Steam as a metaphor

As steam transportation spread across the United States, steam as a metaphor showed up increasingly in American language, both in published works and in private correspondence or diaries. Indeed, steam-as-metaphor may have spread faster than steam transit itself. For infrastructure to expand, corporations had to be created, funded, and then built. But metaphors required only publication in a newspaper or journal, which could then be mailed around the country. The cultural reach of steam transit could move faster than the physical reach of steam, particularly in the early decades.

One example of such writing comes from a short story entitled “The Young Lawyer,” published by Thomas Shreve in February 1835 in the Cincinnati Mirror and Western Gazette of Literature and Science. In the story, one character offers a lawyer an alcoholic drink, hoping to bring up the lawyer's spirits. The character making the offer says that “A man’s like a steamboat--he may have good works aboard, but damn the bit he goes ahead, till he gets steam up.” The lawyer declined the offer of drink, but kept the metaphor: “Thank you, Joe; I’ve got as much steam about my upper works as I can navigate well under. If I should take any more aboard, some of the flues might collapse, and the boiler burst, or some other mishap come over me.” The steam metaphor was perfect for both the offer of the drink and the refusal.

Metaphors such as these were all over the place in antebellum writing, as things were described happening with “railroad speed,” and so on. Such metaphors helped extend the cultural reach of steam transit throughout the United States, naturalizing the machine's presence on the landscape even if the reader had not yet encountered it in person.

Land acquisition for railroads

When railroads were constructed in antebellum America, land acquisition was one of the first hurdles that had to be overcome. A company's desired route might appear as a continuous line on a map, but creating that continuous line required careful piecing together of a jigsaw puzzle from the various owners of land along the route. Some landowners might be willing to part with their land readily, eager for the compensation offered, while others could prove more obstinant. Any one landowner along the route could stymie the entire work, and so railroad corporations took the process of acquisition seriously in order to not delay construction.

But landowner complaints could go right up to the very last minute. In 1839, construction contractor Asa Sheldon went to a site along the route he was working on with a load of materials, clearly ready to begin work. Neighbors to the landowner drew up their animal teams in order to block his progress, and the landowner, a woman, soon arrived on the scene to block the way as well. The land was muddy, and so Sheldon brought a plank for her to stand on so she did not get wet and dirty. One of Sheldon's colleagues asked him why he did not simply force the woman out of the way and begin construction. Sheldon responded that “for more than twenty years I have not been in the habit of driving more than half way over so handsome a woman as that.” Sheldon's compliment “brought a smile to her face and loosened her tongue,” and shortly thereafter the woman stepped aside and construction began on this section of the railroad.

Constructing the railroad was not just a matter of land acquisition through legal battles or financial settlements. Railroad employees occasionally had to think on their feet and use whatever tricks or charm they could to move construction forward.

Source: Asa Sheldon, Yankee Drover: Being the Unpretending Life of Asa Sheldon, Farmer, Trader, and Working Man, 1788-1870 (1862; repr. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1988), 122-3.

NARA's antebellum railroad holdings

The focus of the National Archives is the records of the federal government. However, through their holdings relative to the Interstate Commerce Commission, they do have an assortment of antebellum railroad reports at their facility in College Park, Maryland. Since I was recently there on a research trip, I made a list of what reports are available, and have posted it for reference.

Snakeheads, again

One of the challenges of assessing antebellum travel is the lack of comprehensive accident statistics. In a previous post, I suggested that while stories of "snakeheads” (rails snapping loose and flying up through the bottom of carriages) were perhaps not as widespread as their prominence in some memoirs of the period suggests. (In the comments section of that post, a reader helpfully provided a few more examples.) While researching a series of railroad advertisements from the antebellum era, I recently came across another data point on the subject which I found of interest.

In an 1844 advertisement for its new line of cars, the Phoenix Line in Pennsylvania boasted that its cars were "all new and of a very superior quality, both for safety and comfort.” One aspect of this safety was the fact that "the bottoms of all the Cars are lined with heavy boiler iron, so that in case of a break or loose rail on the road, it will be impossible for any thing to penetrate or break through the bottom of the Cars." Clearly, this company felt that it had an important safety measure worthy of the public's attention. In all my reading on antebellum railroads, this is the first time that I've seen a specific reference to this type of safety measure in an advertisement: usually, advertisements boasted about the speed of travel or the convenience of connections. Nevertheless, it seems that the management of the Phoenix Line felt that this was worthy of the public's notice, and might help assuage any fears they had about travel.

So: while we many never know exactly how many rails posed a danger to travelers by snakeheads, this advertisement offers another way in which they were part of the contemporary conversation about travel, not just in the memories of travelers after the antebellum era.

The quotation is courtesy the American Antiquarian Society, which holds a copy of the broadside.

Releasing data on antebellum southern railroad income

I am very pleased to say that the data which undergirds a portion of chapter five of my book Railroads in the Old South is now available for anyone else to use for their own purposes. The Magazine of Early American Datasets provides a platform to share data on the early American economy, and I'm taking advantage of that to release the data on railroad income and passenger traffic that I covered in the book.

When writing Railroads in the Old South, I wanted to address the issue of what impact the railroads had on the antebellum South's consumer society. The classic assessment of railroads on this point came from U.B. Phillips, who argued that southern railroads were mostly concerned with carrying staple goods to the coast and had little meaningful traffic in the other direction. Other historians have echoed these sentiments. When I delved into the corporate records, however, a slightly different picture emerged.

When I read through the annual reports of southern railroads, I found that some reported their freight income based on which direction the freight was traveling. Thus, I could compare the company's "downfreight" (usually staple crops traveling from the interior to the port cities) to the "upfreight" (freight going into the interior). Reading through the reports of the South Carolina Railroad, I was surprised to see that on only six occasions between 1834 and 1857, the upfreight constituted less than 50% of the company's annual income. In all other instances, it was above 50%. Moreover, the value of upfreight climbed steadily throughout the antebellum era.

To be sure, it is difficult to achieve a full reconstruction of the performance of these corporations. All we have are the records they left us, which don't always answer the questions we would like to have answered. And not all railroads conformed to this pattern. Nevertheless, I thought that it was worthy of mentioning in the book as a challenge to the Phillips consensus about southern railroad performance. Additionally, I would hope that these data suggest that we are due a more comprehensive treatment of southern consumerism than we have had up to this point.

Compiling all that data took time, and so I'm happy to share it here and save others the trouble. This page links directly to the files which are downloadable on the MEAD website. I'd like to extend my sincere thanks to Billy Smith of Montana State University for getting the materials up at MEAD, and hope that others will be able to make use of this material.