The Dawn of Innovation (30 page)

Dickens took that route on his trip west and wrote, “Occasionally the rails are laid upon the extreme verge of a giddy precipice; and looking down from the carriage window, the traveller gazes sheer down, without a stone or scrap of fence between, into the mountain depths below.... And it was amusing, too, when . . . we rattled down a steep pass, having no other moving power than the weight of the carriages themselves.” One enterprising sailor took a boat from eastern Pennsylvania via river and canal to the Portage Road and, after it had been hauled to Johnstown, sailed all the way to New Orleans.
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The Portage road cut the cost of moving goods across the mountains to a fourth the cost of the old wagon routes. But it was never a financial success, in large part because it was very expensive to maintain and to staff. The frequency of “breaking bulk” was also an annoyance. Merchants of the day took for granted that they had to unload and reload their goods at each change of railroads, or from railroad to canal boat. But the Portage road required reloading at each new inclined plane—ten times altogether at each crossing. In 1854, the state sold the road to the Pennsylvania Railroad, a private entity that the state had taken the lead in organizing in 1846. It began working on an Alleghany rail crossing shortly after it was incorporated,
even as it consolidated dozens of smaller roads on both sides of the mountains and forged the links required to supplant the old canal legs of the journey. The unified Philadelphia-Pittsburgh rail line opened in 1855, a two-track road completed according to the high engineering standards the Pennsylvania became famous for. The most striking engineering feature was the Summit Tunnel, 3,600 feet long, running through the summit of the highest mountain traversed, about 200 feet below the peak. The construction required four shafts, two of them 300 feet deep. Winter operating conditions were sufficiently severe that the western tunnel portal was fitted with doors that were opened only for a train passage.
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Elsewhere, line development was rather more harum-scarum, although often punctuated with feats of virtuosic engineering. The Erie, completed in 1851 and linking New Jersey's Hudson River piers to Lake Erie and the West, may be the best example.

The Erie's slogan was “between the Ocean and the Lakes,” and when it opened, it was the longest continuous train route in the country. The construction had taken almost twenty years, and completion came only months shy of exceeding a twenty-year franchise limit that would have triggered a reversion of the railroad to the State of New York, which could have sold it to the highest bidder.

It was a challenging route, wending through the Catskill and Pocono mountains, necessitating ravine-spanning bridges and difficult cuts and grading through granite terrain. Most impressive, perhaps, was the Starrucca Viaduct, consisting of Roman-style stone arches, 1,090 feet long, 25 feet wide, and between 90 and 100 feet high. When asked if he could build it, an engineer affirmed that he could, and could finish on time, “provided you don't care what it costs.”
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But the true miracle was navigating the shoals of politics and finance in a notoriously corrupt age, while fending off Wall Street's banditti. For comparison, the transcontinental railroad authorized by Congress the next decade was completed in about one-third the time, even though it crossed the Rockies.

There were multiple close calls. Several times the planned route turned out to be impassable, and by pure luck, another acceptable path was found.
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And the road was often on the verge of bankruptcy. At one
of the darkest moments, in 1846, the company was running out of money, the British were ratcheting up the price of the line's iron rails, and late British deliveries were making the completion deadline unattainable under almost any circumstances.

The rescue came from two brothers, George and Selden Scranton, who ran a floundering little iron business—a furnace, a forge, and a rolling mill—in the woods of northern Pennsylvania. The Scrantons volunteered to supply the rails, a product they had never manufactured, for slightly more than half the British price. The Erie gambled on the Scrantons, and they somehow produced adequate rails on schedule, hauling them as much as sixty miles through the forest. The Scrantons' precarious iron venture, relocated to Lake Erie and dubbed the Lackawanna Iron and Coal Company, became a major industry player in the second half of the century. Their coal business remained in Pennsylvania, and the village near their woodland factory is now the city that bears their name.
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Actual completion of the line was decidedly a matter for celebration, in an era that had grandiloquent tastes for such doings. The main event was a train trip from the railroad's Hudson River docks to Dunkirk, the small town on the southern shore of Erie that served as the line's western terminus. A two-train excursion party included President Millard Fillmore, who was born in the lake region and had practiced law in Buffalo; Secretary of State Daniel Webster; other members of the cabinet; presidential hopefuls like William Seward and Stephen Douglas; executives and bankers of the railroad; and nearly three hundred other notables.

The party assembled on May 13 at the Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan and moved in stately procession to city hall, where they were entertained by multiple military marching bands and hours of speechifying. Promptly at six the next morning, they reassembled at the Battery for the twenty-five-mile steamboat ride to the Erie terminal at Piermont, New York. There they disembarked and were directed to two trains leaving just five minutes apart. Remarkably, both were actually underway only a few minutes later than the scheduled departure.
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The steamboat trip was necessitated because some years before, the directors had inexplicably passed up an offer from the tiny Hudson and
Harlem Railroad for an inexpensive direct rail link into the city—a mistake that dogged them for the next century, not least because of the necessity to break bulk on arriving at the Hudson and restow goods on a freight ferry. Another catastrophic decision was to use the six-foot British rail gauge, when most American lines were standardizing on a gauge of four feet, eight and a half inches. The wider bed increased the labor of cutting track beds in granite, the heavier trains burdened bridge building, and it cost many millions to finally bring the Erie to standard a half century later. The choice of the British gauge was both intentional and utterly wrongheaded, for it was expressly intended to make it difficult for other lines to connect with the Erie—to its great disadvantage as the national network steadily integrated after the Civil War.
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The celebratory trip itself came close to fiasco. Almost as soon as the train reached steeper terrain, the first engine proved inadequate to its load. (There had been a bitter factional argument over engines within the engineering staff.) After a considerable delay, the second train's engine was linked to the rear of the first, which solved the problem. According to the testimony of the conductor, engineer, and several passengers, the trains then traversed a thirty-four-mile stretch from Port Jervis to Narrowsburg in just thirty-five minutes, an extraordinary speed for the time. Some passengers were sufficiently alarmed to leave the party. Webster must have had the ride of his life. To get a full view of the scenery, he had insisted on riding in a rocking chair tethered to a flat car, protected only by a steamer blanket and a bottle of rum.
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In the event, the party reached Elmira, 283 miles from New York within minutes of the scheduled 6:09 PM arrival time. They were greeted there with a seven-hour banquet but were off again the next morning at 6:30 and arrived at the scheduled 1:45 PM at Dunkirk, where they tucked into yet another enormous meal. The bill of fare was preserved for posterity: “Chowder, a yoke of oxen barbecued whole, 10 sheep roasted whole, beef a la mode, boiled ham, corned beef, buffalo tongues, bologna sausage, beef tongues (smoked and pickled), 100 roast fowls, hot coffee, etc.”
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The broad outline of the modern railroad network east of the Mississippi was more or less in place by 1860. There were four large east-west
networks. Two originated in New York: the Erie and Cornelius Vanderbilt's New York Central, an 1850s consolidation often connecting roads. Both the Pennsylvania and the B&O offered through service to Pittsburgh and beyond from Philadelphia and the Chesapeake region respectively. The outline of a rail network emanating from Chicago was in place, with multiple connections both with the four east-west lines and to Cincinnati, St. Louis, and most other western cities besides.

American development was still very inconsistent, much like the quality of its trains, but the breadth and power of the economic surge was unmistakable. But if British investors seemed almost irresistibly drawn to American bonds, elite British opinion remained dismissive of “Jonathan's” pretensions.

Two other European travelers visited the United States shortly before Trollope did. One, a British military man and travel writer, had the same caustic tone as Trollope but with none of her natural empathy. He was especially entertained that the New York legislature consisted “chiefly of farmers, shopkeepers, and country lawyers, and other persons quite unaccustomed to abstract reasoning.” Unlike Tocqueville, he did not believe the middle class could run a country. A German traveler, Duke Bernhard of Saxe-Weimer-Eisenach, like Tocqueville a noble from one of the most royal European lines, was critical of a great deal of what he saw, especially in the South, but much more favorably impressed than British travelers.

A British journal reviewed the two books together in 1829 and decided that the German's views could only be accounted for by the fact that most of his previous travels had been on the continent: “The rapidity of the progress made in [America] must be the more striking to one who compares them, as the Duke would do, with the cities [on the continent] . . . than to a native of Great Britain.... So the differences between our two authors may be easily accounted for by the different tenours of their previous experiences and habits.” The reviewer concluded happily that there is “nothing in [America] . . . to excite envy or jealousy.”
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B
Y 1860, THE UNITED STATES WAS HOME TO 31 MILLION PEOPLE, OR NEARLY as populous as Great Britain and France. Until the 1830s, population growth had been dominated by the rate of natural increase. Immigration accelerated in the 1830s, and from the 1840s until the 1920s consistently accounted for a quarter to a third of the total growth in population. As the country grew, its center of gravity also steadily moved west.

The country was urbanizing. At the turn of the century, three-quarters of employed Americans worked in agriculture, but by 1860, only 56 percent of workers toiled on a farm. Agricultural employment accounted for fewer than a third of jobs in the Northeast by 1860 but still more than 60 percent in the Midwest, and a nearly unchanging three-quarters in the South, which remained dependent on King Cotton.
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The Northeast still commanded about half of the country's total income, but average incomes in the Northeast and the Midwest had begun to converge and would be approaching parity by the end of the century.
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The Northeast's large income advantage reflected both its lower reliance on agriculture and greater concentration of good-paying, white-collar, service employment—banking, insurance, accounting, wholesale and retail trade. The white-collar pay advantage was particularly strong in the nineteenth century. Edward Tailer was twenty in 1850, when he started work as an assistant clerk for a New York dry goods importer while complaining of his $50 annual salary. But within two years, and after two job changes, he was making $1,000—a solid middle-class income. He then went on the road as a traveling salesman at $1,200 and had his own business when he was twenty-five.
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