A Natural History of the Early American Railroad

Early railroad advocates promised that steam locomotion would allow human enterprise to triumph over natural limitations – to “annihilate space and time” – yet they simultaneously situated the new technology within prevailing ideas about nature, geography, and commerce. In Baltimore, the birthplace of American railroading, citizens ranging from artisans to bank presidents imagined that the railroad’s annihilative capacities would restore “natural” patterns of trade that had been subverted by the “artifice” of the Erie Canal. Examining how the pinnacle of nineteenth-century artifice could serve a natural order reveals the ways in which ideas about nature inflected the industrial pursuits of Early Republic Americans. Railroad supporters not only read what we would call geography as “nature,” they considered many seemingly social phenomena – including business decisions, urbanization, and internal improvement – extensions of natural phenomena. For the railroad proponents, nature was not separate from society; rather, nature set the limits and determined the course of social action.