American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  At dawn that Sunday morning the great bell of the Marshfield parish church loudly rang out. People stood transfixed; someone had died. The bell tolled three times three strokes, the signal for the death of a male. Then, indicating his age, it pealed seventy times. Webster! Born a few years before Shays’ Rebellion and the drafting of the Constitution, he had, along with Clay and Calhoun, dominated the last forty years of Congress. A friend, walking around Webster’s farm with him, once noted that the Marshfield land was not rich by nature, but rich with the money and manure the senator had lavished upon it. Webster had made a fainéant national government work too, after a fashion. Emerson mused: “He brought the strength of a savage into the height of culture.”

  THE CORNUCOPIA

  By the 1850s in the upper Mississippi Valley, the endless work to clear and plow the land, the desperate struggles with bugs and blizzards, the risky financial gambles with machines and middlemen—all this effort was paying off. A twelve-year-old boy in Wisconsin, John Muir, would never forget the joys and woes of pioneer Wisconsin farm life: planting corn and potatoes and spring wheat while the nesting birds sang in the mild soothing breeze, the oaks behind “forming beautiful purple masses as if every leaf were a petal”; then the heavy summer work, sweaty days of sixteen or seventeen hours grinding scythes, chopping stove wood, fetching water from the spring, harvesting and haying under a burning sun; in the winter, rising in a bitterly cold house, squeezing throbbing, chilblained feet into soggy boots, hauling and chopping and fencing in the frozen wastes and yet still relishing the wonderful radiance of the “snow starry with crystals.”

  Farming remained the main occupation of Americans—about three-quarters of the nation’s 24 million population were still “rural”—but the agricultural heartland was moving west. In what Allan Nevins called the Northwestern Surge, land-hungry settlers had broken through the Appalachians to seize the flat and later the rolling prairies to the west. Illinois began the 1850s with fewer people than Massachusetts and ended the decade with almost half a million more. Wisconsin jumped ahead of New Jersey. The population of Iowa soared from 200,000 to almost 700,000. With 2,340,000 inhabitants, Ohio became the third biggest state of the Union. The irresistible magnet was the soil, dark and black, fertile from age-old grassland vegetation and deep root systems, six and even ten or twelve feet deep. The climate, while occasionally cruel, was just about right for rich yields.

  Improved farm machinery boosted production during the 1840s and 1850s. The steel plow was the decisive weapon in breaking up the prairie land, replacing eastern-type cast-iron plows that would not scour effectively. John Deere had fashioned his first steel plow from a saw blade in 1837; a decade later this plow, manufactured by the thousands in the East, was rapidly coming into use in the prairie region. In the late 1850s farmers even tried to substitute a steam plow for the ox-driven plow, but the ungainly contraption was not a success. The most dramatic change on the prairie came with the improvement of the reaper. Hussey’s reaper, the most widely known in 1840, was mounted on two large drive wheels from which extended a platform with its cutting knife on the forward edge. The grain fell on this platform and had to be quickly raked away by half a dozen men. With Cyrus McCormick’s improved reaper, the grain was raked from the side of the platform, thus forestalling the need to bind before the machine came around again. Reapers often were deployed together by the scores, with hundreds of men, women, and children harvesting the golden grain behind them.

  Everything ultimately turned on the intelligence, daring, and persistence of the farm people. James Baldwin left a striking record of his farm days, as portrayed by Allan Nevins: “Here is a sober, hardworking Quaker farmer of Indiana, living in a log cabin with stick-and-clay chimney—but with the skeleton of a new frame house near by.” About it stretched the “big woods,” especially thick down by the watercourses, two large cornfields speckled by charred stumps, other fields marked for “tree dead-enin’,” and a full-grown orchard. “The farmer’s speech is Hoosier dialect. Yet like the Yankee squire he is proud of his shelf of books: the Journals of George Fox and John Woolman, Walker’s Dictionary, standard texts like Noah Webster’s blue-backed spelling book, Pike’s Arithmetic, and Lindley Murray’s English Reader; some volumes of McGuffey; old classics like Robinson Crusoe; and in due time Dickens. Though his daily dress is blue jeans, he has a ‘go to meetin’ suit of drab homespun and a gray beaver hat in which he takes on a mien of dignity.”

  Out of this magical mix of men and machines and moisture with sun and soil was arising the granary of the world—a cornucopia of corn and wheat, of oxen and horses, of pork and beef, and later of poultry, and the products of grain, especially whiskey. At first corn was king, then wheat. The corn crop of 1839 came to 377 million bushels, while that of 1849 was almost 600 million. Wheat production in the next decade rose by 75 percent to about 175 million bushels, while the rate of increase of corn production fell somewhat. Illinois led the nation in corn and later in wheat. By the 1850s that state and Indiana and Wisconsin were far outstripping New York and Pennsylvania in wheat output. One stockman alone, B. F. Harris of Urbana, raised annually about 500 cattle and 600 hogs on his four-thousand-acre farm.

  The prairie land seemed to pulsate with energy. The air was filled with the clatter of revolving wooden horse rakes, threshing machines, seed drills, corn planters, harrows, sulky plows, self-scouring disks, and—in the farmhouse—hand-washing machines and chain-bucket pumps. Farm people flocked to agricultural fairs to see new machines, inspect livestock and produce, hear political orators. Energy radiated outward. The railroads and canalboats that brought people and machines west returned east loaded with hogs and foodstuffs. Cattlemen trying to save money drove huge herds of steers overland, pasturing their beeves on roadside grass and in hired meadows, trying frantically to keep them out of farmers’ fields. With a sixty-day drive from Illinois to eastern cities, however, stockmen increasingly chose to sell their hogs and cattle in western cities instead. Alton and Peoria and especially Chicago were rapidly becoming the slaughtering centers of the nation.

  This Northwestern Surge in agriculture produced a powerful social and economic undertow in the East. Farmers in the Northeast were accustomed to change; many had shifted from a self-sufficient home economy to a market economy as the seaboard cities expanded. Now they were faced with a more severe challenge as grain from the West cut heavily into the market for their cereals, and their holdings of swine and sheep fell off. The drovers of Long Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Westchester, who had once hustled their herds into the cattle market at Bull’s Head Village in-lower Manhattan, had to stand by helplessly as wholesale slaughterers brought in cattle and hogs by the hundreds of thousands via canals—especially the Erie—and railroads from the West. Some farmers could not make the transition, and they—or at least their sons and daughters—escaped to the city or to the West.

  But others proved that Yankee resourcefulness was still alive. They stepped up their production of milk and apples and berries and market vegetables. They bred some of the best sheep and blooded horses and poultry and cattle—Guernsey, Durham, Devon, and other breeds. Upstate New Yorkers produced cheddar good enough for the export trade, and built more than a score of cheese factories during the 1850s. New England farmers made money out of the rich tobacco lands along the Connecticut River, out of maple sugar, cranberries, butter, vegetables. Canneries, using tin canisters—later “tin cans”—preserved lobsters, oysters, fruit jellies, peas, tomatoes, sweet corn, some of which was bought by whalers for their long voyages. The Yankees were quick to take advantage of farm fads. One of these was “hen fever”—unbridled speculation in blooded fowls. Shanghai chicks, Cochin Chinas, and other fancy Oriental poultry brought from $75 to $100 a pair at the Boston Fowl Show in 1852.

  Many of these efforts were experimental, and not all ended well. Ephraim Bull of Concord spent years perfecting an early-ripening variety of the wild northern fox grape. After eleven years of p
lanting, selecting, and testing his stock, he exhibited his “Concord grape” amid much acclaim in the Massachusetts Horticultural Hall. But Bull was better at inventing than profit-making, for commercial nurseries moved in on his trade in seedlings and bested him in competition. The embittered Bull at least had the last word. On his gravestone in Concord cemetery is carved the epitaph: “HE SOWED, OTHERS REAPED.”

  While northwestern farming surged, and northeastern agriculture adapted, much of southeastern farming lagged behind. A South Carolinian in 1857 summed up the situation in an address to his state’s agricultural society, in much the same words of warning used by other farm leaders: “Our present system is to cut down our forest and run it into cotton as long as it will pay for the labor expended. Then cut down more forest, plant in cotton, plough it uphill and downhill, and when it fails to give a support leave it….Then sell the carcass for what you can realize and migrate to the Southwest in quest of another victim. This ruinous system has entailed upon us an exhausted soil, and a dependence upon Kentucky and Tennessee for our mules, horses, and hogs, and upon the Northern States for all our necessaries from the clothing and shoeing of our negroes down to our wheelbarrows, corn-brooms and axe-handles. ” The South was still self-sufficient in food, but already in 1859 the wheat and corn crops of Illinois and Ohio exceeded those of all seven states of the Deep South combined.

  Slavery was keeping the South excessively rural, with an unbalanced economy dominated by dangerous speculation in cotton, tobacco, and sugar. Southerners could not break out of their economic prison, walled in by poor communication and transportation, depleted soils, limited capital, lack of diversification, a slower population growth, and, first and last, a great sluggish under-class of poor whites and under-caste of blacks. Moreover, the large plantation owners lacked an incentive to break out of the pattern, for the prices of cotton and tobacco rose steadily between 1850 and 1860, even while production doubled. King Cotton brought prosperity—at least to a few—and made it possible to ignore the underlying problems.

  The southern “rim states” were somewhat more successful in agriculture. Northwestern Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley produced heavy crops of wheat; small farms were thriving in Tennessee and Kentucky; Arkansas and Florida were boosting their cattle and hog production; the piedmont country of Virginia and North Carolina displayed agricultural diversity in its market gardening and livestock raising; Texas was rapidly becoming a livestock empire by itself. By 1856 Texans were driving their longhorns overland to the slaughterhouses of Chicago. By the end of the decade the “outer” South was, in agricultural diversification and innovation, leaving the “inner” far behind.

  Agriculture North and South showed the defect of its own virtue of abundance—colossal waste. Land was depleted by inefficient plowing, waste or improper use of manure and other fertilizers, single-cropping of the same land year after year, heavy leaching. It was easy to squander a commodity that seemed in endless supply. Throughout the nation, however, were men aware of this waste and inefficiency. Long active in their own states, in 1852 they formed the United States Agricultural Society to represent and assist the nation’s agriculture and promote experimentation and education. As farm journals burgeoned—Prairie Farmer, American Agriculturalist, American Farmer, Farmer’s Register, and Cultivator—editors preached better fencing, fertilizing, plowing, draining, rotating. Greeley’s Tribune appointed an agricultural editor. The message was further spread at fairs and exhibitions. Scientific farming, however, remained in its infancy.

  States began establishing agricultural courses, departments, and—in Michigan—a college of agriculture. The federal government largely stood aloof. Despite a tiny budget, the Patent Office promoted use of new seeds and new crops, such as sorghum cane, but bills to establish grants of public lands for higher education met a presidential veto. Agriculture—still the foundation of the American economy—was left primarily to private leadership and enterprise.

  The British and Pennsylvania pig iron that helped mechanize much of the northwestern farmer’s work supplied also the thousands of miles of rails that bound him closer to the markets of the East. The railroad fever and expansion of the 1850s was producing a virtual revolution in transportation. Hardly a town or large city did not harbor ambitions that the rails would come its way, bringing investors, buyers, jobs, and access to the whole railroad gridiron developing in the Northwest. The eleven thousand miles of railroad in existence in 1852 almost tripled in length by the end of the decade. The north-central states led the way in this expansion, followed by the Northeast, the south Atlantic states, and the old Southwest.

  America’s hundred-year romance with the railroad was well under way, although some people did not love the iron horse. “The railroad will leave the land despoiled, ruined, a desert where only sable buzzards shall wing their loathesome way,” cried an orator. A state legislator waxed more evangelical than environmental: “Canals, sir, are God’s own highway, operating on the soft bosom of the fluid that comes straight from Heaven. The railroad stems direct from Hell. It is the Devil’s own invention, compounded of fire, smoke, soot, and dirt, spreading its infernal poison throughout the fair countryside. It will set fire to houses along its slimy tracks. It will throw burning brands into the ripe fields of the honest husbandman and destroy his crops.…”

  But, as Bismarck once remarked, it is not by speeches and parliamentary resolutions that the great questions of the day are decided but by blood and iron, and the iron rails continued to chop through the countryside, at a national average of almost forty miles a week. Each mile cost from $20,000 to $40,000, but capitalists and civic leaders in the big eastern cities and the growing inland towns raised the money, with aid from European financiers. The local citizen helped out too; during the 1850s Wisconsin farmers mortgaged their property for almost $5 million to invest in railroad building. Politicians and capitalists and townspeople alike felt well rewarded when the first iron horse arrived in town. Church bells rang, bands played, and politicos gave speeches as the hissing monster rumbled into the new depot. And when the Erie Railroad completed its 450-mile main line stretching from the Hudson to the Lakes in 1850, President Fillmore and Daniel Webster themselves rode the train—Webster seated on a rocking chair fastened onto an open flat car—to the end of the line at Dunkirk, where they were greeted by a parade, a barbecue, and a twenty-one-gun salute from the U.S.S. Michigan.

  Cities wanted railroads—and railroads built cities. Chicago, perfectly situated at the center of the northwestern heartland, and at the southern tip of Lake Michigan around which east-west traffic to the north had to detour, had not a single railroad tie in 1850. Within five years it became the terminus for 2,200 miles and had 100 big trains arriving and departing each day. Its grain elevators, trackside warehouses, lake and canal facilities meshed with its railroads radiating out like spokes in a wheel. Soon trains out of Chicago were jumping the Mississippi into Iowa, steaming down to Cairo and points south, invading Missouri, and linking with the great northern arms of the Father of the Waters.

  Lake Michigan served as a broad seaway south to Chicago, lapping the wilderness to the north; two other nautical boulevards, Lakes Ontario and Erie, pointed directly at Chicago from the east. But these inland seaways were not connected and hence could not serve heavy transportation until man intervened. As the constantly improved Erie Canal disgorged people and freight from the east, more and more Lake Erie steamers navigated its shallow and frisky waters. The opening of the Canadian-built Welland Canal enabled steamboats to pass around Niagara Falls between Ontario and Erie. But the most momentous development for Chicago and all the other Great Lakes cities was the extraordinary feat, conceived and engineered by a young Vermonter named Charles T. Harvey, of building the Sault Ste. Marie Canal to bypass the rapids between huge Lake Superior and Lake Huron. Soon lake steamers were toting vast quantities of copper and iron ore from the mines on Superior’s shores to points east. By the late 1850s Chicago, Detroit, C
leveland, Buffalo, and scores of smaller cities were battening off this new lake commerce, and ships were carrying western products from Chicago to Liverpool over the thousand-mile seaway stretching toward the northeast.

  Not only grimy ore boats plied the lake waters. Fine lake steamers were built to carry first-class passengers in style, as well as immigrants below-decks. “The handsomest of the lake vessels by the middle fifties,” Nevins wrote, “the Western World, was 348 feet long, with powerful engines and beautiful interior fittings. She and her peers, the Plymouth Rock, the Western Metropolis, and others, with several hundred staterooms each, competed in luxury and entertainment for those who could pay. Down the green lakes they slipped with dancing, gambling, flirtation, and feasting, the musicians in the ballrooms thrumming their guitars,” to the chant:

  Old Huron’s long, old Huron’s wide,

  De engines keep de time.

  Still, nothing could compete for romance with the river-boating a thousand miles south, on the Mississippi. Nevins pictured the river port scenes: “The mile-long expanse of boats smoking and throbbing at the St. Louis and New Orleans levees; the motley crowds of passengers—fur-traders, immigrants, soldiers, cotton-planters, land-speculators, gamblers, politicians, British tourists, Indians, and plain farmers; the avalanche of pork, grain, tobacco, cotton, and hides that the Illinois, the Cumberland, the Washita, the Arkansas, and the Red poured into the central Mississippi stream, cramming every deck; the lordly pilots, the hardbitten captains, the profane mates, the chanting roustabouts; the fierce races as the firemen tied down safety valves; the hands crammed fat-pine into the roaring furnaces, and the passengers cheered.…”

  No lady, northern or southern, could ever forget those New Orleans riverboats—stepping down the long promenade deck with its view of hundreds of lights reflecting off the river water, or parading into the palatial dining saloon, with its glittering mirrors, shining candelabra, table settings of damask and silver, and bowers of fruits and flowers.