A Most Magnificent Machine: America Adopts the Railroad, 1825–1862 (review)

Craig Miner’s sociocultural history of antebellum American railroads tells the story of the railroad’s imprint on a developing continental nation. Americans’ positive and negative reactions to railroads, garnered from myriad news articles, provide the grist for his mill of research. For most middle-and upper-class citizens, their first encounter with a large machine was the locomotive steam engine having fire flashing in its belly. Thus, this mechanical beast not only conquered the barriers of travel time and distance but also fired the imagination. The former was essential for the growth of a continental state and the latter for ushering in attendant ideas of modernity. In these two ways, the railroads expanded the societal space of business. The carriers supported the transformation of an agrarian society rich in land and natural resources into a business society creating capital.

In various overt and covert ways, not just communities but also structures and landscapes were “railroaded.” The lines opened the resources of a continental realm while lowering the transportation cost of commodities and manufactured products. People began viewing the land with a new perspective as railroads conquered vastness. Rustics spurned the hardships and banality of country life for the newly reachable enticements and glitter of the city.

Railroad manias became part of market dynamics. In the gradually all-encompassing market, large-scale financing, credit, debt, speculation, and fiscal disorders grew, and railroads played central roles in all of these. The market ensnared everyone as ideas of a Jeffersonian self-sufficient yeoman faded before the reality of a machine’s attendant. Labor-management relations took on new forms as employees challenged executives’ power. Wealthy corporations purchased legislative advantages. Monopolies began limiting railroad competition.

Miner discusses these topics across fourteen chapters. “The Baltimore Looks West” examines overcoming the Appalachian barrier to the Ohio River while pioneering long-distance railroading. “The Vast Machinery” treats the early development of local railroads. “Network” reviews the intrusion into local communities of long-distance lines such as the Western and the Erie. “Default” surveys the pitfalls regarding unregulated investing of individual, business, and government funds in a burgeoning railway enterprise. Banks and states defaulted on payment of interest for their railroad debts and thus on the trust underlying an international financial system. “Riding the Rails” presents the rail passengers’ experiences and consequent impressions concerning the new transportation. Numerous popular writings depicted experiences on the iron road. “The Soulless Corporation” has railroads, empowered by eminent domain, expanding their rights of way in the primary service of the stock- and bondholders, not the abutters or wider public. “Scalded by the Steam” recounts reactions to death in a ghastly train wreck. Such large-scale carnage had previously not been seen outside of war.

“The Near West” explores the railed networking of the American expanse extant before the Louisiana Purchase. Despite city rivalries, integrations of state economies developed apace. “Southern Strategy” finds an alternative to the northern manner of advancing railroads and reports reactions to the dread of bypassing a city in a planned rail route. With its Western & Atlantic, Georgia managed state rather than entrepreneurial development of a railroad. “The Prairie and the River” has railroads spreading across the upper Midwest and connecting the Great Lakes and Mississippi to an expanding reticulation of lines—and encountering a new challenge: the engulfing snows of the northern plains. “Panic” discusses responses to financial schemes and schemers after the Panic of 1857. “We Fly by Night” depicts “an industrializing society driving with obscured vision into an uncertain future” (p. 208). It also treats white and black passenger accommodation on trains and slavery on railroads. “Mr. Whitney’s Dream” reviews early visions of a Pacific railroad, which come to fruition in the culminating “Panic or Bust.” Miner cannily selects from the corpus of past journalism to report public opinion concerning the first thirty-seven years of U.S. railroads. These carriers did indeed help “ruin” traditional towns and destroy agrarian America...