Steam transit and religious instruction

As I began looking for examples of the cultural reach of steam transit in the antebellum era, I knew that religion was one of the areas that I wanted to investigate. The story of sabbatarianism has been well told by other authors, but I was particularly interested to see if there were other ways in which religious culture and steam transit intersected.

Steam metaphors abounded in early American writing, and religious instruction was no exception. In an article from the Colored American on December 8, 1838, the author wrote that he saw a man hurrying along to catch a steamboat, but the man was too late. “The poor man looked very sad, bit his lip and stamped his feet, but all would do not good, it was ‘too late,’” the author observed. The steamboat had departed, and the man was not on board. The author then turned this tale to the question of religion. “How many, my young friends, are too late about religion,” the author asked his audience. “That most important of all things. We see so many who have put off religion till it is too late, that there is great reason to fear that many more will do the same thing.” Just as no one can board a steamboat which has already departed, one could not turn to religion when it was too late. The message would have been clear to the reader.

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.

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.