The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar

  The decade of the 1850s was a period of railroad mania. Whereas New England had benefited from most of the growth in the 1840s, the focus now shifted to the plains of what is now known as the Midwest but was then called the Northwest. The huge size of the territory meant that in the 1850s, Illinois and Ohio vied for the prize of building the most miles of railroad, a contest that the Land of Lincoln shaded with more than 2,600 miles of track—just 300 more than Ohio. These figures are impressive, though still modest in comparison with those achieved in the last thirty-five years of the century, after the Civil War. The premium line was the Illinois Central Railroad, which was begun in 1851 and spread rapidly southward from Galena in the Northwest of the state, running in parallel with the Mississippi down to Cairo at the confluence of that river with the Ohio at the southern tip of Illinois. The Illinois Central, when its initial phase was completed in 1856, took over the mantle as the world’s longest railroad, with more than 700 miles of track, mostly a perfect straight line heading south across the Midwest plain. It was also the first to benefit from grants of land. In 1850, two senators, Stephen Douglas from Illinois and William King from Alabama, had managed to maneuver through Congress a bill that allowed land grants for two of their pet railroad projects, the Illinois Central and the Mobile & Ohio. This was to prove groundbreaking as a future way of enabling the state to support railroad projects and to make them viable. The idea was that the land would be sold profitably to new settlers, further boosting the use of the railroad and providing a perfect illustration of how the railroad became a kind of self-sustaining economic catalyst. Incidentally, Abraham Lincoln had been one of the key lobbyists for the line as a local politician and had also worked for the Illinois Central in his capacity as a lawyer. He was about to play an even bigger role in railroad history.

  Ohio, which built most of its lines on an east-west axis, was messier. Its plethora of gauges made journeys across the state time-consuming and inconvenient, as did the failure to build a bridge over the Ohio River (which runs largely east-west), a task that was completed only in 1870. The states of Indiana and Missouri also built hundreds of miles in the run-up to the Civil War. By the end of the 1850s, the iron road stretched well into Iowa, which completed 655 miles of railroad from scratch during the decade. A crucial development in the railroads’ westward expansion came in 1854, with the completion of the Chicago & Rock Island Railroad, which deliberately ran its tracks right up to the eastern bank of the Mississippi, facing westward, with every intention of fording the river, using an island as a support. Within two years, despite much local opposition from the Mississippi rivermen, the railroad had built a bridge into Iowa over the river at Rock Island, triggering a dispute that was to be a landmark in establishing the railroad’s dominance over its predecessors. Within days of the first train passing over the bridge in April 1856, a steamboat, the Effie Aflon, smashed into it at full speed, and the ensuing fire from the ship’s engines destroyed the whole structure. The rapidity with which a banner appeared proclaiming “Mississippi Bridge Destroyed. Let All Rejoice” suggested strongly that the collision was no accident, and it soon emerged that, rather suspiciously, it was the first time that the Effie Aflon had ever ventured that far upriver.

  This strong whiff of suspicion did not prevent the emboldened boat owners from suing the railroad for putting the bridge in their way when it might have been expected that the railroad had a rather stronger case against them for destroying its structure! It was at this point that Lincoln made the first of his two significant—but largely forgotten—contributions to US railroad history (he will reappear later as the major political supporter of the transcontinental), as the lawyer representing the Rock Island in court. The importance of the Effie Aflon case went well beyond the interests of the local boat owners, as it was effectively a test of whether the right of the railroads to traverse rivers prevailed over those who sailed on them. More broadly, it was a case that pitted communities such as Chicago, already establishing itself as the hub of the rail network, against riverside towns such as St. Louis, whose interests lay with developing the waterway. The southerners, too, were on the side of the boat owners, as they were reluctant to see the West, with all the potential of its vast lands, gain access to the railroad. Lincoln, who had previously been a river pilot, spent days surveying the site and talking to those who worked on the river. In court, he tactfully acknowledged that the accident had been due to “pilot error” but argued that the need for Americans to travel between East and West to populate the vast country should be paramount. The railroad won—just. The jury in the lower court was tied, which meant that the plaintiff, the boat owners, did not win the case, and, despite a later successful appeal, the issue was eventually resolved in the Supreme Court, which declared that bridges were not a hazard to navigation.42

  It was the last-gasp attempt of the boat owners to resist the onslaught of the iron road. Reaching the Mississippi was crucial. It enabled the railroads to offer far easier and cheaper access both to Chicago and to the river itself, the most important waterway in America, as an alternative to the tortuous route through the canals, rivers, and lakes used by shipping. Furthermore, by crossing the river, they had overcome a key barrier to reaching the Rockies and beyond. As its inhabitants had feared, the completion of the iron road through to the river was extremely damaging to the South, cutting off much of its lucrative through trade to Europe. Even worse for shipping interests, from the Midwest to the South, railroads were beginning to be built parallel with the Mississippi. The Illinois Central began to take from the Mississippi some of the trade between the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, as did another north-south railroad, the Mobile & Ohio, linking Mobile on the coast of Alabama with Cairo in southern Illinois and completed just before the outbreak of war. Other railroads, such as the more successful Louisville & Nashville, which would play a prominent role in the Civil War, soon followed.

  Not only was the South losing out as the very economic orientation of the central part of the United States shifted ninety degrees to the east, but its railroads were in a sorry state, far less developed and sophisticated than their counterparts in the North. And that would cost the South dearly in the Civil War that broke out in 1861.

  4

  THE BATTLE LINES

  In the optimistic mood that accompanied the arrival of the railroads, one of the most notable and oft-repeated claims was that they would bring about an end to warfare. The manifesto promoting a railroad between Cincinnati, Ohio, and Charleston, South Carolina, published in 1835, had suggested that once the railroad was built, “the North and South would, in fact, shake hands with each other, yield up their social and political hostility, pledge themselves to common national interests, and part as friends and brethren.”1 Henry Poor, the founder of the American Railway Journal, suggested that the railroads were an agent of national peace and that “the certain prevention of foreign war . . . will be one of the numerous advantages of the railroads.” The Cincinnati Daily Chronicle, in 1843, went further, arguing that by ensuring the country would always be in a state of military preparedness, the railroads would bring about permanent peace and would be “dispelling prejudices and cementing friendships, calculated to perpetuate the institutions under which we have risen from a mere handful.” Poor saw trains and Christianity going hand in hand as forces for good. As war approached and seemed inevitable, the American Railroad Journal somewhat rowed back on its optimism, but it still remained unreservedly positive, noting that the majority of railroads would be unaffected by the conflict. Sadly, all these assertions proved to be wrong. As Sarah H. Gordon counters, “No voice rose to predict that trains might disseminate bad behaviour as well as good, or widen the scope of war beyond imagining.”2

  In the Mexican-American War that broke out in 1846, following the US annexation of Texas the previous year, the army had made some use of the railroads to transport troops down to Texas, but their efforts were hampered by the paucity of the lines in the South a
nd the fact that Texas itself did not join the railroad age until 1853. Nevertheless, in “the Mexican War [US] generals learned first hand just how useful the new invention could be, and they took that knowledge into the Civil War.”3

  Far from being a catalyst for peace, the iron horse turned out to be one of the most effective weapons of war invented by man, helping create a far more intense, deadly, and lengthy type of warfare.4 Moreover, the American Civil War would prove to be a testing ground for the use of railroads to extend the scope and impact of warfare; as a result, the conflict exacted a terrible toll on the American people. The story of the American Civil War can, in fact, be told through the railroads. Only an understanding of the role that the railroads played in it can explain how the Civil War became bloodier and more intensely fought than any previous conflict.

  At the outbreak of the war, the nation’s thirty thousand miles of railroad could be broadly split into three. Following the railroad construction boom of the 1850s, the Midwest, all free states, now had the most mileage, with eleven thousand miles, whereas New England together with the Middle Atlantic states boasted around a thousand miles fewer. That left the slave states of the South with just nine thousand miles, half as many as the North. Moreover, while substantial railroad companies able to cover long distances were beginning to emerge in the North, and the process of consolidation of lines had already begun there, the South’s—mostly poorly equipped—railroads presented a deliberately disparate picture, still entirely in keeping with the Jeffersonian model of localism. There was no southern equivalent of the big trunk railroad companies like the Erie and the Pennsylvania, which together possessed as much locomotive power as the entire Confederacy. The only route that even vaguely resembled a trunk line ran east-west in Tennessee between Memphis and Chattanooga, with branches northward to Richmond and Norfolk in Virginia and southward to Atlanta and Savannah in Georgia. Any lengthy trip undertaken was likely to require a change of train because of gauge differences.

  Substantial railroad construction had taken place during the 1850s, with Virginia and Georgia the main beneficiaries, but the railroads of the South nonetheless remained largely underdeveloped. The poor condition of the southern railroads was partly due to the weakness of the local economy and the lack of capital, but there was a more fundamental reason, too, rooted in the South’s history and its adherence to slavery. Broad swaths of southerners were deeply suspicious of the iron road and through their actions stymied the development of the railroad as an effective mode of transportation in their region. The dichotomy between the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian approaches to the construction of railroads was nowhere more apparent than in the South. In railroad terms, the debate boiled down to two contrasting positions: on the one hand, for the creation of a railroad network that would make it easier for southerners to travel to the burgeoning cities of the North; on the other, for a more localized railroad, geared to funneling commerce in the direction of its own ports.

  The most ambitious railroad promoter in the South, Robert Hayne, a South Carolina senator who had supported the Charleston & Hamburg Railroad, had envisaged a railroad running all the way from Charleston, South Carolina, the South’s best port, to Memphis, Tennessee, but his sudden death in 1839 brought an end to the idea and, worse, seemed to sap the South’s entrepreneurial spirit. It was not only the lack of promoters, however, that held back the growth of the southern railroads. The region simply did not have the right attributes for the development of an efficient transportation system: “Nothing could make up for the inferiority of the South’s ports, the lack of adequate markets for imports and diversity of exports, and a slave-labor system that immobilised her capital resources.”5 Had the South managed to overcome these deficiencies and its leaders’ reluctance to exploit the potential of the iron horse, it would have had the side effect of strengthening the Union and might thereby have reduced the likelihood of war, or at least delayed it.

  Instead, at the outbreak of the Civil War, the South possessed a messy, ill-connected ragbag of underfunded railroads that, because of the purpose for which they had originally been built, were wholly inadequate for the needs of the military: “The Southern railroads, initially built to expand the wealth of Southern plantations and states, remained almost entirely in the control of those local interests who put states’ rights ahead of the long-distance exchange of goods and people.”6 The military consequences of these failings would become all too obvious.

  The hundred or so southern railroads, which averaged just ninety miles in length, were hampered, too, by a lack of gauge standardization. Although many had been built to five feet, the dominant gauge in the South before the war, there were also many standard-gauge railroads, and a variety of others. However, even when neighboring railroads were built to the same gauge, there seemed to be an almost perverse reluctance to connect the lines when a town found itself with several termini. This was, in part, due to the lack of popularity for railroads. Southern towns had simply not welcomed the iron road with the same warm embrace as their northern counterparts. On the contrary, the opposition to railroads was broader in the South than in the North. And the forces ranged against the railroad promoters included not just the usual nakedly self-interested groups of innkeepers, haulers, and hoteliers but also the powerful lobby of the large wholesale merchants. They opposed the arrival of the iron road because they realized it would destroy the profitable trading opportunities they enjoyed through the loading and unloading of produce in their locality. It was therefore in their interests to ensure the railroads remained inefficient with a lot of enforced transfers of goods and people.

  There was, too, a gut feeling in the South that the railroads put at risk their very way of life. The house-proud southerners certainly did not want these foul-smelling machines, belching sparks that could so easily lead to a conflagration, anywhere near their city streets. And not only were the tracks kept away from the town centers, but local business interests prevented them from reaching the waterfronts where goods could be easily transferred from rail to water. Even when the railroads spread rapidly in the South in the decade before the Civil War, becoming a more important part of the southern economy, this antagonism from local business groups prevented a rational approach to their needs. Because the early railroads were mainly built to bring in agricultural produce from the surrounding rural areas rather than to serve local passenger needs, the railroad companies were forced to build their depots on the outskirts of towns. The Virginia legislature had actually passed a law allowing towns to prevent railroad companies from running their lines down city streets. Consequently, Richmond, Virginia, which would become the capital of the Confederacy in 1861, was the town most inconvenienced by these legislative obstacles. It had five railroad lines, all leading to different depots, yet none of them connected with one another by rail, even though three of them used standard gauge. Similarly, Savannah, Georgia, was the terminus of two railroads—the Savannah, Albany & Gulf Railroad and the Georgia Railroad—but vociferous opposition prevented a bridge being built over the Savannah River to connect the two until just before the outbreak of the Civil War. There were all too few exceptions. In a couple of inland towns, notably Atlanta, Georgia, and Columbia, South Carolina, important junctions were created to allow the through passage of freight, but for the most part any lengthy journey in the South would involve several inconvenient and expensive transfers.

  A further hindrance for the South during the Civil War was the layout of its railroad network, which was blessed with few through connections beyond the region. Most of the lines ran north-south, and consequently there was only one railroad route connecting the Deep South with the southwestern states. The rivers, too, were still a barrier. Whereas the Mississippi had been traversed by the railroad at Rock Island, the Ohio River remained unbridged when the war broke out, as did the Potomac, which cuts a swath through Virginia, effectively separating much of the South from the North. As if to demonstrate just how separate the North and
South were even before secession, only one railroad line—at Bowling Green, Kentucky, a junction on the Louisville & Nashville—crossed between North and South. At the outbreak of the Civil War, only one of the five railroads that went through the Appalachians, the mountain range that separates the East from the Midwest and Southwest, was in the South.

  It was not only the connections that were bad on the southern railroads. The facilities on the southern trains were far worse than those in the North, with poor rolling stock and lackadaisical timetables that were often unintelligible because of the plethora of local time zones. Facilities such as waiting rooms and ticket offices were even scarcer in southern depots than in their northern counterparts. Fares tended to be high precisely because of the paucity of facilities. The fastest train in the South in 1861 ran between Nashville and Chattanooga on the Louisville & Nashville but still required nine and a half hours for the 150-mile journey, an average of barely 15 mph, whereas in South Carolina trains were expressly forbidden to exceed 25 mph.

  The architect of New York’s Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted, complained about the primitive nature of the southern railroads. According to Olmsted, the southerners’ attitude seemed to be that the Yankees’ demands for a clean bed, digestible food, and trains that made their advertised connections at least half of the time were utterly unreasonable and demonstrated the northerners’ weak-bellied nature. He was concerned, too, about safety on the southern lines and suggested that the difference in railroads demonstrated the disparity in the economic situation of the two regions: “There is nothing that is more closely connected, both as cause and effect, with the prosperity and wealth of a country than its means and modes of travelling.” If, at the outset, the South was already at a disadvantage in terms of its railroad network, matters were made worse when war was declared by “a traditional dislike for mechanical pursuits in the South that had resulted in the employment of many northerners on southern roads.”7