurs who frequently represented the interests of small towns and cities hoping to enrich themselves through trade; states, following the lead of the Supreme Court, divested themselves of the right to take control of corporations they had legally created, making businesses completely private and subject to much less government control; and state courts in all parts of the country provided railroads with all the land they needed, under the doctrine of eminent domain.
These and other changes dramatically accelerated the construction of railroads and contributed to unification. But in the process they unleashed a storm of civil conflict between those who benefited from the old legal, social, and economic order and those who gained from the new. The railroads' need for legal help became legendary as townspeople and farmers fought to preserve their land and their own safety from the loud, dangerous, and apparently unstoppable steam engines. Passengers too sought redress for personal injuries and in. The social aspects of this new commercial service fell far short of people's needs and expectations.
The conflict raged on other levels as well. Long before the Civil War it had become evident that towns were incapable of regulating the operations of railroads beyond their own borders. Different towns passed different laws, creating a patchwork of regulation without uniformity or consistency. While the states tried to regulate railroad services before the Civil War, the low quality of services widened the gap between townspeople and the railroad corporations.
Sectional differences also emerged. Southern states did not wish to connect their railroads with those of the North. In fact, proponents of states' rights would not allow any railroad corporation to control track in more than one state, since this would diminish the power of the state. As railroad lines grew longer and longer in the North, and by 1857 connected the Atlantic coast with the Mississippi River, the South was guided by its sectional beliefs. In 1861 no track connected railroads north and south of Washington, D.C., and the Ohio River. True to the concerns of the founding fathers, the Union broke almost precisely along this line.
Train travel uprooted people from all regions and generated the crowds that became a new and permanent feature of the American social order, eclipsing the old bulwarks of community, family, and church. Cultural and social differences in crowds of Northerners, Southerners, and Westerners, rich and poor, black, white, and Indian. all worked to create a society at once more united and diverse, but also one fraught with conflict over social and cultural standards. The experience of social diversity on the train and in once-distant regions fascinated travelers, but deep rifts persisted. Observing the behavior of the rural poor, slave society, Indians, or others did not translate into an acceptance of them as equals.
Finally, cutthroat competition among the railroad companies worked both for and against the principle of national unity. In the name of competition, the stronger roads rapidly bought out the weaker. While this consolidation helped to unify services, the railroads' competitive stance prevented them from cooperating. Although the ideal of a railroad system connecting all parts of the country in orderly fashion had emerged by 1850, the railroads never adhered to this ideal unless forced to do so by law.
The nation's rush toward unification screeched to a halt in the late 1850s, once the railroads had reached the Mississippi River. The South, holding to a states' rights doctrine, refused to allow Northern lines to dominate expansion into the West. This slowed Western development markedly and contributed directly to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861.
During the war the railroad became the central institution that promised order amidst chaos, signaling a sea change in the relationbetween social order and mass transportation. As a supply line the railroad kept armies fed and clothed, and withdrew the wounded from the field of battle. It brought the essentials of civilization, in portable form, to armies in the field. In the havoc of war, the train, despite its dangers and poor services, seemed orderly indeed. The Northern victory assured Northern railroad interests that they would dominate the drive to connect the sections and the two coasts by rail, using the railroad as their new standard of union and social order. Epitomizing the principle of exchange, of people as well as goods, railroads could lead the effort to settle the West and rebuild the South through the medium of trade with the North. But the local conflicts that had accompanied this expansion before the Civil War were later transformed into state and national struggles.
After the war the trains moved west, carrying hundreds of thou- sands of passengers to settle the land. The railroads, cumbersome for the transport of small groups, were ideally suited for the large numbers of immigrants and farmers heading west. Investment money poured in ftom Europe as well as the eastern United States, and railroad building preoccupied Northern business interests more than any other single economic project. More than 300,000 miles of track were laid between 1865 and 1917, much of it in the South and West. While population grew in both regions, social order remained a question because as a new institution the railroads operated largely outside the bounds of the law. The states responded with a flood of laws regulating the quality and safety of rail service. But for the railroads themselves, the guiding principle was commercial exchange; their role as a social institution with a fixed legal identity was secondary.
With the increasing dominance of interstate railroads, state commissions strove to apply uniform standards to the operation of the roads because they could see no other way of making the laws stick. But railroads crossing state lines constitutionally fell under the jurisdiction of the federal government. In 1887 Congress passed its earliest railway regulation with the founding of the Interstate Commerce Commission, a small solution to a very large problem.
By this time even the railroad owners had begun to realize that order and uniform standards of service might increase their efficiency and lower their operating costs. The population had grown too large and too commercially interdependent to rely on local or regional standards of service. \\idle they might exacerbate local conflicts over railroad operations, standard time, standard gauge, and standard design of cars did improve the efficiency of national service. They made cars interchangeable from line to line, and scheduling of service became a national rather than a local affair.
But civil conflict persisted on a national stage after 1865. Lawsuits involving property damages, personal injury, and inadequate service increased rather than declined after needed laws were on the hooks. Railroad barons enriched themselves with excessive grants of land and money from the federal government, which wanted to see the West drawn into the Union as quickly as possible. Efforts by the railroads to eliminate competition concentrated the ownership of the roads under a few men from the major urban centers of the North. Crowds of travelers swamped the cities, drawn to the centers of the greatest wealth. The cities quickly grew to unprecedented and unmanageable proportions just as the population and wealth of smaller towns began to stagnate. Cities welcomed the crowds, which translated into profits for stores, restaurants, theaters, and hotels, but they did little to control crowd behavior or protect the weak from the strong in crowds of strangers.
Despite these unsettling aspects of an emerging mass society, a corresponding growth in national institutions with national memberships came to depend on the railroads to carry large groups of people from long distances. The wealthy followed established paths of travel from city to city, and even liked to vacation together in fashionable resort areas. The middle class traveled to the early political conventions held before the Civil War; to schools that drew students from all parts of the country; to professional gatherings in law, medicine, teaching, and library work; to national meetings of retailers, women's dubs, and suffrage associations. The poor, who could not afford long-distance travel, affiliated with groups that met closer to home. In each case the railroad continued to provide a unifying and even orderly influence which aided the country's rapid growth r, but only by providing services that reflected the social and economic divisions among their passen.
After the Civil War, railroads financed by Northern money expanded quickly into the predominantly rural South and West, severely limiting local control of railroad service in those regions. Despite the financial panic. of 1873, the South and \Vest were drawn into the national rail net by 1890. But both regions had serious grievances. Their expectations of large-scale commercial development that would follow on the heels of railroad service were largely unmet. In the absence of local control of the railroads, profits traveled eastward and northward to the controlling interests rather than enriching the patrons.
By the dose of the nineteenth century the drive to expand the railroad network to every conceivable location of business opportunity had begun to slow. New railroads continued to be built, particularly in the West and South, but the number of lines in the country far exceeded need. The era after 1890 was more notable for further centralization. with Harriman, Could, Morgan, and a few others controlling most of the country's track mileage. Population became more and more concentrated in the urban areas of the Northeast, as the South and West failed to build the industrial base that would attract people looking for jobs. Wealth too gravitated to the urban Northeast, and, as international trade grew, American trade became more centralized in the major port cities, leaving smaller ports such as Portland, Portsmouth, Providence, and New Haven without the booming business they had hoped for.
With the centralization of wealth in Northern cities and the reducof rural areas to second-class economic status came a new philosophy of business which emphasized efficiency in the pursuit of profit. Speed became the watchword in both the production and delivery of services, and railroads sought to move as many people and as much freight as quickly as possible. Speeding trains vied to reduce travel time between the country's major economic centers, delivering passengers, goods, stock quotations, and business mail. To save time the roads reduced the number of stops at small stations that provided the least economic return.
Rural train service, lacking any specific need to race the clock, continued at the pottering pace it had known for decades. With fewer passengers and fewer profits, rural lines were the first to be discontinued when railroads began facing competition from automobiles. The economies of small towns and rural railroads depended on each other; they collapsed together as the wealth and the means of attaining wealth became ever more centralized.
Thus the centralization of wealth and services advanced the national economy but left behind many individuals, towns, and even states. Even among those individuals who migrated to the cities were some who could not find a secure living and became permanent drifters in urban America. By the 1920s, when investments and social habits began to favor the automobile, a new railroad culture emerged, one which stressed the terrible loneliness of the declining countryside, the migration from hometowns, or the hobo's niche in an urban train yard. In the drive for national unity and prosperity; some were left behind and unable to go home. In a commercial society, home was no longer a fixed abode, rooted in social and legal protections, but merely a resting place along the road.
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