The Dawn Of The Iron Age
Despite the superiority of the new iron age that quickly followed the
widespreading canal movement, there was a generous spirit and a chivalry
in the "good old days" of the stagecoach, the Conestoga, and the lazy
canal boat, which did not to an equal degree pervade the iron age of the
railroad. When machinery takes the place of human brawn and patience,
there is an indefinable eclipse of human interest. Somehow, cogs and
levers and differentials do not have the same appeal as fingers and eyes
and muscles. The old days of coach and canal boat had a picturesqueness
and a comradeship of their own. In the turmoil and confusion and odd
mixing of every kind of humanity along the lines of travel in the days
of the hurtling coach-and-six, a friendliness, a robust sympathy, a
ready interest in the successful and the unfortunate, a knowledge of how
the other half lives, and a familiarity with men as well as with mere
places, was common to all who took the road. As Thackeray so vividly
describes it:
The land rang yet with the tooting horns and rattling teams of
mail-coaches; a gay sight was the road in those days, before
steam-engines arose and flung its hostelry and chivalry over. To travel
in coaches, to know coachmen and guards, to be familiar with inns along
the road, to laugh with the jolly hostess in the bar, to chuck the
pretty chamber-maid under the chin, were the delight of men who were
young not very long ago. The road was an institution, the ring was an
institution. Men rallied around them; and, not without a kind of
conservatism expatiated on the benefits with which they endowed the
country, and the evils which would occur when they should be no
more:--decay of British spirit, decay of manly pluck, ruin of the breed
of horses, and so forth and so forth. To give and take a black eye was
not unusual nor derogatory in a gentleman: to drive a stage-coach the
enjoyment, the emulation, of generous youth. Is there any young fellow
of the present time, who aspires to take the place of a stoker? One sees
occasionally in the country a dismal old drag with a lonely driver.
Where are you, charioteers? Where are you, O rattling Quicksilver, O
swift Defiance? You are passed by racers stronger and swifter than you.
Your lamps are out, and the music of your horns has died away.
Behind this change from the older and more picturesque days which is
thus lamented there lay potent economic forces and a strong commercial
rivalry between different parts of the country. The Atlantic States were
all rivals of each other, reaching out by one bold stroke after another
across forest, mountain, and river to the gigantic and fruitful West.
Step after step the inevitable conquest went on. Foremost in time
marched the sturdy pack-horsemen, blazing the way for the heavier forces
quietly biding their time in the rear--the Conestogas, the steamboat,
the canal boat, and, last and greatest of them all, the locomotive.
Through a long preliminary period the principal center of interest was
the Potomac Valley, towards whose strategic head Virginia and Maryland,
by river-improvement and road-building, were directing their commercial
routes in amiable rivalry for the conquest of the Western trade.
Suddenly out from the southern region of the Middle Atlantic States went
the Cumberland National Road to the Ohio. New York instantly, in her
zone, took up the challenge and thrust her great Erie Canal across to
the Great Lakes. In rapid succession, Pennsylvania and Maryland and
Virginia, eager not to be outdone in winning the struggle for Western
trade, sent their canals into the Alleghanies toward the Ohio.
It soon developed, however, that Baltimore, both powerful and ambitious,
was seriously handicapped. In order to retain her commanding position as
the metropolis of Western trade she was compelled to resort to a new and
untried method of transportation which marks an era in American history.
It seems plain that the Southern rivals of New York City--Philadelphia,
Baltimore, and Alexandria--had relied for a while on the deterring
effect of a host of critics who warned all men that a canal of such
proportions as the Erie was not practicable, that no State could bear
the financial drain which its construction would involve, that theories
which had proved practical on a small scale would fail in so large an
undertaking, that the canal would be clogged by floods or frozen up for
half of each year, and that commerce would ignore artificial courses and
cling to natural channels. But the answer of the Empire State to her
rivals was the homely but triumphant cry "Low Bridge!"--the warning to
passengers on the decks of canal boats as they approached the numerous
bridges which spanned the route. When this cry passed into a byword it
afforded positive proof that the Erie Canal traffic was firmly
established. The words rang in the counting-houses of Philadelphia and
out and along the Lancaster and the Philadelphia-Pittsburgh
turnpikes--"Low Bridge! Low Bridge!" Pennsylvania had granted, it has
been pointed out, that her Southern neighbors might have their share of
the Ohio Valley trade but maintained that the splendid commerce of the
Great Lakes was her own peculiar heritage. Men of Baltimore who had
dominated the energetic policy of stone-road building in their State
heard this alarming challenge from the North. The echo ran "Low Bridge!"
in the poor decaying locks of the Potomac Company where, according to
the committee once appointed to examine that enterprise, flood-tides
"gave the only navigation that was enjoyed." Were their efforts to keep
the Chesapeake metropolis in the lead to be set at naught?
There could be but one answer to the challenge, and that was to rival
canal with canal. These more southerly States, confronted by the
towering ranges of the Alleghanies to the westward, showed a courage
which was superb, although, as time proved in the case of Maryland, they
might well have taken more counsel of their fears. Pennsylvania acted
swiftly. Though its western waterway--the roaring Juniata, which entered
the Susquehanna near Harrisburg--had a drop from head to mouth greater
than that of the entire New York canal, and, though the mountains of the
Altoona region loomed straight up nearly three thousand feet,
Pennsylvania overcame the lowlands by main strength and the mountain
peaks by strategy and was sending canal boats from Philadelphia to
Pittsburgh within nine years of the completion of the Erie Canal.
The eastern division of the Pennsylvania Canal, known as the Union
Canal, from Reading on the Schuylkill to Middletown on the Susquehanna,
was completed in 1827. The Juniata section was then driven on up to
Hollidaysburg. Beyond the mountain barrier, the Conemaugh, the
Kiskiminitas, and the Allegheny were followed to Pittsburgh. But the
greatest feat in the whole enterprise was the conquest of the mountain
section, from Hollidaysburg to Johnstown. This was accomplished by the
building of five inclined planes on each slope, each plane averaging
about 2300 feet in length and 200 feet in height. Up or down these
slopes and along the intermediate level sections cars and giant cradles
(built to be lowered into locks where they could take an entire canal
boat as a load) were to be hauled or lowered by horsepower, and later,
by steam. After the plans had been drawn up by Sylvester Welch and
Moncure Robinson, the Pennsylvania Legislature authorized the work in
1831, and traffic over this aerial route was begun in March, 1834. In
autumn of that year, the stanch boat Hit or Miss, from the Lackawanna
country, owned by Jesse Crisman and captained by Major Williams, made
the journey across the whole length of the canal. It rested for a night
on the Alleghany summit "like Noah's Ark on Ararat," wrote Sherman Day,
"descended the next morning into the Valley of the Mississippi, and
sailed for St. Louis."
Well did Robert Stephenson, the famous English engineer, say that, in
boldness of design and difficulty of execution, this Pennsylvania scheme
of mastering the Alleghanies could be compared with no modern triumph
short of the feats performed at the Simplon Pass and Mont Cenis. Before
long this line of communication became a very popular thoroughfare; even
Charles Dickens "heartily enjoyed" it--in retrospect--and left
interesting impressions of his journey over it:
Even the running up, bare-necked, at five o'clock in the morning from
the tainted cabin to the dirty deck; scooping up the icy water, plunging
one's head into it, and drawing it out, all fresh and glowing with the
cold; was a good thing. The fast, brisk walk upon the towing-path,
between that time and breakfast, when every vein and artery seemed to
tingle with health; the exquisite beauty of the opening day, when light
came gleaming off from everything; the lazy motion of the boat, when one
lay idly on the deck, looking through, rather than at, the deep blue
sky; the gliding on, at night, so noiselessly, past frowning hills,
sullen with dark trees, and sometimes angry in one red burning spot high
up, where unseen men lay crouching round a fire; the shining out of the
bright stars, undisturbed by noise of wheels or steam, or any other
sound than the liquid rippling of the water as the boat went on; all
these were pure delights. ¹
¹ American Notes (Gadshill Edition), pp. 180-181.
Dickens also thus graphically depicts the unique experience of being
carried over the mountain peaks on the aerial railway:
There are ten inclined planes; five ascending and five descending; the
carriages are dragged up the former, and let slowly down the latter, by
means of stationary engines; the comparatively level spaces between
being traversed, sometimes by horse, and sometimes by engine power, as
the case demands. Occasionally the rails are laid upon the extreme verge
of a giddy precipice; and looking from the carriage window, the traveler
gazes sheer down, without a stone or scrap of fence between, into the
mountain depths below. The journey is very carefully made, however; only
two carriages traveling together; and while proper precautions are
taken, is not to be dreaded for its dangers.
It was very pretty traveling thus, at a rapid pace along the heights of
the mountain in a keen wind, to look down into a valley full of light
and softness; catching glimpses, through the tree-tops, of scattered
cabins; children running to the doors; dogs bursting out to bark, whom
we could see without hearing; terrified pigs scampering homewards;
families sitting out in their rude gardens; cows gazing upward with a
stupid indifference; men in their shirt-sleeves looking on at their
unfinished houses, planning out tomorrow's work; and we riding onward,
high above them, like a whirl-wind. It was amusing, too, when we had
dined, and rattled down a steep pass, having no other motive power than
the weight of the carriages themselves, to see the engine released, long
after us, come buzzing down alone, like a great insect, its back of
green and gold so shining in the sun, that if it had spread a pair of
wings and soared away, no one would have had occasion, as I fancied, for
the least surprise. But it stopped short of us in a very business-like
manner when we reached the canal; and, before we left the wharf, went
panting up this hill again, with the passengers who had waited our
arrival for the means of traversing the road by which we had come. ¹
¹ Op. cit.
This Pennsylvania route was likewise famous because it included the
first tunnel in America; but with the advance of years, tunnel, planes,
and canal were supplanted by what was to become in time the Pennsylvania
Railroad, the pride of the State and one of the great highways of the
nation.
In the year before Pennsylvania investigated her western water route, a
joint bill was introduced into the legislatures of the Potomac Valley
States, proposing a Potomac Canal Company which should construct a
Chesapeake and Ohio canal at the expense of Maryland, Virginia, and the
District of Columbia. The plan was of vital moment to Alexandria and
Georgetown on the Potomac, but unless a lateral canal could be built to
Baltimore, that city--which paid a third of Maryland's taxes--would be
called on to supply a great sum to benefit only her chief rivals. The
bitter struggle which now developed is one of the most significant in
commercial history because of its sequel.
The conditions underlying this rivalry must not be lost sight of.
Baltimore had done more than any other Eastern city to ally herself with
the West and to obtain its trade. She had instinctively responded to
every move made by her rivals in the great game. If Pennsylvania
promoted a Lancaster Turnpike, Baltimore threw out her superb
Baltimore-Reisterstown boulevard, though her northern road to
Philadelphia remained the slough that Brissot and Baily had found it. If
New York projected an Erie Canal, Baltimore successfully championed the
building of a Cumberland Road by a governmental godmother. So thoroughly
and quickly, indeed, did she link her system of stone roads to that
great artery, that even today many well-informed writers seem to be
under the impression that the Cumberland Road ran from the Ohio to
Washington and Baltimore. Now, with canals building to the north of her
and canals to the south of her, what of her prestige and future?
For the moment Baltimore compromised by agreeing to a Chesapeake and
Ohio canal which, by a lateral branch, should still lead to her market
square. Her scheme embraced a vision of conquest regal in its sweep,
beyond that of any rival, and comprehending two ideas worthy of the most
farseeing strategist and the most astute politician. It called not only
for the building of a transmontane canal to the Ohio but also for a
connecting canal from the Ohio to the Great Lakes. Not only would the
trade of the Northwest be secured by this means--for this southerly
route would not be affected by winter frosts as would those of
Pennsylvania and New York--but the good godmother at Washington would be
almost certain to champion it and help to build it since the proposed
route was so thoroughly interstate in character. With the backing of
Maryland, Virginia, Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and probably several
States bordering the Inland Lakes, government aid in the undertaking
seemed feasible and proper.
Theoretically the daring scheme captured the admiration of all who were
to be benefited by it. At a great banquet at Washington, late in 1823,
the project was launched. Adams, Clay, and Calhoun took the opportunity
to ally themselves with it by robustly declaring themselves in favor of
widespread internal improvements. Even the godmother smiled upon it for,
following Monroe's recommendation, Congress without hesitation voted
thirty thousand dollars for the preliminary survey from Washington to
Pittsburgh. Quickly the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company and the
connecting Maryland Canal Company were formed, and steps were taken to
have Ohio promote an Ohio and Lake Erie Company.
As high as were the hopes awakened by this movement, just so deep was
the dejection and chagrin into which its advocates were thrown upon
receiving the report of the engineers who made the preliminary survey.
The estimated cost ran towards a quarter of a billion, four times the
capital stock of the company; and there were not lacking those who
pointed out that the Erie Canal had cost more than double the original
appropriation made for it.
The situation was aggravated for Baltimore by the fact that Maryland and
Virginia were willing to take half a loaf if they could not get a whole
one: in other words, they were willing to build the canal up the Potomac
to Cumberland and stop there. Baltimore, even if linked to this partial
scheme, would lose her water connection with the West, the one prized
asset which the project had held out, and her Potomac Valley rivals
would, on this contracted plan, be in a particularly advantageous
position to surpass her. But the last blow was yet to come. Engineers
reported that a lateral canal connecting the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay
was not feasible. It was consequently of little moment whether the
Chesapeake and Ohio Canal could be built across the Alleghanies or not,
for, even if it could have been carried through the Great Plains or to
the Pacific, Baltimore was, for topographical reasons, out of the
running.
The men of Baltimore now gave one of the most striking illustrations of
spirit and pluck ever exhibited by the people of any city. They refused
to accept defeat. If engineering science held a means of overcoming the
natural disadvantages of their position, they were determined to adopt
that means, come what would of hardship, difficulty, and expenditure. If
roads and canals would not serve the city on the Chesapeake, what of the
railroad on which so many experiments were being made in England?
The idea of controlling the trade of the West by railroads was not new.
As early as February, 1825, certain astute Pennsylvanians had advocated
building a railroad to Pittsburgh instead of a canal, and in a memorial
to the Legislature they had set forth the theory that a railroad could
be built in one-third of the time and could be operated with one-third
of the number of employees required by a canal, that it would never be
frozen, and that its cost of construction would be less. But these
arguments did not influence the majority, who felt that to follow the
line of least resistance and to do as others had done would involve the
least hazard. But Baltimore, with her back against the wall, did not
have the alternative of a canal. It was a leap into the unknown for her
or commercial stagnation.
It is regrettable that, as Baltimore began to break this fresh track,
she should have had political as well as physical and mechanical
obstacles to overcome. The conquest of the natural difficulties alone
required superhuman effort and endurance. But Baltimore had also to
fight a miserable internecine warfare in her own State, for Maryland
immediately subscribed half a million to the canal as well as to the
newly formed Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. In rival pageants, both
companies broke ground on July 4, 1828, and the race to the Ohio was on.
The canal company clung doggedly to the idle belief that their
enterprise was still of continental proportions, since it would connect
at Cumberland with the Cumberland Road. This exaggerated estimate of the
importance of the undertaking shines out in the pompous words of
President Mercer, at the time when construction was begun:
There are moments in the progress of time, which are counters of whole
ages. There are events, the monuments of which, surviving every other
memorial of human existence, eternize the nation to whose history they
belong, after all other vestiges of its glory have disappeared from the
globe. At such a moment have we now arrived.
This oracular language lacks the simple but winning straightforwardness
of the words which Director Morris uttered on the same day near
Baltimore and which prove how distinctly Western the new railway project
was held to be:
We are about opening a channel through which the commerce of the mighty
country beyond the Allegheny must seek the ocean--we are about affording
facilities of intercourse between the East and West, which will bind the
one more closely to the other, beyond the power of an increased
population or sectional differences to disunite.
The difficulties which faced the Baltimore enthusiasts in their task of
keeping their city "on the map" would have daunted men of less heroic
mold. Every conceivable trial and test which nature and machinery could
seemingly devise was a part of their day's work for twelve
years--struggles with grades, locomotives, rails, cars. As Rumsey,
Fitch, and Fulton in their experiments with boats had floundered
despondently with endless chains, oars, paddles, duck's feet, so now
Thomas and Brown in their efforts to make the railroad effective
wandered in a maze of difficulties testing out such absurd and
impossible ideas as cars propelled by sails and cars operated by horse
treadmills. By May, 1830, however, cars on rails, running by "brigades"
and drawn by horses, were in operation in America. It was only in this
year that in England locomotives were used with any marked success on
the Liverpool and Manchester Railroad; yet in August of this year Peter
Cooper's engine, Tom Thumb, built in Baltimore in 1829, traversed the
twelve miles between that city and Ellicott's Mills in seventy-two
minutes. Steel springs came in 1832, together with car wheels of
cylindrical and conical section which made it easier to turn curves.
The railroad was just beginning to master its mechanical problems when a
new obstacle confronted it in the Potomac Valley. It could not cross
Maryland to the Cumberland mountain gateway unless it could follow the
Potomac. But its rival, the canal, had inherited from the old Potomac
Company the only earthly asset it possessed of any value--the right of
way up the Maryland shore. Five years of quarreling now ensued, and the
contest, though it may not have seriously delayed either enterprise,
aroused much bitterness and involved the usual train of lawsuits and
injunctions.
In 1833 the canal company yielded the railroad a right of way through
the Point of Rocks--the Potomac chasm through the Blue Ridge wall, just
below Harper's Ferry--on condition that the railroad should not build
beyond Harper's Ferry until the canal was completed to Cumberland. But
probably nothing but the financial helplessness of the canal company
could have brought a solution satisfactory to all concerned. A
settlement of the long quarrel by compromise was the price paid for
state aid, and, in 1835 Maryland subsidized to a large degree both canal
and railroad by her famous eight million dollar bill. The railroad
received three millions from the State, and the city of Baltimore was
permitted to subscribe an equal amount of stock. With this support and a
free right of way, the railroad pushed on up the Potomac. Though delayed
by the financial disasters of 1837, in 1842 it was at Hancock; in 1851,
at Piedmont; in 1852, at Fairmont; and the next year it reached the Ohio
River at Wheeling.
Spurred by the enterprise shown by these Southerners, Pennsylvania and
New York now took immediate steps to parallel their own canals by
railways. The line of the Union Canal in Pennsylvania was paralleled by
a railroad in 1834, the same year in which the Allegheny Portage Railway
was constructed. New York lines reached Buffalo in 1842. The
Pennsylvania Railroad, which was incorporated in 1846, was completed to
Pittsburgh in 1854.
It is thus obvious that, with the completion of these lines and the
building of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway through the "Sapphire
Country" of the Southern Alleghanies, the new railway era pursued its
paths of conquest through the very same mountain passageways that had
been previously used by pack-horseman and Conestoga and, in three
instances out of four, by the canal boat. If one motors today in the
Juniata Valley in Pennsylvania, he can survey near Newport a scene full
of meaning to one who has a taste for history. Traveling along the
heights on the highway that was once the red man's trail, he can enjoy a
wide prospect from this vantage point. Deep in the valley glitters the
little Juniata, route of the ancient canoe and the blundering barge.
Beside it lies a long lagoon, an abandoned portion of the Pennsylvania
Canal. Beside this again, as though some monster had passed leaving a
track clear of trees, stretches the right of way of the first
"Pennsylvania," and a little nearer swings the magnificent
double-tracked bed of the railroad of today. Between these lines of
travel may be read the history of the past two centuries of American
commerce, for the vital factors in the development of the nation have
been the evolution of transportation and its manifold and far-reaching
influence upon the expansion of population and commerce and upon the
rise of new industries.
Thus all the rivals in the great contest for the trade of the West
speedily reached their goal, New York with the Erie and the New York
Central, and Pennsylvania and Maryland with the Pennsylvania and the
Baltimore and Ohio. But what of this West for whose commerce the great
struggle was being waged? When the railheads of these eager Atlantic
promoters were laid down at Buffalo on Lake Erie and at Pittsburgh on
the Ohio they looked out on a new world. The centaurs of the Western
rivers were no less things of the far past than the tinkling bells borne
by the ancient ponies of the pack-horse trade. The sons of this new West
had their eyes riveted on the commerce of the Great Lakes and the
Mississippi Valley. With road, canal, steamboat, and railway, they were
renewing the struggle of their fathers but for prizes greater than their
fathers ever knew.
New York again proved the favored State. Her Mohawk pathway gave her
easiest access to the West and here, at her back door on the Niagara
frontier, lay her path by way of the Great Lakes to the North and the
Northwest.