The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar

  6

  RAILROADS TO EVERYWHERE

  The first transcontinental stimulated a rapid growth of railroads in the West that was part of a wider nationwide expansion in the network far beyond the scale of anything that had gone before. After the war, there was no brake on the growth of the railroads in the newly reunited nation, which, during the 1870s and 1880s, a period dubbed the Gilded Age by Mark Twain, grew faster than at any other time in its history. The route mileage of the railroads doubled between 1865 and 1873 and, after a brief lull caused by the financial panic that year, would double again by 1887, reaching nearly 164,000 miles by the end of the decade. These impressive figures do not take into account the large amount of reconstruction work on the wrecked railroads of the South or the improvements carried out on older parts of the network.

  To put this achievement into perspective, the British railroad network in its heyday before the First World War had just under 20,000 route miles. Even the whole of western Europe had fewer miles of railroad than America. Or to express it another way, on average the Americans built an additional 15 miles of railroad every day in the two decades up to 1890. The labor force required for such a massive scale of construction can only be guessed at, as there is no reliable source of figures, but clearly would have numbered tens of thousands. Sure, fewer men were required than before because of technical developments. The invention of dynamite and the gradual adoption of steam-powered pile drivers and shovels improved the efficiency with which railroads were built, but there was still a considerable need for sheer muscle power, and the workforce employed by the railroads represented a substantial proportion of manpower in a country whose population reached only 50 million in the middle of this period. Railroad labor mostly consisted of recent immigrants, especially Irish, and later Italians, though on several of the western projects large numbers of Chinese were hired. As with the Union Pacific, there were, too, many veterans of the Civil War who, inculcated with military discipline and sometimes even engineering skills, made ideal rail construction workers, as they had also proved on the Union Pacific.

  There was a symbiotic relationship between the exceptionally rapid expansion of the railroads and the wider changes occurring in American society. The nation was industrializing rapidly, with the railroads as the catalyst. However, the pattern of growth contrasted markedly between the regions, as they were in different stages of economic development. The East already boasted a well-developed network. In the West with its vast expanses served only, in the early years of this period, by the transcontinental line, the promotion of railroads was principally designed to encourage settlement. In the South, for the first decade or so after the Civil War, most effort was focused on the postwar Reconstruction, and it was not until the withdrawal of the last Union troops in 1877 that business really picked up and the South began the process of connecting its local lines with the major systems of the North and West. Various new lines began to be added to the network in the 1880s, the peak decade for railroad construction in the South, as in the rest of the United States.

  The Southern railroad network had been devastated by the war: “With ruined cities, and a much poorer and smaller population than the North, the South found it difficult to rebuild railroads.”1 In the early postwar years, numerous short lines were rebuilt, financed by the bonds being issued freely by the new administrations of the states, which were now run by a combination of Northern whites and some freed blacks who briefly dominated local government in the South. But, as before the war, the rail network still consisted mainly of short lines with few connections. Although by the end of the 1860s every state in the South had some railroad track in working condition, and on the map the South appeared to have something resembling a coherent network, in practice it was still a patchy, disconnected system offering a primitive level of service likened by experienced travelers to a journey in the North on the early railroads of the 1840s. Longer journeys in the South required numerous changes of train, and on most lines there was only one scheduled passenger train a day, with perhaps an additional one carrying mail.

  Indeed, the postal and rail services throughout the United States had long been intertwined. The first trains to carry letters had been on the Camden & Amboy in New Jersey as early as 1832, and six years later Congress designated all railroads as “post roads,” which qualified them for the carriage of mail. After the war, railroad post offices—specially designed coaches in which postal workers sorted mail—became commonplace. These coaches were equipped with ingenious openings and chutes that allowed mail to be collected from hooks by the side of the track without the train having to stop. To drop off mail, there was the rather less sophisticated method of throwing the bag out of the train. Letters and parcels developed into an important part of the economics of many railroad companies, nowhere more so than in the South, where few people could afford to travel by train. The southern railroads remained much more expensive than those in the North due to the paucity of passengers, with travelers in the South paying around six cents per mile, twice the rate of average fares in the North. Mail carriage was thus particularly important in maintaining the solvency of many southern railroads and was often carried in wagons attached to passenger trains, which made for infuriatingly slow journeys because the mail trains, unlike the railroad post offices, stopped at every station. As there was no food service on these trains, a passenger could go all day without a meal, and, worse, trains would not infrequently break down for lengthy periods, far from any hotel.

  Travel on the southern trains in the immediate postwar period was not very different from travel in the supposedly wilder West and probably even more perilous. Badly laid track led to frequent derailments, and the rickety-looking trestle bridges were not for the fainthearted. On the lower ones, built over minor creeks, the weight of the train could make the foundations sink, causing water to lap over the track. It was not unknown for the foundations to give way completely, sending the coaches into the creek. There were dangers inside the trains, too. Nimrod Bell, a conductor for various southern railroads of the time who wrote about his experiences, says he frequently carried a gun and had to resort to hitting argumentative passengers and even crew with a stick.2 At one point, a fellow crew member, a mail agent, was shot by a sniper from nearby woods, and in another incident Bell had to hold a number of black men at bay with his gun as they were insisting on traveling to Chattanooga without paying the fare. The tense relationship between the races and immigrant groups—Irish and Chinese as well as black and white—frequently led to fights and brawls that the conductor had to sort out.

  The South still lacked any equivalent of the big east-west railroad systems in the North, which had consolidated their position in the postwar period. There were few through services, since the state line invariably marked the border between different companies, which remained state-sponsored enterprises and were therefore confined to one state. And any change of train might entail a long wait, as connections were not synchronized. The Virginia & Tennessee, for example, had 204 miles of track but operated just one scheduled passenger train a day, making a lengthy wait almost inevitable for connecting travelers. Even if through routes were advertised, as when a group of southern short lines cooperated to provide the “Great Southern Mail Route,” journeys were painfully slow. This service was, in fact, anything but “great”: it took four or five days to cover the 1,200 miles between Mobile, Alabama, and New York City because of the need to change trains.

  The only two lines in the South that could lay any claim to trunk status were the Louisville & Nashville and the Mobile & Ohio, both of which followed a north-south route from the Ohio River to the Gulf of Mexico. The hub of the southern rail system remained Tennessee and Kentucky, and lines radiated from these states to all the Atlantic ports. The South, in other words, was still linked with the outside world rather than the rest of the country, and it was not until the 1880s that the railroad system began to improve connections with the North: “This long
delay in uniting the two rail systems persisted despite efforts by Northern bankers and investors to rebuild the Southern railroads in such a way that they complemented the interests of the major Northern roads.”3

  The focus on the South by northern interests was by no means benign, nor motivated by philanthropy. The weak financial condition of the southern railroads left them vulnerable to precisely the type of northern profiteers whose ambitions had helped provoke the South into war. The expression carpetbagger was born, to describe these northern adventurers looking to make a lucrative career in the southern states.4 There was certainly no shortage of sharp-eyed Yankees trying to profit from the Reconstruction by promising to undertake repairs or rebuilding work on the southern railroads, much of which was carried out to a low standard or, worse, never even completed, though it had been paid for.

  Northerners also traveled south to swallow up ailing railroads on the cheap. Bankers and investors from New York and Boston who had funded many developments in the North and the Far West now reckoned that the best profits could be made from the Reconstruction of the South and bought up southern railroad company shares and state bonds cheaply to sell, at a profit of course, in the Northeast and even Europe. The carpetbaggers, though, often lost their shirts or at least those of their backers. The railroads in the South were unable to earn the profits they needed to repay the loans they had raised from both the private banks and the states to build or reconstruct them. This was partly a result of the low number of passengers, but it was also due to the sheer scale of the railroad boom: “[The collapse of many railroads] was caused in part by building more railroads than any town or state would ever need—in order to make money on financial speculation, without regard for the future usefulness of each line.” This was often the case during periods of railroad boom—called railroad manias—both in the United States and, indeed, in other parts of the world. A kind of self-perpetuating madness would engulf potential investors, who would pour money into ever more dubious schemes. In fact, in the words of Sarah H. Gordon, “looked at from both business and personal perspectives, the efforts of Northern investors appear not only self-interested but unsuccessful.”5 In particular, they subsequently lost much of the money they had invested in the panic of 1873 and the ensuing downturn.

  These failures took place despite the fact that there was no shortage of low-paid, or even free, labor available for railroad companies in the South, enabling lines to be built on the cheap. Slavery may have notionally been ended by the Civil War, but the railroads took advantage of a corrupt judicial and prison system to obtain large amounts of poorly remunerated labor for their construction work. The southern railroad boom in the quarter century after the Civil War would not have been possible without what effectively amounted to a massive state subsidy through the provision of near-free labor, which was overwhelmingly black. Theodore Kornweibel Jr. has no doubt that it was a deliberate policy of the judicial and political systems to create a cheap labor force that worked under such harshly punitive conditions that were often worse than those endured in the prewar days of slavery: “From Reconstruction into the early 1900s, southern courts purposefully convicted large numbers of blacks—many for minor property crime—and sentenced them to lengthy prison (not jail) terms to ensure that railroads and railroad construction companies . . . could obtain cheap labor from the state.” Under the convict-lease system whereby these prisoners were “rented out” to railroad companies and others to carry out demanding physical work, the states were relieved of the need to pay for the upkeep of their prisoners, while the companies who “employed” them obtained cheap labor. As Kornweibel suggests, the convict system “replicated slavery but with an earlier death sentence.”6

  The contractors who took on the convicts were often well connected politically, sometimes being the very politicians who created the system. Young blacks were literally railroaded straight from local courtrooms to work camps on the railroads and, indeed, mines and plantations. Kornweibel cites an example: “Of the 30 unfortunates sent to help build the state-owned Western North Carolina Railroad in January 1879, 24 were convicted of larceny.” That effectively meant theft, defined as taking from a person, often of a small amount—mugging in modern parlance—rather than robbery, and would earn the defendant a sentence of up to fifteen years. Not that they were likely to live that long. Convicts were, in fact, cheaper than slaves, who had been hired from owners before emancipation for much greater sums than the three dollars per month that, for example, the Greenwood & Augusta paid in the 1870s. Moreover, the railroads were even less concerned about the welfare of the convicts than the plantation owners had been about their slaves: “Its workers, who labored in chains, were underfed, poorly housed, and medically neglected.” On the Greenwood & Augusta, almost half of the 265 prisoners working on the line died, but there were always more to replace them. On some other railroads, nothing was paid for convict labor. Although the contractors were required to feed and house the prisoners, the meager rations were usually insufficient for the hard labor they were required to perform, and they were often housed in thin tents. Death came easily, frequently, and in many forms: accidents were common, disease endemic, and violence routine. In Alabama, which, according to Kornweibel, “set the record for barbarity,” in the mid-1880s, convicts survived on average just three years, and one in ten perished within the first four months. Florida was hardly better: a commander of various Florida convict camps, J. C. Powell, who later wrote about the system, described how one group was sent into the tropical marshes with no provision for shelter or even food and forced to scavenge to keep alive.7

  The railroads were crucial to the South’s recovery and central to the Reconstruction efforts because of the investment they attracted. As Sarah H. Gordon suggests, “In connecting the population centers of the South, and in bringing supplies, money and mail from the North, the railroad, for all its inadequacies, was one of the only links holding this ruined society together and tying it to the rest of the Union.”8 Within a decade of the end of the war, too, a more rational railroad system was beginning to emerge in the South, triggered, ironically, by the panic of 1873, which forced many penurious railroad companies to consolidate. After the financial collapse, the surviving railroad companies took over many of their weaker peers. The largest and strongest of the southern railroad companies began the process that their counterparts in the North had embarked on a quarter of a century previously, becoming, at last, systems and networks rather than simple routes. Railroad empires were finally starting to emerge in the South.

  Meanwhile, the trend toward bigger unified networks was becoming even more marked in the Northeast, where the substantial network built before the war limited the scope for further growth. This was particularly the case in New England, whose railroads had initially been the fastest to develop. Expansion mostly took the form of branch lines or links between existing railroads, although there was one spectacular project, the belated completion of the Hoosac Tunnel through the western Massachusetts mountain range. At four and a half miles, it was, at the time of its completion in 1875, the longest in America and the second longest in the world after the Mont Cenis Tunnel under the French Alps. The tunnel, which was originally conceived as a canal connection back in the 1810s, was intended to provide a direct link between Boston and the Great Lakes to the west. It was the brainchild of one Alvah Crocker (no relation to Charles of the Union Pacific), a self-made paper-mill proprietor and owner of the Fitchburg Railroad, which ran from Boston to Greenfield, Massachusetts, eighty miles to the west. The tunnel was needed to get through the Hoosac Range and connect northern Massachusetts directly with routes to the west without travelers having to first head south toward New York. It proved, however, to be a much more difficult enterprise than anticipated, and very costly in terms of both lives and money.

  Work had started in 1852, nine years before the Civil War, and had been expected to be completed in just five years at a cost of $2 million. That ubiquitous ge
nius Herman Haupt was again involved, designing the tunnel and the lines leading to and from it, and for a while progress was steady. As well as the obvious problem of blasting through a mountain, the project was dogged by a host of geological, financial, and political difficulties. A thousand-foot vertical shaft was dug in the mountain to provide access to the middle of the tunnel to speed up progress, but this central shaft was an unsatisfactory and dangerous arrangement, resulting in an explosion that killed thirteen men in an accident in October 1867. Inevitably, too, as costs mounted, the project was caught up in political controversy because such an expensive piece of infrastructure needed considerable state funding. Worse, Haupt was forced out by opponents of the tunnel who argued, wrongly, that his methods were at the root of the engineering problem. With his departure, work on the tunnel ground to a halt, as the money from the private investors had run out. After a delay, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts stepped in to ensure completion, demonstrating yet again that the state was often the investor of last resort in railroad enterprises, especially those that it hoped would produce extensive benefits for local people.

  In the event, further technical difficulties, and opposition by rival railroads to increased state funding, meant that the tunnel was not completed until 1875 at an eventual cost of $20 million, ten times the original estimate. Moreover, nearly two hundred men died during construction, a huge number in comparison with the death toll on much larger projects. As on the first transcontinental, it was explosive material that was the main danger, with the old black powder and the newer nitroglycerin, introduced in the latter stages of the project, proving to be equally deadly. Because of state involvement, once the tunnel was open, there was a rather unusual operating arrangement. Rather than granting a monopoly, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had encouraged various railroads to build their lines up to the tunnel and actually charged a toll for every train passing through to help pay for the investment. Despite the difficulties of construction, the tunnel was to demonstrate its worth over many years after its completion, becoming a vital part of New England’s transportation system.