1831

by Louis P. Masur

  Such, however, was the import of nullification, “a word which contains within itself an absurdity, importing a pretended right of one State in this Union, by virtue of her sovereignty, to make null and void, which it presupposes to be null and void before.” “Philosophically, politically, morally considered,” shrieked Adams, who strained his voice as he spoke, nullification “is an inversion of all human reasoning; it cannot be conceived without confusion of thought; it cannot be expressed without solecism of language, and terms of self-contradiction … . Stripped of the sophistical argumentation in which this doctrine has been habited, its naked nature is an effort to organize insurrection against the laws of the United States.” A tempest, warned Adams, was forming, and though it might serve only to purify the atmosphere, it threatened desolation. As he concluded, he outlined the consequences of nullification: “It strips us of that peculiar and unimitated characteristic of all our legislation—free debate. It makes the bayonet the arbiter of law; it has no argument but the thunderbolt. It were senseless to imagine that twenty-three States of the Union would suffer their laws to be trampled upon by the despotic mandate of one. The act of nullification would itself be null and void. Force must be called in to execute the law of the Union. Force must be applied by the nullifying State to resist its execution … . The blood of brethren is shed by each other. The scaffold and the battlefield stream alternately with the blood of their victims. Let this agent but once intrude upon your deliberations, and Freedom will take her flight for heaven. The Declaration of Independence will become a philosophical dream, and uncontrolled, despotic sovereignties will trample with impunity, through a long career of after ages, at interminable or exterminating war with one another, upon the indefeasible and unalienable rights of man.”62

  In time, the threat of force arrived. Despite the efforts of Southern Unionists, nullifiers gained control of the South Carolina legislature, and on November 24, 1832, passed an Ordinance of Nullification against the Tariff Acts of 1828 and 1832. Some nullifiers hoped that, despite unambiguous pronouncements, the president, a native son of South Carolina, would somehow endorse their position. Given his disregard of the Supreme Court in Worcester, v. Georgia, some commented that “the old man seems to be more than half a Nullifier himself.”63

  Such wishful thinking vanished like the morning fog. On December 10, 1832, Jackson responded with a Nullification Proclamation in which he declared “the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State, incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.” Declaring that “disunion by armed force is treason,” Jackson threatened to use whatever means necessary to save the country. Preparations for armed conflict accelerated. Robert Hayne, now governor of South Carolina, called for a volunteer force of ten thousand men; South Carolina’s Unionists informed the president that eight thousand men stood ready to heed a call to arms. Only with the passage of a compromise tariff in 1833 that significantly lowered duties did the conflict abate. Along with the new tariff, Congress passed a Force Bill that authorized the use of federal troops to enforce compliance with tariff laws. South Carolina repealed its nullification ordinance but, in a final truculent act, nullified the Force Bill. The union had passed “under one of the deepest Eclipses which has ever obscured it,” but the tensions between state and nation continued to cast shadows and darkness.64

  MACHINES AND NATURE

  RAILROADS AND REAPERS

  “A rail-road! You never travelled on a rail-road! Then you have yet to witness one of the noblest triumphs of human ingenuity.” It was November, and Robert Dale Owen, editor of the Free Enquirer, could hardly contain himself. He had left New York City on a journey, and just outside of Albany, he boarded a car on the recently opened Mohawk and Hudson railway line. As he arrived, he found “the steam engine already smoking, and six or eight stages—cars they are usually termed though scarcely differing except for their wheels from ordinary stages—ready to receive passengers.” The engine initially “set off without its train (as one would walk a race horse about, before starting) to get up its steam.” On its return, six nine-seated cars were attached, “and the next minute we were off at the rate of twenty miles an hour, whistling past surrounding objects pretty much in the same style as if mounted on a fleet horse at full gallop.” The party traversed the entire line of twelve and a half miles in less than twenty-five minutes. “No one,” concluded Owen, “can enter a rail-road car for the time, and thus find himself conveyed with perfect ease and safety, without feeling, that a new era in the annals of locomotion has commenced … . That, in twenty years from this time, the entire Union will be intersected with rail-roads, it needs not the spirit of prophesy to foresee; but how immense the advantages, mental and moral perhaps as well as physical, which may thence result, it is not easy to predict.”1

  “RAIL-ROAD MANIA” is “epidemic,” declared editors across the nation. One passenger compared a railway journey to “sailing on dry land,” and expressed no surprise that “there is Railroad fever abroad in the land; for whoever see the operation of railroad travelling … cannot but be infected with this contagious fever.” James Alexander reported, “Rail-roads were the universal topic of conversation in all parts of the country.” Railroad travel made plausible what had previously seemed impossible. “The increasing facilities for journeying from one portion of our great republic to another,” imagined one writer, “will soon cause extended space, or remote distance, to be a matter scarcely worth taking into consideration.” “The Americans are indeed a locomotive people,” concluded a contributor to one newspaper, and the time was approaching when a young man would “sleep one night in Penobscot, the next in Cincinnati, the third in Charleston, the fourth in Philadelphia, and the fifth in a remote corner of Lake Winnipeg!” The new form of travel “annihilated time and space by its celerity” and overthrew in a day “notions which have been received from our ancestors, and verified by our own experience … . The world has received a new impulse.” But as remarkable as that seemed, railroads too would become outmoded: “Mounting the air by means of steam balloon (no improbable conjecture), man will circumnavigate the globe in less time than it takes this paper to travel to Ohio … . The sun will be partially eclipsed by the flights of men.”2

  Railroad developments occurred so quickly that someone sheltered from the news for several weeks could miss an entire phase of its history. Only three months before Owen’s journey, William Seward traveled on the Mohawk and Hudson line. He boarded the car and, while he was waiting, “a fine large gray horse was attached to it, by shafts, exactly like those of a one-horse wagon.” The horse drew the stage car “through hills and over valleys,” and after four miles stopped to drink. A new horse replaced the gray, and the journey of twelve miles was completed in eighty minutes. By November, a horseless engine was in place and railroad lines around the country had placed orders for steam locomotives. Steam power had already transformed river travel, but “rail roads, associated with steam power,” predicted Niles’ Weekly Register, “are about to accomplish a much greater revolution in the future affairs of men and nations, than steam, itself, has yet brought about in the present condition of things.”3

  Appropriately, the engine on the Mohawk and Hudson line was named the Robert Fulton. Built in England by Robert Stephenson, whose early designs made the Liverpool and Manchester Railroad a model for what was possible with steam locomotion, the Robert Fulton did not work so well on the hilly American landscape as it had on flat British soil. The engine often derailed, and its low steam pressure kept it from hauling heavy loads over steep grades. But American manufacturers learned about steam engines by literally taking them apart and putting them back together again. In October 1830, Robert Stevens, the president and chief engineer of the Camden and Amboy Railroad, sailed for England to purchase a loc
omotive for the new line. He made his way to Stephenson and Company in Newcastle-on-Tyne and placed an order for an engine that would come to be known as the John Bull. Completed on June 18, the John Bull was tested, disassembled, and shipped to Philadelphia, where it arrived in August. The engine cost about four thousand dollars; a tariff on British locomotives added 25 percent to the price. The engine body, boiler, wheels, axles, and four crates of parts reached Bordentown, New Jersey, on September 4, and Isaac Dripps, a twenty-one-year-old steamboat mechanic who worked for Stevens, faced the task of putting it together. There were no drawings. There were no instructions. Dripps and his assistants worked for ten days, assembling and reassembling, adjusting and improvising. Finally, they filled the boiler, lit the flame, opened the throttle, and cheered as the John Bull lurched into motion.

  On Saturday, November 12, Stevens invited politicians and local dignitaries to ride the John Bull along the test track. One participant described the event: “They had a coach that held thirty passengers attached to the steam car and ran one and a quarter miles in two minutes and twenty-two seconds. This they repeated a great many times, as there was a great assemblage of people there and all wanted to ride. The legislature was invited and attended in a body, and a great many of the best people in New Jersey. Robert Stevens conducted the machinery itself. It was a fine performance and gave great satisfaction.” 4

  Sometime during the fall, Matthias Baldwin inspected the John Bull. Baldwin, an evangelical Presbyterian and Whig supporter, had earlier in the year designed a one-fourth-scale working model of a locomotive engine. Placed at the Philadelphia Museum, the engine drew two cars with four passengers each around a track every evening. Throughout the summer, lines at the museum formed early. Baldwin turned his energies toward building a full-size locomotive engine. Named Old Ironsides, it first ran in November 1832 on the Philadelphia, Germantown, and Norristown Railroad. Here was the beginning of the Baldwin Locomotive Works, which dominated engine design and production in the nineteenth century.5

  16. “Railroad Depot at Philadelphia” (Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia)

  What started as novelty soon became ubiquitous as legislatures and various commercial interests across the nation promoted the construction of railroad lines. States held railroad conventions. Investors sent stock prices soaring. Shares of the Camden and Amboy, for example, rose from twenty-three to seventy dollars before the John Bull even arrived. The fever spread south as well as north. In Richmond, the principal engineer called the railroad system “the triumph of the age—the ultimate effects of its introduction are incalculable.” The South Carolina Canal and Rail-Road Company began construction on a route from Charleston to the west bank of the Savannah River, below Hamburg (now part of North Augusta, South Carolina), a distance of 133 miles. Hoping to make Charleston “one of the chief Atlantic cities for the Imports and Exports of ‘the Great West,’” the directors celebrated the railroad as evidence of “a spirited determination … to shake off the imputation that South Carolina neither possesses the means, enterprise, or capability, of bettering her condition.” Even in New Orleans, known as the “wet grave” because water rose so close to the surface that holes had to be drilled into coffins to keep them sunk, the Pontchartrain Railroad connected the city with the lake five miles to the north.6

  The most ambitious railroad line in the country, the Baltimore and Ohio, had been chartered in 1827. At the laying of the first stone on July 4, 1828, ninety-one-year-old Charles Carroll, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, turned the earth and proclaimed, “I consider this among the most important acts of my life, second only to my signing the Declaration of Independence, if even it be second to that.” The first line of twelve miles to Ellicotts Mills opened in 1830. On January 4, the B & O announced a contest. The directors offered a prize of four thousand dollars for a four-wheel, coal-burning locomotive that weighed no more than three and a half tons yet could draw fifteen tons at fifteen miles per hour. Their goal was to develop “a supply of Locomotive Steam Engines of American manufacture.” A year before, Peter Cooper, a wealthy manufacturer and inventor, had “rigged up” the Tom Thumb, a one-ton locomotive, and ran it successfully. That it lost a race to a horse-drawn car did little to diminish the enthusiasm for steam power. The B & O received five entries. One exploded during its trial run. Another vibrated so badly that pieces of the machine went flying. Phineas Davis’s York captured the prize, and in July the engine carried five loaded cars the length of the line. By December, when the extension to Frederick, Maryland, opened, a passenger could travel sixty-one miles west of Baltimore by railroad.7

  Two decades later, the line neared its final destination, the Ohio River at Wheeling. Nationally, about a hundred miles of rail had expanded into sixty-five hundred miles of iron road. Little got in the way. Sharp curves and severe inclines, which required less blasting and digging, kept construction costs down and challenged engineers to design ever more powerful, dependable engines. Viaducts leaped rivers and chasms. Lanterns allowed engines to run at night, and cowcatchers, attached to the front of the engine, kept the tracks cleared of cattle and people. Andrew Jackson, who often voiced disdain at the rage for internal improvements, yielded to the “onward spirit of the age” when, in 1833, he boarded the B & O and became the first president to ride the rails. That same year, a prisoner of Jackson’s government, Black Hawk, saw the railway line and expressed surprise that so much labor and money would be spent simply to make a good road for travel. “I prefer riding on horseback,” he concluded.8

  As Black Hawk’s remark suggests, the railroad was not without its critics. Labor activists condemned the railroad corporations as yet another example of a general movement toward greater inequality of wealth. George Henry Evans favored the chartering of the New York and Harlem Rail Road, but protested that the aldermen received grants of stock in return for their support. “We already have too many laws to favor capitalists,” he snorted. Amos Gilbert concluded: “Rail roads, canals, and every other facility, whether for growing, manufacturing, or transporting the products of labour, would unquestionably be of benefit, if society were rightly constructed; if all were sharers and equal sharers in the benefit. That they are not is not attributable to the improvements themselves, but to an unequal, unnatural, anti-social system which excludes the great mass from any share in the advantages.”9

  Recognizing the huge profits accruing to railroad corporations, workers urged that they were entitled to generous compensation for the arduous work of clearing land, quarrying stone, and laying rails. At the end of June, Irish laborers, dismayed at having not been paid and disgusted by a ban on whiskey, refused to continue working on a nine-mile section of the B & O. The supervisor summoned a sheriff who was greeted “by the workmen to the number of 135 marching with their stone hammers and other tools, with a handkerchief on a pole for a flag … . One of them seized the reins of the Sheriffs horse and refused to let him proceed, and all were totally regardless of his authority and injunctions.” The workers bashed, broke, and burned the iron, stone, and wood. Only with the arrival of the militia, and the eventual payment of the workers, who earned three to four dollars a week, was harmony restored.

  Others worried that thousands would squander their savings by investing in railroad schemes. “The railroad mania,” warned one writer, “will divest many of our citizens of their prudence, and involve them in absurd and ruinous expenditures on railroads, where the scarceness of the population, or physical obstacles, render them inexpedient.” “The tendency of our countrymen,” he lamented, “is towards excess in every speculation which presents the chance of profit.” Where wealth created, it also destroyed, and one investor’s opportunity was another’s ruin. The railroad not only pitted worker against capitalist, but corporations against one another. Though orators such as Henry Clay might talk about turnpikes, canals, and railroads as equal components of a transportation revolution, proponents of one form of internal improv
ement frequently battled proponents of another. The rapid emergence of the railroad posed a threat to the supporters of canals, who, with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, envisioned an arterial system of waterways for the nation. Railroad advocates argued that railroads were less expensive to construct, faster, safer, healthier, and more convenient than canals. Canals required more land than railroads and relied on animal power. Their still waters spawned disease. It was doubtful that a canal could negotiate the altitudes of the Allegheny Mountains, but a railroad could. And severe weather would not keep locomotives frozen in place.10

  Some politicians gave careful thought to railroads versus waterways as a means of development before choosing one over the other. In 1831, a twenty-one-year-old pioneer built a flatboat on the Sangamon in Illinois and explored the river. The following year, proud of his service as a captain in Black Hawk’s War, he ran for election to the Illinois legislature. He praised railroads as “a very desirable object” that served as a “never failing source of communication, between places of business remotely situated from each other,” but he lamented the great expense of constructing a railroad line and recommended to the voters that the state devote its resources to improving the navigation of the Sangamon. Abraham Lincoln lost that first election; years later a railroad would carry him to Washington and take his body back home.11