Chapter 29

INDUSTRIAL ADVANCE BY 1840

[1840]

During the War of 1812 we had in England an industrial spy, whose campaign there has perhaps accomplished more for the country than all our armies did. It was Francis C. Lowell, of Boston. Great Britain was just introducing the power loom. The secret of structure was guarded with all vigilance, yet Lowell, passing from cotton factory to cotton factory with Yankee eyes, ears, and wit, came home in 1814, believing, with good reason, as it proved, that he could set up one of the machines on American soil. Broad Street in Boston was the scene of his initial experiments, but the factory to the building of which they led was at Waltham. It was owned by a company, one of whose members was Nathan Appleton. Water furnished the motive power. By the autumn of 1814 Lowell had perfected his looms and placed them in the factory. Spinning machinery was also built, mounting seventeen hundred spindles. English cotton-workers did not as yet spin and weave under the same roof, so that the Lowell Mill at Waltham may, with great probability, be pronounced the first in the world to carry cloth manufacture harmoniously through all its several successive steps from the raw stuff to the finished ware.

From this earliest establishment of the power-loom here, the cotton-cloth business strode rapidly forward. Fall River, Holyoke, Lawrence, Lowell, and scores of other thriving towns sprung into being. Every year new mills were built. In 1831 there were 801; in 1840, 1,240; in 1850, 1,074. Henceforth, through consolidation, the number of factories decreased, but the number of spindles grew steadily larger. This rise of great manufacturing concerns was facilitated by a new order of corporation laws. There had been corporations in the country before 1830, as the Waltham case shows; but the system had had little evolution, as incorporation had in each case to proceed from a special legislative act. In 1837 Connecticut passed a statute making this unnecessary and enabling a group of persons to become a corporation on complying with certain simple requirements. New York placed a similar provision in its constitution of 1846. The Dartmouth College decision of the United States Supreme Court in 1819, interpreting an act of incorporation as a contract, which, by the Constitution, no State can violate, still further humored and aided the corporation system.

So early as 1816 the New York and Philadelphia stages made the distance from city to city between sun and sun. The National Road from Cumberland was finished to Wheeling in 1820, having been fourteen years in construction and costing $17,000,000. It was subsequently extended westward across Ohio and Indiana. It was thirty-five feet wide, thoroughly macadamized, and had no grade of above five degrees. Over parts of this road no less than 150 six-horse teams passed daily, besides four or five four-horse mail and passenger coaches. In Jackson's time, when for some months there was talk of war with France and extra measures were thought proper for assuring the loyalty of Louisiana, swift mail connections were made with the Mississippi by the National Road. Its entire length was laid out into sections of sixty-three miles apiece, each with three boys and nine horses, only six hours and eighteen minutes being allowed for traversing a section, viz., a rate of about ten miles an hour. Great men and even presidents travelled by the public coaches of this road, though many of them used their own carriages. James K. Polk often made the journey from Nashville to Washington in his private carriage. Keeping down the Cumberland River to the Ohio, and up this to Wheeling, he would strike into the National Road eastward to Cumberland, Md. He came thus so late as 1845, to be inaugurated as President; only at this time he used the new railway from Cumberland to the Relay House, where he changed to the other new railway which had already joined Baltimore with Washington.

But all these improvements were soon to be overshadowed by the work of the railway and locomotive. The first road of rails in America was in the Lehigh coal district of Pennsylvania. Its date is uncertain, but not later than 1825. In 1826, October 7th, the second began operation, at Quincy, Mass., transporting granite from the quarries to tide-water, about three miles. This experiment attracted great attention, showing how much heavier loads could be transported over rails than upon common roads, and with how much greater ease and less expense ordinary weights could be carried. The same had been demonstrated in England before. Locomotives were not yet used in either country, but only horse-power. The conviction spread rapidly that not only highway transportation but even that by canals would soon be, for all large burdens, either quite superseded or of secondary importance. In 1827 the Maryland Legislature chartered a railroad from Baltimore to Wheeling. The projectors, though regarding it a bold act, promised an average rate between the two cities of at least four miles per hour. Subscriptions were offered for more than twice the amount of the stock. The Massachusetts Legislature the same year appointed commissioners to look out a railway route between Boston and Hudson River. Also in this year a railway was completed at Mauch Chunk, Pa., for transporting coal to the landing on the Lehigh. The descent was by gravity, mules being used to haul back the cars.

In most country parts, the new railway projects encountered great hostility. Engineers were not infrequently clubbed from the fields as they sought to survey. Learned articles appeared in the papers arguing against the need of railways and exhibiting the perils attending them. When steam came to be used, these scruples were re-enforced by the alleged danger that the new system of travel would do away with the market for oats and for horses, and that stage-drivers would seek wages in vain.

The first trip by a locomotive was in 1828, over the Carbondale and Honesdale route in Pennsylvania. The engine was of English make, and run by Mr. Horatio Allen, who had had it built. This was a year before the first steam railroad was opened in England. July 4, 1828, construction upon the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was begun. It, like the other early roads, was built of stone cross-ties, with wooden rails topped with heavy straps of iron. Such ties were soon replaced by wooden ones, as less likely to be split by frost, but the wooden rail with its iron strap might be seen on branch lines, for instance, between Monocacy Bridge and Frederick City, Md., so late as the Civil War.