The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar

  The engine had been built at the West Point Foundry in New York and was delivered by steamer to Charleston, where it was assembled and tested. In December 1830 the Best Friend pulled its first train, carrying some two hundred shareholders and local notables and the following year was in regular use, hauling passengers at speeds of up to thirty-five miles per hour. The locomotive met an unfortunate end, however, when, as the possibly apocryphal story goes, a fireman,24 annoyed at the sound made by the escape of steam from the safety valve, sat on the offending piece of machinery, which, after a few minutes of quiet, resulted in the boiler exploding, killing him and scalding the engineer.

  In Britain there had been worries right from the start that steam locomotives would wreak havoc, turning sheep black, stopping cows milking, and even causing asphyxiation, as their speed would prevent travelers from breathing. In America such fears were compounded by the country’s relative unfamiliarity with the new technology. The United States was much less industrialized than Britain and had far fewer factories that employed steam technology: “The steam, the smoke, the sparks emitted from the belly of the monster were quite sufficient to invoke anxiety, if not down-right terror, in timid souls who drew nigh the early demonstration trains.”25 Explosions, though, had always been the main concern, and to allay these fears, when traffic on the Charleston & Hamburg resumed, the trains ran with a flat “barrier” car loaded with cotton to protect the now understandably nervous passengers from similar mishaps.

  The motive for building the Charleston & Hamburg, as with the other pioneering lines, had been narrowly and nakedly commercial. Charleston’s foreign exports had gone into decline, and its merchants looked inland to restore their fortune. They hoped to secure the trade of the rich cotton-growing area both in their own state of South Carolina and in Georgia by building the line northwest from Charleston to the bank of the Savannah River at Hamburg,26 just across the water from Augusta, Georgia. By adopting the new technology right away, these southern pioneers proved more farsighted than their peers at the Baltimore & Ohio, who remained unconvinced of the need for the newfangled devices called steam locomotives. This attitude was not unusual at the time. In several European countries, notably Austria, long lines were still being built in the early 1830s with the idea of using horses, rather than locomotives, to haul the trains. Although the Stourbridge Lion had demonstrated the feasibility of locomotive technology, provided the track was sufficiently robust, the promoters of the Baltimore & Ohio insisted on a trial between horses and locomotives to determine the best means of traction, although in truth they probably knew that horses would never be suitable, given the hilly terrain the railroad was intended to cross.

  The railroad’s construction standards, with their sharp curves and light rails, precluded the use of locomotives imported from Britain. The promoters therefore called upon a notable inventor, Peter Cooper, to build a suitable locomotive. He produced a tiny engine, later nicknamed Tom Thumb, which had just four small wheels and was described by one onlooker as having a boiler “not as large as the kitchen boiler attached to many a modern mansion.”27

  Nevertheless, on a test run along the first thirteen miles of track, the unprepossessing engine reached an exhilarating eighteen miles per hour, impressing the assorted investors and VIPs who had come along for the ride. On the way back, Cooper foolishly agreed to race his locomotive against a horse to prove that it was superior. The powerful gray initially took the lead, thanks to its faster acceleration, but once the little engine had gained purchase on the track and Cooper opened its safety valve to provide extra power, Tom Thumb glided past the galloping steed. Cooper’s machine was a quarter of a mile ahead when disaster struck. Just as the horse rider was ready to give up, the belt that drove the pulley on the locomotive snapped, and the engine eased to a halt. Cooper managed to effect a repair, burning his hands badly in the process, but he finished the course well behind his rival. The equine victory, though, proved Pyrrhic, as the engine had done enough to convince the investors that steam haulage, rather than horsepower, was the only way to make the line viable. Although some horse traction was used early on, locomotives were dominant, and the line was soon operated exclusively with engines.

  History is harsh on losers, which is perhaps why, in most accounts of the early railroads, the Charleston & Hamburg gets such scant attention. It was, in fact, initially a far more significant achievement than the Baltimore & Ohio, but as it was in the South and was soon subsumed into another railroad, the South Carolina Railroad Company, its role as a pioneer has been largely forgotten. Nor did it have a charismatic wordsmith like Charles Carroll to inscribe its place in history. Thus, the Baltimore & Ohio, which survived as an independent company until long after the Second World War, was free to promote the myth that it was America’s first proper railroad. In fact, Holbrook, like other impartial historians, is unequivocal about which came first: “The Charleston & Hamburg, six miles long, may be said to have been the first American railroad as the term is generally understood.”28 It was soon 136 miles long, the longest in the world for a few short years, as it was completed remarkably quickly and fully operational by 1833. The rapidity of construction was helped by the ability of the railroad to call on slave labor, which, as we will see in the next chapter, was an important factor in southern railroad construction (and may also account for the Charleston & Hamburg being written out of history). Ultimately, the Baltimore & Ohio became more important because the railroads in the North developed in a far more sophisticated way than their southern counterparts. In particular, they were prepared to go over state boundaries to provide long-distance services, unlike in the South, where the railroads largely stayed within individual state borders.

  These two railroads were part of a wider spurt of railroad activity, a mini version of the “railroad manias” that characterized future developments not just in the United States but across the world. In addition to the two longer coal railroads in Pennsylvania, New York State’s first railroad, the Mohawk & Hudson, which provided a shortcut to a circuitous section of the Erie Canal, had been chartered in 1826. However, financial and political difficulties meant that work did not start until the summer of 1830, and a 16-mile route between Albany and Schenectady opened a year later. Then there was the New York & Harlem, chartered in 1831, which ran initially from the Bowery to Fourteenth Street and within a couple of years along Fourth Avenue to Harlem, making it one of the world’s first street railroads. Unlike the steam-hauled Mohawk & Hudson, the New York & Harlem initially used animal power, as did the Chesterfield Railroad in Virginia, a 13-mile mining line that connected the Midlothian coal mines with wharves on the James River. By the early 1830s, numerous other projects, with evocative names such as the Tuscumbia, Courtland & Decatur, the Rensselaer & Saratoga, and the Little Schuylkill Navigation, Railroad, and Coal Company, received charters and were being built. More significantly in 1832, a seminal year in US railroad history, services began on the Camden & Amboy between Trenton and New Brunswick in New Jersey, a response to the obvious need to improve transportation links between the two biggest cities of the day, New York and Philadelphia. By 1835, remarkably, there were nearly 1,00029 miles of completed railroad on thirty-nine lines in the United States. The railroad age had arrived, and nothing could stop it from transforming America.

  2

  A PASSIONATE AFFAIR

  These early lines represented an impressive start and marked the beginnings of the love affair between ordinary Americans and the railroads, but it would take a few years before the right conditions were in place to spark a prolonged railroad boom and begin the establishment of a nationwide network.

  Although rapid improvements to the technology were being made, it was still primitive and crude, and there were several other respects in which America was still not geared up for railroads. Obtaining the requisite financing, a problem for railroads the world over, was a major obstacle for the nascent industry. Labor, too, was not always available, which, as
mentioned in the previous chapter, meant that in the South there was widespread recourse to slaves. The legal status of the railroads was over-dependent on the whim of local state legislators, since, initially, there was no clear understanding of how to treat these new and potentially monopolistic enterprises. During the first two decades of the railroad age, much effort was expended in overcoming these hurdles.

  The railroads were a novel concept that would cross state boundaries and require large swaths of land, and there was no real precedent for coping with such an intrusive invention. They needed a sympathetic environment in which to flourish and to overcome any doubt and hostility that they were bound to engender. In Britain, railroad promoters were required to obtain an act passed in Parliament that enabled them to force landowners to cede their land to the company and made provision for all the other various requirements of the railroad. This was by no means a perfect arrangement, as it made the fate of the railroad dependent on the whims of parliamentarians who not infrequently had their own agendas that were likely to prejudice them either for or against the project. Powerful landowners were able to pressure railroads into paying significantly more for the land than it was worth. However, by and large the British system was sufficiently adaptable to encourage promoters to come forward with schemes and to ensure lines were built.

  In the United States the procedure was different, and, perhaps inevitably in a nation that had only come into being in 1776, no clear system had been devised by the time the first railroads were being debated in the 1820s. Consequently, aspiring railroad entrepreneurs faced a battle to persuade legislatures to allow them to build their lines. The power to grant the necessary charters belonged to the states rather than the federal government, and the inadequate legal system had to grow quickly with the railroads in order to meet their needs. Anyone seeking to start a business and form a corporation had to obtain a charter, which placed certain obligations on the new company. In the case of the railroads, these related to such matters as fares, the nature of the services, the location of the track, and even the speed of the trains. The states, too, had rights over any company to which they granted a charter, including the assumption that they could ultimately revoke the charter and run the company directly. It was only later, as the railroad companies grew and became more powerful, that this right was challenged and eventually set aside.

  While obtaining a charter was a difficult and expensive process, the crucial legal requirement for the railroads was to obtain “eminent domain,” which was the right to take over whatever property was needed in return for fair compensation. This put the US railroads in a much stronger position than their British counterparts, since it gave them a general power to take over any land rather than only particular plots specified in the acts obtained by British promoters. The right of eminent domain in US law had a long history, born of the necessities of a new and expanding nation. It started with mill owners who flooded land upstream by building dams but were granted the right to do so, despite the damage caused to landowners, because they created wider benefits for the general public. Once established, this principle was extended to turnpike promoters and canal owners on the same basis—that the public advantage outweighed the drawbacks for the few unlucky proprietors whose land happened to be in the wrong place.

  The railroads faced an uphill struggle to persuade the courts to give them this power because, initially, they were by no means universally welcomed. They faced opposition from canal owners and turnpike operators, who rightly saw them as major competition, and there were other vested interests lined up against them as well. Tavern owners and stagecoach drivers were two such groups, but many farmers resented the incursion of tracks across their land. Moreover, there was a debate about whether the railroads were really for public use and were of sufficient benefit to justify the granting of such a widespread power as “eminent domain.” The early railroads were crude affairs, covering only short distances at slow speeds, and with no guarantee of trains reaching their destination. The canals and turnpikes had more obviously widespread benefits and, significantly, were open to all comers to travel on their own conveyances, whereas the railroads not only provided the cars and locomotives but also insisted on rigid schedules. These early-nineteenth-century objections to the granting of legal powers to the railroads offer an interesting parallel to the reluctance of twenty-first-century Americans to leave their much-loved automobiles at home and take the bus or train. American suspicion of the railroads’ intentions, therefore, started early in their history, and such feelings are at the root of much of the antagonism toward them documented in later chapters of this book.

  Nonetheless, the railroads were granted eminent domain in various court cases, notably in New York, which established the principle thereafter. The courts recognized the early railroads as a major technological breakthrough, promising immense economic benefits in opening new territories and allowing the rapid transportation of goods, people, mail, and, of course, troops in time of war. One crucial New York case, in 1837, captures the mood of the era and reveals the arguments put forward for the development of railroads generally:

  Railroads are not only of great public use in the ordinary business transactions of the citizen, but they may be more advantageously used than turnpike roads for national purposes; . . . they tend to annihilate distance, bringing in effect places that are distant near to each other: tending in their magic influence to the extension of personal acquaintance, the enlargement of business relations, and cementing more firmly the bond of fellowship and union between the inhabitants of the States. Next to the moral lever power of the press should be ranked the beneficial influence of railroads in their effects upon the vast and increasing business relations of the nation, and promoting, sustaining and perpetuating the happiness, prosperity and liberty of the people.1

  This sort of rationale was followed in other US state supreme courts that considered the grants of eminent domain to the early railroads, which were thus spared the British experience of negotiating for rights-of-way with each individual owner. In the United States, it was simply a matter of selecting a route, assessing the damage caused to private owners, and paying them. This process, which amounted to the legal confiscation of land, was a much cheaper method of acquiring for railroad development than in Europe, where land had to be purchased at considerable expense from the owner, representing a significant proportion of the cost of building a railroad line. This was one of the reasons US railroads were less expensive to build than those on the other side of the Atlantic and was a key factor in their remarkably rapid growth.

  The legal arrangements were part of a complex relationship between the state and the nascent railroads that was to prove troublesome for both sides, particularly when it came to money. Ostensibly, the railroads were supposed to be private businesses, as befitted the American ethos. But, in fact, the idea that they were an entirely private enterprise is one of the great myths of railroad history. The railroads couldn’t be funded by purely private means. The economics and practicalities of railroad development made that impossible, and the reality was very different. The desire to make the railroads a privately owned enterprise, given the already-established American suspicion of government involvement, was always a vain hope. The railroads were such a large and complex enterprise and so capital-hungry that, almost invariably, they were forced to seek various types of support and, in many cases, funding from either local or the federal government.

  Raising capital was a perpetual struggle for the railroad promoters. Unlike in Europe, where railroads usually connected existing settlements, even ones that were quite far apart, in America the railroads were often being built from, as an English wit put it, “nowhere-in-particular to nowhere-at-all.” Unsurprisingly, there was little capital available from parsimonious bankers in New York or Boston to fund such enterprises: “A banker might be more than willing to foot the bill for a railroad between Boston and Worcester or between New York and Philadelphia, but a rai
lroad between two log cabin villages in Indiana was something altogether different.”2 Furthermore, the banking system in Europe was more developed and was expanding swiftly to cater to the needs of the railroads, which were fast becoming the biggest industry. In America, mostly still agrarian and mercantile, there was a shortage of capital for the building of new lines.

  Therefore, while the promoters may, mostly, have been private individuals, the role of the state—and, particularly, of the individual states—was absolutely crucial for the majority of early railroads. Notionally, the government was not supposed to become involved in the business of providing what were known as “internal improvements,” infrastructure projects such as new turnpikes, canals, and railroads. In practice, neither the federal government nor the states could avoid becoming embroiled, and most of the early railroad schemes had some sort of government support. In many cases, states recognized that the local railroads were so important to their economy and their development that the railroad companies had to be supported. This meant that, far from being an example of raw capitalism in which investors were risking all their money, the railroads were a hybrid, a mix of private and public interests. It was, in modern parlance, a public-private partnership, where both the capital outlay and the risks were shared.