1831

by Louis P. Masur

  Like Lincoln, other statesmen took sides. On the same day Charles Carroll turned the earth for the B & O, President John Quincy Adams broke ground for the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. The competing ventures had already begun suing, seeking injunctions to prevent one another from acquiring right of way along a narrow stretch of the Potomac. The railroad won two initial decisions, but on December 30, the Court of Appeals, with one prorailroad justice absent because of illness, found for the canal and allowed them to proceed with construction along the contested area from the Point of Rocks to Harpers Ferry. William Wirt was among the attorneys for the C & O; Roger Taney and Daniel Webster for the B & O. Eventually, the legislature passed a bill effecting a compromise. Each had to narrow its width so that both ventures could be accommodated along the narrow pass. In addition, a fence would separate the steam engines from the horses who pulled the boats. But the competition between the two corporations remained keen, and each wished fervently for the other’s destruction.12

  As the contest between the C & O and B & O illustrated, development entailed conflict between vested interests. In March, the Supreme Court first heard arguments in a case, Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge, that in many ways defined the changing features of the economic and legal landscape. In 1785, the Massachusetts legislature issued the Charles River Bridge Company a charter to construct a bridge between Boston and Charlestown. In return for building the structure, the company received the right to collect tolls for several decades. But in 1828, the legislature gave a charter to the Warren Bridge Company to erect a new bridge, less than one hundred yards away from the Charles River Bridge. The question before the Court was whether the old charter implicitly conferred an exclusive right to the Charles River Bridge Company that could not be taken away without just compensation, and whether the state’s actions constituted a violation of the contract clause of the Constitution, which forbade states to pass laws that impaired the obligation of contracts.13

  For Justice Joseph Story, the decision was clear. The original charter implied a monopoly that gave the Charles River Bridge Company an exclusive right, and by granting a charter to a competing company, the legislature violated its contractual agreement, overstepped its authority, and threatened to impede future investments by failing to support the original proprietors. But despite writing “a very elaborate opinion extending over sixteen folio sheets,” Story could not move the Court toward a decision. The case was continued and reargued, and by the time it was finally decided, in 1837, the Court had changed as much as the nation. John Marshall was gone, replaced by Roger Taney, whom one observer described as “a gaunt, ungainly man,” but whose words were “so clear, so simple, so admirably arranged … you never thought of his personal appearance.” Jackson had made two other appointments as well. Story remained, bitter that he had been bypassed for chief justice, and the draft opinion of six years earlier now formed the basis for a dissent: “I stand upon the old law, upon law established more than three centuries ago, in cases contested with as much ability and learning, as any in the annals of our jurisprudence, in resisting any such encroachments upon the rights and liberties of the citizens secured by public grants. I will not consent to shake their title deeds by any speculative niceties or novelties.”

  Seeing novelties as necessities, Taney and the majority ruled in favor of the Warren Bridge proprietors. To uphold the implied monopoly of the Charles River Bridge charter, he argued, would be against the interests of the public, would favor one group over another merely because they had the good fortune to arrive first, would restrain competition, and would impinge on the rights of the state to exercise its own legislative authority. “Let it once be understood that such charters carry with them these implied contracts,” he argued, “and you will soon find the old turnpike corporations awakening from their sleep, and calling upon this Court to put down the improvements which have taken their place. The millions of property which have been invested in railroads and canals upon lines of travel which had been before occupied by turnpike corporations will be put in jeopardy. We shall be thrown back to the improvements of the last century, and obliged to stand still until the claims of the old turnpike corporations shall be satisfied and they shall consent to permit these States to avail themselves of the lights of modern science, and to partake of the benefit of those improvements which are now adding to the wealth and prosperity, and the convenience and comfort, of every other part of the civilized world.”14

  Winners and losers. Development would take place, but who would pay and who would profit? Courts faced these issues repeatedly in cases having to do not only with charter rights, but also with such legal questions as eminent domain (the power of the state to confiscate land), just compensation, and negligence. Time and again they found ways to use the law as an instrument to promote competition and development. They also struggled to sort through competing patent claims. Among the “practical and ingenious improvements” that received patents in 1831 were a platform scale for weighing heavy objects, wheels for railroad cars, a process for making coke from anthracite, and a way of manufacturing gas for illumination. More than sixty patents were issued for various kinds of threshing machines, but one machine, tested on July 25, proved as revolutionary as the steam engine.15

  17. “The Testing of the First Reaping Machine Near Steele’s Tavern, Va. A.D. 1831,” n.d. (Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society)

  About a mile from the family’s Virginia farm in the Shenandoah Valley, Cyrus McCormick tested his reaping machine. Only twenty-two at the time, McCormick experimented in the blacksmith shop and emerged with a machine that promised to cut grain across a six-foot swath under any conditions. On the day of the trial run, McCormick family slaves held the reins of the horse to keep it from jolting at the whirring sound of the blades. One observer later described the device: “The cutting was done by a straight blade with a sickle edge, which received a vibratory motion from a crank, the grain being supported at the edge of the blade by stationary pieces or points of wood projecting before it. On one side of the Machine the gearing was attached by cog wheels which operated the crank, driven by one main wheel running upon the ground and supporting one side of the Machine—the crank being attached to a blade by a connecting piece. From the frame work that supported the wheels, a pair of shafts were extended forward to which a horse was attached that pulled it—and the side of the Machine extending into the grain was supported by a small wheel.” McCormick rapidly made improvements and patented it in 1834. Reporters exclaimed that, “besides the great savings of labor it effects, which is estimated by intelligent farmers at fifty per cent, it takes off the grain with far less waste than the ordinary modes.”16

  In time, the mechanical reaper transformed American agriculture and McCormick became known as “the liberator of agriculture.” The machine made the Midwest, Old Northwest, and Great Plains into the most productive agricultural land in the world. It freed farmers from the soil, sending laborers to the factories of the industrial age and others to lands still uncleared. Its cutting power was so great that some say it even helped snip the chains of the enslaved who, in Gustave Beaumont’s observation, served as the “agricultural machinery” of the slaveholders. Within two decades, the reaper would be described as “that wonderful machine … seen moving quietly and steadily on, and laying the harvest-field bare at the rate of an acre to the hour, in place of what was formerly seen, the farmer toilfully cutting up the stalks with a sickle, and depositing them on the ground by the armful.” The mechanical reaper, everyone agreed, served as an “effective and beneficent agent of human progress.”

  The success of the reaper led to conflicts over its patent. In 1848, another inventor, who claimed to have devised the machine first, challenged the extension of McCormick’s patent. The Senate Committee on Patents examined the history of the device and concluded that McCormick’s invention and testing of the reaper in the harvest of 1831 gave him priority. McCormick brought suit for patent infringement,
and in 1854 his attorney, William Seward, won the case with an argument that highlighted sectional rivalries: “The defendants stigmatize the plaintiff as a Virginian, and his machine as a Virginia humbug … . A citizen of Connecticut, a Northern man, enriched the Southern States by devising and delivering to them an automoton, which picked the seeds from the cotton boll and prepared the clean fibre for the spindle. Courts and juries in those States denied him the redress to which he was entitled for unlawful violation of his patented rights. South Carolina, to her lasting honor, vindicated her character by bestowing a munificent donation upon the inventor out of the public treasury. A Virginian has returned to us in the form of an automoton-reaper, the benefit which Eli Whitney conferred on the South. That automoton is the slave of Cyrus H. McCormick. He created the automoton and the law made it his slave for fourteen years, only nine years of which period have elapsed. The defendants have appropriated that slave to their own use. I appeal to you as just and magnanimous citizens to restore it to its owner.”17

  In depicting machinery and slavery as indistinct, Seward failed to grasp the tension his analogy created with his own political views. Seward detested slavery but, like many Americans, he worshipped technology, so much so that he fell easily into thinking about the machine as an ideal slave. He was not alone. “The engine,” wrote one enthusiast, “has no feeling. It can neither smart under the lash, nor be galled by yoke or harness. No cruelty, neglect, or exposure can occasion to it one of those tortures which mercy, with bleeding heart, weeps when she sees inflicted on a beast … . Who can estimate the suffering which the Steam Engine is destined to save, through all coming time, to man and the inferior animals? Countless labors are to be performed, and, if lifeless machines did not perform them, living creatures must.” Machines would liberate humans to pursue other endeavors: “The consequent saving of the most valuable of all earthly possessions—time—is equivalent to a new lease on life—a prolongation of the usual terms of human existence.” “Machinery seems likely to do everything,” proclaimed one editor, “and man will soon have nothing to think of but lay his head on a basket of peaches generated by heat, and fix his eye on a cherry tree from which the fruit will be pulled by a steam engine.”18

  Some went further. Machines were not a substitute for men; men were merely advanced machines. In The Results of Machinery, a paean to technology published on both sides of the Atlantic, Charles Knight argued, “The most stupid man that ever existed is, beyond all comparison, a machine more cunningly made by the hands of the Creator, more perfect in all his several parts, and with all his parts more exquisitely adapted to the regulated movement of the whole body, less liable to accidents and less injured by wear and tear, than the most beautiful machine that ever was, or ever will be invented.”

  But if the machine had its promoters, it also had its detractors. Rather than freeing workers from labor, technological advances might make humans slaves to the machine. A “furious hostility to machinery” led workers on both sides of the Atlantic to sabotage the mechanical inventions that put them out of work. By performing with greater efficiency and less expense the tasks of many men, machines displaced labor; instead of marking progress, they became a “grievous curse” to the laboring classes. “Machinery,” observed one writer, “substitutes bodies of iron, with souls of steam, to do the work of living men.” Whereas some activists, such as Stephen Simpson, urged that “all MACHINERY and IMPROVEMENTS constitute in themselves an immense stock of industry, and add immeasurably to the national wealth,” others alleged that “machinery gathers men together in large masses, confines them in unhealthy apartments, ruins their health, contracts their minds, and depraves their morals; that its wages, like the wages of sin, is death,—moral, intellectual, physical death.”19

  The new machines of the age seemed to violate nature. They literally cut through and across the face of the land and made possible construction and production on an unimaginable scale. For some, annihilating time and space was not to be welcomed but dreaded, a rupture from the established rhythms of life. “If machinery was used simply in following nature,” urged the author of a work on poverty, “it would be a blessing; but while nature has to follow it, and is distanced in the contest, it is the means of destroying harmony and producing every degree of suffering and misery.”20

  TOCQUEVILLE AND BEAUMONT

  “The fact remains that I think I am more than ever a human machine.” Tocqueville was back in Paris after nearly a year traveling in America, and he felt overwhelmed by the task that lay ahead, writing a report on the penitentiary system. He and Beaumont had stayed true to their promise and visited Sing Sing, Auburn, Charlestown, Wethersfield, Eastern State, and several other jails and penitentiaries. He sat in an immense easy chair, his thick notebook balanced on his knees, a writing stand perched next to him. With “eyes half-closed, I wait for the spirit of the penitentiary system to appear to me,” he reported. Despair was part of Tocqueville’s makeup, and it hit with particular force once he returned from the excitement and challenge of his American journey. In October, from Hartford, he had written a friend, “The great point of this life is to forget as much possible that one exists.” Faced with figuring out America, he had largely managed to succeed in the enterprise amid a swirl of travels and dinners and conversations. But now, alone with his notes, he was all too aware of his existence.21

  The term he used to describe his self-imprisonment—human machine—applied equally well to the goals of the penitentiary system, which aimed to “reduce the inmate to a silent working machine.” The means applied to do so were enforced silence, solitary confinement, and regular labor. Thinking about the American penal regime, Tocqueville wondered, “Can there be a combination more powerful for reformation than that of a prison which hands over the prisoner to all the trials of solitude, leads him through reflection to remorse, through religion to hope; makes him industrious by the burden of idleness, and which, while it inflicts the torment of solitude, makes him find a charm in the converse of pious men, whom otherwise he would have seen with indifference, and heard without pleasure?” No doubt the impression this regimen made on the prisoner ran deep. But whether or not it was durable, Tocqueville was unsure. The penitentiaries of New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania certainly marked an advance over what he saw in the South, where, at the prison in New Orleans, he encountered “men thrown in pell-mell with swine, in the midst of excrement and filth, … they are chained like wild beasts; they are not refined but brutalized.” But his research also yielded more than enough material “to prove that the penitentiary reforms and that it does not reform; that it is costly and cheap; easy to administer and impracticable.”22

  In their visit to Sing Sing, Tocqueville and Beaumont first began to speculate about the power of association and communication in society. They noted that thirty officers watched over nine hundred prisoners in an open field. Why, they wondered, were “these nine hundred collected malefactors less strong than the thirty individuals who command them?” The answer was that “the keepers communicate freely with each other, act in concert, and have all the power of association; while the convicts, separated from each other, by silence, have, in spite of their numerical force, all the weakness of isolation.” And yet “an act of simultaneous determination” on the part of the prisoners “would infallibly set them at liberty.” Tocqueville developed his ideas about the power of association and made it a cornerstone of his understanding of American society. He also seemed to recognize how tenuous the balance was between order and liberty, structure and chaos: “As long as the machinery is in good order, the discipline prevailing in their prisons will be a thousand times better than that of any in Europe. But there cannot be a half-revolt there. So the system at Sing-Sing seems in some sense like the steamships which the Americans use so much. Nothing is more comfortable, quick, and, in a word, perfect in the ordinary run of things. But if some bit of the apparatus gets out of order, the boat, the passengers and the cargo fly into the
air.”23

  Tocqueville’s metaphor emerged from his experiences. In only a month, he had already experienced delays and groundings along the Hudson. On November 26, Tocqueville and Beaumont nearly drowned on the Ohio River when, near midnight, their steamboat, the Fourth of July, struck a rock at the Burlington Bar, between Pittsburgh and Wheeling. The vessel, “driven by the current and all the forces of steam, smashed itself like a nutshell on a rock in the middle of the Ohio.” The cry of “we sink” “resounded immediately; the vessel, the gear, and the passengers started in company for eternity.” The water rushed quickly into the boat and began to fill the cabins. An eerie silence filled the air as the two hundred passengers solemnly awaited death in the freezing, ice-choked river. Tocqueville and Beaumont “grasped each other’s hand in farewell.” But “suddenly the boat stops sinking; its hull is hanging on the very reef that broke it.” Until they were picked up by another boat, the two remained “planted in the middle of the river like prisoners on a hulk.”

  Tocqueville and Beaumont survived the sinking and continued on their travels. They had come to America to study the penitentiaries and came away “doubtful whether one could succeed in reforming criminals.” They had come to understand the “mechanism of republican government” and discovered that “no central idea seems to govern the movement of the machine.” They had come to study American society and encountered a society of nations “without roots, without memories, without prejudices, without routines, without common ideas, without a national character,” yet contented and linked together, paradoxically, by self-interest (“the passion for making a fortune carries away and dominates all others”) and restlessness (“in the midst of the universal movement that surrounds him, the American could not stay still”). The travelers had come as well to explore the American wilderness.24