by Peter Krass
On May 17, the ship hoisted anchor and rode the tide out of the firth and into the Atlantic, where the expansive skies and waters were a welcome sight for those suffering through the oppressive Hungry Forties; many danced on the decks and sang in high spirits. Of course, what was welcomed now would become hated over the coming weeks as the monotony of the horizon took its toll. Agitated seas that rolled the ship with violence and the accompanying sickness also became anathema; and on days when the winds were not favorable, there was the nerve-racking threat of an extended voyage resulting in food and water shortages. In addition to nature’s hazards, the passengers had to be ever-vigilant of petty thieves in their midst; old men and women, in particular, were robbed to their last shilling. The passengers brought their own food for the trip, so that, too, was guarded. Disease was another menace, for there was no place to escape a sudden outbreak of cholera. Not all survived the voyage. As for the corpses, the heads and shoulders were sewn up in an old jacket, a bag of coal was tied to the feet, the captain read the burial service, and the crew committed the body to sea. The passengers would quickly forget the whole affair—they had to.26
While a prison to his parents, the Wiscasset was a pirate schooner, a Spanish galleon, and a man-of-war to Andy and brother Tom. The brothers saw the trip as a grand adventure, and precocious Andy wasted no time in making himself known to the sailors. “During the seven weeks of the voyage,” Carnegie reflected, “I came to know the sailors quite well, learned the names of the ropes, and was able to direct the passengers to answer the call of the boatswain, for the ship being undermanned, the aid of the passengers was urgently required.”27 A square-rigged ship could be handled by just a captain, a mate, a cook, and four hands—a bare-bones crew that maximized the shipping company’s profits—but with a hold full of passengers, help was indeed required. On a regular schedule, the mattresses were brought up to air and the ship scrubbed, more often after rough seas and bouts of sickness. Eager and bright-eyed, Andy directed dumbstruck Scots, some quadruple his age, to assist with the chores; as a reward for his help, he was treated to plum pudding in the sailors’ mess on Sundays.
Just after the Fourth of July, the ship made its way into New York City’s harbor. As the ship approached the lower tip of Manhattan, Bedloe’s Island, the future home of the Statue of Liberty, came into view. But it was Fort Columbus on Governor’s Island, with its round bastion patrolled by smartly uniformed soldiers and defended with rows of cannons, that caught Andy’s fancy. As the boy’s eyes followed the cannons pointing across the harbor to Manhattan, he encountered hundreds of masts stabbing the sky, the ships draped like a primitive necklace of splintered wood around the lower portion of the island. Beyond them, the gothic spire of Trinity Church rose like a beacon. The Wiscasset dropped anchor off the Castle Garden, a premier theater that was circular, two-tiered, and sitting in the water, tethered to the Battery by a wooden bridge.28 The city commissioners reported that 189,176 immigrants landed in 1848—many of them ravaged by the odyssey.29
One contemporary, Isabella Bird, observed a group of seven hundred English immigrants just deposited dockside and noted: “They looked tearful, pallid, dirty and squalid. . . . Many were deplorably emaciated, others looked vacant and stupefied.”30 Andy admitted to being bewildered and overwhelmed by the city’s great hive of human activity, for as the boy crossed the threshold between old country and new, every sense was attacked.31 The stench of fish and excrement burnt his nostrils; the clatter of hooves and wooden wheels against cobblestone rung in his ears; newsboys shouted the day’s headlines and peddlers hawked their wares; foul beggars from Five Corners Slums pleaded for mercy; slinking among the wooden boxes and crates and trunks piled precariously high, runners hissed promises of shelter and directions. Runners, a notorious bunch identified by their bright green neckties, lured the green arrivals to boardinghouses on Greenwich Street or to ticket agents who booked them passage on steamers and canal boats traveling north, south, and west at prices that amounted to robbery. The charter was not going to be freely handed over in the land of the free.
William Carnegie ignored the runners and sought advice for traveling to Pittsburgh from emigration agents. Railroads were not yet an option, so the family would have to travel on packet boats and steamers via canals, rivers, and Lake Erie. After haggling with the agents over ticket costs, the Carnegies retired to the more tranquil promenade along Bowling Green at Castle Garden, where women with fashionable bonnets and parasols and men with top hats and canes strolled along with great dignity. There, one of the Wiscasset’s sailors, “decked out in regular Jackashore fashion, with blue jacket and white trousers,” caught Andy up in his arms, he recalled, and took him over to a refreshment stand.32 He bought the boy a glass of sarsaparilla, a sweetened, carbonated drink flavored with sassafras; for a brief moment, Andy drank in the beauty of America. So very briefly.
When the Carnegies landed, the city was still abuzz over the July Fourth celebrations, with the New York Herald reporting two days later on the front page: “The celebration on Tuesday was splendid—nay magnificent. . . . From daylight to midnight the city was enveloped in the smoke of gunpowder and crowded with people from all parts of the surrounding country.”33 Home to Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman in 1848, New York was a worthy place to come celebrate and a top tourist attraction. In addition to the popular Castle Garden and Trinity Church, visitors flocked to the Customs House, with its Grecian Revival columns, and Wall Street, already recognized in the United States and Europe as a powerful financial center. But the number one attraction was Barnum’s American Museum, the building looming over Broadway just south of Ann Street, the facade adorned with a colorful snake mural. No time for tourism, the Carnegies boarded the 6 p.m. overnight steamer to Albany—again, this was no luxury liner and safe passage was not guaranteed. Even in 1848, steamers’ boilers tended to overheat and occasionally set a ship on fire or simply exploded. Invariably, there were enough casualties for enterprising undertakers from New York to send up loads of coffins on speculation.
The rising sun introduced yet another boat, a packet boat that would take the family through the Erie Canal, which, running through farmland and forest, village and city, offered a dramatic, surreal juxtaposition of modern technology and brute labor, of sprawling countryside and urban centers, of the organic and the artificial. Not only did it symbolize technological progress, but Manifest Destiny, the slogan for America’s righteous march westward to civilize the land and the native heathens.34 The cigar-shaped packet boats, able to transport forty passengers at night and triple that during the day, were no more than 78 feet long and 14½ wide, and had a single-level cabin that extended almost its entire length, so the cabin roof served as observation deck. At night, the cabin was divided into ladies’ and gentlemen’s quarters by a curtain. Tiered berths were pulled out of cabin walls and additional cots were strung from the ceiling. The passengers were packed together like pigs in a pork warehouse. Although the boats were a marvel in their efficient use of space, passengers had to contend with bunks ripping out of walls and falling on those below, incessant snoring, babies crying, and mosquitoes feasting.
Delays were numerous. Canal gridlock often ensued when aqueduct walls crumbled, canal banks collapsed, and locks malfunctioned. At many of the locks, Margaret had to shield her boys from the brawls that erupted over various problems. A tough crowd, the canallers relished swearing, drinking, gambling, and whoring; even the children who comprised about one-quarter of the workforce were a profane bunch. The vulgarities washed over Andy. “Nothing comes amiss to youth,” he reflected, “and I look back upon my three weeks as a passenger upon the canal-boat with unalloyed pleasure.”35 Andy’s optimism was irrepressible, whether he was on a hazardous five-week ocean crossing or a tedious three-week canal tour, prime examples of the ability to make “all my ducks swans” inherited from Grandpa Andrew. But what better way to mask fear than with effusive optimism? Andy varnished his youth to soo
the the pain.
The plodding pace of the packet boat and the oppressive July heat took their toll. The family was disturbed by being separated each night; moreover, body sores developed from the hard bunks, as did rashes from the heat, and they became lethargic from confinement and revolted by the monotonous diet. Finally, ten days later, the Carnegies arrived in Buffalo, where they boarded the steamer to Cleveland and then another packet boat down the Ohio & Erie Canal to Akron, Ohio. From there it was to Beaver, Pennsylvania, located at the confluence of the Ohio and Beaver Rivers. They arrived late in the day and were forced to spend the night on a wharf boat sitting in backwater. Throughout the dark hours, mosquitoes had a feast at the family’s expense, and the next morning Margaret’s face was so swollen she could hardly see. It was the last indignity—of the journey, anyway.
A paddle wheeler took the family up the Ohio to Pittsburgh, where Margaret’s anxious sisters awaited their arrival. Smoke in the sky, not the Dunfermline Abbey tower, now became the family’s beacon for home, and the closer the dark blanket, the more excited they became. Uprooted and detached from any semblance of a stable home for so long, the Carnegies rejoiced at the sight of fellow clan members on the Wood Street wharf. There to meet them were the Hogans, Annie Aitken, and Margaret’s older brother William, who had emigrated to a farm in East Liverpool, Ohio, forty miles distant via the Ohio River. They clung to one another as though they had been brought back from the dead.
As the Carnegies stood on the wharf, gazing at the many raised arms of smoke that entwined into a great body overhead, and then at the hustle and bustle of man, beast, and cart in the streets, they were in awe. As one businessman passing through Pittsburgh on his way to Wisconsin observed, “This is one of the most active, business-like places I have ever seen, with every appearance of present prosperity and future greatness; manufactures of iron, glass, and machinery are carried on extensively, and under great advantages; iron abounds in every valley, and bituminous coal of the best quality comes cantering down from surrounding mountains. . . . A place so situated must rise to greatness.”36
Just days after their arrival, the Carnegies were shocked to hear the news that an army of ax-wielding females had taken control of Allegheny’s Penn Cotton factory and routed the sheriff. Apparently their adopted home was as riotous as the one they left, and the reasons for why the town’s cotton mill workers were striking the same as those of the textile workers in Dunfermline: better wages, better hours, and better conditions. Had nothing changed for the desperate emigrants in search of opportunity?
Not until mid-August did the cotton mill workers return to their bobbin wheels, only to strike again in September. Over the next months the owners of Blackstock Cotton Mill, Gray’s Allegheny Cotton Factory, and the Penn factory were met in Slabtown’s streets with curses, rotten eggs, tomatoes, and rocks. The 1848 Cotton Mill Riots initiated a tradition of labor violence in the greater Pittsburgh area, but then Pittsburgh already had a tradition for violence and bloodletting dating back to 1749, when the French sent an expedition to assert their claims over Ohio country and to incite the Indians against the English settlers there.
After increasingly violent skirmishes, in 1758, the English, in force under General John Forbes (who happened to own the Pittencrieff estate in Dunfermline for a period) marched on Fort Duquesne to permanently vanquish the French. Hopelessly outnumbered, the French retreated posthaste and burned the fort—black smoke rising over the area for the first time. On arrival, General Forbes rechristened the smoldering ruins Pittsburgh, in honor of the English prime minister William Pitt. To ensure complete domination of the Ohio lands, the English built Fort Pitt, and the Forks never again fell to Frenchman or Indian. Many of the Scottish Highlanders and Irish who served under Forbes and subsequent commandants of the fort chose to settle in Pittsburgh. Their town motto became “A compound of worship on Sunday and whiskey on Monday, thus blending the spirits.” The mountains to the east of Pittsburgh obstructed access to the seaboard, so the town quickly became economically and socially independent.
While the town was just a fur-trading post at first, the hardworking settlers soon began to tap the area’s rich natural resources that would transform Pittsburgh into a powerful industrial center. Saline wells were discovered along the Allegheny and saltworks lined its banks, timber rafts 350 feet long and 40 feet wide were floated down the Ohio to lumber mills, rich deposits of coal and iron were discovered seemingly everywhere. The first iron furnace was built in 1793, and a Pittsburgh foundry supplied cannons, howitzers, shells, and balls to America’s fleet on Lake Erie during the War of 1812. Four years later, the city was incorporated, the population now six thousand, and complaints about the smoke had begun. “Pittsburgh is by no means a pleasant city for a stranger,” Darby’s Emigrant’s Guide for 1818 stated. “The constant volume of smoke preserve the atmosphere in a continued cloud of coal dust.”37 Regardless, in a sign of Pittsburgh’s growing respectability as an important manufacturing center, renowned New York governor DeWitt Clinton visited in 1825, as did William Carnegie’s favorite author, Charles Dickens, in 1842.
Eying continued expansion, business prospectors surveyed the land across the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh, the north side, and built a second industrial center. All eight square miles of Allegheny City was incorporated in 1840. The population was then ten thousand, and the ethnic groups were well segregated, with the Germans ensconced in the town’s eastern end, nicknamed Deutchtown, and the Irish and Scotch-Irish in the western end.38 There were ironworks, slaughterhouses, food-processing plants, cotton mills, and tanneries. Allegheny City was a premier leather tanning center, making harness leather, sole leather, belt leather, and lighter leather for shoes and clothing. While the pride of the modest city, the tanneries were the chief perpetrators in polluting water supplies with rotting flesh and stinking tree bark. Typhus was rampant.
Will and Margaret Carnegie envisioned Allegheny City as the American version of Dunfermline. In contrast to Pittsburgh and its heavy industry, Allegheny City was “a hive of family workshops” that attracted artisans like Will, although by the time the family arrived the population had exploded to twenty thousand, substantially larger than Dunfermline’s thirteen thousand citizens.39 At least Slabtown was rich with Scottish traditions, for many of the area’s most successful families were Scottish and Scotch-Irish, as well as of New England descent.40 It was infused with a spirit of independence, self-reliance, and the puritan work ethic—all qualities admired by the Carnegies.
Preparations had been made for the Carnegies’ arrival. Kitty Hogan, her husband, Thomas, Andrew Hogan, and Annie Aitken lived together in a black, two-story frame house tucked among other bleak homes and squalid hovels on Rebecca Street, said to be more rundown and muddy than any other street. (Annie’s husband, Andrew, had died several years earlier.) At the rear of the house facing the muddy back alley, Thomas and Andrew had built a loom shop with two rooms on a second floor, which were now converted into living quarters for the Carnegies. The rickety house was no Dunfermline cottage with a view of the Firth of Forth, but it was rent free until they were settled. The Hogans and Annie Aitken could afford the generosity, as they were making an honest go of it: Thomas worked as a clerk in a crockery shop, and Aunt Annie worked as a nurse and later was the proprietor of a grocery store.
Will immediately encountered three major obstacles in finding work: riots, depressed trade, and soldiers. At first brush, a job at a cotton mill seemed ideal for the onetime damask weaver, but the riots put an immediate end to fourteen hundred jobs and that possibility. While there were other industries to explore, the particularly low river levels that summer and the completion of the Cincinnati & Sandusky Railroad to Lake Erie diverted trade from Pittsburgh, forcing unemployment on the area. Not only was the job market tight, but the unemployed ranks swelled with both immigrants and returning soldiers—the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had been signed earlier in 1848, formally ending the Mexican War. It was just as
well; Will preferred to work the loom, so he commandeered the Hogans’. Unlike in Dunfermline, where the merchants supplied the materials and then sold the finished webs, Will had to buy his own supplies and then hawk his tablecloths and other wares door-to-door. He soon discovered there was little market for his fine linens; they were far too expensive compared to the factory-made versions. A ball of fear, familiar from the last months in Dunfermline, hit Andy’s gut hard when the boy recognized that for his dad’s work “the returns were meager in the extreme.”41 Had the voyage been for naught? There was no turning back. How would they eat?
Notes
1. Annie Aitken to Sisters and Friends, October 7, 1840, ACLOC, vol. 1.
2. Local Chartist organizations in Scotland numbered 78 in 1838, 169 in 1839, and 127 in 1840, illustrating the falloff in activism. See Wilson, p. 269.
3. Simpson, p. 29.
4. Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 1, pp. 34–35; Carnegie, Autobiography, pp. 8–9.
