What Hath God Wrought (83 page)

An American coach-maker turned master manufacturer, Peter Cooper, designed a locomotive with a shorter wheelbase and smaller wheels than British models so it could negotiate inclines and sharp curves. Because of its small size, he nicknamed it “Tom Thumb.” As a publicity event in 1830, the Tom Thumb raced a horse-drawn wagon. The horse won when the locomotive slipped a drive belt, but Cooper’s steam engine impressed the B&O’s representatives enough that they adopted it. Peter Cooper’s “contrivance,” one of them later recalled, proved instrumental “in making available, in America, that vast system which united remote peoples and promotes that peace on earth and good will to men which angels have proclaimed.”
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Most early American railroads, like Baltimore’s, reflected the ambition of cities to engross the trade of a hinterland before some municipal competitor did so. They expressed the same geographical rivalries that canal-building had. Charleston, worried about the competition of Savannah, completed in 1833 a railroad to Hamburg, South Carolina, that was actually the world’s longest at that time, 136 miles. Boston tried to get a piece of the trade generated by the Erie Canal with a railroad through Worcester to Albany completed in 1842. Both the Charleston and Boston railways relied predominantly upon public funding.
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Andrew Jackson arrived in Washington in 1829 in a carriage and left eight years later on a train. Throughout the United States, people welcomed the steam locomotive as a heaven-sent deliverance from the tyranny of distance. The heady prosperity of the early 1830s encouraged construction, though the ensuing depression slowed it down. By the end of the 1830s, there were 450 locomotives in the country, only 117 of them imported from Britain, and 3,200 miles of track—as much as the total canal mileage and, amazingly, more than twice the track in all Europe. Railroad building proceeded more quickly in the United States not only because of the greater felt need but also because of the availability of land. Where European railways had to spend a lot of time and money acquiring their rights-of-way, American ones got theirs cheaply or in free land grants. Even fuel was inexpensive: American locomotives burned wood rather than coal, as European ones did, because wood was so cheap.
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The generosity of public authorities further helped the exceptionally rapid growth of U.S. railways. A comparative study of the economic policies of the United States and Prussia in the nineteenth century concluded that while the Prussian government contributed only 7 percent of the capital needed for that country’s early railroads, American state governments contributed 45 percent of early railroad capital.
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When prosperity began to return around 1842, railroad construction resumed at full throttle. The depression did leave one lasting mark on the railroad industry, the demise of the mixed public-private corporation as an investment vehicle. Yet public support continued in a variety of other forms, including land grants, cash subsidies, loan guarantees, and the purchase of corporate bonds. Cities as well as states eagerly threw their money at the new technology. Even the federal government helped out some, providing free surveys for routes and tariff refunds on iron imported for rails. Public financial support proved particularly important for railroads in the South, where it was hard to tempt private capital away from investment in plantations and slaves. The famous subsidies that southern states granted to railroads during Reconstruction actually had plenty of precedent in the antebellum years. Without owning stock, the public entities providing support to internal improvements could no longer share in any profits, but the hoped-for economic benefits to their citizens—plus an occasional payoff to a relevant officeholder—constituted sufficient motivation. Mixed corporations were abandoned on the grounds that they lent themselves to corruption, but in fact the other forms of subsidy proved no less liable to dishonest exploitation. By fair means or foul, railway mileage had more than doubled to 7,500 by the end of the 1840s.
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Railroads dramatically shortened travel times. When Henry Clay first went to Washington from Lexington, Kentucky, in 1806, his trip took three weeks; by 1846, he could do it on a train in four days. Despite their speed, however, trains by no means immediately rendered canals obsolete. For shippers not in a hurry, canal transportation, with ton-mile charges generally less than those of a railroad, might well remain advantageous. The Erie Canal, granddaddy of them all, continued to expand its traffic until after the Civil War. Weighing the comparative importance of canals and railroads is not easy, and canals may well have been the more critical improvement in transportation. But, of course, their impact was cumulative; the effects of the railroads came on top of those of canals. Perhaps more important than the speed of the railroads was the fact that they offered year-round transportation, since, unlike canals, they did not freeze up in winter.

Railroads had an enormous impact on Americans’ lives. They allowed the cities to keep growing by bringing them ever greater quantities of food. The efficiency with which railroads could transport freight meant that inventories and storage costs could be reduced in many parts of the economy. By facilitating long-distance travel, the railroads also made the labor market more responsive. Cultural consequences of the railroads included the proliferation of reading matter and the ability to take regular vacations in distant places, a custom that began with the wealthy and gradually extended to include the middle class. In response, resorts grew up and a tourist trade developed. Railroads increased reliance on the newly mass-produced watches and clocks. Even more than factories and farms, the operation of railroads depended on close attention to accurate timepieces.

Railroads did not come as an unalloyed blessing; they were dirty, noisy, and dangerous. Until after the Civil War, different railroads sometimes had incompatible gauges (track widths), hampering long-distance shippers. Like steamboats, the early trains had abysmal safety records, in large part because of the high-pressure boilers both used; hasty, cheap construction and excessive speeds didn’t help either. On November 8, 1833, a passenger train carrying John Quincy Adams ran off the track near Amboy, New Jersey. The train had been speeding at “one mile in one minute thirty-six seconds,” he noted. The car ahead of his overturned, leaving “men, women, and a child scattered along the road, bleeding, mangled, groaning.” All but one of those in the car were injured, three (including the child) fatally. Adams successfully demanded a coroner’s inquiry.
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Because of the multiple and cumulative effects of the railroads supplementing canals, the years from 1843 to the Civil War have sometimes been called America’s economic “take-off.” Whether this is an apt term depends on what one means by it. The U.S. economy before railroads was neither static, anti-entrepreneurial, nor isolated from the rest of the world. What the railroads changed was not American hopes but the material conditions for fulfilling them. Railroads did not produce a “market revolution” any more than canals did; instead they introduced a new phase in a long-range process of economic development. The American economy expanded more or less constantly from 1820 (that is, from before the introduction of the railroads) to the Civil War except for the depression of 1837–42, not only in the aggregate but also per capita; returns to capital over that period constituted a remarkably long-term bull market.
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More relevant to railroad history than the concept of a “market revolution” is “industrial revolution.” If the railroads did not initiate the industrial revolution, they certainly speeded it up. They stimulated the mining, processing, and importing of iron and steel (and, after the eventual switch in fuel, coal). They created vast primary industries in the manufacture of rails, locomotives, and rolling stock. They encouraged the workforce to continue to leave agriculture and move into other occupations. They multiplied new jobs as engineers, firemen, brakemen, switchmen, conductors, and roundhouse mechanics. (The gendering of so many of these occupational titles was, of course, no accident.) Since their public subsidies so often took the form of land grants, railroads became large-scale land speculators, promoting settlement along their routes and urban development at major railheads.

The sheer size of the railway companies altered the American economy. The major railroads came to dwarf the antebellum manufacturing concerns, even the Lowell mills. Railroads became the largest corporations since the demise of the BUS, and the first nationwide secular enterprises under entirely private control. When these big players went into the capital markets of New York and London, they necessitated the creation of new kinds of financial services to meet their needs. Perhaps most importantly, being too large and technical to operate through the conventional arrangement of an owner and a foreman, the railroads developed a whole new profession: business management. Yet, throughout the nineteenth century, the skilled machinist remained a key figure in industry alongside the newer white-collar salaried manager.
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The career of Peter Cooper, builder of the Tom Thumb, is instructive. This former artisan combined iron manufacturing, railroads, and telegraphy in a highly successful business career before turning, as Robert Owen had done, to philanthropy and politics.

The railroads had particularly portentous consequences for settlers in the newer states of the Old Northwest: Illinois (1818), Michigan (1837), and Wisconsin (1848). The space-binding technology of the trains magnified the opportunities for farmers in those places to ship their crops to distant destinations, encouraging market production rather than local consumption. Farmers who migrated into these areas typically concentrated more on commercial staples like wheat than they had done in their previous homes. More small farmers entered the market, where the large ones had been all along. The drop in farm prices after the Panic of 1839 hurt these new commercial farmers and prompted a temporary reversion to diversified production, some of which could be consumed locally.
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But once transportation improved, both farm prices and land values climbed. Many a midwestern farmer realized a handsome profit reselling land he had obtained cheaply from the government. The coming of the railroad affected farm families in their role as consumers too, widening the choice of clothing and household goods available from the country store. Railroads also facilitated the emergence of towns and cities in the West. The extraordinarily rapid growth of Chicago, from a population of less than one hundred in 1830 to thirty thousand in 1850 and far greater heights thereafter, would have been inconceivable if the city had had to depend entirely on water transportation without the railroad.
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In 1845, a poet addressing the Mercantile Library Association of Boston celebrated the effects of the railroad in knitting the country together with a poem that also likened the trains to giant textile looms:

Railroads did indeed have political as well as economic consequences, but they turned out to be sectional rather than simply strengthening the Union. Their network reinforced east–west ties at the expense of north–south ones. Their resources, added to those of the Erie and related canals, further encouraged the Old Northwest to ship its produce eastward rather than southward along the river system to the Gulf, affecting the balance of political power both regionally and nationally. The geographical competition that the railroads stimulated for westward routes, fostered by politicians like Illinois’s Stephen Douglas, was destined to exacerbate sectional tensions in the years leading up to the Civil War.

A cold and blustery March wind chilled the ceremonies for the presidential inauguration of 1841. But the old soldier at the center of attention spoke for an hour and a half. In an era when people took oratory seriously, William Henry Harrison delivered the longest inaugural address of any president ever, full of learned classical allusions. In implied but clear reproach to the Democrats, he promised to exercise executive restraint, serve but one term, and use the veto sparingly—the last not too risky a commitment since his party controlled both houses of Congress. He condemned hard money, the spoils system, and “the spirit of party.” He warned of the dangers of demagogues claiming to speak “in the name of democracy,” who perverted the commonwealth and stripped the people of their liberties. He cited Caesar and Cromwell as his examples, but all understood these as coded references to Andrew Jackson. The Whig victory had averted, just in time, the corruption of American republican institutions—“a calamity so awful, not only to our country, but to the world.”
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In claiming for the Whigs the toga of Roman virtue, Harrison’s inaugural address aimed at personal as well as national vindication. His background and lifestyle having been subjected to considerable distortion during the campaign by friend and foe alike, Harrison felt it time to start looking presidential. He had written his inaugural speech himself, though he allowed Daniel Webster to edit it; the senator jested that in abridging it he had “killed seventeen Roman proconsuls.”
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The erudition of Harrison’s address demonstrated that the incoming president was no humble denizen of a log cabin but a distinguished Virginia gentleman like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. And by delivering such a long speech in the cold with no overcoat, the author would demonstrate his hardy vigor—despite being, at sixty-eight, the oldest president inaugurated up to that time.
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Harrison’s opponents had made his age an issue, ridiculing him as “granny.” His proud defiance of their jibes may have proved literally fatal.

William Henry Harrison brought to the White House creditable qualifications. Born into a prominent family, the son of Benjamin Harrison V, signer of the Declaration of Independence and governor of Virginia, William attended Hampden-Sydney College, entered the army, and distinguished himself in several important battles against Indians and British, including Fallen Timbers (1794), Tippecanoe (1811), and the Thames (1813).
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Chosen by the legislature of the Northwest Territory their non-voting representative in Congress, he made himself the most influential such territorial delegate in history, crafting the major federal land legislation of 1800. Governor for a dozen years of Indiana Territory (larger than the later state), he nursed further political ambitions. Moving to Ohio, he served that state as legislator, U.S. representative, and senator, demonstrating sympathy for banking, tariff protection, and the extension of slavery. Secretary of State Clay sent him on a mission to Colombia as part of the effort to increase trade with South America. In 1828, he was mentioned as a possible running mate for John Quincy Adams, though in earlier years Harrison, with the hauteur of the Virginia aristocracy, had privately looked down on the “clownish” dress and manner of the merely bourgeois Adams.
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Having shown himself the strongest Whig candidate in the presidential election of 1836, Harrison challenged Clay for the party’s nomination four years later.

This time around, the Whigs resolved to hold their first national convention. They called it early to give their nominee plenty of exposure, meeting at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in December 1839. Harrison arrived already bearing the nomination of the Antimasonic Party, whose supporters preferred him to Henry Clay because of the latter’s nominal Masonic membership. At the Whig convention, Harrison gained support from a number of nervous northern politicians who suspected that a military hero could outpoll Clay, by now carrying a lot of contentious baggage from previous years. Clay showed up with most of the southern delegates and a significant minority of northern ones behind him. The convention adopted a “unit rule” that state delegations would vote as blocs; this smothered the Clay votes in states where he did not command a majority. Disgusted at his convention delegates for allowing this rule, Clay later grumbled that they were “not worth the powder and shot it would take” to blow them up.
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General Winfield Scott, whose role in preventing war along the Canadian border had won favorable attention, attracted support as a possible compromise candidate. The wily Thaddeus Stevens, Pennsylvania Antimason, contrived to turn a key group of Virginia delegates away from Scott and toward Harrison by leaking a document that aroused their fears for the security of slavery. Stevens somehow obtained a letter that Scott had written courting antislavery New Yorkers and deliberately dropped it where he knew the Virginians would find it. (In the light of Stevens’s later career as an architect of Radical Reconstruction, his role at the Harrisburg convention is ironic in the extreme.) With Daniel Webster backing Harrison and Scott no longer viable, the Whig convention nominated Old Tippecanoe on the third ballot, 148 to 90 for Clay and 16 for Scott.
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The victorious Harrisonians now offered the vice-presidential nomination to Clay himself or a candidate of his choice. But the despondent Kentuckian did not reply to their inquiry. It proved a costly fit of pique. Other Clay followers whom they approached, such as Senator John Clayton of Delaware, would not accept without his permission.
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In the end the Harrisonians turned to John Tyler of Virginia, who did accept. Tyler had been supporting Clay’s candidacy at the convention, but he felt no commitment to Clay’s nationalist program. An eccentric Virginia state-righter, Tyler had joined the Whig Party because he found Andrew Jackson high-handed. Surprisingly, Clay might even have been considering Tyler as his own possible running mate.
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If so, presumably Clay’s motive was to solidify support among southern sympathizers with nullification who had backed Hugh White in 1836 and who now appeared slow to identify with the Whig Party. The vice-presidential nomination is customarily dictated by concern to “balance the ticket.” But the Whigs’ choice of Tyler turned out to be one of the worst mistakes ever made by any political party.

Before the Whig convention adjourned, Clay recovered the good grace to give the party nominees his endorsement. The Harrison campaign moved quickly into high gear, borrowing techniques from the current experts on mass persuasion, the revival preachers. Harrison himself, deferring to nineteenth-century sensibilities, stopped actively campaigning once he received the Whig nomination and relied on supporters to electioneer for him. His missionaries would come to a town on his behalf and hold a torchlight parade to whip up popular interest the evening before their main event. During the night, they would pitch a tent on the outskirts of town. The next morning a “barker” standing outside would begin encouraging people to enter and hear the speeches, punctuated by music and songs like “Van, Van, Van Is a Used-up Man,” or most famously, “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” The historian Ronald Formisano has aptly called these activities “a form of political revivalism.”
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In the tent, the speaker would lambaste the administration, particularly its passivity in the face of economic disaster and public hardship. When the crowd had been wound up emotionally, they would be asked to make a commitment, in this case not to Christ but to the Whig ticket. It all must have had a familiar ring, because we know that the Whig Party appealed to many members of evangelical religious bodies. (In later years, Phineas T. Barnum would adapt the same techniques to his traveling circus.) Harrison’s campaigners also exploited new technology, moving their speakers from place to place via railroads and attracting attention with a giant transparency displaying Whig emblems.
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No incumbent president campaigned overtly for himself before Theodore Roosevelt in the election of 1904.
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Van Buren’s re-election campaign was headed by Amos Kendall, who resigned as postmaster general to devote full time to the effort, and Francis Blair of the
Washington Globe
, who formulated the Democratic case as follows: “The issue, then, is Martin Van Buren, a sound currency, and independence of the honest producing classes, against a spurious and fictitious bank currency, dependency, venality, and servility to the non-producers and aristocrats, the representatives of their available G. Harrison.”
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Kendall and Blair often invoked ex-president Jackson and the necessity to carry on his legacy—an approach that would have been more effective if Clay had been the Whig candidate. Seeking to outdo the earlier Whig convention, the Democratic convention issued the first official party platform in history. Of its nine clauses, six renounced any federal power to implement the American System or interfere with slavery; one endorsed the separation of bank and state; one promised “the most rigid economy” in government; and the last one opposed any curtailing of the rights of immigrants to citizenship. The theme running throughout this negativist document was fear of change. The statement said nothing about the depression.
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The Democratic convention proved unable to agree to renominate Richard Mentor Johnson, who seemed out of his depth in the vice presidency. But since no one else in the party then had the nerve to challenge the president’s choice, that crusty Kentuckian wound up on Democratic ballots again simply by default.

The Van Buren campaign of 1840 is remembered mostly for a blunder. A Democratic newspaper correspondent in Baltimore, intending to mock Harrison’s advanced age and suggest he was a better candidate for retirement than for the presidency, wrote, “Give him a barrel of hard cider, and settle a pension of two thousand a year on him, and my word for it, he will sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin by the side of a ‘sea coal’ fire, and study moral philosophy.”
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Although the suggestion of moral philosophy was probably the most plausible part of this fantasy, since Harrison read seriously, it did not become famous. Instead, the Whigs seized gleefully upon the log cabin and hard cider images, as providing their candidate with precisely that common touch he needed. From then on, cider barrels and miniature log cabins adorned every Whig banner and parade. Temperance advocates of course regretted the “hard cider” symbol but, interestingly, were not alienated from Harrison’s candidacy by it.
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The populistic, emotionally evocative campaign methods of 1840 by no means precluded a discussion of the issues. The medium was
not
the whole message the parties wanted to convey. In fact, 1840 was the first election in which both parties clearly and forcefully articulated their positions on the issues of the day—the most urgent of which was the depression. The Whigs campaigned for soft money and government intervention in the economy, adding executive restraint to remind people of Jackson’s presumptuousness. The Democrats defended hard money and laissez-faire. Evidence of the level of intellectual seriousness in the campaign is provided by such Whig pamphlets as Calvin Colton’s
The Crisis of the Country
, Henry C. Carey’s
Answers to the Questions
, and the historian Richard Hildreth’s
The Contrast: William Henry Harrison versus Martin Van Buren
. (Hildreth declared that the American farmer was no longer the self-sufficient yeoman “described by poets” but “must have a
market
for his produce.”)
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On the Democratic side, Orestes Brownson asserted the existence of American class conflict in his provocative essay
The Laboring Classes
. The two parties’ stated policies were underscored by the programs they actually implemented, which voters could observe in action at the state level. There, Whigs supported chartering banks and subsidizing internal improvements; Democrats generally opposed these.
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One issue only the parties tacitly agreed to avoid: slavery. Both dissociated themselves from abolitionism.

As month after month of 1840 ticked by, the economy descended deeper and deeper into the tank, taking with it the hopes of the man Whigs now called “Martin Van Ruin.” The Magician had run out of magic. The Whigs won the state and local elections that gradually led up to the big contest in the fall. As a Whig presidential victory came to seem inevitable, the significance of the early date of the Whig convention became apparent. Some Whig politicians, particularly in the North, had supported Harrison for prudential reasons but would actually have preferred Clay as the true embodiment of the party’s principles. Now it seemed clear that Clay too could have won election—and that he would have gained the nomination had the convention been held later when the full impact of the Panic of 1839 had been felt. Clay himself commented bitterly that he had been “always run by my friends when sure to be defeated, and now betrayed for a nomination when I, or any one, would be sure of an election.”
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When the results came in, the Whigs indeed swept all before them: Harrison won 234 electoral votes to 60 for Van Buren; the Whigs would have majorities of thirty-one in the House and seven in the Senate. It was the only time in the party’s history that the Whigs won control of both the executive and legislative branches of government. Yet 1840 was no fluke; it had long-lasting significance. In fact, the election of 1840 has been rightly judged more important than that of 1828 in defining the Whig–Democratic political party system and the parties’ positions on issues.
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In earlier times, election campaigns had often focused on praising prominent local leaders as candidates for office. Jackson’s campaigns, which emphasized his personal popularity, did not altogether depart from this tradition. From now on, however, elections—state as well as national—focused unmistakably, on both sides, on parties and issues.