Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Jacksonian New England [1 ed.] 9780826264367, 9780826214997

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Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Jacksonian New England

Shades of Blue and Gray Series Edited by Herman Hattaway and Jon L. Wakelyn The Shades of Blue and Gray Series offers Civil War studies for the modern reader—Civil War buff and scholar alike. Military history today addresses the relationship between society and warfare. Thus biographies and thematic studies that deal with civilians, soldiers, and political leaders are increasingly important to a larger public. This series includes books that will appeal to Civil War Roundtable groups, individuals, libraries, and academics with a special interest in this era of American history.

Capitalism, Politics,

and

Railroads

in

Jacksonian New England

Michael J. Connolly

Un ive r s i t y o f M i s s o u r i Pre s s Columbia and London

Copyright © 2003 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 07 06 05 04 03 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Connolly, Michael J., 1971– Capitalism, politics, and railroads in Jacksonian New England / Michael J. Connolly. p. cm. — (Shades of blue and gray series) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8262-1499-1 (alk. paper) 1. Railroads—New England—History—19th century. 2. Railroads—Economic aspects—New England. 3. New England—Politics and government—19th century. I. Title. II. Series. HE2771.A11C66 2003 385'.0974'09034—dc22 2003016354 ™ This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Designer: Jennifer Cropp Typesetter: Crane Composition, Inc. Printer and binder: The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group Typefaces: Minion, Flareserif, and ExPonto

For my parents, Michael and Dianne,

and my wife, Mary Beth

Contents Acknowledgments ix

Introduction The Invention that Distinguishes this Age Railroads and Antebellum America

1

One "Look Out When the Bell Rings!" Railroads and Jacksonian Entrepreneurial Politics

21

Two "Everybody Must Go to Boston" Railroads, Capitalism, and the New Hampshire Jacksonians

73

Three "Mere Naked Right" Essex County Whigs and the Expansion of Public Authority

Four Desperation and Restoration Essex County Whigs and the Economics of Railroads Conclusion Bibliography Index

205

188 191

153

119

Acknowledgments

Ultimately, one person writes a book, but behind that person are dozens who advise in times of question, assist in times of trouble, correct in times of error, and inspire in times of doubt. My mentor, advisor, and friend Jon L. Wakelyn showed a remarkable degree of patience over our ten-year acquaintance, and I measure my success as a writer and historian against his achievements. My professors at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.—Gary Gerstle, Jerry Z. Muller, and Larry Poos—offered assistance and encouragement at every turn. Good friends and historians John Allen, Clayton Jewett, and Ken Nivison read much of this in rough manuscript and pushed me to shore up my points and pursue new directions. The Paulist Fathers generously supported my efforts, and their patronage and encouragement allowed me to remain in Washington, D.C., and complete my research. The staffs at the Library of Congress, New Hampshire Historical Society, Peterborough (N.H.) Historical Society, Peabody Essex Museum, and Haverhill (Mass.) Historical Society were also very helpful and informative. I am particularly thankful for the support and love of Mary Beth Connolly and my parents, Michael and Dianne. This work is a tribute to their belief in me.

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Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Jacksonian New England

Introduction The Invention that Distinguishes this Age Railroads and Antebellum America

Let me say, fellow-citizens, that in the history of human inventions there is hardly one so well calculated as that of railroads to equalize the condition of men. Daniel Webster, Grafton, New Hampshire, August 28, 1847

A major extension of public power to private railroad corporations occurred during the construction of the Eastern Railroad into Newburyport, Massachusetts, and across the mouth of the Merrimack River. In March 1826, the Massachusetts legislature had chartered a toll bridge across the river and incorporated it under the name of the Newburyport Bridge Company. When the Eastern Railroad (ERR) was chartered in 1836 to cross the river at the same point, an interesting problem arose—which charter would prevail? The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts spoke twice in 1839 on the matter of dual rights of publicly chartered businesses on the same plot of land, and both times the rights of the railroads won. First, a water power company lost its appeal against the Boston & Worcester Railroad crossing its “franchise,” and then—more importantly, for our case—the Newburyport Turnpike Company lost its case against the ERR that its rights were harmed by a railroad crossing the road. “[T]he powers and privileges of each shall be no further limited or restrained, than may be reasonably necessary to enable the other to accomplish the public purpose, for which it was

1

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Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Jacksonian New England

established,” Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw wrote. This reasoning left the bridge company without recourse, and they quickly settled with the ERR.1 In the April 1840 settlement, the Newburyport Bridge Company and the ERR agreed to share a new double-decker bridge, with the railroad on top and the toll bridge below. The agreement contained two major stipulations. First, the bridge company would tear down the old bridge and keep the materials, while the ERR would build a new one and pay the company $8,000 once it was completed. Second, if the bridge company refused or was unable to tear down the Newburyport Bridge within thirty days of the agreement, the ERR—empowered by charter to build across the River at that spot—had the power to rip it down themselves. William Davis signed for the bridge company and George Peabody for the ERR. Witnessing the deal as justice of the peace was Benjamin T. Reed, the treasurer of the ERR. Compelled by law and the threat of destruction, the Newburyport Bridge Company forfeited to the ERR their formerly exclusive right to cross the Merrimack. One public power gave way to another.2 The new bridge arrangement did not go unchallenged, however. River merchants downstream in Salisbury, Massachusetts, felt the new bridge infringed upon their river-to-ocean trade and filed an injunction against both companies to stop construction. The new lower bridge endangered the hay and merchandise trade along the lower Merrimack valley, they charged, and some even insinuated that the bridge was deliberately built lower to force trade off the water and onto the rails. “It was not alone the possible mischief of the bridge that prompted the complainants,” the Newburyport Daily Herald reported, “but alarm at what they considered a deliberate assumption of power. Being the first to feel it, they conceived it to be their duty to be the first to attempt to arrest its encroachments.” The ERR claimed that as a public project, it was immune to an injunction. Further, their charter gave them the 1. Leonard W. Levy, The Law of Commonwealth and Chief Justice Shaw, 123–27. Shaw had an enormous influence on railroad law in the nineteenth century. See Levy’s two chapters on this particular jurisprudence, 118–65. 2. “Copy of the Agreement between the Proprietors of the Newburyport Bridge and the Eastern Railroad Company, April 8, 1840,” Newburyport Bridge Company Papers, Box 3: Folder 2, Peabody Essex Museum–Phillips Library (hereafter cited as PEM).

Introduction

3

authority to build the bridge, and therefore they were also immune to damage suits. According to the railroad’s attorneys, the charter insulated the ERR from all legal jeopardy. The Supreme Judicial Court disagreed. The ERR may, in fact, be using public power, the court held, but they were still a private corporation. That status did not grant them legal immunity from either injunctions or suits. The decision was an important one, as it placed limits on corporate power. If the ERR had won, citizens would have been legally powerless to stop or fight railroad development if they felt it damaged their lives or property. Railroads could have hidden behind their quasipublic status and stayed out of court.3 Meanwhile, on February 19, 1842, years of debate and contention within New Hampshire Democracy came to a violent climax in downtown Concord. At a Democratic party “Grand Rally” meant to finalize party policy, boost the gubernatorial candidacy of Henry Hubbard, and energize loyal Democrats for the March elections, the two wings of New Hampshire Democracy battled for control of the meeting and, ultimately, the soul of the party. Led by editor Nathaniel Baker and Concord politician Joseph Robinson, radical Democrats—dubbed “loco-focos,” “ultras,”“Destructives,” and “New Lights” by their critics—quickly moved to seize control of the agenda by appointing Baker chairman. Conservative Democrats in the audience, led by the venerable yet irascible ex-governor Isaac Hill, cried out that the radicals were defying the will of the Democracy by preventing their leader from speaking. Hill, continually interrupting the proceedings, loudly claimed that Baker was not the legitimate chairman of the rally, yelling, “He ought to be put out!” He then grabbed his friend and protégé, the Scottish émigré and state senator Dr. Peter Renton, declaring, “I’ll put you in!” and rushed the stage. When Baker refused to leave the dais, a riot ensued around the 3. “The Inhabitants of Salisbury vs. The Proprietors of the Newburyport Bridge and the Eastern Rail Road Company,” Leverett Saltonstall Papers, Box 10: Folder 2, PEM. Apparently a similar suit was filed in 1843 by another group of merchants who felt the bridge was too low. The ERR claimed it had actually built the span one foot higher than the older one. Also see Saltonstall Papers, Box 10: Folder 2, PEM. Newburyport Daily Herald, August 11, 1840 (herafter cited as Herald). The Whiggish Herald defended the decision. A railroad could pay damages and be done with them; citizens were stuck with a bridge forever and should have some legal recourse.

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Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Jacksonian New England

platform. Details on the melee are sketchy—radicals claimed afterward that Hill’s “countenance was livid with rage and glowing with fiend-like passions”; conservatives claimed that the radicals had rioted with “canes and cudgels” and attacked Renton. After Hill’s son smashed the chairman’s desk to bits, the brief battle came to an end. At Baker’s suggestion, the radical forces retreated from the building and adjourned to the American House nearby to pass their own set of resolutions supporting Hubbard’s candidacy and congratulating the legislature on its policies. Congressman Edmund Burke was disappointed; he wanted the radicals to stay and fight: “They ought not to have retreated from the place they occupied.” Now in charge of the proceedings, the conservatives moved swiftly to enact their resolutions. Hubbard’s candidacy for governor was condemned and the Democratic legislative program of the past year ridiculed as a set of “destructive doctrines.” The conservatives then nominated Judge John H. White as their standard-bearer.4 At the center of this violent split in the New Hampshire Democracy—in the north’s most consistently Democratic state—was the railroad. Between 1840 and 1843, radical Democrats made railroads the focus of their anticorporation legislation, passing, among other resolutions and bills, the landmark Railroad Act of 1840, which effectively halted all railroad construction in the state for five years. While much of the legislation applied to corporations in general, the thrust of the radicals’ program was aimed squarely at the railroads expanding northward out of Boston toward the New Hampshire heartland and across the seacoast to Maine. The program was so radical that it split the Democrats into wings, essentially pro- and antirailroad, well earning the title “Railroad War.” It was, therefore, no idle remark of Hill’s pet newspaper, Hill’s New Hampshire Patriot, when, describing the radicals holding onto the Concord rally platform, it claimed they were “the rum-faced mob that was employed a few weeks since to arrest the work upon the [Concord] railroad.” The railroad, more than a bank or a factory, became the symbolic and defining centerpiece of an ideological battle within the 4. New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette, February 24, 1842 (hereafter cited as Patriot); Farmer’s Cabinet (hereafter cited as Cabinet), quoting Hill’s New Hampshire Patriot, February 25, 1842 (hereafter cited as Hill’s Patriot); Edmund Burke to Henry Carroll, February 25, 1842, Box 1: Folder 4, Henry Carroll/Nathaniel Baker Papers, New Hampshire Historical Society (hereafter cited as NHHS).

Introduction

5

antebellum Democratic party of northern New England. The battle was not merely, as one historian described, “a brief feud over a local question.”5 The railroad craze shook politics to its foundations, not only splitting the New Hampshire Democratic Party but also shaping economic ideologies and regional fortunes to such an extent that railroads become an excellent interpretive tool with which we can better understand antebellum America. Railroad development was an issue of considerable importance in antebellum political economy. Elias Hasket Derby, a prominent Boston businessman and railroad promoter, wrote in 1850 that many of the branches being constructed were “unwise” ventures, built “at a period when the whole civilized world seems to have been insane on the subject of railroads.” The railroad question bent political perspectives and economic ideas, and it reordered the way New Englanders looked at their future. At the junction of antebellum political economy and railroad development, we can gain a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of “entrepreneurial politics” in Jacksonian America and use railroads as a lens to peer into their world.6 This book examines the political economy of railroads in New Hampshire and Essex County, Massachusetts, between 1830 and 1860. The focus remains on these regions for three reasons. First, outside the influence of a growing New York, these areas felt the unique combination of tugs from an expanding greater Boston, mill cities like Lowell and Manchester, and the demands of the emerging western and Canadian markets. Second, concentrating on northern New England and Essex County asks a different set of questions about nonfrontier development in a mature region. What was the difference between railroad development in the frontier West—as presented by William Cronon in Nature’s Metropolis, for example—and an aging, developed Northeast? Third and most importantly, both regions offer tremendous historical richness, not only in the variety of available sources, but also in the stories they tell about antebellum political economy. New Hampshire 5. Hill’s Patriot, February 25, 1842; Lucy Lowden, “ ‘Black as Ink—Bitter as Hell’: John P. Hale’s Mutiny in New Hampshire,” 29. 6. Derby, A Brief Reply to the Report of the Investigating Committee of the Old Colony Railroad Corporation by the President of the Company. April 12, 1850, 7; James L. Huston, “Property Rights in Slavery and the Coming of the Civil War.”

6

Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Jacksonian New England

remained one of the premier Democratic states in the American north until the mid-1850s, providing the nation with Jacksonian politicians like Isaac Hill, Levi Woodbury, and Franklin Pierce. Bounded by the Atlantic Ocean in the east, the Connecticut River in the west, Canada in the north, Massachusetts in the south, and split in two by the course of the Merrimack River, New Hampshire also struggled mightily with the economic implications of railroad development. Essex County—in the northeast corner of the Commonwealth, bounded by Boston in the south, the ocean in the east, and New Hampshire in the north—was Massachusetts’ most densely “railroaded” county by the mid-1850s and also highly Whig. In addition, this county suffered through serious political and economic decline in the antebellum era, a combination of economic change, comparative advantage, and simple bad luck. The city of Salem’s fall from economic grace, for example, began with Jefferson’s Embargo and the War of 1812, which bottled up and destroyed commerce and spurred domestic industrial growth away from the coast in the Merrimack River valley. As the era of large clipper and packet ships arrived after 1820, shallow Salem harbor gave way to the deep berths in Boston and New York, and Salem merchants, sensing the movement of capital away from Essex County, moved south with their business. During the 1820s, a coalition of merchants and mechanics attempted to raise funds for a canal project running through town to power a series of mills. Money and legal troubles ended all hopes of canal construction by 1830. In addition, the growing network of railroad lines spreading westward from Boston—the Boston & Providence, the Boston & Worcester, the Fitchburg, and the Boston & Lowell—progressively cut off Salem as a point of trade.7 The most famous rendering of Salem commercial decline came from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s vivid descriptions of life in the Salem Custom House in The Scarlet Letter. As surveyor of the Port of Salem from 1846 to 1849—a lucrative political plum given the Jacksonian novelist by President Polk—he bemoaned the loss of trade and observed Derby Wharf from his window, “burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, 7. Roger F. Craig, “The Era of Salem Shipbuilding, 1629–1850: People, Personalities and Potential(?) Profit,” 14–15; John H. Galey, “Salem’s Trade with Brazil, 1801–1870”; Gary J. Kornblith, “The Rise of the Mechanic Interest and the Campaign to Develop Manufacturing in Salem, 1815–1830.”

Introduction

7

and exhibit[ing] few or no symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, halfway down its melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood.” Speckled with “unthrifty grass” and falling into the harbor, the “dilapidated wharf ” was oftentimes washed over by high tides. Remembering Salem’s heady days as America’s primary international seaport, he excoriated the new antebellum merchants for allowing “her wharves to crumble to ruin, while their ventures go to swell, needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood of commerce at New York or Boston.” The port’s custom officials, usually aged and out-of-work sea captains, had so little to do that often “they were asleep, but occasionally might be heard talking together, in voices between speech and a snore, and with that lack of energy that distinguishes the occupants of alms-houses.”8 Newburyport underwent a similar depressing process. As at Salem, Jefferson, “Madison’s War,” and the fall of Napoléon—signaling the return of British commercial dominance—crippled shipping. Business also suffered after a fire destroyed 250 buildings, valued at nearly two million dollars, in the downtown market district in May 1811. At a disadvantage with Boston, New York, and the other deeper American ports, Newburyport harbor was also too shallow to accommodate the larger clippers and frigates. More “piers and beacons” were built with state and federal help after the war to make the harbor safer, but “foreign vessels were not thus to be baited to [the] wharves.” In 1829, Congress appropriated $30,000 to build a breakwater outside the harbor to alter silt and sediment and deepen the passage. However, the nineteen-hundred-foot structure failed completely and collapsed into the ocean during an 1851 storm. Most importantly, the building of the Middlesex Canal between Pawtucket Falls (soon to be Lowell) and Boston in 1803 diverted the “country trade” along the Merrimack River valley southward and left Newburyport isolated at the river’s mouth. In desperation, a group of canal enthusiasts chartered a company in 1816 to build a canal from Newburyport to Concord, New Hampshire, to tap northern New England’s timber resources for shipbuilding and fuel. They raised almost $80,000 before the “energy and determined perseverance” of the 8. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 36–37, 38, 45–46.

8

Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Jacksonian New England

town waned in the 1820s. Railroads branching out from their Boston terminus eclipsed the Middlesex Canal after 1835 but continued to leave Newburyport behind. “[S]he stood still,” one local chronicler remembered, “and saw her old trade dying out, with but feeble efforts to resuscitate it. The result was its irretrievable loss.” When railroad development rumors spread across town in the late 1830s, many Whigs pinned their hopes on steam trains to “revive the fallen fortunes of Newburyport.”9 Antebellum political ideologies and party dynamics have had their share of historians over the past fifty years, and for good reason. The period between 1820 and 1860 helps us better understand the revolutionary and early national eras, as a second generation of American political and business leaders struggled with building a nation on their own while striving to interpret and fulfill the high expectations of the departed founders. The period also helps set up the crisis of 1860 to 1861, when stress on the national union grew too great and the nation fell into a devastating fratricidal war over slavery. Further, the antebellum era is fascinating and richly illustrative on its own terms, as Americans encountered new economic challenges, technological innovations, political strife, and used their experiences to reorder and rethink their world. In all times and places, economic dislocation attracts political attention. Fear that innovations in transportation and communications technology will destroy more than create, and the opposing hope that those innovations will deliver society to a better age, recurs in all periods of tremendous technological invention, whether that invention be the railroad, television, or the Internet. Some citizens fear that such changes in their daily lives are beyond their control, unsettling to established society, and ultimately destructive of democratic liberty. They see government as an active force in their lives, with both limited and limiting powers—a state with a clearly defined limited role but powerful in limiting dangers to civil society and individual freedom. Still others em9. Euphemia V. Blake, The History of Newburyport; from the earliest settlement of the country to the present time, 205–7, 223; An Account of the Great Fire, Which Destroyed About 250 Buildings in Newburyport, on the Night of the 31st of May, 1811, 3–6; Charles J. Brockway, Business Statistics of Newburyport, with an Introductory Sketch, 8; Herald, September 21, 1839.

Introduction

9

brace the changes and possibilities innovations bring to daily life, and they dismiss the dislocation as inevitable and an example of a healthy progress. They also see government as an active force in their lives, but with powerful enabling powers—a state directed by forward-thinking visionaries, unafraid to use political power for economic promotion. While shades of contention and agreement can be found between both extremes, these two divergent perceptions of technological innovation and daily life supply much of the energy behind political and economic ideology. In the antebellum world, the development of the railroad forced communities across America to rethink their political ideas and economic arrangements. Unlike the west, sparsely settled and still a frontier, New England faced this challenge in a unique way. As an older region with settled patterns of political economy, innovations like the railroad forced antebellum citizens to alter their patterns of life. Some, like radical New Hampshire Democrats in the 1840s, wrestled with the change and sought to obstruct its progress by legislative action. Others, like Essex County Whigs, welcomed the shift and used all their rhetorical and political muscle to hasten its arrival. The dialogue between the two (and within the two) over railroad development helps us better understand the contours of American antebellum political life. This book contributes to the ongoing debate over the political economy of antebellum America, particularly the development of largescale capitalism. Beginning with Arthur Schlesinger’s magisterial and controversial Age of Jackson in 1945, historians have debated the ideology and meaning of Democracy and Whiggery incessantly. For Schlesinger, Jacksonian Democrats were forerunners of the twentieth-century progressive left: ardent critics of the Whiggish business and commercial world and spokesmen for an embattled and morally superior agrarian, anticapitalist ideal. If Jacksonians were not exactly New Dealers because of their commitment to limited government, they were at least pointing toward and inspiring a future age hostile to capitalist development. Schlesinger grossly underestimated the entrepreneurial tendencies of the Democracy, however, and in the 1950s a reaction toward the progressives developed. Bray Hammond and the “consensus school” of historians suggested that the Democrats were, in fact, budding entrepreneurs eager to take

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Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Jacksonian New England

advantage of commercial developments and technological advancements. The American Democrat of the 1830s was a rising man “on the make,” not a nostalgic yeoman standing athwart economic progress. I am in great sympathy with this school of thought, as will be clear from reading this book. Hammond was correct to give the Democrats an entrepreneurial urge and an ethic of economic gain, but I question his picture of the Jacksonian anxious to latch onto technological progress. Jacksonian Democrats were profoundly entrepreneurial and profoundly skeptical of technological progress that could harm as much as liberate. In the early 1960s, a group of “ethnocultural” historians discounted political economy in favor of ethnic, social, and religious understandings of the antebellum parties. According to Lee Benson, disputes over the nature of economic change were peripheral; “ethnic and religious differences have tended to be relatively the most important sources of political differences.” Ronald Formisano explained party ideology via the ethnocultural-sociological terminology of “Center” and “Periphery,” roughly similar to the “Court” versus “Country” interpretation of the colonial and revolutionary era. At the center, or “Core,” were “culturally or religiously dominant groups seeking to maintain or extend their values over out-groups or minorities which the paternalist Core usually regard as subordinate or inferior”; at the periphery were “subcultures of ethnically, linguistically, or religiously distinct provincial populations resistant to state centralization.”“In the North and the South, for different reasons, and with many variations, the Whigs tended to be strong in Core and Center while Democrats seemed characteristically associated with the upcountry, backcountry, or highlands.” An appealing and convincing interpretation of the coming of the Civil War, I believe the Core-Periphery conceptualization suffices for an overall summary but lacks when attention is paid to the smaller details. While it is no doubt true that Democrats often appealed to the “country elements” and the Whigs to the city, some economic issues, like the railroad, could break that division down. In much of the New Hampshire Railroad War, the radical Democratic antirailroad elements came from the centers of population and urban commerce, while the boosters of development lived in the rural backwaters. Exceptions do not destroy the rule, but railroads were arguably the most important technological

Introduction

11

innovation of the antebellum era, so they carry a degree of interpretive weight.10 The ethnocultural historiographical histories did not stop an interest in antebellum political economy. John Ashworth’s “Agrarians” and “Aristocrats” introduced a boisterous Marxist perspective on Jacksonian Democracy and Whiggery, reclaiming Schlesinger’s contested agrarian mantle for the Democrats: “The Democratic response to the prevailing commercial spirit was thus not one of enthusiasm but dismay. The idea of Jacksonian Democracy as a movement of ‘rising entrepreneurs,’ men ‘on the make,’ and alert to ‘the main chance’ is at odds with the party’s clearly expressed agrarian ideology.” Diametrically opposed were the Whigs, the party of “political conservatism and of business dynamism. . . . They sensed that Democratic egalitarianism offered a serious threat to a commercial economy and they recoiled from the atomistic society which the most enthusiastic democrats sought to promote.” I have more serious disagreements with this historiographical school than the others, especially with the stark dialectical contrast between agrarian, anticapitalist Democrats versus grasping, commercial, citified Whigs. In a sense, the Marxists are only half right. Their interpretation fails to account for Democratic backing of communications and transportation technology (both financially and rhetorically); its criticism of the same with the language of markets, profits, and the survival of commercial life; and the avowed rejection of the agrarian label by the radical elements of the Democratic party. The Whigs may have been procapitalist, but the Jacksonian Democrats were, too.11 More recently, Lawrence F. Kohl has suggested a psychological understanding of Jacksonian politics, where “tradition-directed” Democrats battled for ideological supremacy with “inner-directed” Whigs. For Democrats, modernization was mentally unsettling as it tore up existing social relationships and institutions and replaced them with an individualist ethic. For Whigs, modern life was uniquely their life: “Even though their material success was not strikingly greater than that of the 10. Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case, 165; Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s– 1840s, 5–7, 20. 11. Ashworth, “Agrarians” and “Aristocrats”: Party Political Ideology in the United States, 1837–1846, 34, 82–83.

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Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Jacksonian New England

Jacksonians, their striving was more successful psychologically. Whigs felt a sense of mastery over their lives that Jacksonians did not share.” While I am very much in sympathy with Kohl’s portrayal of an antebellum ideological divide over the public and private sphere and his portrait of the Democrat as struggling to preserve a challenged lifestyle, I hesitate to ascribe these political differences to psychological factors. Jacksonians fought modernization efforts like the railroad because it destroyed an existing market society focused on the town, the county, or the region, rather than the nation or beyond. If modernization was mentally unnerving, the danger to political independence and economic energy was the root cause.12 Many historians have perceptively pointed out that much of the debate over the nature of capitalist political economy, especially in New England, hinges on the definition one uses. Gordon Wood wrote recently, “The trouble is we scholars cannot agree on the nature of the beast.” Paul Gilje, in a similar vein, called capitalism “a slippery concept.” As a starting point then, what does “capitalism” mean? In truth, it depends on which set of historians you ask. For “moral,” “cooperative,” and “social economy” historians like James Henretta, Michael Merrill, and Charles Sellers, capitalism is a modern economic development that eclipsed earlier communitarian, socially cohesive economic arrangements in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Whereas before, yeomen farmers participated in self-sufficient, family centered barter and exchange economies of local scope and possessed a precapitalist “mentalité,” the arrival of capitalism (almost always forced upon them) meant an enslaving “cash nexus,” a complicated series of financial institutions dominated by outside speculators and operators, and an exploitative outwork and then factory system that made them poor, dependent, and essentially unfree. Many farmers and artisans opposed these new institutions (like mechanized factories, banks, and railroads) of a rising industrial America as capitalist intrusions into their “traditional,” nonmarket world.13 Neoclassical, “entrepreneurial,” or “market” historians define capitalism 12. Kohl, The Politics of Individualism: Parties and the American Character in the Jacksonian Era, 16. 13. Wood, “The Enemy Is Us: Democratic Capitalism in the Early Republic,” 293; Gilje, “The Rise of Capitalism in the Early Republic,” 160.

Introduction

13

in more benign if not kindly terms. For many of them, capitalism in one form or another was present in America from the moment European settlers touched North American shores. Farmers and entrepreneurs were engaged in oftentimes lucrative exchange economies, rural industrial development, and production for dozens of regional market towns. The lack of a “cash nexus” notwithstanding, these New Englanders were inherently capitalist and used their entrepreneurial instincts to better their own condition and carve a commanding niche for New England economic interests around the world. Economic historian Winifred Rothenberg, in her studies of the eighteenth-century Massachusetts farm economy, has persuasively replied to the moral economy argument: “Massachusetts did not begin as an experiment in self-sufficiency. The people who settled this land came from a tradition of Market Crosses, Market Days, Corn Markets, cattle, wool, cheese, silk, and produce markets, stalls, shops, fairs, itinerant peddlers, and cattle drovers. . . . Shall the case be made that what prevailed in New England villages from the earliest decades of settlement was a commercial mentalité, an entrepreneurial spirit, an individualistic ethic of private gain?”14 A twenty-five year debate has raged between both schools, and much has been learned. Moral economy historians were forced to reckon with proving the existence of a pre- or anticapitalist mentalité in New Englanders in the face of tremendous evidence of commercial activity. Neoclassical market historians were forced to show the evolution of capitalist mechanisms and society from colonial to antebellum times, not just claim a static capitalist presence from the first settlements of the region. Recently, a marked convergence has occurred as both schools have admitted the debate is not over whether market mechanisms were in existence, but “the degree of local self-sufficiency and the extent of market exchange rather than the fact of exchange.”15 Still, much remains to be explained. “Moral economy” historian Michael Merrill remarked in 1995: A great deal of confusion still bedevils the literature on the so-called transition [to capitalism] question, however. Much of this confusion stems from historians’ uncritical acceptance of the conventional identification 14. Rothenberg, “The Market and Massachusetts Farmers, 1750–1855.” 15. Allan Kulikoff quoted in Wood, “The Enemy Is Us,” 296.

14

Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Jacksonian New England of capitalism with a free-enterprise market economy. Defining capitalism in this way, as almost everyone now does, consigns the great struggles over the proper place of capital and capitalism in American society to a semantic no-man’s land. If capitalism is little more than a synonym for a market economy, then any opposition to capitalism necessarily becomes an opposition to markets—in other words, an opposition so rarified and unreasonable to most people as scarcely to matter historically, except as an instance of exemplary witness.

Merrill’s concerns are well taken. An equal danger, however, is the tendency to define capitalism down until it means nothing but the most advanced institutions of industrial finance, corporate structure, and commercial entanglement. At that point, almost no one is “acting” capitalist, and we are again left fumbling to explain the “great struggles over the proper place of capital and capitalism” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. Both excessively broad and narrow definitions given by historians can render the word meaningless.16 Perhaps a solution to the definition problem lies within the past and not with historians. What about the meaning given “capitalism” by antebellum Americans? As will be seen, “capitalism” and “capitalist” were pejorative to many Jacksonian Democrats. Capitalists were “stockjobbers,” reckless speculators, locals in cahoots with “foreign” businessmen, and distant economic “imperialists” intent on colonizing area industry. Use of the term did not imply opposition to markets, market society, commerce, trade, or the profit motive; quite the opposite. While radical Democrats criticized the trickery of capitalistic speculators on one hand, they routinely advised aggressive business expansion, stock investment, and technological improvement on the other—all elements contemporary Americans would label capitalistic. In this sense, therefore, economic historians like Michael Merrill are quite correct: there was a difference between capitalism and the market economy to the antebellum mind. The difference, however, was not market versus nonmarket, or market versus less-market. For antebellum New Hampshire Jacksonians, the difference was small market (the traditional liberal market economy of New England) versus big market (a growing “illiberal” economy driven 16. Merrill, “Putting ‘Capitalism’ in Its Place: A Review of Literature.”

Introduction

15

by Boston, Canada, and the west opened by railroads). The “opposition to capitalism” that Merrill and the moral economists crave can be found here: what we today would call “liberal capitalism” versus “illiberal capitalism.” In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Joseph Schumpeter described these two types of capitalism. Liberal capitalism was the capitalism of entrepreneurs, innovators, and the dynamic interplay of human enterprise and human needs. Ownership of land and the productive sectors of the economy were widely dispersed, and the spirit of a market economy fed politics and society with energetic new ideas that challenged and bolstered existing institutions. A whirlwind of constant movement and “creative destruction,” liberal capitalism was “an evolutionary process . . . by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary.” Liberal capitalist economic change was “a history of revolutions.” This type of economic change is self-destructive, however. Its freedom allows for the concentration of property and the destruction of the economic liberties and social stability that make it possible. “[I]ts very success undermines the social institutions which protect it, and ‘inevitably’ creates conditions in which it will not be able to live,” declared Schumpeter in notso-veiled Marxian terms.17 From this point, capitalism slides along a spectrum from entrepreneurship toward monopolized industry and allied government regulatory bureaucracies. As the economy moves away from its entrepreneurial foundations, illiberal capitalism is created. The super-efficient allocation of goods and services allows for the absorption of smaller business interests. Corporations and conglomerates form, and the dynamic nature of economic change is buried beneath large-scale enterprises unforgiving of independent innovation and challenges to their economic hegemony. Centralization of the economic resources of a nation, far from being a positive step, according to Schumpeter (and here he rather obviously departs from Marx’s rejoicing of the coming fall of 17. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 82–83. It is also important to note that I do not define or describe “liberal capitalism” as an adoration of laissez–faire economics, free from all government control, in the sense of Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition. As will be seen, the preservation of liberal capitalism (in the Jacksonian–Schumpeterian sense) necessitates active government intervention; ibid., 61.

16

Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Jacksonian New England

capitalism and the rise of proletarian communism), signals a depressing ripple effect for politics, society, and culture: [T]he capitalist process pushes into the background all those institutions, the institutions of property and free contracting in particular, that expressed the needs and ways of the truly `private’ economic activity. . . . The capitalist process, by substituting a mere parcel of shares for the walls of and the machines in a factory, takes the life out of the idea of property. It loosens the grip that once was so strong—the grip in the sense of the legal right and the actual ability to do as one pleases with one’s own; the grip also in the sense that the holder of the title loses the will to fight, economically, physically, politically, for ‘his’ factory and his control over it, to die if necessary on its steps. And this evaporation of what we may term the material substance of property—affects not only the attitude of holders but also that of the workman and of the public in general. Dematerialized, defunctionalized, and absentee ownership does not impress and call forth moral allegiance as the vital form of property did. Eventually there will be nobody left who really cares to stand for it— nobody within and nobody without the precincts of big concerns.

Economic forms become massive and impersonal; political forms become the shills of corporate interests; society and culture become blasé, dispassionate tools of a conglomerated elite perpetuating its power. The model citizen is no longer the freeholder or entrepreneur but the stockjobber: “[H]is will to fight and to hold on is not and cannot be what it was with the man who knew ownership and its responsibilities in the full-blooded sense of those words.” The Schumpeterian symbol for illiberal capitalism is the corporation: “[It] socializes the bourgeois mind; it relentlessly narrows the scope of capitalist motivation; not only that, it will eventually kill its roots.”18 This book will undoubtedly be accused of resurrecting the “consensus school” of American historiography, ascendant during the 1950s and recognized with such notable historians as Louis Hartz, Daniel Boorstin, Richard Hofstadter, and others. The charge is only partially correct. While I do argue that a broad consensus on the existence of a market economy did characterize the antebellum era, that consensus did not preempt all conflict. The great battles over antebellum political economy 18. Ibid., 141–42, 156.

Introduction

17

did not occur over the existence of market capitalism, but its shape and scope; not over whether America should be a market and profit-driven society, but the size of markets and how innovations in transportation and communications technology affected existing entrepreneurial life. The Jacksonian Democrats were not “nascent capitalists”; they were existing capitalists fighting for an endangered market society. Consensus may have existed, but at the heart of that agreement were terribly bitter and divergent ideas on how American political economy should be shaped. This work also looks to explain the difficult process of American railroad development. Albert Fishlow’s American Railroads and the Transformation of the Antebellum Economy and Robert Fogel’s Railroads and American Economic Growth concentrate mainly on the macroeconomic impact of railroads upon nineteenth-century America. Both have a low regard for the ultimate effects of railroads on the nation, stating that they were but one of many technological changes overtaking the economy during the period. Paul Cootner, in a “skeptical, somewhat debunking attitude,” concurred and, while giving some credit to the railroad for western development, subsumed the railroad in global economic patterns. In this vision, railroads are but one invention in a century of technological boom times. Winifred Rothenberg, in her study of Massachusetts farmers from 1750 to 1850, likewise found no significant impact of the railroad on market patterns: of the hundreds of market trips she analyzed, only one went to a railroad depot. Robert Doherty found in his Society and Power that despite the increased mobility of antebellum New England, traditional elites and their institutions simply adjusted to changes and retained their authority.19 Cultural historians tend to give the railroad credit for having a greater impact on the lives of Americans. Wolfgang Schivelbusch in The Railway Journey notes that railroad development in Europe and America ushered in a distinctly modern era. Whereas before, community identity was secured by isolation, self-sufficiency, and temporal and spatial distance from competing cultural, social, and economic visions, the railroad brought communities into intimate and challenging proximity to one another. No province was immune; railroads could reach 19. Cootner, “The Role of the Railroads in United States Economic Growth,” 477.

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Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Jacksonian New England

anywhere. Jonathan Stilgoe in Metropolitan Corridor paints a like picture. When a railroad entered a town, two worlds collided: traditional and modern. Railroads were the creatures of factories and mills, science and technology; traditional towns were places of stasis and order, timehonored institutions and an agricultural pace of life. These studies have added to our knowledge of economic change, cultural patterns, and the role of railroads in each, but they have left unanswered questions. Geographically, both economic and cultural historians either focus entirely on the virgin western frontier or refuse to define specific American contexts on which to base their theses. How did railroads affect the political economy of northern New England? Other than Edward Chase Kirkland’s Men, Cities, and Transportation, which focused almost exclusively on business habits, the historiography is unsatisfying. How can we better understand the complex relationship between entrepreneurial politics and rapid changes in transportation and communications technology in the northeast? How did northern New Englanders react to the arrival of the railroad in their community? How did Jacksonian Democrats and Whigs react to the railroads’ reordering of the relationship between private enterprise and public authority? How did both perceive the changes railroads signaled in American capitalism? Chapter 1 of this book examines the bitter railroad development battle among New Hampshire Democrats in the 1840s. Known famously as the “Railroad War,” this controversy underscored the divisions within the party and between its leaders, the core ideas of the pro- and antirailroad movements, and the Democrats’ competing notions of “private” and “public.” Chapter 2 investigates Jacksonian economics as exhibited in the “War” and outlines the sophisticated understanding of market society given by radical New Hampshire Democrats in their fight against railroad development. Far from promising economic recovery, radical Democrats saw the railroad as an enemy of an existing, entrepreneurial market society and a tool of distant capitalists to rob their economic lives. Chapter 3 examines New England Whiggery and railroad development by focusing on Essex County, Massachusetts, and describing the Whigs’ eager acceptance of an enlarged public sphere at the expense of the private to facilitate railroad construction. For Whigs, growing public power was merely a method to get railroads built, not a growing dan-

Introduction

19

ger to private liberties or individual freedom. Chapter 4 compares Whiggery’s “railroad economics” with the Democrats’ by describing the battle to build railroad connections to the declining ports of Salem and Newburyport. Since railroads offered such promise to lift smaller New England cities and towns out of economic slumber, Whigs fiercely competed with each other to get lines built to their towns. For radical Jacksonians, building railroads would take market society away; for desperate Whigs, building railroads would restore a market society they had already lost. Railroad development was, therefore, an exercise in survival.

One “Look Out When the Bell Rings!” Railroads and Jacksonian Entrepreneurial Politics

The State is in no respect interested in a Rail-Road, otherwise, than it is in a line of stages, or a manufactory, or a grist-mill, or in the farms and workshops of its citizens. Albert Baker, December 1840

At the center of Jacksonian America was an intense debate and struggle over the relative extent of the public and private spheres in the face of new political and economic pressures. As suffrage was extended to more Americans, political parties began to organize as professional political blocs, the economy began to gravitate toward more corporate and industrial forms, and links of communication tied once distant regions together in sometimes uncomfortable bonds, the tension between the “political” and the “personal”—always in flux—became irritated and at times violent. In the face of intense pressure surrounding railroad development to extend the bounds of politics into once secure areas of personal hegemony and private concern, the Jacksonians of northern New England resisted by working to extend the private sphere outward at the expense of the political. For the Jacksonians, property stood at the core of an ongoing publicprivate debate that was taking a new and potentially lethal twist. No longer was public power seeking to push back the outer limits of private rights; now it was combining with certain elements of the private sphere

21

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Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Jacksonian New England

to benefit one group at the expense of another. An evolving antebellum political economy that sought to redefine the nature of property along these blurred public-private lines forced Democrats to fundamentally rethink what property meant in terms of political liberty and economic freedom. In the context of the rapid innovations of the era and the sociopolitical thought of the revolutionary and early national periods (only a few decades distant), they saw property as a barrier against the new aggressiveness of public-private power. Guaranteed in law against political interference, property ownership was the foundation of their unique liberties as Americans and the private sphere’s answer to Madison’s question on the balance of power. As much as government needed checks within its institutions to prevent the corrosive centralization of power, so too did the private sector need corresponding institutions— safe and independent from the machinations of politics—to hold against politics as a safeguard of its liberty. This notion of property fulfills, in the fullest sense of the phrase, what Lee Benson and others have called “negative freedom.” Jacksonians were using property not in a “positive,” enabling, Whiggish sense of future investment or gain, but as an emphatic “no” to the needy demands of aggressive public power. Property rights were non-negotiable out of fear that a slippery slope of increasing public demands would erode private checks on public power.1 In addition, as a barrier and a source of the private sphere’s identity, rights, and claims against the public, property was also at the very heart of Jacksonian concepts of “independence.” Independence through property can be understood in several senses. It was a source of political independence in that man was not indebted or liable to political sources for his personal “worth” and could consider public questions free of public pressure; it allowed him an existence separate from public control. It was also a source of economic independence in that, no matter the nature of the property, man either owned means of production or had a 1. It is interesting to wonder if Jacksonians thought of themselves in terms of “negative” freedom. One suspects that these Democrats saw their political and social program in a brighter light—that they were, in fact, proposing a “positive” program by seeking a limit on government authority and an extension of the private sphere. After all, saying “no” to one is saying “yes” to the other. Who is to say this is more of a “negative” program than that of the Whigs, which said “no” to extensive private rights and “yes” to an empowered public sphere?

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stake in the wider economy that gave him a voice and means of supporting himself—fully or partially—independent of the demands of others. In short, property was a buffer from the domination of others— by political means of government oversight and regulation, and economic means of reducing the ability to support oneself. As such, property was a contentious point in the public-private debate in antebellum America and a violent one in the New Hampshire Railroad War of the 1840s. In 1838, the railroad was the least of concerns to New Hampshire Democrats. The deep depression of the late 1830s was endangering party control of state politics in the face of a growing and outspoken Whiggery. Businesses were suffering badly, and farmers were having a progressively harder time finding profitable markets for their goods. Democratic appeals for patience and desperate charges that WhigFederalist banks bent on aristocratic control of the American economy were behind the downturn failed. As a result, between 1835 and 1838, one-party New Hampshire became a battleground between Democrats and Whigs as the upstart anti-Jacksonian forces capitalized on popular discontent. The solidly Democratic state splintered into regional voting blocs—Cheshire County and the Connecticut River towns along with a smattering of towns in coastal Rockingham County moved into the Whig column, while the Democracy continued to show strength in the Merrimack valley and the North Country. Although Whiggery could neither capture the governor’s mansion nor gain control of the legislature, it now became the legitimate opposition party in the state. Along with the depression came a lack of Democratic issues. In other states, the debate over banking held sway, but in New Hampshire the issue was more distant and less compelling. Despite interest in and support of Jackson’s antibanking policies and all the economic hardship between 1837 and 1843, northern New England fared rather well compared to other regions in terms of the banking crisis. The stability of the regionally hegemonic Boston banking establishment at the height of the panic not only held off much of the sting of hard times but helped extend the influence of Boston further into the countryside. Noted Norman W. Smith, “New Hampshire’s banking system expanded moderately, although kept in bounds by a sometimes reluctant membership in Boston’s Suffolk System, and a dearth of attractive opportunities. Perhaps for these reasons, deflation following the Panic of 1837, although severe,

24

Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Jacksonian New England

was not fatal.” Further, Whigs in New Hampshire often refused to discuss the banking issues with the Democrats in their campaigns, shifting attention instead to corruption and abuse of power. Banks therefore were not as immediate and central an issue in political life as they were in the south and southwest. Although the issue helped jell the second political party system in the 1830s, as the depression lingered, antibank sentiment was present but relatively muted.2 Besides an energized Whiggery and an ideological void, the Democracy faced a leadership vacuum. The aging governor Isaac Hill (1836– 39) was unable to unite the Democratic Party around a set of policies, and a split between radical and conservative wings began to develop. As historian Donald Cole has noted, “[P]oliticians and newspaper editors used the term ‘conservative’ to describe Democrats who supported business interests, and ‘radical,’ or occasionally ‘locofoco,’ for those who opposed business expansion.” Hill was moderately pro–state bank, moderately pro-corporation, and pro–state aid to railroads; many Democrats considered him a proto-Whig. His successor, John Page, continued many of Hill’s policies, turned briefly toward radicalism in the early 1840s, and then back toward conservatism. By the late 1830s, New Hampshire Democracy was essentially rudderless and split.3 Most importantly, however, and most interesting in view of the policies of 1840 to 1845, was that in the late 1830s New Hampshire Democrats were initially not hostile to railroad development—in many cases, especially in the case of Isaac Hill, they were enthusiastic boosters. As early as 1831, the New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette, Hill’s political organ in Concord, was guarded yet not opposed to railroad development creeping north out of Boston. “The farmers of New Hampshire have no money to throw away on experiments; and they have just as little inclination to mount any political hobby-horse of the federalists,” the Patriot sneered. “Let the Lowell Railroad be first tried—let it be demonstrated that Railroads are adapted to this frosty climate. The ‘Boston capitalists’ have plenty of money—let them make the experiment. 2. Smith, “A Mature Frontier: The New Hampshire Economy, 1790–1850,” 13– 14. This is not to deny New Hampshire Jacksonian instigation of the Bank War on the national stage, particularly through the activities of Isaac Hill. See Donald B. Cole, Jacksonian Democracy in New Hampshire, 1800–1851, 102–35. 3. Cole, Jacksonian Democracy, 186.

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There will be time enough afterwards for the citizens of New Hampshire to commence the work.” Once it was demonstrated—on the Boston & Lowell and Western Railroads in Massachusetts and other roads then developing in Pennsylvania and South Carolina—that railroads could survive difficult New England winters and represented legitimate opportunities for regional economic development, the Democracy turned from caution to warm approval. Governor Hill came out in favor of state aid to help construction of the Concord Railroad (CRR) extending north out of Nashua, connecting at that city to lines stretching south to Boston and points southeast. While he publicly supported state aid, he was also investing heavily in railroad stock and intensely lobbying legislators to favor the project. Even in the ethical-political climate of the antebellum era, where politicians were routinely in the pay of various interests, Hill’s maneuvers turned heads and created disfavor. The Patriot waged a robust public relations campaign in support of state aid: “Is it not time that some decisive movement was made in regard to the Concord and Lowell Rail Road?” The paper celebrated “the spirit and energy which does great credit to those engaged in [the railroad’s] projection and construction” and openly yearned for future connections to Canada and beyond, “a work of incalculable importance to the state at large.” When a railroad meeting in Whiggish Dover passed resolutions in favor of state aid, the paper opined, “If this great benefit can be extended to our farmers and citizens in the interior of New Hampshire, with perfect safety to the State, ought it not to be done?”4 Such a prodevelopment program on the part of a Jacksonian administration inevitably gained attention, from both within and without the party. Whigs wondered aloud if the Democrats had become converted to Whig economics: an easy willingness to use public power and promotion to further private gain. The pro-Whig New Hampshire Sentinel began asking when Hill and the Jacksonians became prointernal improvement, considering their loud denunciations of Clay’s American System during the 1820s and 1830s. The Patriot answered sharply that the “democratic party have never opposed internal improvements, only as attempted by the national government where the 4. Patriot, February 14, 1831; November 1, 1838; December 3, 1838; May 27, 1839.

26

Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Jacksonian New England

right does not exist.” In short, “The question is not one of principle but of expediency.” For many New Hampshire Jacksonians, the issue was not what government did, but what government did it—state or national? Democrats could be reform-minded, forward-thinking, “positive” political actors as well.5 But a more dangerous opposition was emerging to the Democrats’ overtly prorailroad policies from within party ranks. A series of events turned opinion among a devoted and articulate coterie of Democratic leaders against state aid and, in some cases, railroads in general. This shift resulted in the ascension of railroads as the primary issue in New Hampshire politics and the temporary destruction of the second political party system in New Hampshire. Banks may have helped build the Jacksonian political system, but it was the railroad that tore it down. Three issues rallied a significant portion of New Hampshire Democracy against railroads. First, the state legislature gave the railroads the right to survey routes and use the state’s eminent domain power to seize land. While not popular, the idea of public seizure of private land for a private corporation’s use did not ignite wide disapproval at first. Railroads were not yet identified in the public mind with avaricious banks and factories, anxiously expanding their monopolized powers. Instead, they were seen as just another public transportation benefit, not unlike roads, that required some public assistance to be built. But in the late 1830s, officials of the Boston & Maine Railroad (B&M), when surveying lands in Rockingham County, clashed violently with local landowners and farmers. Apparently the surveyors routinely trespassed onto private lands and threatened locals with violence if they interfered with railroad (and by legal extension, “public”) business. Exeter attorney and rising Democratic politician John Parker Hale confided to a friend that the farmers’ legal cases against the railroad were legitimate. Hale himself would represent the oppressed men in the face of the “arbitrary & tyrannical proceedings of the Rail Road Corporation in their illegal & high handed usurpations of the rights of landholders in taking their 5. Patriot, June 3, 1839; Donald Cole perceptively notes, “Jacksonians in New Hampshire were not New Dealers, but they were humanitarians” (Jacksonian Democracy, 171 n. 14).

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27

freehold from them by the hands of violence. . . . I have no doubt at all that the law is perfectly clear in our favor.”6 The incidents ignited a serious controversy in the legislature, where an official investigation was nearly opened: “[I]t would be the duty of the Legislature, upon proof of the alleged facts, to annul the charter of the corporation at once, with a view to protect our citizens from the incursions of land pirates and robbers,” wrote the Patriot. Reports of the railroad’s aggression against landowners swept across the state and soured public opinion. Even the openly prorailroad Isaac Hill admitted later that the B&M’s actions in the southeast had created “an honest prejudice” against railroads. “The [anti-railroad] doctrine grew up from certain difficulties between a Railroad Corporation and some land owners in the Eastern part of the State,” bemoaned one letter to the editor of the Sentinel. “Pre-existing prejudices against Corporations were thereby excited, and the new doctrine sprung forth.” The protective luster of “public good” was now taken off the railroad, and it was rendered just another corporation using public power for private gain.7 There was also the issue of the post office. Mail delivery was regarded by all as a legitimate and necessary public function. When the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad clashed with the postmaster general in 1839 and 1840 over the carrying of mail, specie, and passengers using certain state currencies, the Patriot warned the legislature to make sure that such events did not happen in New Hampshire—just how much public good came from a corporation that quibbled with the government over the mails? The fact that, in 1842, the post office was still using stages in Rockingham County because of high rates on the Eastern Railroad of New 6. John P. Hale to E. W. Tappan, February 14, 1840, Box 5: Folder 7, John Parker Hale Papers, NHHS. Tappan was the U.S. postmaster in Hampton, New Hampshire. 7. Patriot, January 8, 1841; Hill’s Patriot, March 23, 1843; New Hampshire Sentinel, February 2, 1842. Also see Amos Legro to Editors of the Patriot, December 10, 1842, Box 1: Folder 8, Henry Carroll/Nathaniel Baker Papers, NHHS. Recalling the controversy, Legro wrote: “It was enacted in the June session of 1840, having been called for by the numerous petitioners from the Southern portions of the State who had suffered the most intolerable oppression and wrongs from Rail–Road corporations in the exercise of the unjust and unconstitutional powers with which they had been clothed by former Legislatures.”

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Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Jacksonian New England

Hampshire only confirmed the idea with many that the railroads were extorting the government and were no public institution.8 Finally, there was the issue of Governor Isaac Hill himself. As governor, he brazenly pushed for state aid to the CRR while serving as a leading investor and official of that road. Hill seemed in cahoots with private corporate interests, and his name and the corruption of railroads soon became synonymous. He also stood at the center of a growing generational split within the party. To many of the younger political leaders in the state, the fiftyish Hill was a relic from an earlier age. Born in Massachusetts in 1789, he migrated to New Hampshire in the early years of the century and apprenticed at an Amherst newspaper. In 1809 he was in Concord publishing the first issue of the Patriot and on the cusp of a political career that would carry him into the U.S. Senate, the governor’s seat, and the confidence of such antebellum personalities as Andrew Jackson, Amos Kendall, James Buchanan, and Martin Van Buren. By 1840, he had been a dominating figure in New Hampshire politics for the better part of thirty years, and many felt his policies, his dictatorial style, and his age disqualified him from further leadership. The younger Democrats regarded everything the governor represented with suspicion and scorn, and a bitter dispute arose between “Old Guard” or “Old Light” prorailroad Democrats around the older Hill and the younger “New Light” antirailroad Democrats in the legislature. When the elections of March 1840 returned a strong Democratic majority to the legislature, it became clear that something would be done on the railroad issue. Adding to the controversy, Hill became embroiled in an ugly legal battle with his former friend and newspaper partner Cyrus Barton over ownership of the Patriot. Hill was awarded a small sum, but Barton retained control of the paper. Toward the end of the summer of 1840, the formerly pro-Hill Patriot started accusing the ex-governor of bilking the newspaper of money when he was part owner, driven to corruption out of a “grasping, sordid avarice.” In retaliation, Hill began publishing another newspaper in Concord to compete with the radicals—Hill’s New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette. It seems no coincidence that 8. Patriot, January 27, 1840; April 14, 1842.

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as their animosity toward one another grew, Barton’s Patriot became more and more antirailroad.9 These events marked a sea-turn in opinion over the railroad in New Hampshire. As antirailroad petitions flooded the legislature, a letter to the editor of the Patriot hinted at the change and the reaction railroads were about to receive from the state’s political leadership. According to the writer, the people of New Hampshire were beginning to realize that there was a “dark side to the picture” of railroad development and that charters giving public recognition and privileges to private railroad companies were for the narrow benefit of “stock speculators, [and] large salary men, such as agents, treasurers, engineers and real estate owners.” All the suspicions traditionally reserved for banks now fell upon railroads. The veil had been lifted, and railroads were now seen for what they were: benefactors of a dangerous combination of public and private interests, without concern for the common good, that “build up one half of the community by legislative enactments at the expense of the other.” The stage was set for the beginning of the New Hampshire Railroad War.10 When the legislature went into session in early June of 1840, Governor Page set the tone with his annual message: “The number and power of corporations in this country, have been extended to an alarming degree,” he declared, “and it may require the utmost vigilance and efforts of the people, as well as their Legislatures, to retain the government of the country in opposition to so many and so powerful combinations.” Faced with dozens of angry petitions from citizens—all from Rockingham County—the representatives of the people wasted no time in answering his call to vigilance. While the Senate considered motions to make railroads liable for fires caused by locomotive embers and require railroads to construct depots in every town they crossed, the House constructed the infamous Railroad Bill of 1840. The bill—passed with unanimous support from the Democratic Party—repealed the 1836 acts that allowed railroads to utilize state eminent domain authority in 9. Cyrus Barton. Defence of Cyrus Barton, Against the attacks of Hon. Isaac Hill upon the Establishment of the New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette, 4–5, 15. 10. Patriot, May 4, 1840.

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Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Jacksonian New England

constructing lines and forced these corporations to negotiate with each individual landowner along the proposed routes. The railroads were stripped of all public authority and were essentially “on their own” in the construction of lines. The House also moved to repeal an 1839 bill that allowed the city of Concord to purchase stock in the CRR and passed a bill requiring railroads to erect “a proper and sufficient fence” along the length of their routes. If the railroad refused to comply or neglected the upkeep of the fence, adjacent landowners could bring an injunction against the company to stop the passage of trains until the fence was erected or fixed.11 These changes should not be underestimated. Prior to the June 1840 session, railroads were vested with a connection to public authority that no other private interest could boast. The very foundation of the railroad’s existence, and hence its profit-making ability—the land for tracks and buildings—was guaranteed by an authority as weighty and impressive as the public power to tax: the public power of eminent domain. Railroads benefited directly from the growing dominance of the public sphere over the private. Now this power was torn away, and railroads had to purchase plots from individual landowners all along a surveyed route. Several problems were bound to occur. First, a landowner or speculator realizing a railroad needed some of his land could hike the asking price to any level he wished and essentially hold the corporation hostage to his costly demands. Second, if a landowner did not want to sell—say, if the land was particularly important economically or sentimentally—he could deny the progress of railroad construction even if the majority of landowners along a line had sold expecting it to be built. As Whigs and prorailroad Democrats perceptively noted, one man could halt hundreds of investors, hundreds of landowners, thousands of dollars, and the hopes of dozens of cities and towns for improved transportation. In one legislative session, therefore, public hegemony over private 11. Cabinet, June 12, 1840. On June 6, 1840, four Rockingham County state representatives presented the antirailroad petitions of their constituents: Amos Towle, Jr., of Hampton; Elijiah Currier of Newtown (later Newton); Samuel Hatch of Exeter; and Peter Sanborn of East Kingston. Some of the complaints were aimed at the Eastern Railroad as well. See Patriot, June 19, 1840. The depot requirement was dropped in November 1840 as “inexpedient.” See Patriot, November 28, 1840; Cabinet, July 3, 1840.

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concerns had been overturned in favor of an expanding private sphere. New Hampshire Jacksonians had made railroads a private interest subject to the vagaries and demands of the private sphere at the expense of the public. The Railroad Act of 1840 ran up against a problem, however. What of railroads that had already been chartered, had money invested, and begun construction? Was the bill to be retroactive in its restrictions and effectively revoke their charters? This question came up in connection with the most prominent railroad project in the state, the Concord. The CRR, running north along the smooth and level banks of the Merrimack River, was to connect the state capital with the burgeoning industrial cities of Amoskeag (Manchester) and Nashua to the south, with further connections to Lowell and Boston in Massachusetts. It had already been chartered, and construction was underway along the banks of the river. Investors and promoters of the CRR—most prominent among them, Isaac Hill—were intensely concerned that the bill’s strictures would endanger this important and profitable project. Their concerns found their way into the legislature through the votes of Whigs and conservative Democrats, who collaborated in the December 1840 session to cool the state’s antirailroad fever. An “Explanatory Act” was passed by a 133-91 vote in the House just before Christmas 1840, exempting the Concord Railroad from the June bill. The CRR, the bill stated, had already been chartered, and any backing away from that previous commitment was bad faith on the state’s part. The serious amount of Concord time and money already invested in the CRR gave added energy to the bill’s passage. The voting and debate underscored the growing fissures between radicals and prorailroad conservatives—whose support of the Explanatory Act ensured its passage—within the Democratic Party. Radicals felt this CRR exception betrayed the letter and spirit of the June bill and that no exceptions were acceptable. Radical leader Thomas Treadwell of urban Portsmouth saw the issue as one of partial legislation that was “radically wrong, as injustice is done to a portion of the community who do not, and from the very nature of things cannot, share in the privileges granted to others.” With such inegalitarian grants, “distinctions are created in society. . . . [A] privileged order of men exist among us.” Jacksonians who were mesmerized only by banks

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were missing the point. The emerging corporate order was a complex interweaving of new institutions. “[I]t should be remembered that banks are the necessary appendages of other corporations—that they exist together—that they are necessary to each other, and that by increasing the one we add strength to the other,” Treadwell stated. In short, conservative Democratic willingness to excuse railroads while railing against banks was inconsistent; they were one and the same: [A]s soon as a bill is introduced granting a bank charter, members seem to awake, as if it were from a sound sleep, to a sense of all the evils of corporations. . . . [T]he very next moment, the same individuals who so strongly opposed a bank charter with all the powers of their mind are seen, either voting for, or quietly permitting bills to pass, granting corporate powers, with the same privileges as regards their liabilities that are usually granted to banks. Why is this?

Democrats should see that every corporation, no matter its business, was “calculated to crush individual enterprise, to oppress the poor, and to create dissentions and divisions in the country.” When the Whig representative from Eaton sarcastically noted that these remarks reminded him of the Roman philosopher Cato, “who wound up every speech with Carthage must be destroyed,” the humorless Treadwell snapped back, “Rome itself was once saved from destruction by the cackling of a goose and . . . the modern Carthage, corporations might yet be saved from utter annihilation by the same means.”12 Upon passage of the CRR exception, radicals began a multiyear effort to overturn the bill. Joining together to sign a protest petition registering their displeasure over exempting the Concord, they promised to agitate for its reversal in the future. Albert Baker of Hillsborough took the House floor as the radical spokesman. Baker was an integral and fascinating figure in the New Hampshire Railroad War. Born in Bow, just outside of Concord, in February 1810, he was the middle son of a prominent local farmer and the brother of Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science Church. He graduated from Dartmouth in the 1830s (where he made a name for himself as a brilliant scholar) and moved to Hillsborough to study law with a family friend, the rising 12. Patriot, December 5, 1840.

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attorney and politician Franklin Pierce. After apprenticing in Boston for another year, he returned to Hillsborough and took over Pierce’s legal practice while the latter was in the U.S. Senate. A prominent and popular local figure, he was elected to the New Hampshire House in 1839. Albert Baker took sick with a strange kidney ailment just as the House session was closing in early July 1841, returned to Hillsborough, and died in mid-October. However, during his brief political career, he emerged as one of the more outspoken radical legislators, especially regarding railroad development.13 Brandishing the radical petition, Baker attacked the idea that the CRR was somehow different from the railroad power curbed in the June bill. In doing so, he introduced a question repeated dozens of times in the coming months and years: just how “public” was a railroad? To Baker and the other radicals, there was nothing “public” about it: It is not like a highway which is open to all; which is dedicated to the public; in which no one is privileged above another; of which the public is proprietor and owner. It is clearly and exclusively private. The property of the citizen is to be taken and given to a corporation. That corporation is alone interested in the profits of it. It is theirs, and theirs alone. The citizens of the State have no rights, no privileges, no interests, no easement, which is not subject to the control of the corporation. . . . The State is in no respect interested in a Rail-Road, otherwise, than it is in a line of stages, or a manufactory, or a grist-mill, or in the farms and workshops of its citizens.

To allow a private interest the power to seize citizens’ land was tyranny: “It would strike at the very foundation of society. No man would be safe for a moment.” For the radicals, this willingness to excuse land-takings was the first step away from a peaceful republican government of limited power. The Explanatory Act gave the authority to “any corporation 13. Apparently Albert was the closest of the Baker brothers to Mary Baker Eddy, tutored her in classical languages, and corresponded with her frequently. In fact, during the 1860s, she supposedly was in contact with Albert’s spirit and acted as a medium for his voice. Aside from railroad matters, he was also involved in the issue of slavery as chairman of the Select Committee on Slavery in the New Hampshire House, where he was a well–known antiabolitionist. See Patriot, October 21, 1841, for notice of his death.

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which the caprice of a Legislature might create, the power to take over lands, demolish our dwellings, lay waste our fields, at the will of the Legislature.” Like most anticorporation radicals, Baker saw no difference between what a man and a corporation should be allowed to do: “No Legislature would for a moment listen to the application of one citizen, to take the land of another without his consent. Why then, shall they listen to a corporation?” Further, since the June bill recognized no difference between railroads, why was the CRR unique? “[The Concord Railroad] stands upon no different equity.” In a spirit of jealousy for threatened liberties not uncommon in the antebellum republic—and with a note of prophesy considering the coming events—Baker painted a desperate picture of what this legislation meant to the citizen: “If private property may be seized, private right invaded, the solemn guarantees of the constitution disregarded, in one instance, they may be in another. . . . [W]hen once the respect due to the law has ceased, violence will ensue.”14 Baker’s dark predictions signaled that the Democratic rift was growing. Charges of “radicalism” were tossed about within Democratic ranks in the winter of 1841. The Patriot felt obliged to respond in the affirmative: “If it be radicalism to oppose partial legislation, to stand against attempts to circumscribe the freedom of one, by conferring powers and immunities, not enjoyed generally, upon others, then we are radical up to the hub.” The elections of March 1841 returned a comfortable Democratic majority to Concord, and Governor Page was re-elected easily to a third term over his Whig opponent, Enos Stevens. As the legislative session neared, the radicals readied a defense of their railroad agenda and another assault on the CRR exemption. Just as vehement as in 1840, they continued to insist against conservative Democrats and Whigs that “[landowners] cannot be legislated out of the fee they have in [land] without their consent.” Railroad corporations were no different from individuals and must undergo the same business processes; “therefore, if they would own land, [they] must, like others, purchase it of the lawful owners; and if they don’t choose to sell, why they must wait, like others, until they do.” Conservative Democrats, with Whig backing, would not 14. Patriot, January 1, 1841.

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concede the point. A pamphlet made the rounds at the state capital turning the question of public right and monopoly back on the radicals: Can it be right, that [a few landowners] shall have the power of disappointing the public, of depriving the State of the usefulness and benefits of this Road, and of sacrificing this large amount of property, because they will not agree to take for their right of way over their land, twice its value, or what a Committee or Jury shall award them? I ask, is it right? Is it not a monopoly of the most unjustifiable and odious character, for one man thus to claim the right of controlling the whole State?15

Baker wasted no time in pressing the radicals’ case and launched into a long speech on the floor of the New Hampshire House lambasting not only railroads but corporations in general. When some members squawked that Baker should stick to the question of railroads, Speaker Harry Hibbard called him to order and a 156-68 vote in favor of the chair forced Baker to limit his charges to the CRR. Concord Democrat Joseph Robinson, who feared rampant land speculation and a ceasing of construction if the exemption was withdrawn, also chastised Baker for being reckless in his charges. Treadwell, answering Robinson, claimed ominously that when the Explanatory Bill was passed the previous December, “there was an influence at work about this town.” He denied, however, that seeking a curb on corporate power was in any way radical—he and his associates were not agrarians or Fanny Wrights. “These new-fangled democrats ask only that the rich and poor shall enjoy the same privileges, that high and low may stand upon the same platform, and be protected in the enjoyment of their lives, liberties and property.”16 Whigs, though a decided minority, were amused by the spectacle of 15. Patriot, January 22, 1841; May 21, 1841; Cabinet, June 18, 1841. 16. Patriot, June 18, 1841. Harry Hibbard (1816–72) was born in Vermont, studied law under future New Hampshire governor Jared Williams, and graduated from Dartmouth in 1835. A prominent Bath attorney and politician, he served in the New Hampshire House and Senate throughout the 1840s. He also served in the U.S. Congress (1849–55) and was a confidant of President Franklin Pierce. He died in a Somerville, Massachusetts, sanitarium in 1872. Fanny Wright was a BritishAmerican utopian feminist thinker and compatriot of Robert Owen, whose writings were widely known in the antebellum republic.

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loyal Democrats like Hibbard, Robinson, Baker, and Treadwell battling each other. While legislatively unable to influence matters, they took joy in ribbing their divided opponents and perhaps saw opportunities for the future in divided Democracy. After listening to Treadwell, Walter Flanders of New London declared to Hibbard, “It is a crisis with your party, Mr. Speaker. . . . A wicked spirit is abroad.” When Baker again railed against the CRR two days later, denying fellow Democrats’ charges that his were “new doctrines,” Flanders wondered on the floor whether Baker was New Hampshire’s version of John C. Calhoun, nullifying the doctrines of the state government within his hometown: “What do we hear?—Hillsborough will, like South Carolina, have revenge. Is this not new democracy?”17 The attempt to reopen the CRR bill failed, however, in the face of Whig and conservative Democratic resolve not to tamper with the capital’s railroad connection. When radical Samuel Swasey of Haverhill moved to consider the CRR exemption on June 22, it was defeated 100-131. The antirailroad forces were not idle outside targeting the CRR, however. Whig representative George Y. Sawyer of Nashua introduced a bill that provided for a jury panel to decide awards on eminent domain cases—essentially overturning the Railroad Act of 1840. It lasted but three days and failed in a vote for a third reading, 93-136. In addition, a bill passed on July 3 stating that railroads must erect bridges or gates when passing public roads. If after six months the regulation was not complied with, town officials were within their rights to tear up the tracks where it crossed the road and prevent the passage of trains.18 June 1841 signaled a shift in the leadership of the radical Democrats and a maturation of the debate into a second stage of clearly developed political camps, a more sophisticated and nuanced debate about public and private spheres, and a strong animus between radicals and conservatives. Just as Baker was falling ill, attention began to center 17. Patriot, June 18, 1841; June 25, 1841. Earlier, Flanders suggested humorously that perhaps Andrew Jackson would send troops into Hillsborough to force compliance, much like his threatened intervention of South Carolina in the 1830s. 18. Patriot, June 25, 1841; Cabinet, July 2, 1841; July 30, 1841. This is vaguely reminiscent of New Hampshire landowners’ ability to legally tear down dams that were flooding their land. Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Water of New England, 148–51.

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around the new Democratic nominee for governor, a familiar face in New Hampshire political circles, former congressman Henry Hubbard. With Baker’s death, Hubbard became the leader of the radical camp. Henry Hubbard was born in 1784 in the Connecticut River town of Charlestown and set up a legal practice in his hometown after graduating from Dartmouth in 1803. A leading citizen, he served at various times as town moderator and representative in the legislature. When Levi Woodbury was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1825, Hubbard succeeded him as Speaker of the House. From 1831 to 1835, he was a Democratic member of Congress—with a strong pro-Jackson record—and in the latter year was elevated to the U.S. Senate. Nominated for governor to succeed Page, he returned home to a New Hampshire on the cusp of political turmoil and weighed in decisively on the side of the radicals on railroad matters. With the legislature still in session, he answered an open letter from radical Democratic members upholding the Railroad Act of 1840 and supporting unlimited liability legislation. He offered up a more detailed exposition of his philosophy when quizzed again in November by another open letter. With his nomination, the publicprivate debate moved from a vague prejudice against corporations to a complex critique of corporate society, its motivations, forms, and allegiances. The break between radicals and conservatives was nearly complete.19 Echoing the late Baker, Hubbard would not concede that mere public use made railroads a public institution. Perhaps reflecting back on his recent antibank activities as a Jacksonian congressman in Washington, he declared: “That the accommodations provided by the corporations may be used by the public, no more makes a railroad a public corporation than it makes a bank so.” To accept such a broad definition of “public” would blur the clear and necessary distinctions between the public and private spheres and lead to a disturbing new trend in progressively greater public power: All corporations which depend upon the public patronage for their profits are, in one sense of the word, public. The difference between them is only in the quantum of use. A manufactory is not a public corporation 19. Patriot, June 18, 1841.

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Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Jacksonian New England because the public buy its cloth—or a bank, because its bills are current in the market. But the public makes use of it nevertheless. To hold a corporation to be public and authorised to take private property without the consent of the owner, because its privileges are intended to be used by the public, or are actually used, would be to destroy all legal distinctions between public and private institutions.

Railroads were private corporations subject to the same laws as any private entity: “I do not believe the private corporations are entitled to any greater control over the private property of individuals than are individuals over the private property of each other.”20 Not surprisingly, Hubbard’s zeal delighted the radical legislative leadership. Speaker Hibbard wrote forcefully to the influential new Patriot editor Henry Carroll in December 1841, urging him to line up behind the nominee: “[T]ake and maintain high, bold, open, radical ground. . . . Be the advocates of the People’s rights, against the encroachments, the corruptions and the usurpations of corporate institutions. For I tell you it is between these that the great battle is to be fought. The struggle has now begun.” With visions of the Boston & Maine Railroad abusing Rockingham County farmers still in his mind, he fumed, “[The railroads] ought to [be] met at the threshold with the . . . censures of the Press, the prompt interposition of the Legislature, and the heavy action of determined forcible resistance.” That Isaac Hill was taking a contrary position was of no concern to Hibbard. First, the public mood was radical: “This is what the people want. . . . Some who were once foremost in opposing the advance of radical principles, now seem willing and anxious to fall in with, and if possible to ride upon the prevailing current.” Second, Hill was out of power and politically impotent: “He has outlived his time and his good sense. . . . Hill has taken the other side of the [railroad] question. He belongs there. . . . There is no halfway house, nor do we want one. . . . Preach radical anticorporation Democracy.”21 20. Sentinel, January 19, 1841. Hubbard’s letter was known popularly as “The Curry Letter,” addressed to attorney John Curry on November 11, 1841. 21. Hibbard to Carroll, December 11, 1841, Box 1: Folder 3, Henry Carroll/ Nathaniel Baker Papers, NHHS. Henry Harrison Carroll (1813–46) was born in Hampton, New Hampshire, graduated from Dartmouth in 1832, and studied law with Franklin Pierce. In 1840, the twenty–seven–year–old Carroll bought half in-

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An October 1841 editorial entitled “Shall the People or Corporations Rule?” in the upcountry Haverhill Democrat-Republican illustrated the principle at stake and the Democratic split in vivid terms: “There can be no compromise with a plain principle of justice—There ought to be no ‘halfway house’ in these matters.” By denying the distinction between public and private, prorailroad forces set up a contending interest of mixed public-private authority that threatened both spheres. The public was in danger from the “inevitable tendency of these institutions . . . to form a hostile and opposing influence to the government under which they exist. Reason would warrant this belief—History fully justifies it.” The private sphere was in danger from empowered corporations callously unconcerned with the people and their property, and therefore their liberty: Its course is surveyed. The track runs directly across this man’s farm, over his family hearth and through his family graveyard. The agent comes and demands the right of passage. The man hesitates to part with his home. He is unwilling to sell his birth right for a mess of pottage, and be turned again upon the world in his old age. No matter—there is a CLAUSE in that charter that will dispose of such refractory cases. The agent applies to the court. The commissioners come in—this Railroad is to be a public benefit, its progress must be expedited as much as possible—the land is appraised for half its value, the owner turned out and the corporation put in possession. The outraged man has no adequate remedy. He stands hopelessly by, and sees his farm divided impassably in twain—his family mansion pulled down—the crumbling bones of his fathers and children shoveled up by the side of the Railroad track—the cars come whizzing past and he must ‘LOOK OUT WHEN THE BELL RINGS!’”

Public power was corrupted by the infiltration of outside contending interests; private power was torn down by the “needs” of “public benefit.” In short, by accepting the “public utility” arguments of the prorailroad forces, “we open a broad door that can never be shut.” The terest in the Patriot and became a powerful figure in the 1840s New Hampshire Democracy. In the summer of 1846, he went blind and died of an apparent brain tumor. Of note, Hibbard also wrote that since New Hampshire voters were so radical, it was good business sense for the Patriot to back Hubbard and the radical leadership. Radicalism meant more subscribers.

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Haverhill Democrat-Republican provocatively challenged its readers, “Will we bend the supple knee to the sneering minions of money?”22 The radicals’ contention that granting railroads special public license over private property created a “railroad interest” of terrific power, threatening the integrity of government and the people’s liberty, was a perceptive and prescient one. In 1840 and 1841, radical New Hampshire Jacksonians appeared to be mouthing denunciations of railroads not unlike those of postbellum southern and western populists. They also leaned back on an earlier understanding of republican government and its many nemeses. In decrying the railroad’s menace to liberty, radicals used the language of eighteenth-century America: “covert” power, standing armies, the dangers of unified central authority. The passing of time had bent those concerns to the antebellum context and the needs of that age—the secret power was now a railroad interest; the standing army was a corrupt band of prorailroad politicians and lobbyists; the unified authority was a public-private combination of government and business—but the heart of the critique remained the same. How can Americans retain civic virtue and civilian liberty in the face of avaricious public and private interests? With the nomination of Hubbard, the developing sophistication of the railroad debate, and the failure of prorailroad forces to roll back the June 1840 bill, the Democratic Party began to crack up. Hill’s Patriot, the mouthpiece of conservative Democracy, engaged in more heated exchanges with its radical Patriot counterpart. Under attack as being pro-Whig for his railroad policies, Hill shot back that New Hampshire was being run by “new-fledged politicians” and “the democratic young lawyers who, pursuing old John Adams’ advice, have perhaps joined with the democracy to destroy it by advocating ridiculous doctrines.” Even the moderate and relatively nonpartisan Farmer’s Cabinet of Amherst began to question the radicals’ antirailroad policies. “There appears to be a spirit of opposition to the establishment of rail roads in this State,” the Cabinet declared in June 1841, “by those men who are seeking notoriety for themselves under the guise of friendship for the ‘rights of the people.’ . . . [W]ho will trust their property to the custody of men who will hold out pretensions of guarding it by law 22. Haverhill Democrat–Republican, quoted in the Patriot, October 7, 1841.

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one day, and will take possession or destroy its value on the next, at their option?”23 The Patriot answered in kind. There would have been no animosity toward railroad development had those companies not acted with arrogance toward farmers in the southeast; those farmers’ “rights had been crushed in the dust by the car of a Juggernaut corporation and not from ‘new-fangled politicians.’” That Hill or any corporation would argue that the primary purpose of railroad corporations was public benefit was preposterous: [T]he Legislature has no more power to grant away the property of the honest and industrious farmers of this State to a Railroad corporation, than they have to give to the farmer the rails and cars of the Railroad corporation. Who is there that believes, that the stockholders, directors and agents of the Concord Railroad Corporation would have ever undertaken the project of a Railroad to this place had the public benefit been their object? Who does not believe that their sole object was a good percent on the investment?

If the railroads to Concord or any region could not be built because of the radical legislation, “[t]hat is no fault of ours”—go and change the state constitution.24 During the winter of 1842, as the Democrats readied for the March elections, Hill made a bid to regain control of the party and steer it away from antirailroad radicalism. On January 29, Concord Democrats met at the courthouse to organize, and soon after the meeting was convened Hill rose and took charge. As the radical leadership stood by, he announced a preamble and fifteen resolutions he wanted passed by the meeting. Ten of the fifteen related to railroad development and condemned the recent legislation hindering expansion. When Concord 23. Cabinet, January 21, 1842. An interesting subtext to this debate is Hill’s contention—and the radical denial—that lawyers were behind the antirailroad frenzy. Hill revisited the charge time and again from 1841 to 1843. The accusation must have carried some weight—the Patriot analyzed the 1842 gubernatorial vote and later answered that only 1 in 450 radical Democrats was a lawyer, while 1 in 293 conservatives and 1 in every 170 Whigs were. See Patriot, January 12, 1843; Cabinet, June 25, 1841. 24. Patriot, January 13, 1842; January 20, 1842.

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legislator Joseph Robinson, Patriot coeditor Nathaniel Baker, and Cyrus Barton interjected to halt Hill, he refused to relinquish the floor. All the radicals could do was postpone consideration and adjourn until Hill’s platform was printed and digested by the city’s Democrats.25 They reconvened the next week, on February 5, but Hill again gained the floor. He talked straight for three hours, and the meeting adjourned without resolution. The radicals boycotted the third meeting, held on February 12, as they feared (correctly) that Hill would again dominate affairs and push for his platform. Without the radicals, the ex-governor took over, passed his resolutions, and nominated John H. White for governor, instead of Henry Hubbard. By doing so, he created a rival Democratic Party complete with platform and candidate (he would run conservative candidates for some state senate seats as well) organized around the issue of railroad development.26 The radicals were furious. “It was his meeting. Every thing was done at his beck. The expression of his wish controlled every movement. Nothing could have been done without his consent.” By condemning Hubbard and nominating his own candidate for governor, Hill was a political schismatic, “perfidious to the democratic party. We arraign him before [all Democrats] as plotting and striving to carry out in overt acts the overthrow of our holy cause in New Hampshire, for the basest needs.” The Patriot began to wonder aloud whether Hill’s involvement with the CRR charter movement in the 1830s was not tainted with large sums of investment capital from Boston. “[He was] goaded on by a torturing sense of lost power and waned influence. . . . What wicked ingratitude!”27 These three meetings—of radicals’ frustration and Hill’s triumph— led to a fourth on February 19, referred to in the introduction. When the radicals refused to let Hill speak, violence broke out, and the radicals removed to a nearby hotel to conduct their meeting. While Hill and Peter Renton passed prorailroad and “conservative” resolutions and 25. Patriot, February 3, 1842. 26. John H. White (1792–1865) was born in Massachusetts but in the 1810s moved to Lancaster, New Hampshire, where he became a farmer and militia leader. He was Coos County sheriff from 1830 to 1838 and a state councillor under Governor John Page from 1840 to 1841. 27. Patriot, February 17, 1842.

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backed the White candidacy, radicals decried the Hill schism and boosted Hubbard. “What right had Isaac Hill and Peter Renton to break in upon and attempt to act in this meeting?” they asked. “What better right had they, than federalists, to act in our meeting?” Schism or not, the Patriot would not give ground on the railroad issue; it was contrary to every Democratic principle: “[W]e are not willing to have [railroads] made by violation of the Constitution, by violation of the rights of property, by trampling the individual in the dust in order to enrich a Corporation and gratify a tyrannous will to rule and domineer—to compel a man to part with his possessions, because it is alleged that another can use them better than the owner!” Roughly one month before the 1842 elections, the Democratic Party of New Hampshire was now two parties.28 With the split, New Hampshire voters had the clearest choice of candidates and issues of the antebellum era. Henry Hubbard and the “regular” Democrats were anticorporation, antirailroad, and skeptical of any attempts to curb private rights and expand public authority. John H. White, Isaac Hill, and the “conservative” Democrats were moderately procorporation, pro–railroad development, and recognized the need for a more expansive definition of public power to accommodate technological advances within the American economy. Enos Stevens and the Whigs were, as always, prodevelopment and interested in integrating New Hampshire into the national political economy. A splinter group of fledgling abolitionists also ran a candidate under the banner of the Liberty Party, foreshadowing the coming importance of slavery as a political issue. Clear choices did not necessarily translate into electoral change, however. Many doubted whether the schism would matter in the final tally of votes—could a White candidacy actually derail Hubbard and lead to Whig rule? Franklin Pierce, recently retired from the U.S. Senate and back in Concord as a private attorney and party leader, did not think so. 28. Patriot, February 24, 1842. An interesting sidebar is the radicals’ disdain of Peter Renton, a native of Scotland. “He has the least tact and sagacity, and the least knowledge of our political institutions and the principles on which they are bottomed.” Quoting Samuel Johnson on Scotsmen, the Patriot bitterly wrote, “At home they are afflicted with the itch; abroad they become the lickspittles and the parasites of men in power.”

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Supportive of the radical program and bitter toward Hill, Pierce thought Hubbard would still win easily. “[Hill’s] appearance & conduct [is] an indication of monomania. . . . Hubbard will I fear lose at least 150 votes in [Concord] and there will be considerable defection in Hopkinton, Warner, Pittsfield, Chichester.” The rest of the state (excepting Whig pockets in Cheshire and Rockingham counties) would be “an unbroken phalanx” for the Democracy. The prorailroad Cabinet was skeptical but hopeful of White’s chances: “It is not probable that this nomination will, at this late period of the canvass, be very generally supported by the democratic party—but there is a large portion who are in favor of a more conservative practice in Legislation than is indicated by some of the radical leaders.”29 The Democratic in-fighting delighted the Whigs. Hoping perhaps that a Democratic split would be their best chance at control over the government since the late 1830s, they prodded the radicals over the Hill defection. When the Patriot called Hill a neofederalist, the Keene Sentinel laughed, “Well, if this ain’t pretty well! . . . The Governor has faults enough without alleging treason to democracy.” It was hardly a certainty that Whigs would benefit, however, considering Hill’s prorailroad stance. Would traditionally Whig voters abandon their party for Hill’s banner, seeing in the splinter party a better opportunity to change policies? Both Whigs and Hill were prorailroad, and the fact that both parties were addressing the same pool of voters left no guarantee either party would achieve success. They could, in short, “check” each other—the true split in New Hampshire politics was with prorailroad voters, leaving the regular radical Democrats alone to take an easy victory.30 Radical Democratic confidence led to speculation on Hill’s ultimate motivation in dividing the party. Most thought Hill was a corrupt public official on the payroll of railroad interests. Swasey wrote Henry Carroll of rumors he had heard in Haverhill of strange land transactions 29. Pierce to John McNeil, March 7, 1842, Box 2: Folder 2B, Franklin Pierce Papers, NHHS. Roy Nichols also points to Pierce’s loyalty to the late Albert Baker as being behind his pro-Hubbard stance. “He had watched carefully the rise of his protégé, Albert Baker, and Baker’s untimely death the preceding October left him with a sentimental interest in the anti-railroad movement to which Baker had contributed so much enthusiasm.” Roy Nichols, Franklin Pierce: Young Hickory of the Granite Hills, 119; Cabinet, February 25, 1842. 30. Sentinel, February 23, 1842.

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between the ex-governor and the Concord Railroad. Apparently Hill was paid two thousand dollars for a plot of land in Bow for the railroad’s right-of-way. Swasey thought that was an inflated price meant to buy Hill’s favor: “If such was the sum of money & such the extent of the land it would seem that possibly it might in part have been intended as a quid pro quo for something besides damages to land—Is this the source of the water that drives the mill?” The Patriot concurred and used Swasey’s facts and phrases in an editorial: “[Hill] is, and always has been, a corporation man.” While governor, he lobbied for public funding of railroads, invested in the same, and almost wrecked the party with his corrupt exploits. Pointing to the mysterious Bow land payment, the paper suggested that a bribe was “THE WATER THAT DRIVES THE MILL.” Sarcastically waving off any suspicion, the Patriot concluded, “We discard all thought that the Railroad folks, in paying such a bountiful sum, had any intention of doing more than show a mark of respect and friendship, of liberality and gratitude.” Whatever transpired between Hill and the CRR, there was “no difficulty, no negotiation, no chattering, no haggling about the price.” For the radicals, better evidence of the dangers of a blurring of the public and private spheres could not be had.31 The March elections justified radical confidence in the face of Hill’s insurrection. Hubbard won easily with 56 percent of the vote, while Stevens came in a distant second at 26 percent, dominating only the traditional Whig Cheshire County. White garnered only 12 percent of the vote, but (fulfilling Pierce’s prediction) showed very well in greater Concord and in Rockingham County. The Liberty Party registered only 6 percent. Interestingly, for all the contention, rhetoric, and violence of the 1842 elections, voter turnout was lower than the previous year in almost every county, save for far north Coos. The radicals would have their victory, but the electorate appeared unenergized. Victorious, the radicals turned to reflection and retribution—how should Isaac Hill be punished? Swasey was confident Hill and White were forever discredited as political figures. “Isaac can never regain what he has lost. . . . I am sorry that Col. White has proved himself to possess so little sense as to follow Hill’s lead to the devil.” To prevent 31. Swasey to Carroll, February 7, 1842, Box 1: Folder 4, Henry Carroll/Nathaniel Baker Papers, NHHS; Patriot, February 24, 1842; March 3, 1842.

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any resurrection of the conservative revolt, the Haverhill radical asked Carroll to contact ex-president Jackson and ask for his support: “Can you not contrive some respectable and warrentable occasion out of all these circumstances for addressing Old Hickory on these radical questions. Especially the responsibility of members of corporations, and ask of him the privilege of lighting a taper at the flame of his steady old lamp? . . . I think much of this little plan—will you carry it out?” One victory did not end the nemesis of the railroads and entrenched corporate power, however. Vigilance was the key. “Every measure will be tried by the money Gods to buy—to intimidate and to cajole.”32 The Patriot was likewise not in a forgiving mood. Even though Hubbard won an overwhelming victory, this was no time for Democrats to forgive party treason.“It is true that the great champion of corporate monopolies, the self-styled dictator, and the proscriber of all ‘young men,’ was able to lead astray but a comparatively small number of democrats in the State. But is he less guilty, than if he had succeeded?” Further, Carroll and Nathaniel Baker were unprepared to back down on the railroad issue. In an editorial titled “The Railroad Question,” they first reaffirmed their commitment to protecting private property from eminent domain seizure by quasipublic railroads: “We contend that [eminent domain] power cannot be rightfully and constitutionally granted, unless the chief use and benefit resulting from the exercise of the power pass directly to the public for public purposes.” They then asked why a private institution, funded by private money for the profits of the private sector, should be rewarded with use of public power—how was the railroad different from Nicholas Biddle’s Bank of the United States in the 1830s? Conceptually, radicals and the Patriot could not fathom a private entity having public use. Such a definition rendered virtually any private economic enterprise, from mills to stores to farms, a “public good” and therefore eligible to use and abuse by public power. The dangers inherent in such a broad scheme of public authority were too great: Do the Boston capitalists invest in the Concord Railroad for the ‘public use’ of the State of New Hampshire? . . . Our ears are stunned with 32. Swasey to Carroll, March 25, 1842, Box 1: Folder 5, Henry Carroll/Nathaniel Baker Papers, NHHS. No evidence exists that Carroll ever tried to contact Jackson.

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ejaculations of ‘a great public enterprise,’ ‘a great public improvement,’ and we are told in advance, of the blessings in the rise of real estate, increased facilities of intercourse, with other matter of the same sort. But this can as well be applied to other kinds of enterprise. A railroad conduces to the public use in no other sense than does a grist mill or factory.

Were the prorailroad forces also prepared to give the growing industrial sector in New Hampshire the same powers over the private sphere?33 Amid the celebrations of victory over Hill, however, a worried voice was heard from within the radical Democracy. Congressman and supporter of the radicals Edmund Burke, viewing the railroad battles from his House seat in Washington, D.C., saw continued harping on railroads as a risky political game. For all the Democratic talk of Hill’s treason, greed, and pride, Burke thought Hill made a valid point that would sooner or later win favor with the electorate—that railroads were a unique private enterprise necessitating some form of public eminent domain powers. “This is indeed the strong point on his side of the controversy, and like a shrewd tactician he has planted himself upon it,” Burke wrote Carroll. The antirailroad position was a losing one and would inevitably lead to Democratic embarrassment and defeat. Burke had been researching American and European railroad development and was convinced (tacitly agreeing with Isaac Hill) that New Hampshire was standing alone. “[With] the whole world against us, we cannot, I fear, get along with this question.” Instead, the issue should be broadened and rephrased: “Shall the people’s rights be paramount to [corporate] rights, or their rights be paramount to the people’s rights?” Fight a battle against corporate abuses, not against railroad development.34 When Swasey began to hear rumors that the radicals were thinking of surrendering the principles of the antirailroad fight, he wrote to Carroll 33. Patriot, March 24, 1842; April 14, 1842. 34. Burke to Carroll, March 30, 1842, Box 1: Folder 5, Henry Carroll/Nathaniel Baker Papers, NHHS. Edmund Burke (1809–82) was born in Vermont and, after passing the bar, moved to Colebrook, New Hampshire, to open a practice. In the 1830s he was a prominent Jacksonian newspaper editor; he was elected to Congress in 1839. In 1845 he left Congress and President Polk appointed him commissioner of patents. By 1850 he had returned to his law practice and continued to be a leading Democratic spokesman in the state.

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testily that talk of concession was “a godsend to [Hill] . . . a dangerous one.” He returned to the idea that public favors to one private enterprise necessitated favors to others, and surrender on this issue would signal the end of radical power: “If we concede that the Legislature may properly confer this power upon one kind of private corporation, why not upon another? Upon all other? To concede this would be like knocking a plank off the bottom of our ship, while on the voyage. The leak might be small, but would surely sink the ship if left unstopped.” However, though he would not back away from the 1840 Railroad Act, Swasey was sensitive to the dangers the issue posed to the party. Continued agitation might swing public opinion. Democrats must consider the issue solved and “settled, at least as we would have it” and move on to other important matters. If not, Hill’s machinations would not only complicate radical reform of the state but endanger radical leadership as a whole. “The attempt to make the R. Roads the ‘great question’ is a mere trick, a strategem to draw off public affection and feeling from the true main question at issue. In this attempt I hope you will not allow God Hill to succeed.” Present attempts in the legislature to push for a charter for the Northern Railroad (stretching from Concord northwest to the Connecticut River valley) free from the 1840 regulations were “a mere diversion in favor of the enemy.” In fact, Swasey was perfectly willing to support the charter if and only if it was passed “on the just grounds that we have placed all future R. Road Corporations upon & upon no other.” If it could not be built under the 1840 law, it was no concern of his: “[T]here is no need of hurry. I would rather see Concord the terminus for a few years—than get entangled in a web of selfishness at this time.”35 This attitude of cautious triumph lasted through the spring of 1842, with radicals gloating over Hill’s downfall yet denying that railroads were or should be considered the cause of the split. As the convening of the June session of the legislature neared, Governor-elect Hubbard followed Burke, Swasey, and the Patriot’s lead and tried to tone down the Democracy’s antirailroad rhetoric. When he submitted his annual message to Henry Carroll for review, he left out extensive mention of 35. Swasey to Carroll, April 27, 1842, Box 1: Folder 5, Henry Carroll/Nathaniel Baker Papers, NHHS.

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railroads, explaining that the address was already too long and that he had outlined his ideas on railroad policy in the Curry Letter of 1841. More likely, the seasoned politician Hubbard could perhaps sense the dangers of irritating the railroad issue further; building the radical platform on antirailroadism was a losing proposition.36 Still, Hubbard proclaimed his railroad policy in bold if curt terms. First, railroads were antidemocratic: they demand public authority without showing any willingness to adopt public habits. “They are the work of private corporations and are wrought for the interests of the corporators. The public are shut out from a participation in their government and directions.” Second, the reckless invocation of “public use” for the seizure of property endangered the people’s rights by weakening the protective barrier of ownership. “The principle that individual property shall not be taken except for public use is in a republic the surest guarantee of individual independence. It is in the truest sense of the word conservative and not anarchical. Without this principle every citizen would hold his dearest rights at the shifting will and temporary caprice of Legislative assemblies.” Once men could not hold their property independent of government’s ability to take it, what liberty was safe? People no longer had power against and over the state—they were helpless against it. The Amherst Cabinet found the address long and unbearable. “Governor H. having submitted himself to political mesmerism, and being under the influence of the ‘manipulations’ of party, is ready to do the ‘will’ of ‘his constituents’ and not his own. May they ‘will’ that he ‘do’ that which is best for the public good and not their own.” Predictably, Hill’s Patriot was also unimpressed, calling the speech, “double-distilled, if not double-refined radicalism.”37 For all the bluster of the 1842 election, the June legislative session was uneventful. Democrat Amos Tuck of Exeter introduced legislation to redirect all railroad-land petitions away from the House Committee on Roads, Bridges, and Canals and into the New Hampshire Supreme Court, but the bill failed. Benjamin Boardman, a conservative Democratic 36. Patriot, April 21, 1842; Hubbard to Carroll, May 30, 1842, Box 1: Folder 6, Henry Carroll/Nathaniel Baker Papers, NHHS. As testimony to the Concord editor’s immense influence, Governor Hubbard told Carroll, “I give you liberty to prune [the address].” 37. Cabinet, June 10, 1842.

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representative from Gilford, had a more sweeping proposal that looked forward to the Progressive Era—immediately “declare” by legislative fiat that all railroads were public corporations, create a state-run Railroad Commission with eminent domain powers, and limit profits for all railroad corporations to 8 percent. That too failed in the face of radical resolve. Conservatives and Whigs gained a victory of sorts by fighting back another challenge to the Concord Railroad exemption, with the override failing in a consideration vote 88-133.38 One matter that did occupy the legislature—and enhanced their radical reputation—was the fight over unlimited liability. Without limited liability protection granted by the state, stockholders risked asset seizures by anxious creditors and personal bankruptcy if their corporation went bust. When Isaac Hill charged radicals with “agrarianism,” Portsmouth radical Thomas Treadwell bitterly responded: “A proposition, making individuals responsible for debts, contracted by themselves, or their authorized agents, and for their own benefit, is not an attempt ‘to strip innocent persons of their property,’ but a simple proposition to apply the same principles of law to members of corporations, that are now applied to private individuals.” Treadwell also lashed out at Hill for suggesting that women and children would be harmed by changing liability law, linking the issue to the railroad controversy. “This affected sympathy for the widow and the orphan comes with an ill grace, from one, who claims the right ‘to strip’ the widow and orphan of the possession of their land—of their homes, for the benefit of a Railroad Corporation. To his darling Railroad project, Isaac Hill would sacrifice even the interest of the widow and orphan.” After postponing a vote on overturning the existing limited liability law in June 1842, the legislature finally acted in December of that year, passing unlimited liability by the narrow vote of 117-94. Next to the railroad regulations themselves, this law was the most controversial in the radical program and was repealed after the railroad law was amended in December 1844.39 38. Patriot, June 16, 1842; June 23, 1842; June 30, 1842. 39. Patriot, April 21, 1842. Conservative Democrats merged with the Whigs in their support of liberalized liability laws, passed by the Hill Administration in 1837. The Sentinel of Keene, New Hampshire, summarized their position well: “If an individual contract a debt, his whole property is liable for payment. Credit was given him on the strength of this liability. But if the same individual place a part only of

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The summer and fall of 1842 were mysteriously quiet. Railroads went little mentioned in the newspapers and little discussed in correspondence. When the first train arrived in Concord on September 6, 1842, the city celebrated, but the radicals said nothing. In a sense, this moment marked the beginning of the third and final stage of the Railroad War, a “backing down” and moderating of the debate as the radicals desperately sought an honorable peace with the railroad. Cracks in the antirailroad forces were first seen in Burke’s doubts in the spring of 1842, but with Hubbard’s victory, the radical front remained relatively firm. As the year wore on, the ranks began to thin and increasing numbers of the radical leadership looked for a way out. In the end, even the devoutly radical Patriot began to buckle. From this point, the radicals’ question increasingly became, How can we accept railroads without sacrificing radical principles?40 Swasey found the silence unnerving. Failure to press the issues of radicalism was akin to defeat and retreat. “‘What is the news?’ Now, literally, none,” he wrote Carroll in August 1842. “Our folks seem to be dead, dying or backing out. . . . [S]ome among us are preaching smooth things—and shaking their heads over what they call ‘going too far they fear.’” In a fearful yet determined tone, he urged the Patriot editor toward renewed vigilance.41 The conservative Democrats had not been swayed from their revolt, however, and despite the defeat of 1842, Hill and his compatriots from around the state met in Concord on January 12, 1843, to plan for the March elections. The group was an interesting gathering of the state’s more prominent and storied Democratic politicians, many with backgrounds in banking, finance, manufacturing, and railroads. Among others were former governor John Page, Concord postmaster Robert Davis, wealthy manufacturer (and Isaac Hill’s brother-in-law) Richard H. Ayer, his property, with others, in a corporation, the amount of credit properly given him is only to the amount of the property he has so placed there. Let this be taken. It should be so taken; but nothing more.” Sentinel, January 12, 1842; Patriot, June 30, 1842; December 29, 1842. 40. Patriot, September 8, 1842. Mention of the first train to Concord was, not surprisingly, buried inside without much fanfare. 41. Swasey to Carroll, August 21, 1842, Box 1: Folder 7, Henry Carroll/Nathaniel Baker Papers, NHHS.

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ex-congressman, abolitionist, and Canterbury banker Joseph Harper, and CRR official William Walker, Jr. Conservatives had hoped as many as three thousand people would attend the rally, but they were disappointed when fewer than five hundred came. Bad weather had apparently made travel difficult, and no one from Cheshire, Sullivan, or Carroll Counties attended. The Patriot laughed at Hill’s efforts, claiming the majority of conservative supporters came from corporate towns like Manchester, New Market, and Meredith. “Banks, factories, toll bridge, turnpikes and all sorts of corporations were represented there. Twaddlers, federalists, renegades, spoil hunters, men who have in turn betrayed every party and done good to none, were there. Faction, spite, weakness and base subserviency to the influences of wealth, and the principles of aristocracy, marked all the proceedings.”42 Swasey remained confident that radicalism held the people’s affections and that conservatism was a dead issue. “I do not believe that this conservative movement can succeed. . . . [R]eflection among the people would do up the business without firing a gun. As it is[,] the attempt is so much like the hard cider movement in this State, and the similarity is so striking that I think nothing but death awaits the movers.” There was a danger, however. Echoing Burke’s and his own concerns of the previous spring, Swasey wrote that radicals should not let railroads be the central issue. If the conservatives were able to agitate over the 1840 bill and make the election a mandate on railroad policy, radicals could suffer. Hubbard and the radical leadership must widen the issue to corporate abuse of the people’s liberties.“[T]hey must not be allowed to change the issue or make false issues. Keep the true issues, men vs. money— whether the people themselves, or those few of them who are corporators with their toadies, shall bear sway.” Two years had transformed the New Hampshire political scene. What was once the source of the radicals’ great strength was now one of potential weakness and defeat.43 42. Patriot, January 19, 1843. The Patriot estimated that 250 people attended the conservative rally. 43. Swasey to Carroll, January 30, 1843, Box 2: Folder 1, Henry Carroll/Nathaniel Baker Papers, NHHS. Some in greater Concord were not as confident as the north-country Swasey. W. C. Clarke in Meredith, a growing manufacturing town near Lake Winnipesaukee, wrote Carroll privately, “Conservatism is pretty hot about us.” Clarke to Carroll, January 29, 1843, Box 2: Folder 1, Henry Carroll/ Nathaniel Baker Papers, NHHS.

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Isaac Hill’s pet newspaper fulfilled Swasey’s fears and began to attack radical railroad policy. When a series of Concord Railroad trains derailed in January, Hill’s Patriot claimed that radical-inspired hate of railroads was goading people into antirailroad violence. “With a large part of this community who have observed the disposition which has manifested itself within a year past, we believe that the inclination to commit depredations on the railroad, at the risk of human life, has partially arisen, and been engendered, from the heathenish prejudice against railroads so prevalent among a certain class who regard neither law nor morality.” Taking exception to the radical claim that Whig and conservative Democratic prorailroad legislation was for the benefit of a select wealthy few, a letter from “PLAIN DEALING” further agitated the railroad issue: “What is their railroad law but special legislation of the very worst kind? Who are benefited from it? A set of black-leg speculators.” In early February, the conservative leadership published an address in Hill’s paper lambasting railroad policy that “denies to the majority the right to govern and control, and enables one person to prevent the government and the whole people from accomplishing an object, however important that might be to the interests of the whole community.” Conservative Democrats would not let the issue rest.44 The radicals responded in kind, and in February, U.S. senator Levi Woodbury wrote of his firm support of Hubbard and the antirailroad agenda. In addition, he attacked John Page for party treason and inconsistency—how could the ex-governor, who encouraged, supported, and signed the 1840 bill, now side with Isaac Hill and boost the conservative movement? When Hill and John Parker Hale debated at Meredith Bridge that month, the radicals were forced to defend what they had done to railroads. According to an onlooker of radical persuasion, Hill’s speech “has appeared every week in his paper for the last six months.” Of Hale’s reply, “such an hour Mr. Hill has never saw. . . . [T]he positions which Hill took in relation to railroads and corporations were utterly demolished.”45 In March, with election day fast approaching, the radical leadership 44. Hill’s Patriot, January 26, 1843; February 9, 1843. 45. Patriot, February 23, 1843; Charles Lane to Carroll and Baker, February 22, 1843, Box 3: Folder 2, Henry Carroll/ Nathaniel Baker Papers, NNHS.

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answered conservative charges by placing the railroad issue in perspective. Their response followed the advice first mentioned by Edmund Burke a year earlier. What was the difference, the radicals asked, between the 1828 agitation by National Republicans for costly canals and the current anxiety over railroads? Both were devious attempts to curtail the people’s liberty. “The first was ever appealing to the people with moonshine promises of splendid internal improvements. In this, the last is equally artful. By the first, wherever dissatisfaction appeared, the project of some great road or canal, was set on foot, and engineers were sent to mark their courses. By the last, new and visionary railroad projects are made the same use to deceive and mislead the people.” Now as then, those anxious for an expanding, aggressive public sector were willing to curtail the people’s liberties by regarding their property as disposable and dependent on the public’s whim. Incredulous, they restated the issue. “They say the democracy are guilty of gross wrong, because a law is in existence, which will not permit railroad corporations to dig trenches and raise embankments upon a poor man’s land without his consent— to use private property—till they have bought it of the owners—to tear down our houses, dismember our farms and take from us our most valued possessions at their own arbitrary will and pleasure.” To those former Democratic radicals who supported the 1840 bill yet were now allied with Hill or the Whigs, the leadership remarked in disdain: “What mean these men by their unnatural denunciations of their own offspring? . . . THE PHILISTINES ARE UPON US.”46 For all the dangers, the radicals remained optimistic. From Exeter, Amos Tuck reported: “The prospect is far better than we had feared it might. . . . If Hill, White & Co. obtain votes in Rockingham County out of Portsmouth, they will be cast by the federalists.” One Meredith radical lightheartedly related that the reality of an impending radical triumph was sinking in: “Some of the old ladies here in the village don’t believe it yet. ‘The people won’t be so cruel,’ said one grandma, ‘as to ruin everything, will they?’ ” Isaac Hill campaigned hard in the last weeks as well, claiming that armed speculators were constantly threatening CRR workers. “[A]ll experience teaches us,” he declared, “that no great improvement of any considerable extent ever can be effected without 46. Patriot, March 2, 1843.

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the exercise of a power in the government which the politicians of the new tests deny.” Explaining the ancient origins and widescale contemporary usage of the eminent domain power, he proclaimed that New Hampshire was on the wrong side of history in relation to railroad development. In addition, Concord Railroad workers were voting the Hubbard ticket: “[T]hese Railroad agents intend to keep the road where it is, and suffer none of its benefits to travel for the north.”47 The radicals’ margin of victory in March 1843 was dangerously slim. Hubbard slipped to just under 52 percent of the vote, and the Whig candidate Anthony Colby rose to 28 percent. The conservative candidate John White received 12 percent, mostly from the greater Concord and central New Hampshire areas. The abolitionist Liberty Party jumped slightly to 8 percent of the statewide vote. A swing of two thousand votes away from the radicals and the election would have been thrown into the legislature. There, the possibility of a conservative Democrat-Whig coalition electing either Colby or White was a real one. The legislature remained in Democratic hands as well, but the Whigs, besides holding on to their traditional strongholds in Cheshire and Rockingham Counties, made serious gains in greater Concord and the Lakes region. Again, especially with such a close election, the radicals were under attack. Some conservatives claimed the radicals intended to “back down,” while others decried their intransigence. Jacksonian radicalism in New Hampshire was at a crossroads, and its leaders knew something had to be done. Should the antirailroad policy, upon which they had built much of their fame and political capital, be abandoned as bad politics? Or was the principle too great to surrender? Faced with Burke’s 1842 reminder of the issue’s potential danger, New Hampshire radicalism of 1843 was increasingly torn. One moment radical leaders claimed railroads were not worthy of public power; the next, defending themselves 47. Tuck to Carroll and Baker, March 6, 1843, Box 2: Folder 3, Henry Carroll/ Nathaniel Baker Papers, NHHS; Charles Lane to Carroll and Baker, March 8, 1843, Box 2: Folder 3, Henry Carroll/ Nathaniel Baker Papers, NHHS; Hill’s Patriot, March 23, 1843. The Patriot treated Hill’s complaint about CRR officials voting radical with scorn: “We have yet to learn and be still more surprised, that politics is to be made a ‘test’ of a man’s capacity for business on the Concord Railroad” (March 30, 1843).

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against charges of “backing down” or being antiprogressive, they frantically wondered how they could accept railroads without denying their radicalism. The Patriot continued to publish antirailroad materials into the spring but felt obliged to defend the Democracy as progressive and forwardlooking, not dedicated to outmoded traditions or Luddite principles. They were not the party of the past: “We should assent to newly discovered demonstrable truths in political science, with as little reluctance as we do to newly discovered principles in the natural sciences. Democracy has improvement for its object; and guided by the lights of reason and experience, is constantly searching for the means of rendering more secure the rights of man.” In another lucid editorial that spring of 1843, they continued: The idea of ‘backing out’ is not very fitly or happily applied to the party who boldly inscribe on their banner the word Progress, who manly abandon error and press forward after truth. . . . It is [Democracy’s] vocation to reform old abuses and to establish the broad principles of equality— He who supposes that the democracy of New Hampshire will take a backward movement, knows little of their character or the means by which they have so long maintained their ascendancy.

These statements by the Patriot reveal the radical dilemma. While radicals held back New Hampshire railroad development, contrary to much of the country’s sentiments on improvement, they desperately sought to convince themselves and others that theirs was the progressive way. Slowly the conclusion was reached that no radical philosophy or principle could be enacted if the radicals did not have the political power to match. If it held political danger because of emerging economic realities, antirailroadism had to go.48 The first step was to find a new governor. Hubbard had represented radicalism well in Concord, but his near defeat in March was too much for the radical leadership to take. In a revealing spring 1843 letter, antirailroad radical Harry Hibbard wrote to Carroll, agreeing with the powerful editor’s opinion that Hubbard was through.“We could give a stronger vote for a new man—Hubbard has done well—he has advocated and 48. Patriot, April 30, 1843; May 27, 1843.

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sustained in word and deed, our principles and cause firmly & ably. . . . [I]f in the opinion of the convention the party would be stronger with a change, I should suppose he would be content.” The danger, as Hibbard clearly saw, was that conservative Democrats and Whigs would see in Hubbard’s departure a “falling off ” from radical principles and try to capitalize on it politically. In view of what was to come, that is perhaps exactly what Henry Carroll wanted. By 1844, the Concord editor was advising an abandonment of the railroad issue to preserve Democratic hegemony, while Hibbard was demanding redoubling radical efforts. In mid-1843 Carroll’s softening had already begun, and he may have seen an obstacle in Hubbard’s renomination. Hibbard was none the wiser, however. Strong denials and smart politics would end speculation: “We must be ‘wise as serpents & innocent as doves.’”49 In Hubbard’s place, the Democrats nominated the wealthy Peterborough manufacturer John Hardy Steele. The son of a poor ScotchIrish mason and a native of North Carolina, Steele was born in 1789, emigrated north while still in his teens, and worked at a textile mill in Peterborough. Intelligent and innovative, he moved up through the ranks of the company, and by the 1830s he was managing the Union Manufacturing Company in his hometown. Recently returned from England, where he inspected textile machinery for updating his New Hampshire mills, the moderate Democrat Steele seemed an excellent choice for ending the antirailroad unpleasantness and reuniting the Democratic Party. Of limited political experience and from traditionally Whig Cheshire County, he had served briefly in the legislature in 1829, was Peterborough town moderator from 1830 to 1838, and sat on the Governor’s Council under John Page from 1840 to 1842.50 As the 1843 legislative session opened in Concord, Hubbard held to his radical positions and, as many in the party were moving toward reconciliation, stressed retrenchment: 49. Hibbard to Carroll, May 27, 1843, Box 2: Folder 4, Henry Carroll/Nathaniel Baker Papers, NHHS. 50. Journal Kept By John H. Steele on a Journey from Peterborough, N.H. to Salisbury, North Carolina in the Months of November & December 1838, edited by John Lindenbusch, 1–4.; Archibald Henderson, “John H. Steele, Native Tar Heel, Twice Governor of New Hampshire”; Robert Sobel and John Raino, eds., Biographical Directory of the Governors of the United States, 1789–1978, 955–56.

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Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Jacksonian New England Property cannot be put away from the control of its owner, against his will, when required for the purposes of individual speculation, when wanted to accomplish private ends, or when necessary to advance private interests. Such objects can only be attained by negotiation and contract. Mind must meet mind when the possessions of one may be needed to carry out the operations of another. A contrary doctrine would place the estates of men beyond the control of their owners—give to wealth the power of applying the means of others to the accomplishment of its own ends, of converting the soil of the husbandman, without his consent into canals and railroads, and of thus subjecting the homes of the poor to the claims of the rich.

Clearly, whatever the changing sentiments of New Hampshire Democracy, Hubbard was not yet ready to give ground: “There is no compromising, no giving up to this principle.” Governor Hubbard seemed to realize that compromise was afoot when he warned legislators not to give railroads public powers “by considerations of expediency.” Holding fast to his position that there “is no halfway house, no middle ground,” he celebrated the “stern and inflexible democracy of New Hampshire.”51 The June 1843 session of the legislature was more active than 1842 in relation to railroads, especially regarding the possible extension of the CRR northwestward to Lebanon in the Connecticut River valley. Prorailroad Democrats and Whigs wanted a charter for the Northern Railroad similar to the CRR charter of December 1840, exempt from the eminent domain strictures. When Andrew Pierce, a staunch Whig from industrial Dover, introduced the exemption amendment to the NRR charter, a lively debate began. Keene Whig Phineas Handerson, supporting the amendment, rose and declared that “[h]e would make the ‘public benefit’ the rule of action, leaving it to the legislature to say when the ‘public benefit’ would be promoted.” The Patriot derided Handerson and Pierce as too forgiving of public power: “By this loose and latitudinarian mode of construction, they very conveniently dispense with all the restrictions and limitations of the constitution, and mould it to warrant any thing.”52 51. Cabinet, June 16, 1843. 52. Patriot, June 29, 1843. In addition to considering the NRR charter, the legislature also banned stockholder proxy voting. See Patriot, May 4, 1840; June 15, 1840; May 27, 1843; Hill’s Patriot, reprinted in the Cabinet, August 15, 1844.

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Leading the opposition to the NRR exemption were Dr. Dixi Crosby and Harry Hibbard. While Crosby, a radical Democrat from Hanover and chairman of the Dartmouth College Department of Medicine, was concerned with issues of western trade, Hibbard took on the issues of missing landowners and the eminent domain. Whigs were claiming that under the 1840 law construction would be halted indefinitely because some lands were owned out-of-state and the owners could not be found—in such cases, what was a railroad company to do? Hibbard dismissed the argument. If owners were unknown or missing, the land could be auctioned off by the state and the railroads could bid along with other interested parties. As for giving railroads land-taking power, Hibbard remained unshakably devoted to the 1840 bill: land seizures for railroad construction were “taking from one to give to another, making one class subject to another, ministering to the clamorous demands of wealth, and erecting the convenience of the associated few into something superior to the rights of the people.” Without a viable alternative, radicals would not yet abandon their principles, and the NRR exemption amendment was defeated 84-136.53 As the NRR amendment was defeated, the Patriot engaged in an interesting dispute with Andrew Pierce over the meaning of the “public sphere.” Though it seems a trivial sidebar to the Railroad War, the conflict shows the extent to which the organ of New Hampshire radicalism debated over the extent of public power versus private rights. Pierce had blundered when speaking in favor of his NRR amendment and, under pressure from radical members, suggested that since a railroad was a “public consideration,” its property was universally accessible to the public. In other words, without fear of trespass, the public could not only use railroad land but place their own cars on the tracks. After realizing the dangerous implication of his words, he then reconsidered and claimed that all railroad property, except the tracks, were public. The Patriot immediately began prodding Pierce on his ideas of “public” and “private.” Did Pierce’s admission on the true nature of railroad land destroy the concept of “public use”? “Admitting the constitutionality of the grants to railroads to take land, does their right to the part covered by the rails, differ from that of the other part? Certainly not.” Only half 53. Patriot, June 29, 1843.

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in jest, the Patriot now swung around rhetorically to defend railroad property from the implications of Pierce’s remarks: The doctrine goes to deprive the railroad company of rights which the legislature professed to confer upon them—Every person might put his cattle, horses and carriages, upon the outside of the track, and use it as he pleases. He might have drove sheep, hogs, and cattle, caravans, military companies, log cabin processions, and any thing else upon it, and the company could not help itself. They would be obliged to pay for a privilege whose use would inure to others as well as to them. The exercise of it to them might be rendered valueless by the intrusion of others.

In rankling a prominent Whig, the paper also illuminated the problem with definitions of public and private use. New industrial forms and new technological advances were necessitating a more complex understanding of the public sphere. If New Hampshire was to embrace and benefit from antebellum economic advances, it would have to bend to the demands those innovations made on public and private power. Labeling railroads as wholly private was just as effective in quashing their development as labeling them wholly public. Neither strategy would allow railroads to develop in New Hampshire; in one, they could not benefit from public power and could therefore not be built; in the other, they would be “rendered valueless” by incessant public interference. In poking fun at Pierce, the Patriot inadvertently admitted that Edmund Burke was right: Isaac Hill had “the strong point on his side of the controversy,” and a compromise had to be struck.54 When the legislature adjourned, again the radicals went quiet on railroads. With Steele as the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, the Patriot came out in favor of the NRR charter. Moderation seemed at hand. Hill’s Patriot started bragging openly that the radicals were backing down. Pointing to fears that a railroad from Boston to Vermont would perhaps bypass New Hampshire, the paper reported rumors that the legislature would act to “allow” a road to pass through Keene, exempt from the 1840 law. The paper also noted that railroad officials along the proposed NRR were still faced with stubborn landowners refusing to 54. Patriot, June 29, 1843; July 6, 1843.

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sell. All this, combined with continued complaints over the dangers of public use, appeared to the conservative paper as dirty politics: The twisting, turning, and analyzing of the words “public benefit,” “public uses”—“private benefit” and “private uses,” by shrewd and cunning lawyer politicians, is all gammon and humbug—got up with the sole view of proscribing this or that man who does not agree with their notions, in order more easily to advance themselves to places of trust and emolument. Of this the public are fast becoming convinced; and we now see many of these consistent politicians backing out from the untenable ground they had previously taken, with equally as much impetuosity as they rushed into it.

When word came to the paper that ex-governor Hubbard was now booming the construction of a railroad to Keene, they could barely contain themselves: “The people are waking up to their interests; and the demagogues who have heretofore misled and blinded the majority with selfish appeals and false outcrys respecting the invasion of individual rights, are among the first to rub their eyes and pretend to see more new light.” After Hubbard appeared at a Keene railroad rally in January 1844, Hill’s Patriot sneered, “His whole political life is proof that he may change his coat as often as he please and lose no credit as a politician.”55 Compared to past election winters, 1843–44 was relatively calm. The Democrats were unified behind candidate Steele, although a small group of independent Democrats again ran John H. White. The Whigs renominated Anthony Colby, who had come so close to unseating Hubbard the previous year, and the antislavery Liberty party once again ran John Hoit. Once word spread across the state that a bill might appear in the 1844 legislative session moderating railroad policy and repealing the 1840 act, the Patriot heard both concern and relief from loyal Democrats. Nathaniel Baker wrote to his editorial partner Henry Carroll: “Some of our folks here [in Concord] blow a little about the railroad bill.” Northwest 55. Hill’s Patriot, November 30, 1843; December 7, 1843; January 11, 1844; January 18, 1844.

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of the capitol, word filtered in that citizens were supportive of a moderated policy and an NRR charter.56 John Hardy Steele was also being queried whether he supported a moderated railroad bill. “[To] think that nearly every leading democrat in the state, should prove false to principles which they have supported with such pertinacity, for the last two or three years, is almost insupportable,” one despondent correspondent wrote the Democratic nominee. Recalling the divisions and rancor the issue had caused the party since 1840, he complained, “Backing out. Backing out, will be hooted in your ears by the whigs & conservatives the moment this bill passes and with justice too. . . . Where is Hubbard, the man once foremost in the fray? Has he too turned traitor?” Advising Steele to hold the radical line, he added, “[T]hings have got to such a crisis that it will depend on you, to stay the tide; or the battle which equal rights has fought & gained over moneyed aristocracy will have been fought in vain.” Another correspondent begged him to reverse Hubbard’s radical policies and support a revised right-of-way policy allowing eminent domain. “The very existence of our social compact implies the surrender of certain individual rights for the greater prosperity of the whole,” a Keene resident wrote. “We pay a small tribute by the way of self sacrifice for the inestimable advantages society affords. Must not he there be a selfish & unpatriotic man, who, when some important good is sought by a great improvement opposes his interest to the general welfare & that too when this welfare is his welfare?”57 The March elections brought some relief to the Democratic Party. Steele garnered 54 percent of the vote, up slightly from Hubbard’s showing in 1843. Colby received 30 percent, the best Whig total in recent years, while John White slipped to a paltry 4 percent. Fewer than two thousand people statewide voted for the former conservative standard-bearer. Perhaps the greatest surprise of all was the Liberty 56. Baker to Carroll, January 3, 1844, Box 2: Folder 7, Henry Carroll/Nathaniel Baker Papers, NHHS; John K. Cate to Carroll and Baker, January 29, 1844, Box 2: Folder 7, Henry Carroll/Nathaniel Baker Papers, NHHS. 57. “One who sees, reads, & knows” to Steele, February, 1844, Box 3: Folder 22, John Hardy Steele Papers, Peterborough Historical Society (hereafter cited as PHS); Josiah Colony to Steele, February 21, 1844, Box 3: Folder 22, John Hardy Steele Papers, PHS.

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Party receiving 12 percent of the vote, up from 6 percent in 1842 and 8 percent in 1843. Hoit’s burgeoning vote foretold much of the coming crises in post-1845 America and what issue would eclipse the railroad by year’s end. But the election answered no questions about future railroad construction. Neither the incoming governor nor the radical leadership knew what would unfold in 1844, or how. On March 21, Steele wrote Hubbard accepting an invitation for “conferring with [the Governor] on State affairs” and asked him his thoughts on the railroad rumors. Steele’s tone suggests he was anything but decided on being the moderate voice in the dispute. “What means those dark hints thrown out in some of the newspapers, and occasionally whispered in private circles, in relation to a new discovery in the art of framing Rail Road charters so as to make private mean public interest within the meaning of the Constitution? Are some of our friends mad? Or do they expect to turn and twist about the unyielding democracy of this state, to suit their pleasure or fancied interest?” Steele was concerned that a readjustment in railroad policy would lead to another schism within the party and 1845 would be a repeat of 1842. “[A]re we to have another split & another conservative party to fill up the vacant ranks of Hill & Co’s dispersed squadrons?” While not answering that question, Henry Carroll reported to the incoming governor that the likely alteration to railroad policy would be as follows: “[I]n case the corporation & landowners cannot agree, the question of public use shall be submitted to the Court and jury, in every case, & leave it to the Court & jury to say whether the owner ought to yield up the use of the land.” In any case, the new policy would be “as near to Radicalism as possible.” This was a significant compromise. In 1840, radical policy stated that landowners held property above the interests of railroad companies; now the suggestion was that landowners and railroads had equal right to the land. Send all land disputes to a courtroom.58 After the March elections, the Patriot mellowed dramatically in its 58. Steele to Hubbard, March 21, 1844, Box 3: Folder 9, John Hardy Steele Papers, PHS. In another part of the letter, Steele flatters Hubbard: “[T]he day will come when the sentiments expressed & the principles laid down in your letter to Curry & others will be quoted as [an] authority not to be gainsaid.”; Carroll to Steele, April 23, 1844, Box 3: Folder 9, John Hardy Steele Papers, PHS.

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railroad philosophy. The paper reported support for the NRR in towns north and west of Concord and published letters boosting its construction. In response to critics claiming the Patriot was “backing down,” the paper denied railroads were ever “a dividing question” between Democrats. They claimed Hill’s treason split the party between 1840 and 1843— an incredible suggestion considering that Hill never would have revolted had the 1840 bill not been passed. Further, if the legislature decided upon a different railroad policy, the paper would not complain. “Though we may deem the decision wrong, we shall not be found assailing brother democrats for an honest difference of opinion. . . . In the exercise of the rights and privileges of freemen, we wish to see men engaged in any undertaking they please, if not inconsistent with the rights of the people. Let them build factories, railroads, or pyramids—we care not. Let enterprise have full scope.” What was once “treason to party” and “high principle” had become “an honest difference of opinion.”59 Leading radicals were dismayed by talk of abandoning the 1840 railroad law and wrote Concord frantically. Harry Hibbard saw “backing down” as a vast betrayal of the people’s trust. Referring to Judge Nathanial G. Upham’s prorailroad speech at a Lebanon railroad meeting in 1843 (widely read and republished from 1843 to 1844), Hibbard wrote Carroll, [Upham’s arguments] are mere forms to cover up and cloak a proposed abandonment by our Legislature of a ground which we as a party and as a Legislature have solemnly expressed in the eyes of the country, and which the people have over and over again sanctioned by strong majorities. . . . For one I shall never consent to its abandonment either directly or indirectly. . . . The people by a large majority stand here with us. They will and ought to abandon us if we desert this position.

To abandon the 1840 railroad policy was to deny the progressive tendencies of Jacksonian democracy and to embrace Whiggish conservatism. The electorate’s preference and the party’s future lay with more radicalism, not less. “I am this year as last, for no backing out, no heading backward—no retracing our steps. I am rather for advancing still farther,” the emphatic Bath radical wrote. “There is no safety for Democracy but 59. Patriot, May 23, 1844.

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in progression. It cannot stand still much less can it retrograde without endangering its own safety and very existence.” Not convinced that railroads were the innovation of the age, Hibbard was unmoved by desperate appeals for development. If the 1840 bill was too restrictive to allow construction, the railroads did not deserve to be built—the sacrifice of individual rights and private interests was too great: “[If] it be that Rail Roads cannot be built without breaking down and treading over [our rights]—I say let them be unbuilt from this time henceforth.”60 The outgoing Speaker of the New Hampshire House, Samuel Swasey, also wrote in disgust to Carroll over the turn of events. He could not understand how people considered railroads a public institution: they were no more public than “a line of Stage Coaches & baggage wagons.” Any changes in the 1840 law allowing eminent domain or easing the regulations on land seizures were “unnecessary, unjust, inexpedient, and unconstitutional.” He was on record as supporting the Northern Railroad charter, but under the laws “as they are . . . the way can be obtained at less prices as the law now is than with the law as it was.” Echoing Hibbard, Swasey thought the spirit of the Democratic Party was at stake with the railroad issue: was the Democracy progressive and forwardthinking, or conservative and in the pay of corporate interests? “I am for going ahead & not backward—the very crisis of the reforms is coming or perhaps come.”61 Letters to the Patriot from radical voters also expressed concern that the 1840 railroad regulations were about to be scrapped. One writer, known only as “A Sucker after truth,” took issue with Judge Upham’s “more extended notion” of the public sphere, asking “what possible connection [exists] between the right of the public to the right of way for common roads, & that of a corporation composed of various scattered individuals to the right of way for a railroad to be built by them for the purpose of adding to their own private wealth [?]” Another, 60. Hibbard to Carroll, March 20, 1844, Box 2: Folder 8, Henry Carroll/Nathaniel Baker Papers, NHHS. Hibbard urged Carroll to “keep the ship right.” Judge Upham’s address to the Lebanon rally, along with Dr. Charles Haddock’s speech, gained wide approval as eloquent and convincing expositions on railroads and their emerging role in American society. See chapter 2. 61. Swasey to Carroll, April 30, 1844, Box 2: Folder 8, Henry Carroll/Nathaniel Baker Papers, NHHS.

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from a town along the NRR route, cynically related how his region was antirailroad until the NRR was announced and citizens began to think of the economic benefits. “Up to about the time of the survey of the route of the proposed Northern railroad not a lisp was heard against those principles repeatedly sanctioned by a large majority of the voters of the State,” he reported. After the NRR engineers and surveyors came through, however, “[t]hey obtained a new light. . . . This change of sentiment and action, is not adverted to for the purpose of insinuating that those individuals acted from interested or selfish motives. But this change, and the survey, happening at the same time, is surely a most wonderful coincidence.”62 Governor Steele’s first address to the legislature clearly signaled that he was open to a change. All previous radicalism and skepticism aside, Steele became the voice of moderation and compromise, virtually inviting the legislators to adjust the 1840 bill. “If [railroads] are of so much importance as many seem to think, it unquestionably is the duty of the legislature to favor their construction, under such restrictions and limitations as the constitution of the State and the security of individual rights require.” Unlike the strident Hubbard, Steele declared that if the people consented to eminent domain, the government was bound to follow. But Steele would not be the leader of this effort—the legislature had responsibility to construct a bill for his consideration. “If the legislature in their wisdom should see fit to grant charters for railroads, it is for them and not for me to say what guards or limitations should be provided. It is enough for me to say that upon this as well as upon all other questions, when brought to my official consideration, I shall fearlessly exercise a sound discretion and an honest judgement.”63 The June 1844 session was the most contentious legislature since 1840, and railroad matters were of considerable interest. The House was swamped with railroad petitions urging passage of the NRR charter and an end to the 1840 bill. “It looks very much like an attempt to carry things by rush and storm,” the Patriot quipped. When a motion was introduced extending the session three extra days—ostensibly to allow the legislature to handle all the railroad questions—the radicals barely 62. “A Sucker after truth” to the Patriot, April 1844, Box 2: Folder 8, Henry Carroll/Nathaniel Baker Papers, NHHS; Patriot, May 16, 1844. 63. Cabinet, June 13, 1844.

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defeated it 106-119. On June 18, Whig leader Dr. Charles Haddock, Dartmouth professor and well-known railroad booster, introduced a resolution to have Superior Court judges decide irreconcilable cases between railroad companies and landowners. Speaker Hibbard descended from the chair to oppose the proposal: “He would not take, as a legislator who had assumed a solemn oath to abide by the Constitution, the opinion of the justices of the Superior Court or of any other tribunal however high. Legislators are bound to abide by the Constitution as they understand it.” Restating the traditional radical reply to the idea that railroads were public, the Speaker declared, “Some say they are for public use—so is a grist mill; if railroads can take land, so may a grist mill.” Haddock’s resolution was “postponed” in a close consideration vote, 110-89.64 Lastly, the NRR charter came out of the Roads, Bridges, and Canals Committee and was reported to the House—subject to all current railroad policy, including the 1840 bill. While many in the House wanted a charter similar to the CRR’s, supporters put off a battle for exemption until a later date. The NRR charter passed on June 18 by a resounding 176-47 vote. Soon after, the session adjourned and the members departed. The Amherst Cabinet was disgusted: the legislature lasted a short fifteen days and continued to manifest “a rigid adherence to the ultra measures of the democratic party.” Three railroad charters were passed, including the NRR, and none were exempted from the 1840 law. “[T]hey are of no use to the petitioners,” the paper complained, “as no one pretends that any of them can be carried into operation.”65 The Patriot meanwhile was becoming actively interested in boosting New Hampshire as a state worthy of railroad development. When word leaked that an excursion of Boston and Canadian railroad officials traveled the route between Boston and Montreal via Fitchburg, Massachusetts, and Rutland, Vermont—thereby completely avoiding the Granite State—the paper claimed the Fitchburg route was a waste of time. If developers favored the route from Boston to Concord and extending northwestward through the Connecticut River valley to Burlington, Vermont, they would shave roughly eight hours off travel time. The newspaper that 64. Patriot, June 20, 1844; Cabinet, June 27, 1844. 65. Cabinet, June 27, 1844.

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once declared itself radical and skeptical of railroads was now publicly advertising New Hampshire as a railroad-friendly state. With the railroad issue, economic pressures fired political change. When the legislature reconvened in the late fall, it was clear that some reform of the 1840 bill would be passed. New Hampshire congressman Moses Norris—Speaker of the New Hampshire House when the 1840 bill was passed—wrote a series of letters to Henry Carroll proposing possible solutions to the railroad problem. Norris doubted the legislature’s ability to simply “declare” railroads public and therefore make them eligible for eminent domain powers: “Can the legislature create a new kind of public corporation unknown in law at the adoption of the Constitution & evade the constitutional provisions giving to individuals the right of having all questions touching his property settled by jury? I think not.” He also raised the clever idea with Carroll that perhaps the state could institute a new tax, raise money to buy the railroads in New Hampshire, and then lease them back to investors. This way, the railroads truly would become a public, state-owned enterprise, and the public could recoup all revenue losses through the lease. In the end, Norris turned away from this idea, too: “Is the government of NH a good broker’s shop? . . . It strikes me that the principle is a dangerous one—and if possible the precedent more dangerous.”66 Instead, the state could make railroads public by giving them clear public functions—not just pointing to a hazy “public good” often claimed by conservative Democrats and Whigs. If the state reserved the ability to set the passenger and freight rates and gave the railroads contracts to carry mail and state militia, the railroads could reasonably be assigned the label “public”: These provisions would in every humble opinion render the use of the road as clearly public as to permit or attempt to permit the cars of Thom, Dick & Harry to run over the road in the same way—Take my suggestions and you will give the corporation the right & the exclusive right it is true of carrying passengers on the road—but on the other hand the property of the corporation—their road, their locomotives, cars and men 66. Norris to Carroll, December 3, 1844, Box 3: Folder 2, Henry Carroll/Nathaniel Baker Papers, NHHS; Norris to Carroll, December 15, 1844, Box 3: Folder 2, Henry Carroll/Nathaniel Baker Papers, NHHS.

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are made by law the servants of the public—They are bound to serve the public or in other words are used by the public in the manner and at the price the public see fit to prescribe. . . . Nothing it seems to me can be more for the public use than such a corporation.67

On December 11, 1844, Harvey Huntoon, a Democratic representative from Unity, introduced a bill reforming New Hampshire railroad policy and effectively revoking the 1840 Railroad Bill: railroads would be recognized as public institutions with public functions subject to public control in the form of a State Railroad Commission. The commission would cooperate with railroad engineers and surveyors in laying out routes and decide on appropriate compensation for landowners. In addition, profits would be capped, and railroads could not abandon lines without legislative permission. Although it is unclear how many of Norris’s suggestions actually influenced the bill revoking the 1840 bill, the proposed legislation resembled his ideas closely. The Patriot quickly supported Huntoon’s bill. Now that railroads could be considered institutions with clear public functions, radicals had no reason to object. The people’s rights were protected: “[T]he bill in no respect surrenders the great principle contended for by the radicals, as some of us have been termed, while at the same time it presents a feasible and salutary system for the construction of railroads, where the public good may require their construction.” The neighboring Belknap Gazette concurred in more vociferous terms: “Make railroads public—put them under the public control—let the public have a voice in their location, and they lose most if not all their objectionable features; and that great stumbling block, the right of way, is of course removed. Upon these principles, who objects to the railroads?”68 When the 1844 Railroad Bill passed the House on December 18 by a conclusive 172-59 vote, and conservative Democrats and Whigs began lambasting the radicals with charges of “backing down” from the “achievements” of 1840, the radicals were forced to respond. From the north, the Haverhill Democrat-Republican steadfastly denied radicals had been inconsistent in supporting the 1840 act and Huntoon’s 1844 bill. Before 67. Norris to Carroll, December 4, 1844, Box 3: Folder 2, Henry Carroll/Nathaniel Baker Papers, NHHS. 68. Both quoted in the Patriot, December 19, 1844.

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1840, the paper rationalized, private corporations were contending for public powers; now, railroads were considered public institutions. “Clear and essential public uses and privileges are reserved to the State.” That Whigs supported the 1844 bill was more an admission on their side that radical principles were right than vice versa. The Manchester Democrat also denied that radicals had buckled under to “Sneaking, abject, driveling conservatism” or “Groveling, prostrate Federalism.” Now that railroad matters were filtered through a public commission and closely regulated by the legislature, the people’s rights were secure. “Democracy questions and hesitates, but still shows its readiness to promote improvements, so soon as a way is pointed out, in which it can be done without sacrificing the constitutional rights of the citizen.”69 The Patriot gave perhaps the clearest explanations of how and why radicalism had come to support the 1844 revision. First, the people’s business was trusted to a commission open to public scrutiny, and railroads consented to a series of public demands: “[T]he State says to the company applying [for a charter], if you will invest your money in this enterprise, agree to the restrictions and conditions we impose, construct the road and conduct its affairs as we proscribe, and in a word, become our agents for the purpose, assuring all the risks and encountering all the contingencies yourselves, we will allow you to have a stipulated per cent of the income.” Second, though railroads could benefit from the state’s powers of eminent domain, the Railroad Commission protected the people’s rights: “The company can have nothing to do with the rights of individuals, except by the usual way of purchase, and the rights of individuals are most scrupulously and effectively guarded. There is no surrender of principle—no ignominious retreat from honest grounds. We stand where we have ever stood—UPON THE DOCTRINE THAT PRIVATE PROPERTY CANNOT BE TAKEN BY PRIVATE CORPORATIONS FOR PRIVATE PURPOSES.” Third, the 1844 revision did not contradict the 1840 act. The 1840 Railroad Bill was a response to corporate arrogance—“The mischiefs that the law of 1840 was enacted to remedy, are familiar to all the people of the State”—and was a legitimate response by the legislature. The radicals were right to oppose ex-governor 69. The bill also had a battle in the New Hampshire Senate, passing on the day after Christmas; both quoted in the Patriot, December 29, 1844.

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Hill and the prorailroad forces urging surrender to the railroad interests: “That was the rock on which conservatism split. While the radicals, as they were termed, opposed no man because of his opposition to the law of 1840, the conservatives made it a ‘test’ of democracy—opposed Governor Hubbard and all the regular nominees of the party who framed that law, and came nigh destroying the republican ascendency in the State.” Now that the public utility of railroads was defined and these companies securely regulated by the state, the questions of antirailroad Democrats had been answered: “The democratic party have never taken the ground that charters for railroads should never be granted with a right of way. On the contrary, they have ever expressed a willingness to grant charters for railroads with a right of way, provided that there was legally and constitutionally a ‘public use’ in such roads.”70 However, the Patriot’s contentions in December 1844 were only partially correct. While it was true that the State Railroad Commission would regulate railroads in New Hampshire to a high degree, private property was hardly in the same position in 1844 as it had been in 1840. During the Railroad War, private property could be held against the demands of railroad companies wishing to buy—now, with a “public” commission, if the state agreed with a railroad that property was needed for a right of way, the owner was forced to sell. Instead of being forced by the railroad company itself, as in pre-1840 New Hampshire, now property owners were being forced by the state, in accord with a railroad company. One wonders if landowners were more satisfied knowing that land was being taken by the state in cooperation with railroads, as opposed to the railroads alone. In addition, to declare that radicals “opposed no man because of his opposition to the law of 1840” is untrue. First, since the 1840 bill was passed with unanimous Democratic support, the radicals had no one to oppose anyway. Second, those conservatives who turned against the 1840 bill were distinguished as “bolters,” “traitors,” and sellouts to railroad corporations; one editorial even compared them to parents who abuse their children. Further, to declare that the radicals never opposed charters with right-of-way provisions is contrary to the record of 1840 to 1844. Swasey, Hibbard, the Patriot, and others were quite clear over 70. Patriot, December 29, 1844; January 16, 1845.

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the four years of the Railroad War that railroads, like any company or individual, should have to negotiate with property owners along proposed routes instead of being able to take land. Repeatedly, they noted that railroads were no different from factories and grist mills—if one could “take,” then why not the other? In truth, the Patriot’s sudden conversion to right-of-way charters was a response to the dangers of railroad politics—they had taken the advice of Edmund Burke and allied themselves to the innovation of the age: No party, standing upon the [ground] of opposition to any of the true improvements of the age, resisting the advantages of the arts and sciences, and attempting to breast the progress of civilization and knowledge, and to turn it back, can maintain such a position for a moment in this State or in this country. It might as well attempt to resist the rushing torrent of the mountain. The true policy is to take advantage of every valuable discovery and use it in conformity with the democratic principle.71

With the Railroad War over, Samuel Swasey was relieved. The diehard radical had had enough of the issue, supported the Huntoon bill, and hoped New Hampshire Democracy could move forward. “I shall be very glad to have the troublesome question laid to rest,” Swasey wrote to Henry Carroll on Christmas Eve 1844. “The question of their ultimate utility will be decided by time. I think however that disappointment awaits those who expect such vast benefits to flow from them as they now pretend. . . . [N]othing will satisfy but the trial.”72 The issue was laid to rest, and, contrary to the skeptical Swasey’s predictions, within five years New Hampshire was second only to Massachusetts in railroad mileage among New England states. By the winter of 1845, attentions had turned away from the iron horse. The boisterous young Exeter attorney and U.S. congressman from New Hampshire, John Parker Hale, began speaking of the dangers of Texas annexation and war with Mexico, and the “brief feud over a local question” gave way to slavery. 71. Patriot, January 16, 1845. 72. Swasey to Carroll, December 24, 1844, Box 3: Folder 2, Henry Carroll/Nathaniel Baker Papers, NHHS.

Two “Everybody Must Go to Boston” Railroads, Capitalism, and the New Hampshire Jacksonians

How is it now? Passengers from Salem. Whiz—and away goes the engine, empty cars and all. In fact, Salem is merely a way passenger. If you are ready, sir, jump in, if not, the next train will be here in a few minutes. Nashua, Exeter, and Portsmouth are now situated as Worcester, Salem, and Lowell once were. In a few days they will become way passengers—and then, the benefits of Railroads will consist in loss of trade, loss of population, loss of enterprise. For which they will occasionally hear the buzz of an engine car ready for Boston—can’t wait gentlemen. The trade of York County will be lost to Portsmouth, Hillsborough to Nashua, some other stopping places for a year or so will be delighted with the benefits of Railroads—and then the charm will vanish and everybody must go to Boston. Letter to the Essex Banner, November 1841

In antebellum New Hampshire, both radical and conservative Democrats embraced the idea of a free market economy and the entrepreneurial function. They did not condemn a market economy nor wistfully wish for a nostalgic past when markets did not hold sway and a brotherly self-sufficient exchange economy was in vogue. Paralleling their fears of an expansive public sector, radical Jacksonians saw in the railroad the specter of an illiberal capitalist state—a state that would attack property ownership and hence the foundation of a free society; reduce

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the force of an entrepreneurial, liberal market economy in their lives; and corrupt politics with corporate interests and “foreign” lobbyists from Boston and New York. Conservative Democrats sought a middle ground between Whiggish illiberalism (which the Whigs celebrated as the creation of an efficient and cosmopolitan national economy) and radical aversion to corporations. Carefully regulated by public vigilance and regulation, the dangers inherent in railroad development could be avoided and its vast benefits harnessed for the economic good of New Hampshire. Contrary to some Jacksonian historiography regarding antebellum Democrats as nostalgic yeomen grasping onto political ideas and “cooperative” economic practices rapidly passing out of date, radical and conservative Democrats had a thoughtful, sophisticated, and forward-looking understanding of American political economy. In addition, “radical,” loco-foco elements (particularly the leadership) in the Democracy were not found in “hilly, poor, and small” towns, but often the very prosperous and very well connected towns close to Massachusetts. In short, the economic aspects of the 1840s New Hampshire Railroad War were not over whether or not capitalism was preferable, but over what kind—liberal or illiberal—would dominate.1 Prior to railroad development, New Hampshire was a liberal capitalist state. Farmers, town merchants, and entrepreneurs—from the seacoast to the Connecticut valley, from the hills along the Massachusetts border to the mountains of the North Country—produced goods for a widely dispersed regional market. A variety of articles were often transported great distances to area market towns in-state, like Portsmouth, Manchester, Concord, and Keene, and out-of-state, like Portland, Maine, and Lowell, Newburyport, Salem, and Boston, Massachusetts. Aware of its liabilities as a productive agricultural area, especially in light of western development, “[t]here existed as well a regional awareness of New Hampshire’s dependency, an economic condition which could be mitigated only by unceasing attention to such resources as the state possessed, 1. Donald B. Cole, Jacksonian Democracy in New Hampshire, 1800–1851, 158. Cole analyzed the 1832 presidential election in New Hampshire and determined that poor hill towns, without Congregational churches and without industry, which in the past were anti-Federalist, tended to be pro-Jackson. Towns that were larger and closer to markets, populated by Congregationalists and pro-Federalist, tended toward Henry Clay.

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and constant improvement of existing market channels.” As a “mature frontier,” New Hampshire communities at various stages of settlement were an important link in a growing American economy. New Hampshire’s regions and towns were involved in market society in relation to their settlement pattern, geography, and distance to regional market centers. As historian Norman W. Smith has noted, there were “contiguous markets for different areas of the state”: greater Boston attracted most southern and central communities; Springfield, Hartford, and New York lured the Connecticut valley; and Portland and coastal Maine drew the North Country. In other words, each region fell into “a natural market area” determined by its geographic location.2 The seacoast was the oldest and most commercially advanced region of the state and benefited in a major way from its short distance to the urban centers of Boston and Portland. Due to its proximity, this region was crisscrossed by a well-developed road system and was the first to experience railroad construction in the 1830s. The Eastern Railroad ran along the coastline connecting Boston, via Portsmouth, to Portland, and the Boston & Maine Railroad (B&M) ran inland connecting Boston, via Haverhill, Massachusetts, to the Maine seacoast. (See Map A) James Farmer’s 1823 Gazetteer of the State of New Hampshire richly detailed the entrepreneurial diversity and energy of the early antebellum, prerailroad seacoast economy. Hampton, a busy coastal town, was a fishing and market center: “Great quantities of the winter fish are carried frozen into the interior, and to Vermont and Canada. . . . Hampton now affords a good market, and its trade is evidently increasing.” Hay was produced in large amounts in the southern seacoast towns nearest the salt marshes at the mouth of the Merrimack and transported upriver and along the coast by a fleet of flat-bottom boats known as gundalows. Capitalizing on their close proximity to major urban centers, towns like Greenland, just west of Portsmouth, raised fruits and vegetables for city dwellers: “The orchards and gardens of this town are valuable, and yield annual profits to the farmers.” Primarily though, the seacoast region was economically defined by its growing industrial sector. The city of Dover, along the banks of the Cocheco River, was fast developing as a textile center. Cotton mills sprang up along Cocheco Falls, 2. Smith, “Mature Frontier.”

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one employing 120 people and producing upward of ten thousand yards of cotton cloth a week in the mid-1820s. Just north, up the Piscataqua River along Salmon Falls, Somersworth boasted clothing mills that produced “200 yards of superfine broad-cloth a day,” along with carding, spinning, and cloth-dying facilities, and oil and nail mills. In Exeter, an old colonial town best known for its prestigious boys’ academy, cotton, woolen, oil, and paper mills harnessed the water power of the Great River, and six tanneries cranked out twenty thousand hides a year for export. Clothing mills were in operation in Sandwich and Meredith, and several bark mills—supplying curing agents for the leather industry in the Merrimack valley and Portsmouth—were working in Gilford, Gilmanton, and Alton. The lumber industry also thrived in this region: in 1820, the four towns of Meredith, Gilford, Gilmanton, and Alton boasted thirty-three sawmills. In advance of Lowell, the New Hampshire seacoast was deeply involved in the antebellum American industrial economy.3 Just west, the Merrimack valley developed at an even faster rate, as the towns along the wide river grew to become the northern link in the nation’s industrial revolution. Like the seacoast, this region benefited from an extensive road and turnpike network stretching north-south along the river bank and east-west reaching toward Keene and the Connecticut River. In addition, river improvements like locks and canals made the Merrimack a viable and profitable transportation alternative, especially after the Middlesex Canal opened up a clear avenue to Boston in 1805. While its cities could not rival the commercial scope or lineage of the coast, Nashua, Manchester, and larger towns like Franklin and Amherst developed connections with Boston, grew rapidly after 1820, and soon overtook Portsmouth in regional and national importance.4 Like the seacoast, by the 1820s this region was in the midst of rapid development and entrepreneurial activity. One of the most prosperous businesses was the lumber industry. Large amounts of timber were cut and floated downstream to Boston, Salem, and even Newburyport for use in house construction and ship-building. At Goffstown, lumber was 3. Farmer and Jacob B. Moore, Gazetteer of the State of New Hampshire, 148, 146, 115–17, 131–32. 4. Mary Stetson Clarke, The Old Middlesex Canal; Christopher Roberts, The Middlesex Canal, 1793–1860.

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cut, floated down the Piscataquog River, redirected down the Merrimack, and used as masts by Massachusetts’ ship-builders. Across the river from industrial Manchester, Bedford was the scene of a bustling lumber industry: “Of the white oak, great quantities of ship timber have been obtained, and conveyed to Charlestown, MS. by means of the river and Middlesex Canal.” At the public landing at Piscataquog village in the northeastern corner of town, “lumber of all descriptions from the circumjacent country, is conveyed down the river to market by rafts and boats to Newburyport, and through the Middlesex Canal, to Charlestown and Boston.” In addition, the Bedford boating business benefited from the canals being constructed in greater Manchester, as goods traveled freely on the river and out of the countryside: “[T]he vicinity is supplied with the heavy articles of salt, lime, iron, fish, plaster, etc. at the Boston prices with the addition of a small amount for freight.”5 The early antebellum Merrimack Valley was also alive with factories and plans for further industrial development. After the Amoskeag Canal was opened in 1816, cotton and linen factories began steady expansion in Manchester. As the factories were extended, the canals grew as well, expanding in 1836 and in 1845. By the time the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company was founded in 1831, its name was used interchangeably with Manchester as the name of the community. Dunstable (soon renamed Nashua) already had a variety of mills, including iron mills manufacturing thousands of hoes and scythes a year; it benefited also as a river port for products shipped between eastern Massachusetts and Keene. In Holderness, saw, grain, paper, carding, and bark mills all utilized the water power of Squam River—by the late 1850s, dams on this river were part of a delicate and complicated system of water control financed by Boston investors operating the huge textile mills in Lawrence and Lowell, Massachusetts. At the state capitol in Concord, business was less pronounced than at Manchester and Portsmouth, but it was still robust. By 1815, the river was fully navigable to Concord, two bridges spanned its width, and boat company warehouses dotted the water’s edge. River improvements combined with the Middlesex Canal worked “to make Concord a point of trans-shipment of goods destined for northern New Hampshire and eastern Vermont.” Granite was profitably 5. Farmer, Gazetteer, 142, 78–79, 214.

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quarried nearby, and the lumber business also boomed. “The intercourse with Boston, opened by way of the canals on the Merrimack, has been of considerable advantage to the county,” and large amounts of goods and “produce of the country” were transported up and down the river from Concord, sometimes fifteen hundred tons annually. Well in advance of the railroad, in small town and larger city alike, a vibrant and diverse entrepreneurial economy was in place.6 The Highlands west of the Merrimack valley were also well supplied with roads and turnpikes connecting east-west by the 1820s. Although rocky and often unproductive, farming and husbandry still yielded impressive returns. In Stoddard, farmers produced thirty-two thousand pounds of butter, forty-three thousand pounds of cheese, and butchered more than seventy thousand pounds of beef in 1820 alone. Further north in Croydon and Springfield, farmers butchered more than 230,000 pounds of beef and pork. In Francestown—birthplace of national Democratic leader Levi Woodbury—a “freestone” quarry was opened: “very extensive and valuable . . . accidently [sic] discovered by Mr. [David] Fuller while ploughing in the field, and was first worked in 1804. . . . When separated from the quarry, it is worth $2.50 per cubic foot. It is transported to Boston in large quantities, where, as well as at the quarry, it is manufactured into stoves, hearths, etc.” At a mineral spring near Mt. Monadnock in Jaffrey, yellow ocher was gathered and sold for the making of paint: “Upwards of 30 tons have been transported to Boston and its vicinity, and a considerable quantity remains.”7 Rural industry dotted the villages and streams of the Highlands, despite distances from urban America and busy market centers. In 1803, the first cotton mill in the state was built in New Ipswich; by the 1820s it was joined by two more cotton mills, two woolen mills, one carding mill, one bark mill, and an oil factory. Busy Peterborough, near Keene, had 6. J. W. Meader, The Merrimack River; Its Source and its Tributaries, Embracing a history of manufactures, and of the towns along its course; their geography, topography, and products, with a description of the magnificent natural scenery about its upper waters, 194; Farmer, Gazetteer, 182, 121; Smith, “Mature Frontier,” 7; Steinberg, Nature Incorporated, 113. Steinberg calls the antebellum damming system of Lake Winnipesaukee and the Merrimack River “a veritable hydraulic empire”; Smith, “Mature Frontier,” 7; Farmer, Gazetteer, 105–6. 7. Farmer, Gazetteer, 242, 112–13, 241, 137, 164.

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five cotton mills and one woolen, one paper, and one oil mill. In Franconia, backed up against the White Mountains, the New Hampshire Iron-Factory Company, capitalized with Salem and Boston investment, had an extensive facility of furnaces that churned out twelve to fifteen tons of iron a week. Mined in neighboring Concord (later Lisbon), this ore was “considered to be the richest in the United States [in 1820].” In Grafton, a middling town along the Grafton Turnpike Road, isinglass was quarried for the international market: “It requires much labor to obtain this glass, which, when prepared, is transported to Boston, and from thence exported to England.” Even in the rural hill town of Deering, just north of Francestown, an iron factory made hoes, kilns turned out bricks, and local produce flowed down the Second New Hampshire Turnpike to Boston and Salem.8 In the far west, the Connecticut River valley was commonly regarded as the state’s agricultural breadbasket, the area (next to greater Portsmouth) most tied to exterior markets. A complex and thorough matrix of turnpikes, bridges, and ferries gave the region close contact with southeastern New Hampshire, greater Boston, southern and central Vermont, and the Connecticut River Valley to Long Island Sound. With such contacts, the entrepreneurial economy flourished, and the Connecticut valley was considered a Whiggish region most hostile to Jacksonian Democracy. Most river towns in the valley produced massive quantities of meat and dairy products for market: in 1820, the eight towns of Gilsum, Marlow, Acworth, Langdon, Charlestown, Unity, Claremont, and Cornish (a combined population in 1820 of just over ten thousand people) produced an astounding 164,000 pounds of butter, 274,000 pounds of cheese, 729,000 pounds of beef, and more than 800,000 pounds of pork. The industrial sector also grew apace. Keene, the region’s largest city (nineteen hundred people in 1820) was “a place of considerable business” with several thriving glass manufactories. In Chesterfield—where “the chief articles that are carried to market are beef, pork, butter and cheese”—mills developed on streams running into the Connecticut, particularly Partridge Brook, where a cotton mill with forty looms was in operation by the mid-1820s. In Lebanon, a variety of mills occupied the 8. Ibid., 197, 211–12, 138–39, 144, 115.

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banks of the Mascomy River, a lead mine worked the foothills, and the White River Company operated a series of locks and canals that helped river passage by the town. Ten stage coaches a week arrived in bustling Haverhill, and Bath had mills and a dam on the Connecticut. Mill sites were also boosted for the Amonoosuck, “calculated to accommodate machinery to any extent,” and “[Bath’s] surplus produce is carried to Boston, Salem, and Portland.”9 At the dawn of the so-called market era, therefore, New Hampshire possessed an integrated, busy regional economy with trading connections extending regionally and internationally. Villages large and small produced goods for internal use and for markets long distances away. Within the Jacksonian Democracy, however, support was not unanimous for the slowly emerging shape of the economy, especially as industry evolved into corporate forms tied to banks and threatened local markets. Radical Democratic hesitancy and criticism was not aimed at the economic mechanisms and market incentives driving these institutions. These, after all, were the same mechanisms that drove their local economy. Rather, Radical Jacksonians questioned who owned these industrial concerns and how they would effect the existing entrepreneurial economy. Jackson men wondered aloud whether industrial America, with its banking and railroad counterparts, threatened the well-established New Hampshire liberal capitalist-entrepreneurial economy. Initially, Democrats saw nothing suspect in railroad development. When the first trains entered Nashua in 1839, the Patriot was effusive in its praise and used language, symbols, and concepts reminiscent of Whiggery. The Jacksonian prorailroad position was a combination of economic optimism and community boosterism, reflecting their entrepreneurial vision: “The people [of Nashua] are as busy as bees—every man steps quicker, and life seems almost to infuse itself into things inanimate.” Land prices would inevitably rise, investments in New Hampshire industry were bound to increase, and markets for native goods were destined to open up, the paper editorialized. “Every farmer within ten miles of Nashua is by it at once sensibly benefited. He gets a higher 9. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Stagecoach Travel and Some Aspects of the Staging Business in New England, 1800–1850”; Farmer, Gazetteer, 141, 184, 65, 172, 94, 251, 102, 111, 166, 100–101, 172, 153–54, 77.

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price for every thing he can raise to sell. Not only his corn and oats and other grains are quicker for sale at a higher price, but his fowl and eggs, his butter and cheese, his potatoes, beets and carrots, and other vegetables are increased in value—articles which bring him more money which he could not before sell.” Railroads, by their speed and efficiency, also brought markets closer. “All the farmers have to do will be to carry their produce to the depot in the evening, or early in the morning, and in three hours time they are in the market at Boston. A good market of the same articles is found also at Lowell and other areas along the way, so that the farmers within ten miles of Nashua will have all the inducements to increase their produce.” In addition, these railroads were the product of considerable local investment and control, or what the Patriot called “the country interest.” As such, New Hampshire Democrats should invest heavily in railroads and profit from open markets and hefty stock dividends: [Local farmers] hold on to the ownership of their stock, determined that it shall not be sacrificed to the cupidity of sharpers. And they all see the advantage of holding an interest in this stock; the present prospect is, that their investment will yield them an annual income to ten percent, being the maximum of profits allowed by the Legislature—this increase is more sure than the prospects from any other investments. There are hundreds and thousands of farmers in New Hampshire who are able to invest from one hundred to one thousand dollars in a railroad; every such farmer will best consult his true interest by investing in any railroad leading directly to a market for his produce, because by so much as he lessens the expense of transportation towards a great thoroughfare of trade, by so much will be increase the value of every acre of his land.

One letter to the editor from far north Coos County even suggested that the railroad would stem the tide of New Hampshire emigrants heading west: “[W]e trust it will not be many years before the inhabitants of Coos, who are as hardy and noble a race of men as live, will be able to pass to market in one day, and with farms thus doubled in value no longer have an excuse for leaving that romantic and delightful section of New Hampshire for the far west.”10 10. Patriot, April 29, 1839.

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When the Boston & Maine Railroad began construction of a line toward Portland, the Patriot repeated its prorailroad themes in an editorial about the Massachusetts border town of Plaistow. Land values would increase 50 percent, and profitable markets would open. “The little town of Plaistow will come in for its full share of benefits, because it increases the demand and prices for every surplus article produced in the town, as well as provisions for timber and other spontaneous products taken from the earth.” The grandest characteristic of the railroad project, once again, was local investment: “It is worthy of remark that nearly every farmer and mechanic in this town has taken one or more shares in the rail road running through it; and that of these who subscribe to the stock there are very few who are not abundantly able from their own means to advance the amount of their subscriptions. There is no class of men who better understand their true interests.”11 For Democrats like Isaac Hill and his associate Cyrus Barton at the Patriot, railroads would be the savior of a New Hampshire economy (particularly Concord’s) at a disadvantage with a developing Massachusetts and the cheap lands of the west. The paper—acting as the state government’s and the Democratic Party’s official organ in the push for state aid to railroads, especially for the CRR—emphasized the wealthy possibilities of railroad-induced economic growth for all: The time has arrived when longer delay to commence the construction of a rail-road from Nashua further into the interior of New Hampshire is like the delay of the farmer to sow his field which is prepared for the present crop—it is holding in abeyance the property of thousands of landholders which may be raised, some ten, some twenty, some fifty, and some a hundred per cent in value—it is postponing the ease, the comfort, the risque, and the expense of every man who wishes either to travel himself, or to carry and fetch articles to and from the seaboard.

Loyal Jacksonian investors should realize the untapped potential of railroad development and “put their shoulder to the wheel.”12 11. Patriot, May 6, 1839. 12. Patriot, May 13, 1839. The Patriot even bragged to its readers over the success of the Western Railroad in Massachusetts: “The farmer is removed so much nearer to a market as time and the rail-road cut off the distance between Worcester and its termini on the seaboard.”

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Besides being profitable, the railroad was also highly practical. The Merrimack valley roads leading along the water’s edge from Massachusetts to Concord were dusty, rutted, and very expensive to maintain. Freight wagons of five to ten tons each passed up and down the valley twenty to fifty times a day; passenger stages also ran past six to ten times a day. The roads—through drought, rain, and snow—were a bumpy mess and “growing worse every year.” After traffic was diverted onto the rails, wealth from the opening of better markets would flow like the river toward suffering state farmers. In eloquent terms strikingly similar to Whiggish economic thought, the Patriot boasted: The immediate consequence of railroad transportation is to impart life and activity to every kind of business. It sets all in motion: it is as the breaking away of a mound or sluce way letting down the waters of an extensive lake—it moves like the waters of the more distant shore as it does those near the mouth which disgorges them. . . . Ease and convenience of traveling—a lessened expense of transporting goods—a saving of the life of the noble animal now dragged down by long transport over heavy roads—a quicker transit—a universal increase of business, and a rise in the value of all commodities, the produce either of our soil or of the hands of our artisans and mechanics—a consequent rise in the value of all real property—a lessening [of] the expense of towns in the support of highways: these are among some of the consequences of the construction of rail roads along the avenues where great travel must naturally flow.

A boon to New Hampshire markets and a practical alternative to weather-beaten roads, railroads were anxiously and openly adopted by the Jacksonians.13 As already shown, however, rifts began to develop in the Democratic Party, as a growing group of vocal “radicals” and those dissatisfied with the moderate-conservative policies of governors Hill and Page (especially their support of state aid to the CRR, in which Hill was a prominent investor) openly questioned the wisdom of the state’s prorailroad 13. Patriot, May 20, 1839. The paper noted that at a recent Concord Railroad meeting at the Eagle House, Patriot editor Cyrus Barton acted as chair and Isaac Hill was in the audience.

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policies. Criticisms of state aid to private railroad developers were aired in the Patriot in June 1839, and the paper quickly responded. In an editorial entitled “DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLES,” the Patriot defended state aid as egalitarian at its roots: it was aimed at reducing the fiscal hegemony of the seacoast, traditionally a region with easy access to capital. The alternative was a Portsmouth railroad monopoly: “Railroads will just cut across the lower section of the state, but their advantages will not be extended to the great body of our farmers.” State aid would be a tool to balance the age-old regional rivalry between the inland communities and capital-rich greater Portsmouth: “Such credit is needed in the country; great capitalists elsewhere can do without it.” The alternative of no state aid was simple: no railroads. As one writer put it, how can interior New Hampshire compete with the faster, efficient railroad if transportation among inland farmers remains unchanged since “the days of Franklin”?14 There was also the question of a railroad’s effect on the state economy. While boosters claimed it would open up markets with its tremendous speed, Jacksonian skeptics wondered if railroad development meant the death of the traditional entrepreneurial economy. In other words, would the railroad be such an efficient shipper of goods and a serious improvement over existing transportation that all business would “channelize” in railroad communities and relocate to the tracks? What would become of business and opportunities in nonrailroad villages when the old entrepreneurial economy had gone? The Patriot gave a weak answer: It is not all to the discredit of the enterprising inhabitants whose course of travel is through the Valley of the Merrimack towards the market towns of Massachusetts on which they primarily rely as well for sales as for supplies, that they have been cautious in feeling the way before they embark in a rail-road. Bad and heavy as the road now is from Nashua upwards, there is not a way so far in the interior of New England over which is so much travel & so great a weight of goods transported. A rail-road here is wanted, not to concentrate the travel from other directions, but to accommodate the travel already passing. 14. Patriot, June 3, 1839.

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From 1841 to 1843, this concern—that railroads signaled the death of entrepreneurship—would be the primary component of Democratic antirailroad ideology in New Hampshire.15 As the radicals turned against the railroad in 1839, much of their economic criticism centered around regional and city rivalries. Some of these disputes dated back before 1800, as the frontier pushed westward away from the developed seacoast communities surrounding Portsmouth and into an undeveloped wilderness. The state capital was moved from the dignified colonial town of Exeter to rough, inland Concord in 1807, signaling the growing strength of Merrimack valley citizens in state affairs. During the War of 1812, a sharp geographical divide broke the state into camps: Federalists in the Connecticut valley and the seacoast opposed the embargo and war, farmers and merchants of the hill country and the Merrimack valley supported Madison’s conflict. Economic developments strained relations between regions and cities during the 1820s and 1830s as the Merrimack valley industrialized into prominent urban and factory centers like Nashua and Manchester, while Portsmouth remained primarily an older mercantilecommercial hub. Political leadership at the state and national level also swung back and forth from one region to another. Jeremiah Mason and the Federalist-Whigs represented Portsmouth and Keene; Isaac Hill, Levi Woodbury, and others symbolized the hopes of the hill and valley towns of the interior. The Railroad War was an extension of these earlier strains, and any regionally antagonistic wounds that healed during the 1830s were quickly reopened by the difficulties of railroad development.16 By the summer of 1839, the funding and construction of the Concord Railroad was at a “dead stand” because of charges of local favoritism from Coos County, indifference from Boston capital, the national depression, and (most infuriating) deliberate stonewalling by businessmen and politicians in Manchester who wanted to make their city the terminus of the line. Other regions of the state were conspiring against Concord to keep it a second-class city: 15. Robert G. LeBlanc, Location of Manufacturing in New England in the Nineteenth Century, 86, 90; Patriot, May 13, 1839. The emphasis is mine. 16. Cole, Jacksonian Democracy, 16–81.

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With all these obstacles to encounter, how can the people of this village, left to rely on their own resources, and even denied the privilege of raising money upon the corporate credit of this town, hope to go forward with an enterprise involving an expenditure of nearly a million dollars? If the people of the interior of this State are content to forego all the improvements of the age, whilst the other States are distancing us with the velocity of steam itself—if they are content to plod their way to market with the snail-moving pace of sixty years gone by, and to see the markets they ought to enjoy monopolized by those living a thousand miles farther off, we cannot help it.

Incorporating Whig ideas on political economy, the Patriot argued that the interest of greater Concord and the upper Merrimack valley were indistinguishable from the interests of any community in the state. Intransigence and community jealousy was hurting Concord’s and New Hampshire’s struggle (one in the same to the Patriot) against the advantages of Massachusetts and the west.17 The situation remained unchanged through the fall and into the winter of 1840. Prominent CRR investor Joseph Low wrote to the Patriot, explaining that stoppage was due to interference from the powerful Amoskeag Manufacturing Company in Manchester, and that the company was “actively engaged in trying to smother and defeat [the CRR.]” Well aware of the growing concerns and complaints over railroad development, the Patriot lashed out at the Amoskeag Company and its allies in Manchester. Any calls for making Manchester a terminus would hamper extension of a line through northern New Hampshire, Vermont, and Quebec and harm state farmers’ search for better market connections. In addition, a Manchester terminus would give Amoskeag, already renowned for its power and influence, dominance over affairs up and down the Merrimack valley, including Concord: What would be the consequence [of a Manchester terminus]? Why all travel betwixt Concord and Amoskeag must be subject to precisely such hours and terms as that corporation might direct. It must run over their road tributary not only to the road itself, but to the various interests of numerous great manufacturing corporations. We shall either have to 17. Patriot, July 22, 1839.

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Manchester must never be the terminus, and development northward was necessary and inevitable. All delays were hurting valley business; “not to advance is to retreat. . . . What would a factory privilege at this day be worth at Lowell without the railroad? What at Nashua? You probably could not give them away.” Again employing Whiggish notions of political economy, the paper explained that railroad development could not be harmful—everyone must benefit: “Lowell is in no manner injured by extending the road to Nashua, neither would Nashua or Amoskeag be injured by extending the road to Concord.”18 This editorial was the Patriot’s last positive mention of railroad development in New Hampshire for nearly four years. In March 1840, John Page of Haverhill was re-elected to a second term as governor, Hill lost control of the Patriot, and forces began gathering to eliminate eminent domain privileges for railroads. Now, however, the regional animosity was turned on Concord, as many around the state thought the capital was receiving an excess of tax money, government benefits, and public attention. When the debate over the Concord Railroad exemption came up in late 1840, and a bill was narrowly passed relieving the CRR of all the requirements in the June 1840 Railroad Act, the primary opponents of exemption were representatives south and east of Concord—from the most economically developed region of the state. Although many votes against exemption came from the spine of the White Mountains in the upper Highlands, the majority of “No” votes came from three areas south of Concord. Some of these towns were agricultural “hill towns” removed from the turnpikes and direct contacts with larger cities of the east, but most were along the Merrimack River valley and in Rockingham County, industrially developed and in close contact with Portsmouth, Concord, Nashua, and Boston. (See Map B)19 When a protest petition was passed around the House Chamber in December 1840 and presented to the legislature by Albert Baker of 18. Patriot, January 27, 1840; February 3, 1840; February 10, 1840. 19. Patriot, December 25, 1840.

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Hillsborough, outlining members’ grievances about the CRR exemption, just over thirty members signed. They were the most intransigent antirailroad men of the radical Democratic leadership. Again, while several were from hill towns north of Concord and distant from eastern cities, the overwhelming majority of signers were from towns south and east of Concord, not distant from market centers but very close to them. The protest included members from towns ringing industrial Nashua and from Portsmouth itself. Antirailroad ferment was popular in the most economically developed areas of the state. (See Map C)20 Not only were these towns long settled and economically advanced, but they were also the benefactors of a complex transportation system that by 1840 included railroads. When the Railroad Bill was passed in 1840, two of the state’s three railroads cut through Rockingham County; the other, the Nashua and Lowell, nudged the bottom of the Merrimack River valley and was extending northward toward Manchester and Concord. Since the Radical Democratic assault on railroads originally began out of anger and frustration with land-taking tactics in this southeast region, much antagonism was undoubtedly stored up—every town on the Eastern Railroad (except Seabrook) voted against CRR exemption; more than half the towns along the Boston & Maine voted against the CRR; Nashua itself gave a split vote, and every town ringing Nashua voted against exemption. Angry at corporate arrogance in the form of violent threats from the B&M, southeastern New Hampshire was not enthusiastic over continuing railroad corporations’ extensive public authority There may be another reason, however. While anger at railroad corporation arrogance certainly energized radical regulation, the traditional rivalry between Concord and the seacoast also re-emerged. In June 1841, a debate ensued over whether to begin a state investigation of CRR finances, and Representative Joseph Robinson of Concord felt obliged to defend the state capitol from radical charges. Concord citizens had never benefited at public expense; “they have, and have always been liberally taxed in all matters of public utility” like the state prison, asylum, state house—all within city limits. “Concord, poor and ‘bankrupt’ as she is, has for the last ten years paid as much towards the support of 20. Patriot, January 1, 1841.

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the government as the whole County of Coos.” Reflecting on the divisions within New Hampshire politics in the midst of the Railroad War, even the Patriot admitted a strong anti-Concord sentiment was afoot, that a “natural jealousy has ripened into a positive and bitter dislike.”21 When the Railroad War moved toward conclusion in 1844 and the radical program collapsed, this bitter regional rivalry remained. The vote to adjourn the June 1844 legislative session early, avoiding consideration of any more railroad charters like the Northern Railroad extending from Concord to the upper Connecticut River valley, was barely defeated. Towns voting to adjourn were mostly from the central hills (off the proposed Northern Railroad route) and Rockingham County, especially a line of towns just along the Massachusetts border stretching from Nashua to the sea. (See Map D) A Northern Railroad charter was easily passed soon after, without eminent domain privileges—the only significant opposition came from a group of hill towns west of Concord, Merrimack Valley towns around Manchester and Nashua, and three towns around industrial Rochester near the Maine border. (See Map E) The Huntoon bill ending the Railroad War by reinstating eminent domain privileges under strict state oversight passed the legislature in December 1844. Again, opposition to ending the strict regulations of the 1840 bill came primarily from greater Rochester-Dover, greater Nashua, and a cluster of towns around Concord. (See Map F) In sum, when opportunities came up in the legislature either to strengthen or liberalize railroad law in New Hampshire from 1840 to 1844—decisions with profound impact on the future of Concord—the strongest, most consistent advocates of strict railroad regulation and limiting railroads’ role in Concord development were the highly capitalized, economically developed communities southeast of the capitol, many of which already had railroad connections. Other regional economic rivalries were inflamed by railroads, as well. In July 1841, the New Hampshire House debated whether construction of an ERR railroad bridge over the Piscataqua River would harm the river trade, and discussion degenerated into charges of regional and corporate favoritism. One Democratic representative from Portsmouth painted the debate as Dover versus Portsmouth, and the Boston & Maine 21. Patriot, June 18, 1841; March 31, 1842.

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Railroad versus the ERR. Some claimed that any delay in building the bridge was a plot hatched by B&M towns to hurt the ERR and Portsmouth. A north-south dynamic was also at work in the debate over railroad development. During the gubernatorial campaign of 1843, one letter to the editor of Hill’s New Hampshire Patriot suggested that Portsmouth, Concord, and Dover business interests in league with both the B&M and ERR were the primary supporters of New Hampshire antirailroad radicalism, and that intransigence and jealousy for their markets was preventing railroad expansion into the North Country: “[T]his improvement which is to bring the counties of Coos and Carroll, as it were, into the vicinity of the market, is adverse to the interests of two corporations, and thus, the people are held at bay by force of the ultra radical law, exerted by soulless corporations against the best interests of the community.”22 Perhaps the most insidious regional rivalry connected to railroad development was that directed against Boston. While rivalry with other New Hampshire towns was the story of economic competition for state resources, the rivalry with Boston was an economic one charged with the rhetoric of colonialism, imperialism, and “foreign” invasion; Boston was attempting, the charge went, through the unique abilities of railroads to make New Hampshire into a colony of eastern Massachusetts. The Boston rivalry was also a traditional one, stretching back well before 1840. To the Democrats, Boston was the great enemy. Every New Hampshire election cycle was punctuated by worries that Boston Whigs would manipulate state politics. “[T]heir emissaries are traversing every part of the State,” the Patriot warned in 1838, “their secret committees are every where at work: MONEY HAS BEEN FURNISHED FROM MASSACHUSETTS, and with this money, agents are paid for traveling.” Boston industry had combined with New Hampshire Whig investors to enslave local men in a web of debt and dependence: “The Boston Aristocracy, the whig merchants, have their agents in all our considerable villages. . . . We have good reason to believe that they are not satisfied simply with the exertions of the factory agents, traders and other local dependents whom they employ to do their business. [They] have stationed spies and eavesdroppers to overlook the local agents whose business 22. Patriot, July 2, 1841; Hill’s Patriot, February 2, 1843.

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is probably secretly to report those who are unfaithful.” When Whigs did win legislative seats or have respectable showings in statewide elections, Democrats suggested bribery and encroaching “Foreign Influence” from Boston. In 1838, the Patriot tied Whiggish gains with imported Irish voters from Massachusetts, lured to New Hampshire with free food and drink: “Every drunkard, and every voter who would be drunk by persuasion, voted for the federal ticket in this town at the late election.”23 This Boston paranoia was most prevalent after Isaac Hill’s conservatives split and ran a separate prorailroad gubernatorial candidate in 1842. To the radicals, Hill—a railroad, bank, and manufacturing stockholder—was doing Boston’s bidding. “Freemen of the Granite State,” the Patriot warned voters, “think of Isaac Hill standing up in the presence of BOSTON BROKERS, STOCKJOBBERS, CAPITALISTS, and NABOBS, and making a solemn PLEDGE to the BOSTON ARISTOCRACY of filthy lucre, that the legislature of this State, SHOULD conform its legislation to suit the WHIMS and SORDID INTERESTS of these men!” When conservatives complained that changes in liability laws and restrictive railroad regulations would lead to decapitalization, radicals took the remark as a threat and an insult: [Hill], who is more intimately acquainted with the views and feelings of Boston capitalists perhaps than any other person in our State, threatens that they will, if we adopt this policy, withdraw their capital from New Hampshire. The fair implication is that our people are dependent upon Boston capital!—The people of this State are threatened with punishment, if they dare make such laws as to them seem just! . . . Is New Hampshire the mere colony of Boston? Is her destiny in the keeping of the brokers, stockjobbers, and speculators of State Street?

Even when the Huntoon bill had passed ending the Railroad War, Samuel Swasey, the radical leader from up-country Haverhill, held out hope that despite railroad corporations blanketing the state and local boosters asking for more development, New Hampshire interests would retain control. “New Hampshire should take care if she can do so,” he wrote Concord editor Henry Carroll, “that the great lines of Rail Roads 23. Patriot, January 8, 1838; February 5, 1838; April 30, 1838.

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should be located so that ‘the greatest benefit to the greatest number’ should be derived from them, that is possible, to the people of our own State.” Still thinking in terms of creeping Boston power, he warned, “We should not it seems to me suffer a R. Road to be laid through N. H. in a location selected with special reference to the interests of another State regardless of the greatest interests of our own.” To the end, embattled radical Jacksonians saw the economics of railroad development as a battle to preserve the “interests of our own.”24 Arguably the most intriguing economic element of the Railroad War was the debate over railroads and the changing nature of trade. During the Railroad War, Democrats and Whigs engaged in a sophisticated discussion over trade, but the themes they emphasized and the points they stressed do not resemble those in moral economy historiography. In arguing against railroad development, radicals claimed they were defending an entrepreneurial market economy from the threats of a superefficient railroad-based national economy that would literally make New Hampshire farmers “lose their markets.” Conservatives claimed such fears were unnecessary and, co-opting Whig rhetoric and economic logic, boosted the railroad as a boon to the New Hampshire market. In other words, the Jacksonian railroad debate was not over whether or not markets (symbolized by the very embodiment of American industrial expansion, the railroad) would prevail, but over what kind of market would ultimately triumph. For Jacksonian radicals, the fear was not of markets, but for markets. As liberal capitalists who had been active in developing the New Hampshire economy for generations, they were highly defensive of their market prerogatives and saw in the railroad the death of their entrepreneurial relationships. From a party in 1838 and 1839 that had heralded the arrival of railroads as a new source of investment income, to a violently split party from 1840 to 1844 that feared railroads would replace their liberal market economy with an illiberal, imperial economy, Jacksonians developed sophisticated understandings of markets, innovation, and change. As earlier noted, by the spring of 1839 there were rumblings within 24. Patriot, February 17, 1842; May 26, 1842; Swasey to Carroll, December 24, 1844, Box 3: Folder 2, Henry Carroll/Nanthaniel Baker Papers, NHHS.

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the Democratic Party that railroads held as much danger as promise. In May 1839, when discussing a railroad from Nashua to Concord in the Merrimack valley, the still prorailroad Patriot tried to head off worries that a railroad would serve, not to stimulate, but to centralize trade along railroad tracks and make it subservient to Boston. “A railroad here is wanted, not to concentrate the travel from other directions, but to accommodate the travel already passing.” Whigs mocked these concerns. One letter to the editor of the Whiggish Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics dismissed such worries out of hand: “The railroad will bring the Boston market nearer to Portsmouth than Exeter is now, at a distance of 19 miles. O, horrid! says one—we shall all be swallowed up in Boston!—Dreadful indeed would it be to have all the advantages of Boston, without any of its disadvantages in respect to high rents, costs of living, and narrow confined living for our habitations.” But radical Jacksonians saw cause to worry. The growing radical contingent was concerned that railroads would drastically alter economic relationships in New Hampshire. Whereas in prerailroad New Hampshire trade was directed along dispersed turnpikes and roads blanketing the state, railroads promised to be so efficient and swift in transporting goods and passengers as to draw all entrepreneurial activity and capital to their tracks. Communities left out of railroad development would either be at a distinct competitive disadvantage in competing with towns that had cheap, efficient railroad transportation, or be so drained of business opportunities that a slow cycle of economic decline would begin. The market economy, formerly dispersed and enjoyed by the state at large, would become the creature of the select railroad towns.25 The first mention of railroads’ destructive economic capabilities was aired in the Patriot, in a republished letter from the Salem, Massachusetts, Essex Banner. Reflecting on his town’s experience, the writer warned that railroads were ultimately illusory in their benefits and that their main purpose was to draw unsuspecting communities into the orbit of the Boston business world: “[A]nd then, the benefits of Railroads will consist in loss of trade, loss of population, loss of enterprise.” Boosterism led to local investment and development, which in turn led to 25. Patriot, May 13, 1839; Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics, June 15, 1839.

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disappointment and the Bostonization of the town and its commerce. After a few years, “the charm will vanish and everybody must go to Boston,” the writer predicted for New Hampshire.26 In the latter stages of the Railroad War, a lively debate took place between radical and conservative Democrats (and Whigs aligned with the conservatives) over the economics of railroads. As the Patriot began to shift away from the radical position and John Hardy Steele campaigned for governor as a moderate Democrat, devoted radicals worried about abandonment of the Railroad War and what it meant to their farms and businesses. One concerned farmer wrote Patriot editor Henry Carroll, under the pseudonym “Anti-Railroad,” that most merchants would lose trade if railroads were built across New Hampshire: “[L]ook at Concord, and you will see that it is a benefit to a few individuals who have lately gone into business. It does not benefit the whole.” Even more, railroads were not needed—New Hampshire farmers had been successful without them for years. Railroad development would benefit a few in railroad towns at the expense of the many in nonrailroad towns. “We have always got along without one so far, and there is no reason why we cannot hereafter. We have always done well with what we have carried and what little the farmers do carry they can carry it as they ever have, by Horse Power.”27 Debate in the legislature also turned toward the effect of railroad trade. In the June 1844 session, as members discussed the merits of the Northern Railroad charter and whether it ought to have an exemption from the 1840 eminent domain strictures, representatives from the seacoast and the lower Merrimack valley clashed over the benefits of railroads. Representative (and future U.S. congressman) George Morrison of Manchester opposed the NRR charter in particular and railroads in general because, he said, their management was corrupt, they lowered local real estate values, and they proved “injurious to the interests of the farmer and the mechanic.” A member from Kingston (a southeastern town along the B&M) concurred, noting that while railroads helped consumers by lowering the overall price level, they also drove out local production. The Kingston lumber business was closing, land prices were 26. Reprint of letter to the editor of the Essex Banner in Patriot, November 1841. 27. “Anti-Railroad” to Carroll, January 15, 1844, Box 2: Folder 7, Henry Carroll/ Nathaniel Baker Papers, NHHS.

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falling, and there was bitter worry that an NRR charter would eventually lead to extension of the line into Canada, thereby “opening a market for the subjects of the British dominions to come in and undersell us.”28 New Hampshire Whigs strongly opposed these views and vigorously replied to the radical Democrats. One representative from upriver Franklin—a town slated for a station on the NRR—denied Morrison’s claims and noted that the CRR had benefited all his constituents by lowering prices and widening consumer choice: “[T]he article of lime which formerly cost [farmers] $2 per bbl. could now be obtained for $1; they can now come to Concord and purchase all their heavy articles much better than formally [sic], such as molasses, sugar, salt, &c.; they can exchange their products as well and better at Concord than in Boston.” One Portsmouth member also took exception to Morrison’s remarks, saying he was “confident that the farmers in the vicinity of Portsmouth were benefited by the Eastern railroad more than any other class. Wood was formerly brought from North Berwick [Maine] to P[ortsmouth] at the expense of $2.50 per cord while it is now transported for $1. The fishermen in the town of Hampton send their fish, in large quantities, to Boston, and even to Buffalo, New York.”29 The most eloquent and effective New Hampshire Whig critic of radical antirailroad policy was Dr. Charles Haddock. Haddock (1796–1861) was born in the Merrimack valley town of Franklin in mid-1796, graduated from Dartmouth in 1816, and after college taught for a short time at Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. In 1819, he returned to his alma mater as Professor of Rhetoric, a position he held until 1838, when he was appointed Professor of Intellectual Philosophy and Civil Polity. During the Railroad War of the early 1840s, Haddock was a Whig state representative from Hanover and a prominent booster of railroads. When a prorailroad rally was held in neighboring Lebanon on 28. Cabinet, June 27, 1844. George Morrison (1809–88) was a prominent Manchester attorney and political leader. He served five years in the New Hampshire Legislature (1840–41, 1844, 1849–50), five years as Hillsborough County Solicitor (1845–49), and two terms in Congress (1849–51, 1853–55). See Charles H. Bell, The Bench and Bar of New Hampshire, 523–25, Gerald D. Foss and Woodbury S. Adams, Three Centuries of Free Masonry in New Hampshire, 464–65, and Chandler E. Potter, The Military History of the State of New Hampshire, 1623– 1861, 309. 29. Cabinet, June 27, 1844.

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October 10, 1843, Haddock was one of the featured speakers. He presented an impressive, articulate treatise on railroad economics, and Hill’s Patriot republished (and apparently approved of) the entire address.30 For Dr. Haddock, any innovation that reduced freight costs for New Hampshire business was a positive good: “[W]hatever facilitates transportation, is, so far, a public good. Whatever diminishes the expense, in money, or in time (which, in effect, is the same thing, for time is money), whatever diminishes the expense of transportation, enriches the community.” Cheaper costs for producers meant cheaper goods for consumers—producers would pass along their savings: “[T]he more easily, that is, the cheaper, we obtain the objects of pursuit, the more prosperous and happy is our condition.” The reduction in transportation costs would also stimulate the marketing of goods that had never before been sold because carrying costs were greater than the potential profits. Connecticut River valley farmers would earn “an indefinite amount of income from the transportation of articles now excluded from market by the expense of carriage, or by their exposure to destruction along the way.” Like ripples in water expanding slowly out from a point of impact, railroads would disperse economic prosperity to a region suffering under population drain and western competition. Haddock admitted that some producers were bound to fail or go bankrupt in this dynamic of railroad economics, as they were unable to effectively compete with other producers or could not capitalize on railroad expansion. These business failures were positive signs that the economy was becoming more efficient by shifting scarce resources to more productive businesses that could weather competition from Massachusetts and the west: “It is true, the first effect may be to deprive somebody of his gains, and, perhaps, throw him out of business. If so, he has but to 30. Rev. George T. Chapman, Sketches of the Alumni of Dartmouth College, from the First graduation in 1771 to the present time, with a brief history of the institution, 181. Considering Haddock taught at Dartmouth from 1819 to 1854, it is likely he had in his lecture hall many of the leading figures in the Railroad War—Nathaniel Upham (grad. 1820), Moses Norris (grad. 1828), Samuel Swasey (grad. 1828), Henry Carroll (grad. 1832), Albert Baker (grad. 1834), Harry Hibbard (grad. 1835), and Nathaniel Baker (Dartmouth and Harvard, grad. 1839). Whig president Millard Fillmore appointed Haddock to a diplomatic post in Portugal in 1850. After being removed by the Democratic Franklin Pierce Administration in 1854, he retired from Dartmouth and public life.

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change that business, and seek new gains in new ways.” Railroad development was no different from any other technological innovation in history, Dr. Haddock insisted. Improved production methods have always led to short-term pain and long-term good. “Every improvement in the production of the raw material, or in the process of manufacture, or in the facilities of commerce, thus resulting in more or less temporary calamity, has ultimately increased the means and augmented the happiness of society,” he explained. “Whatever may have been the immediate and local consequence, the ultimate and general result is necessarily good—enlarging the resources of nations, and multiplying the comforts of individuals.” Directly challenging the radicals’ fear of outside economic interference and the opening of western and Canadian markets, Haddock declared that economic parochialism and local market jealousy was shortsighted and unpatriotic. “It is certainly time we had enlarged our comprehension of life to something more than the limited wants and interests of neighborhoods and families and individuals,” he provocatively charged. “Even if New Hampshire were called upon to sacrifice something to New England, or New England to sacrifice something to the Union, we should be unworthy of our age, unworthy of our fathers, if one should not make the sacrifice.” In following his stark economic logic, Haddock could be severe. Referring to innkeepers, tavern owners, and stagecoach operators who were significant supporters of antirailroad legislation, he acidly remarked, “I am sorry for them. But they have had their day, and a long one, and so had the monks, who lived by writing, till printing was invented. I pity the good men, but their losses were more than made up in the public gain.” Turning Jacksonian Democratic rhetoric against the radicals, he equated the market and democracy as one in the same: “[Anti-railroadism] assumes that the people are not the best judges of their best interests, and the best directors of their own trade and industry. They undertake to buy what they want, and where they can buy to best advantage, and as cheap as possible. Is there any safer or better policy than to leave them to do so, and help them to do so?” Haddock was puzzled over the tremendous fear latent in the antirailroad position. To radicals fearful of Boston interference in northern New England markets, the Dartmouth philosopher countered that Boston was the historical center of regional trade and the inevitable focus

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of New Hampshire business: “The nearer we get to Boston, the more valuable land is, because nearer to market. . . . It is the distance from the centre that makes all the difference.” Railroads would bring producers closer to the Boston market, and new market towns would spring up instate offering new possibilities for marketing goods. Far from destroying the local entrepreneurial economy, New Hampshire would develop “a little home market, now so much needed, as a vent for the thousand minute, but, in the whole, considerable articles of domestic production, which never find their way to the distant ports.” By divine will or the accident of history, New England agriculture was destined for mediocrity because of chronically poor soil. Sounding a Calvinistic tone, Haddock reflected on regional farming: “New England must suffer.” Therefore, citizens should turn their energies toward building up regional industry. Railroads, a key to this goal, would help New Englanders shift away from farming and into factories. In so doing, railroads were not fearful intruders but valuable tools to maintain regional economic hegemony. For Haddock, a manufacturing people were not shamefully “turning away” from some Jeffersonian ideal or surrendering New England political and economic independence. Instead, railroads and mills were New England’s liberation. “Are we not rather, by position and local advantages, a manufacturing people?” he asked. “It is vain to war against nature. If the mulberry will not grow here, we cannot feed the silk worm. If wheat is an uncertain crop in our soil, we must make it our main dependence. If, after raising enough of the fruits of our climate for our own use, we can do something else better than to raise more of the same for exportation, why, let us do that something else.” In the end, if New Hampshire would not end its war on railroads, any hope of prevailing against the emigration and western markets was lost: We will not deny ourselves a good road for fear that other people should derive some advantage from using it. We will not cut ourselves off from all respectable society because we have not force of character enough to appear well in it. If we cannot maintain our position in an open field of generous and manly conflict, let us give up the State, and go off in a body to Iowa or Oregon; let it never be said that New Hampshire can live only within a Chinese wall, that shuts out enterprize and prohibits the intercourse of the rest of the world.

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Engagement with the world and the promotion of business opportunities was New Hampshire’s only hope. Build railroads, advised Haddock, for “whatever adds to the real prosperity of the business portions of society is friendly to all portions.”31 Joining Haddock’s critique, conservative and moderate Democrats also fought radical perceptions of the railroad. An interesting letter to the Patriot from “A POOR MAN’S SON” supported railroad development as helpful to farmers in search of new markets. Why are we letting special interests like inn, tavern, and stagecoach owners—people with very little capital investment compared to farmers—hold railroads hostage? the writer asked. In addition, 1844 gubernatorial candidate John Hardy Steele faced pressures and questions about railroad economics from party conservatives. The “Democratic-Republicans” of Boscowen petitioned Steele in February 1844 to end the Railroad War and allow the state to share in the benefits of greater markets and trade: [W]e deem the extension of Rail Roads in this State to be highly advantageous to the general interests of the country, and that they are granted by the Legislature for the purpose of facilitating the public travel and the more cheap and steady transportation of merchandise and the productions of this State[,] that their speed will enable us to carry many articles to market at different seasons of the year, which by the former tardy mode of conveyance would be rendered worthless, and that the State of Vermont has, to say the least, some claims for a convenient and cheap transportation of their products to the seaboard.

A Keene Democrat wrote Steele echoing this sentiment, claiming that railroads were not for the exclusive long-term benefit of speculators and special interests: The advantages resulting from Railroads, not to capitalists only, but the community are at this day hardly questioned. The time has gone by when increased facilities of communication were deemed a curse to the people. That there may be instances in which this improved method of traveling may result in little or no good, no one doubts it may even prove injurious, but the inconveniences are but grains in the balance compared with the vast amount of unquestioned benefit resulting. 31. Hill’s Patriot, November 9, 1844; November 16, 1844.

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Much like a manufacturer must replace outdated machinery to compete, so too New Hampshire men must build railroads (even if it causes short-term pain) to maintain and expand their market share.32 Some of the bitterest criticism of the radical view of railroad economics came from the traditionally nonpartisan Farmer’s Cabinet of Amherst. Already violently opposed to the policies of Governor Hubbard and the radical Democracy, the prorailroad Cabinet believed state policy was strangling existing commerce, hindering future growth in trade, and forcing investment into other states: The facility for progress in travel and transportation everywhere else going on, renders it absolutely necessary and desirable for the people of this region to avail themselves of the means which Providence has placed so favorably in their power to secure to themselves, as others are doing, the advantages of going easier and quicker to market with their commodities. It is too late now to rail against railroads, as injurious to the public interests, as the public (the people) every where else are adopting them, satisfied that they are essential to their interests; and it is madness and ruin to let others take possession of these facilities at our expense, leaving us without the means of a safe competition in the sale of our produce, or a hope of any thing but a depreciation in the value of our real estates, and discouragement in improving them. While we are so tenacious of our inalienable right in the soil, as to scoff at the idea of permitting a passage across it, because we can, and imagine we ought to cling to such a precious privilege, we shall have the privilege of seeing the benefit accrue to others, and enjoy that of hugging the right and loss together, as an unavailing prescription for our wounded and decaying prosperity.

By 1844, the Cabinet was openly ridiculing state railroad policy and its effect on the business climate: “A citizen of Massachusetts would be insane to make an investment in a Railroad in the State.” Without a railroad, future prosperity was virtually impossible in the face of southern and western competition and powerful radical Democratic politicians who feared those new markets. The paper mocked the radical-dominated legislature: 32. Patriot, May 30, 1844; Joseph M. Harper, Chairman of the Boscowen Democratic-Republicans, to Steele, February 1, 1844, Box 3: Folder 22, John Hardy Steele Papers, PHS; Josiah Colony to Steele, February 21, 1844, Box 3: Folder 22, John Hardy Steele Papers, PHS.

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If, indeed, our political leaders could send their spirit of legislation over the Railroads that are penetrating from the East to the West, and take up their rails—if they apply a sponge to the Erie Canal large enough to absorb its waters, and turn it to dry land; if they could send forth a blight upon intellect and enterprise and enlightened views of the people of the West, and reduce them to their own slender dimensions; if they could send forth from out halls of legislation a pestiferous breath, that should blast and reduce the bottom lands of the West to a sterility equal to that of our pine plains and granite hills; if they could plug up the Mississippi and stop the flow of its waters, they might increase the demand for our products.

One thing was certain, a frustrated Cabinet noted: “[L]et them rejoice in this manifestation of their power; they can plug up the people of Vermont, and keep them from their easiest and cheapest access to market!”33 Conservative Democrats believed that railroads were no longer a choice in planning and facilitating economic growth, but a necessity in facing the unique market demands caused by the opening of the west. If New Hampshire had no railroads, state producers would be shut out of the national market: “[O]ur only salvation is a corresponding improvement to lessen the expense of transportation.” Without a network of railroads reducing freight costs, “we have only the gloomy picture of a gradual deterioration in our circumstances.” For Isaac Hill and the conservatives, railroads presented no danger if they were understood as an extension of traditional economic enterprise in America, not a departure from it. In one provocative 1843 editorial, Hill’s Patriot linked railroads with the overall economic trends of the time: “Liberalism and railroads are synonymous; that is, in the moderate sense of amelioration of condition and spread of intelligence . . . [and in] equalizing and preventing the fluctuation of the prices of the provisions and other articles required by our extensive population.” Railroads were not at odds with New Hampshire economic traditions or the economic patterns of the nineteenth century, but a reflection of them.34 Besides Isaac Hill, the most influential conservative spokesman for railroads was Judge Nathaniel G. Upham. His 1844 prorailroad address 33. Cabinet, March 21, 1844; August 15, 1844. 34. Hill’s Patriot, February 2, 1843.

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(like Haddock’s, also given in Lebanon) was widely discussed in radical circles and published in its entirety in the March 14, 1844, issue of the Patriot. Upham (1801–67) was born in Deerfield, New Hampshire, grew up in Rochester near the Maine border, and attended the prestigious Philips Exeter Academy. After graduating from Dartmouth in 1820, he became a successful Concord attorney and was appointed to the New Hampshire Supreme Judicial Court in 1833. A well-respected figure in state legal circles, he was a member of the 1850 State Constitutional Convention and served at a number of diplomatic posts well into the 1860s. Upham was also a prominent spokesman for railroad development and was superintendent and later president of the Concord Railroad from 1843 to 1866. His 1844 Lebanon address assailed the radical position, suggesting railroads were no different than other roads and that New Hampshire must open the way to Boston if state producers wanted to survive against western competition.35 Like Haddock, Upham saw railroads as an extension of dirt roads— though more efficient in their speed, their purpose and practical effect were the same. The judge understood the radical position well: “Railroads are regarded by [opponents] as the result of a movement which is new and revolutionary in its character, and as unsettling the ordinary modes of business. They are said to introduce new and displace old capital, making a mere change without compensatory benefit.” Such a view clashed with New Hampshire economic history, however. As just another phase in state development, railroads were not a radical innovation at all: “[T]he movement of introducing railroads is not, in fact, a new movement. The particular description of road may be new, but the principle of its introduction and the general object are as old in the experience and action of our citizens as the first settlement of this State.” No different from seventeenth-century road building, railroads were “the mere advance of an old movement.” Upham saw nothing to fear in western competition. For one, western competition predated railroads—“it is the general improvement of the age that has gone on, and will go on, and not the limited improvement of Railroads, that has effected this evil of competition with us if it be 35. Bell, Bench and Bar, 91–93; Chapman, Sketches of the Alumni of Dartmouth College, 204.

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one.” Playing on the popular image of the shrewd Yankee merchant, he joked: “For every dollar of produce [the westerner] brings, he carries back with him an equivalent in the products in some mode of Yankee labor; and I have yet to learn that when Yankees trade with any one, they have not an equal chance at the better end of the bargain. The benefit is reciprocal.” If railroads depress the price level for New England goods, the best response was not attacking development, but building more railroads to cheapen the prices for goods New Englanders consumed. According to the judge, attacks on Boston were regional suicide. The best policy for sustaining and promoting state business was helping develop Boston as a major market for the northeast. New Hampshire businessmen could not expect to survive by blockading Boston and the west, the two greatest markets for state goods. “The New England market is at Boston,” Upham explained. “We meet the Western producer there, and he who can reach Boston by the quickest, and easiest means of transportation, can best compete with each other. The farmer then must resort to improved means of conveyance in self-defence, as by this means only can he realize an equal compensation with others for the fruits of his labor.” For Upham, the radical antirailroad platform was inconsistent with state history and the needs of New Hampshire businesses, especially those in inland towns traditionally jealous of the benefits afforded greater Portsmouth. What better way to make the Merrimack and Connecticut valleys the equal of the seacoast than building a railroad network? “What then, sir, after laboring in unceasing effort until the present time to sustain ourselves in prompt connection with the seaboard, where we interchange all our commodities, we shall now, when a kind of Providence has given us the means of placing ourselves almost on a perfect equality with them, refuse to avail ourselves of such advantages and cry out, for the first time, that it is revolutionary and ruinous to go away quicker or easier to market than before?”36 When the Patriot printed this address and complimented Upham’s “spirit of compromise” on the railroad issue, it signaled the beginning of the end of the New Hampshire Railroad War. Some prominent radi36. Patriot, March 14, 1844. As it gathered attention, the Cabinet printed Judge Upham’s address a month later. See Cabinet, April 11, 1844.

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cals wondered aloud where Upham had compromised and were aghast at the paper’s softening of its stance. Harry Hibbard wrote Editor Carroll on March 20 that Upham held out no compromise, only the “proposed abandonment” of the radical position. An unpublished letter to the editor entitled “Judge Upham & Railroads” criticized Upham’s address as a quasi-Whig proposal for a massive expansion of the public sphere. These protests did not have their desired effect. Less than a year later, the Railroad War was over and the railroad economics of the radical Democrats was in disrepute.37 While it was true that the radical Democrats lost at the ballot box and in the legislative chamber in 1844, their theories on how railroads would affect New Hampshire were never truly tested over time. Were railroads a danger to local entrepreneurial markets or a boon to statewide development? To judge the effect of railroad development and understand its connection to politics, six towns from three regions (the seacoast, the Merrimack valley/Highlands, and the Connecticut River valley) with 1840 population levels close to the state average (1,451) were examined: three railroad towns (Seabrook, Franklin, and Enfield) and three nonrailroad towns (Northwood, Francestown, and Lancaster). Comparing town histories and economic production based on census data from 1840 and 1860 helps reveal the nuances of antebellum railroad development. (See Map G) Not surprisingly, if the three railroad towns are compared as one against their nonrailroad companions, the picture is far from clear. Averaged together, railroad towns’ population increased at a lower rate, crops declined and increased at steeper rates, and manufacturing investment grew at an astounding clip. Nonrailroad towns had impressive population increases, agriculture appeared more stable (rates of decline and growth were lower), and capital investment increased slightly. Broken down by region, however (seacoast, Merrimack valley/Highlands, Connecticut River valley), town totals take on a different significance. Railroad development was not a monolithic phenomenon 37. Hibbard to Carroll, March 20, 1844, Box 2: Folder 8, Henry Carroll/Nathaniel Baker Papers, NHHS; “A Sucker after truth” to Carroll, April, 1844, Box 2: Folder 8, Henry Carroll/Nathaniel Baker Papers, NHHS. Upham did suggest that some accommodation of radical concern on land takings could be put into a new prodevelopment railroad law, but he never complimented the radicals’ economic theories.

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but affected areas differently depending on “the relative accessibility of towns,” or territorial competitive advantage: existing transportation, distance to major cities, availability of resources, etc. As much as the political debate and economic concern over railroads took on a regional perspective, so too did the results of railroad development from 1840 to 1860. Depending on the region, some towns were hurt by railroads, some helped, some barely affected.38 By 1860, southeastern New Hampshire was covered by a matrix of railroad lines connecting Portland, Concord, Portsmouth, and Boston, but it is not clear whether these lines made a significant contribution to regional markets. In the far southeastern town of Seabrook, bordering Massachusetts on its southern perimeter and the Atlantic Ocean on its east, the Eastern Railroad was built through the downtown and opened a depot in November 1840. While agricultural pursuits continued to decline in a town not known for its farming anyway, the population grew modestly and manufacturing expanded remarkably by 1860. Like most towns in New Hampshire, wheat continued its precipitous decline as a town crop, dropping 83 percent to only 25 bushels. Corn—both human and animal feed—dropped 35 percent to 393 bushels, and oats fell 58 percent. Potatoes—grown for town and city consumption—collapsed 71 percent, and wool (never a major town product) dropped 83 percent to just 232 pounds. The only products to increase were hay (salt marsh hay was a major town crop), up 22 percent to 1,069 tons in 1860, and wood to fire the ERR locomotives passing through Seabrook and neighboring Hampton. “Wood and water were taken at Hampton,” a local historian noted. “This made a good market for pine wood in the seacoast area, and a great deal was delivered there. Some people became alarmed that the wood would all be cut off. $3.00 per cord was paid for pine wood.” More impressive was the increase in capital investment: according to the 1860 Federal census, Seabrook businesses encompassed more than $26,000 in investment, compared to a mere $3,500 in 1840. With Seabrook, therefore, the benefits of railroads were hardly clear-cut. They did not stimulate agricultural production, although they did create a temporary market for wood until locomotives began burning coal after 1860. Industrial investment did increase at a robust rate, but the role of 38. LeBlanc, Location of Manufacturing, 86.

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railroads in this expansion is tenuous considering Seabrook’s existing ocean and turnpike connections.39 Further inland toward the Highlands of Rockingham County, Northwood was left off the various railroad lines connecting the state to Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont. One nineteenth-century chronicle painted the town as a sleepy, barely noticed hamlet amid the busy communities of southern New Hampshire: “Were it not for its silver lakes, Northwood would be viewed by travellers with feelings similar perhaps to what would be experienced by one in an uninhabited country, and at a great distance from home.” But appearances could be misleading: by 1860, Northwood had increased its population at a greater rate than Seabrook, its farming declined at a slower rate, and its industrial investment levels were respectable. Wheat production declined radically but at a slower rate than Seabrook. Corn, potato, and wool production also fell from 1840 levels, but still at lesser rates than the seacoast. Surprisingly, Northwood farmers had a boom crop of oats in 1860 and were able to increase hay production by 76 tons. In addition, capital investment rose 203 percent to more than $15,000, covering nine businesses with 83 employees—there were only 49 Northwood citizens employed in “manufacturing” fields in 1840. For Northwood, therefore, the lack of a railroad connection did not spell economic oblivion. Town agriculture declined at a slower rate than its railroad companion on the seacoast, and manufacturing survived and expanded. In sum, seacoast communities with an existing infrastructure of roads and stages, and in the case of Seabrook an ocean connection, did not appear overly effected by railroad development. Both towns declined, and in some cases the nonrailroad town performed better.40 If the seacoast revealed the ambiguity of railroad development, the Merrimack valley and Highlands showed its profound possibilities for growth and decline. While connected with roads, turnpikes, and stages to 39. Seabrook, N.H.: 1768–1968, 25. Eighteen-forty New Hampshire agricultural and industrial statistics were published in the Patriot, January 1841. Eighteen-sixty New Hampshire statistics were taken from the 1860 New Hampshire Agricultural and Industrial Schedules, Seventh Federal Census. Since printed totals are for counties only, the totals for the six towns were copied from the manuscript and totaled by hand. 40. Austin J. Coolidge and J. Brainard Mansfield, History and Description of New England: New Hampshire, 606.

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the prosperous communities of southern New England, the region was still maturing from a frontier to a series of settled communities. Without the seacoast’s level of intimate contact with Boston and Portland, a railroad offered this region an improvement in communication and services and an avenue to new markets. Railroads here fulfilled radicals’ worst fears—the draining away of entrepreneurship to railroad towns. Upriver from Concord, the town of Franklin developed into a major New Hampshire railroad hub by 1860. A junction point between the Northern Railroad, extending from Massachusetts to Canada, and a branch line to Bristol, Franklin’s farmers and businessmen appeared to have profited from the arrival of the first trains in 1848. Far from fearful, citizens embraced the railroad and altered their lives to ensure its passage—a cemetery was dug up and moved to another location, as was the home of favorite son Daniel Webster. “[T]he disk-footed courser,” one windy contemporary declared, “that pants unwearied on his irongirdled course through Franklin, and across the farm of the late venerable statesman, now arouses by its shrill whistle in the early morn other occupants to the toil of the day.” According to census statistics, agriculture and industry were also enlivened by the “shrill whistle.” Wheat and potatoes fell at predictably steep rates, but corn (+56 percent), wool (+66 percent), and hay (+80 percent) production rose dramatically, and oats remained relatively steady. Most impressive was the tremendous increase in capital investment of more than $120,000 dollars in twenty years, confirming the remarks of one local historian, who noted that the arrival of railroads led to “increased business activities here, developed new resources, and made more available the abundant water power of the streams.”41 The opposite was true of Francestown. Away from the Merrimack and tucked up in the foothills, town leaders aggressively pursued a railroad connection to Keene and the eastern river cities, but failed. As early as 1838, eleven town leaders invested from $500 to $5,000 in railroad stock and actively promoted a line from Manchester to Keene. After neighboring Parker’s Station and later Greenfield secured a line instead of Francestown, mail service was diverted to the railroad post offices there. Local boosters soon realized that railroad development in other 41. Ibid., 499; Alice M. Shepherd, The History of Franklin, 261.

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towns was “leaving Francestown in the lurch and killing traffic along the now-obsolete turnpike.” Census statistics confirm their depressing observation—the town suffered population, agricultural, and investment losses. Town production of every agricultural product dropped. In 1840, Francestown produced more wheat, corn, wool, potatoes, and hay, and had more capital investment than Franklin. By 1860, the town led Franklin only in the production of hay—manufacturing had ceased. As opposed to the ambiguities of the seacoast, the lack of a railroad connection appears to have made an enormous difference in the fate of Highland communities like Francestown.42 More similar to Seabrook and Northwood, towns in the Connecticut River valley reacted ambiguously to railroad development. Instead of decline and growth, Enfield and Lancaster both experienced growth, with nonrailroad, frontier Lancaster growing at a robust rate. After the railroad was built, Enfield increased its population, sagged slightly in the farming sector, and greatly increased capital investment. An 1860 state history commented briefly on Enfield by noting, “The Northern Railroad passes through a corner of Enfield, by which a ready market is found for the merchandise and surplus produce of the town.” While this observation certainly applies to corn—which increased by a whopping 349 percent—other farm products sagged over twenty years. Wheat declined at a rate similar to Francestown; oats, wool, and potatoes fell also, but hay remained steady. Investment in manufacturing increased by a respectable 252 percent, only slightly higher than the rate of increase in nonrailroad Northwood. Enfield’s entanglement by the railroad was an economic success.43 Far north in the Coos County town of Lancaster—the largest town in the county in 1840, almost double the size of Colebrook and Whitefield— the lack of a direct railroad connection appeared to make no difference to townspeople anxious to expand business and markets. Access via dirt roads to the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad ten miles away in Northumberland and to the White Mountain Railroad twenty miles away in Littleton was close enough to ignite a business boom in Lancaster. Although 42. Rev. W. R. Cochrane and George K. Wood, History of Francestown, N.H., from its Earliest Settlement April 1758 to January 1, 1895, 205–6; John R. Schott, Francestown: A History of Francestown, N.H., 138. 43. Coolidge and Mansfield, History, 485.

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town leaders repeatedly failed to induce a railroad corporation to connect Lancaster with Portland or Boston, businessmen took advantage of neighboring access, changed business patterns, and, according to local accounts, changed the face of the town. Residents worried constantly about what a lack of railroads would mean to Lancaster business: “In the history of this town, we see how a railroad coming within a day’s journey by team of a prosperous community, disturbs it and throws every sort of enterprise out of relation and harmony with similar ones on the line of the roads,” reflected an 1899 town history. “The town would be only a few hours further north from Boston than the towns below it with which they had sustained a rather uneven rivalry in point of business for some years, and which towns if nearer the proposed railroad would bolt ahead and leave Lancaster an unprosperous back district.” Fear translated into aggressive business expansion: The business, social, and intellectual life of the town was struggling for closer connection with the life of the country at large. There were earnest efforts being put forth to render communication with the larger centers of trade and social life easier and quicker. With the coming of a railroad so near as Lowell, Mass., the distance to Boston did not seem quite so long; and when the railroad reached Concord, N.H., it was possible to reach Boston in a little over twenty-four hours by stage and rail in 1849, and later, when the Passumpsic railroad reached McIndoes Falls, the trip was still shortened by some hours. People at once began to travel more; their products and the merchandise for which they were exchanged could reach their destinations in their respective markets in a few days. The entire life of the people in all their concerns now assumed a quicker pace. The quiet and deliberate manners of the past began to yield to the nervous, impulsive manners of the larger communities. The merchants caught up the proverb of the city merchants—“Quick sales and small profits”—and the people began to look for those quick sales and cheaper goods in the hope of getting more for their labor.

In the spirit of “getting more for their labor,” Lancaster grew in size and citizens produced crops and invested money at very high rates. Lancaster population expanded by more than 50 percent; wheat declined at gentle levels compared to other towns; oats, potatoes, and hay all increased; only corn and wool were stagnant. Capital investment increased at a rate higher than Enfield, as area businesses took advantage of the

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sudden lowering in freight rates: “A little circumstance like this often has the effect to throw the schedule of economic values out of order and demand their readjustment on a basis of new facts; and that is just what happened in Lancaster. For a few years all kinds of business affairs were restless. Some accommodated themselves to the changed conditions of things and prospered the more for it, while others, either unable or too slow to make the changes in methods of transacting business, suffered loss or failed.”44 Missing in the census statistics was the birth of the Lancaster lumber industry. When the railroad came to Northumberland, farmers and farmhands (who were normally idle in winter) began cutting down tamarack trees out of the local swamps and shipping them to the coast for shipbuilders. “No one seemed to see in the timber of the town any great wealth until about the time the railroads came so near that it was profitable to cut the lumber and haul it to the roads for shipment to the large markets.” By 1855, forty teams of horses were involved in hauling timber the twenty miles round-trip to Northumberland. While economic changes like these may appear drastic in their effects, the major local history of Lancaster denied the charge (much like Judge Upham of the CRR), insisting railroad-inspired economic change was a natural evolution: Perhaps no decade in the history of the town saw so many, and such radical changes as that from 1840 to 1850, during which nearly all vestiges of the old, provincial customs gave place to new and cosmopolitan customs. By its own success the older life of the town had worked this change, which was in no wise announced with heraldry or trumpets. The people never said by convention, “Go to now, we make radical changes, and many of them in our town.” They came as silently as growth does to a child, so slow and insidious that the most careful observer does not see it until it is accomplished. So with the passing of the old forms and customs once so prevalent in the life of the people of Lancaster. No revolutions were planned and executed with rancor and contention over the relative merits of things old or new; but a grand evolution was working out results that involved the best thought and efforts of four or five generations since the Puritan ancestry of these people had landed on the shores of New England. Few, if any, of the men and women of that period 44. Amos Somers, History of Lancaster, New Hampshire, 267–70, 136, 141.

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were conscious of the results that were destined to follow the earnest and persistent efforts they were putting forth in the competition and cooperation that was going on in the life of the community. Perhaps they were content with their daily bread, the comfort and the happiness they enjoyed from well-ordered lives, not for a moment aware that these things were the greatest factors of change in the life of a village or town.

For Lancaster, despite being continually frustrated by failure in getting tracks built in town, railroads within a day’s journey spurred tremendous growth and expanded opportunities for townspeople anxious to take advantage.45 Considering these results, the radicals’ two-part fear that railroad development would lure capital to the tracks and help undersell existing entrepreneurs in-state with an influx of “foreign goods” was fulfilled in the Merrimack valley and Highlands, left unanswered in the seacoast, and discredited in the Connecticut valley. They misjudged the railroads’ effect on distant towns like Lancaster, never gifted with easy contact with the ocean or its great market cities. Here, lower freight costs sparked resource development and opportunities where they were once not economically feasible, and not a signal of lower profits for local merchants in the face of “foreign” products. While Franklin boomed with industrial and agricultural growth, Francestown languished in a slow but comprehensive decline; while Seabrook industry prospered as farming dried up, Northwood grew in population, stabilized some agricultural production, and expanded its capital investments; while Enfield grew steadily in most sectors, Lancaster outpaced its competitors in energy and expansion. By 1860, Lancaster tamarack could find ready customers in Portland, but Francestown freestone was no longer quarried for the Boston mills.

45. Ibid., 136–43.

Three “Mere Naked Right” Essex County Whigs and the Expansion of Public Authority

Whatever exists, which public necessity demands, may be thus appropriated. Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, 1855

August 27, 1838—less than two years prior to passage of the 1840 New Hampshire Railroad Bill—was a momentous day for the city of Salem, Massachusetts. Celebrating the opening of the Eastern Railroad between their city and Boston, less than fifteen miles away, dozens jumped aboard the first trains (leaving Lynn citizens angry track-side because Salemites had taken all the seats). Almost eight hundred townspeople gathered at the new depot that evening to hear speeches and toasts from prominent local officials. ERR President and international financier George Peabody expressed the emotions of many locals on the importance of the day: “[W]e seem to have fallen on a magical age. . . . A new power has been granted to man, as decided in comparison with his former capabilities as if the present generation had been born with the wings of Angels.” Mystified by the way steam power was transforming political and economic relationships in America, he foresaw a future in which railroads allowed New Englanders to remain at their homes and in their towns, working for industries in the growing American home market. Better still, the railroads’ ability to open new economic possibilities at home and to allow thousands to avoid emigration westward

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would begin the resurgence of Massachusetts political power. Remembering the passage from the Book of Isaiah—“let every valley be exalted . . .”—Peabody continued: It is by encouraging works of internal improvement like these, by giving every aid to commerce and manufactures, by promoting the frequent intercourse of her citizens, by countenancing every reasonable project for the benefit and extension of her capital, in the prosperity of which her own greatnes [sic] is involved; and thus by creating just and patriotic sentiment of State pride, that Massachusetts can expect to retain her population, and to hold that political rank to which she is fairly entitled. Her sons must be made to realize that the fields of honorable exertion are still open at home—that the barren soil on which their eyes first opened, has proved a blessing rather than a curse, by arousing the energies, quickening the invention to provide the means of subsistence, and calling into action every power of mind and body.1 1. Peabody, Address at the Opening of the Eastern Rail Road, between Boston and Salem. August 27, 1838, 5; Essex Register, August 30, 1838; September 10, 1838.

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In building these railroads, many Whigs were willing to expand a traditionally expansive public sphere out of a sense of crisis and emergency. Unlike Jacksonian radicals across the border in New Hampshire, who sought to expand the private sphere of individual control of property in the face of state-backed railroads’ needs, many Essex County Whigs sought the opposite—to build on the Commonwealth’s tradition of government involvement in the economy by complying with railroad corporations’ sometimes drastic and shocking demands. In addition, as much as the New Hampshire Democratic radicals saw in railroads a threat to the traditional market economy and waged legislative war against their chartering to prevent its erosion, these Whigs promoted railroads and used the weight of state power on their behalf to restore the dynamics of a market economy they had already lost. For the Whigs, expansive public powers for private railroad corporations were necessary not out of public interest, but out of “public exigency.” Exigency suggests an element of crisis not embodied in “public interest” or “public good,” an element of absolute necessity if the community is to be saved. By claiming a crisis, private access to public authority was made easier and, supposedly, less arbitrary and controversial because of extreme need. Public power was expanded, however, not by public authorities acting in new and aggressive ways, but by opening up the traditional power of the state to private forces claiming a desperate exigency. “At a time of economic crisis,” notes economist Calvin Hoover, “when critical extensions of governmental power are likely to occur . . . there is little opportunity for a meaningful vote on whether or not, as a matter of principle, the powers of the state should be extended. Instead, there is likely to be an insistent demand for emergency action of some sort and relatively little consideration of what the permanent effect will be.” In the case of Essex County railroads, the “critical extensions” were not new powers, but old powers given to new sources.2 The claim of “exigency” was not a new one in Massachusetts—mill and dam owners in the eighteenth century often made exigency claims in order to take property to expand their businesses and increase profits. 2. Hoover quoted in Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government, 17. Higgs focuses on the connection between “crises” and government power in America after 1893. The “crisis” theory, however, explains similar phenomena in the nineteenth century equally well.

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But railroads—particularly in Essex County, for the purposes of this study—claimed public exigency not only for the sake of profit but for the greater desperate need to restore regional prosperity and political power. Much of the nonindustrial New England economy had been depressed after 1800. Agricultural returns dipped in the face of less costly western products harvested on cheap, open land. International trade was progressively concentrated in larger coastal cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, to the detriment of secondary ports like Newburyport and Salem, ports that had thrived during the colonial period. Even more important, after 1830 railroad development around these large cities was attracting capital from nonrailroad areas, fulfilling many Jacksonian radical fears and leaving secondary cities and towns in economic depression. “The very advance of the rail-road system,” explained Boston railroad attorney Charles T. Russell in 1846, “has, in many cases, created an overwhelming exigency for its further extension. Towns and communities, by the building of rail-roads to their neighbors, and not themselves, have lost their original and comparative standing. Their lands are less valuable—their water power is, and is becoming, idle—their manufactures droop. All business flies to the lines of existing railways. The right to restoration, to equality of advantages, is an exigency.” Restoration through railroads, therefore, took on a twofold purpose for New England Whigs: to restore the prosperity and prominence lost since the opening of the west, and to restore business lost since railroads branched out from the “hubs” and passed many towns by.3 This pattern—private railroad companies claiming a desperate public exigency to accomplish extraordinary ends—was common during the rapid development of a railroad network in Essex County, Massachusetts, during the 1830s and 1840s, particularly in the building of the Eastern Railroad and the Salem Tunnel, the removal of the Essex County Court House, and the repeated complaints of various area railroads against the chartering of “parallel roads.” 3. Steinberg, Nature Incorporated, 29–32; Rufus Choate and Charles T. Russell, Abstract of the Arguments of the Hon. Rufus Choate and Charles T. Russell, Esq., for the Petitioners, on the Petition of David Pingree, and over 3,000 Other Legal Voters, for a Rail-Road from Salem to Malden, before the Committee on Railways and Canals, of the Massachusetts Legislature. Session 1846, 4.

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Salem was desperate to build a railroad in the 1830s, but the development process had been difficult from the beginning. As momentum gathered in 1835 for the chartering of the Eastern Railroad (ERR) connecting Salem and Boston, some townspeople questioned the usefulness of railroads and whether they would promise as much destruction as growth. A letter to the Whiggish Salem Gazette in June 1835 declared demand was insufficient and dividends would be poor: “[T]he contemplated railroad must be fatal to a very great extent to our present and to all future prosperity.” An ERR would only bring wealthy Bostonians to Salem, not middle-class businessmen or their employees: Would they bring with them business in which they are engaged? Would they come here to employ mechanics and laborers? To expect any such thing is to cherish a delusion of fatal import. Do you doubt this? I will ask you if you ever heard of any one, or ever thought yourself of going to Danvers, Beverly, Lynn, Marblehead, or any of the neighboring towns (to which you could go almost without time or expense) either to reside or to employ mechanics or laborers?

Just as citizens in smaller towns like Danvers and Topsfield traveled to Salem for goods, Salemites went to Boston to buy goods, a process that would be furthered by the bettering of communication southward. An ERR would be the “building up and enriching the one at the expense of the life blood (stagnant and almost curdled though it may now be) of the other.” If Salem had to have railroads to survive, then let the town build its own extending westward and not depend on Boston capital. Anything less was the sacrificing of the Salem “birthright.”4 Instead of creating wealth and opportunities, railroads would destroy wealth already in existence. “But as our manufactories are not very extensive,” the same writer noted, “the advantages to them might be counterbalanced by the injury of the other interests.” These opponents posited a zero-sum economic model, where someone’s gain was necessarily someone else’s loss. All economic growth came at the expense of others, with railroads leading to a Boston takeover of Salem capital and the bankruptcy of stagecoach and tavern owners. “Boston may well promote and multiply them, centering in herself, for they bring every thing 4. Salem Gazette, June 5, 1835.

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more certainly, rapidly and cheaply into her own hands, and greatly increase her monopoly.” Every business not near a depot was doomed; trains, unlike stages and wagons, do not stop where a passenger wants. Every stage inn or stage town within a hundred miles would dry up, another writer claimed: “A vast amount of industry connected with the staging business—carriage making, harness making, iron work, horseshoeing, stabling, etc., etc.—all these branches of industry which now employ thousands of hands, must be severely reduced, if not utterly ruined. Knock your horse on the head, and what becomes of the hay growers in your vicinity,—your coasting trade now employed in bringing grain?” Sounding more like Jacksonian radicals than loyal Whigs, the naysayers claimed railroads were not “labor-saving” devices—they were labor destroyers.5 The response to these criticisms was overwhelming and immediate. Railroad development was a market economy at work, supporters replied—you cannot legislate the flow of goods. “A merchant will always sell at where he thinks he can find the best market, and New York and Boston will always be the great marts for foreign commerce,” submitted one writer to the Gazette. “It is behind the age to think of barring trade, we might as well attempt to compress the ocean into a thimble, or chain the mind of man. Trade will find its level.” If trade needs a railroad, the writer argued, then it is incumbent on Salem businessmen to build a railroad, else trade will leave town. Fearing Boston’s ability to capitalize on a connection to Salem and “robbing” the town of its existing trade misunderstood the nature of the economy. “That what is one man’s gain is another’s loss, cannot be true [by r]eason, if it is every man should dig his own potato and make his own cloth, and every town should be surrounded by a[n] impassable wall. No, we are all mutually benefitted by a few and easy exchange of commodities.” Another writer suspected that opposition was coming from area shopkeepers. Without trade, how could a shop stay open? “He must be aware that shopkeeping follows trade.” Further, the idea that Salem’s birthright was being stolen in railroad development was dismissed as “fiddle faddle” “If some thing is not done, and [opponents] throw cold water upon all new enterprises, many 5. Salem Gazette, June 12, 1835; July 17, 1835. An anti-ERR petition was also passed around Salem in early 1836. See Salem Gazette, February 13, 1836.

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of us, I agree, are in danger of being driven out of our birthplace.” Perplexed at the fear of new trade, yet another writer perceptively replied: “Allow me to ask, if what benefits Boston must consequently injure Salem. The writer may say with as much truth, that our trade to France injures the U. States because it is beneficial to France.”6 Writing in the Essex Register in reply to antirailroad sentiment, one eloquent correspondent asked, how could a town like Salem, whose entire history was dominated by the story of foreign trade, be frightened of trading more closely with Boston? In fact, the closer Salem drew itself to Boston, the better business and trade would fare: “On the whole, we guess, mapping the country 30 miles round State Street, and making deep red the sign of value, you will find the red deeper as you approach Long Wharf, and become fainter and fainter as you recede.” Town pride obstructed good economic sense. Salem could never be as grand, wealthy, or large as Boston, but rather than refusing to trade with its southern metropolis neighbor, Salem should take advantage of its proximity by laying a rail line. “Every one knows that as soon as Salem is the end of a rail-road, the country for ten miles in every direction (except towards Boston) will come here to take the road for Boston and the South.” No longer a major entry point for Massachusetts and America, Salem could become a conduit for Boston’s northern business. The nearer Salem was drawn to the Boston “vortex” the better for every merchant and mechanic.7 By the logic of the anti-ERR forces, railroad supporters claimed, all enterprise was in question. Assuming a new railroad would terminate in Salem (as we shall see, a very unpopular proposition), would not all communities above the line oppose coming to Salem to do business out of fear for their trade? “[I]f you carry the principle of this argument out and act upon it, it effectually stops all improvements and all enterprise.” The fact that Boston business would benefit from a Salem line—which no one doubted—did not doom Salem business. Attacking the zerosum proponents, ERR partisans reiterated the definition of trade: a mutual exchange of goods or services for the benefit of both parties. “[A]s though there was no such thing as mutual benefit, and one must therefore 6. Salem Gazette, June 9, 1835. 7. Essex Register, June 11, 1835; July 20, 1835.

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forego the advantages of all facilities until our own citizens see fit to make them, and upon the true Jacksonian principles, oppose with all our might, the introduction of foreign capital among us.” Sarcastically picturing the Salem of the future with no railroads, one writer mocked: “[S]hall we rush into the all embracing arms and pockets of the usurper, the upstart Boston? Forbid it, genius of sturdy old Salem—better our wharves rot, as they do—our eminent men emigrate, as they do.” Without railroads, Salem would be like a “lighthouse, a standing pillar of granite, knowing from age to age, no change.”8 Once it became clear that Worcester, Providence, and Lowell stood to benefit from Salem’s railway connections to Boston, and that railroad boosters were seeking to connect Salem’s inland county rival, the industrial town of Haverhill in the Merrimack valley, with this emerging network, locals became alarmed that Salem was being left behind. The Salem Essex Register reacted wildly to news that Haverhill had a railroad plan in place, “a plan which will in effect remove us to one corner of Creation, unless we do something more than merely open and rub one eye, turn over and resume our doze!” The rival Salem Gazette was equally hysterical. “Are we to be left on the rocks to perish,” the paper asked in a June 1835 editorial, “while a prosperous internal commerce carries Danvers, Andover, and all our satellites and neighbors onward[?] . . . Stir all who wish to remain at home in preference to seeking fortunes in the West. The alternative is before you. To be first on the bleak and barren rock, or to be amongst the first or second on a rich, comfortable and social homestead.”9 In this climate of fear over losing opportunities for community restoration, the Eastern Railroad was chartered in the spring of 1836. Turnpike owners and stage operators lobbied intensively in Boston against an ERR charter, as did the Andover and Wilmington Railroad (A&W) being constructed in the northeastern corner of the county, “because they hope by the supineness of the eastern part of this county to get possession unawares of the great travel and business which now come from the eastward by this lower route.” Petitions for and against construction flooded the General Court in February 1836—Salem, 8. Salem Gazette, June 9, 1835; Essex Register, June 11, 1835 9. Essex Register, June 25, 1835; Salem Gazette, June 23, 1835.

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Marblehead, and Boston citizens in support; ferry, turnpike, and A&W interests against it. Fierce debate also erupted over location of the planned route, and three proposals emerged. The “southern route” ran along the coast, connected by ferry to Boston, was near to sources of ocean freight, and was backed by Salem financier George Peabody. The “middle route” meandered north through Charlestown, Chelsea, Lynn, Danvers, and entered Salem by turning east along the North River. The “western route,” supported by Boston merchant Thomas Handasyd Perkins, ran northwesterly out of Boston (near the Boston & Lowell [B&L] depot) and entered Salem through west Lynn, south Danvers, and also the North River. Eastern towns like Salem, Lynn, Gloucester, Manchester, and Beverly supported Peabody’s southern plan; Essex County’s central towns like Topsfield, Danvers, and Middleton backed the middle and western routes.10 Peabody’s plan faced stiff opposition and was at risk of rejection early in the charter fight. The Essex Register’s legislative correspondent reported in March 1836 that “there is some doubt whether GEO. PEABODY and others will obtain a charter,” and proceeded to list the various objections: it was geographically difficult; it “cuts up valuable lands”; it was a fire danger to downtown Salem; it avoided both west Lynn and Danvers; it “obstructs navigable waters,” like the Beverly and Lynn harbors; the ferry connection was dangerous; “it injures ponds”; it hurt the Salem turnpike and Chelsea ferry; it hurt the A&W business. Danvers’ state representatives took the lead in decrying the ERR on the House floor, claiming that since the line avoided their town, local business would be harmed, and the bill deserved to fail. Merchants on the Saugus River and in Lynn and Beverly harbors would be cut off from their ocean and coasting business. Further, all the interior industry was passed by for faint hopes of reviving the declining ocean trade. Instead, they suggested that Perkins’ western route was favorable, as it “went between two great avenues from Boston to Salem, to wit, the turnpike and 10. Salem Gazette, February 23, 1836. Competing ferry companies, especially the Winnisimmet Ferry Company, also became involved when it became clear that the ERR would not use their services. For example, see letter to the editor signed “CHELSEA” in the March 7, 1836, issue of the Gazette; Essex Register, February 22, 1836. Also see February 11, 18, and 25, 1836, issues; Salem Gazette, March 29, 1836; April 1, 1836.

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old road, and equally accommodated those who lived upon both.” When these assertions came under attack, they defended their charges as “sincere and conscientious” and warned that a “railroad may be a nuisance and a monopoly instead of a benefit” if they chartered a poor route. Adding a northern Essex voice to Danvers’ complaints, Amos Abbot of Andover—future U.S. congressman and prominent stockholder in the A&W—also opposed the ERR, noting that any eastern rail line should be “a part of a great system of inland communication, extending through New Hampshire to the city of Portland.” Salem representative Charles A. Andrews fought hard for the ERR bill on the House floor. “Every article of opposition to this route originated either in personal or municipal interest,” he blasted opponents, ignoring the fact that his support of the line also emanated from “personal or municipal interest.” ERR supporters from Boston laughed off the “fire danger” argument—Charlestown would burn just as easily as Salem—and defended the southern route as the straightest and cheapest. The Perkins plan twisted its way through Boston’s northern interior suburbs via four very expensive and dangerous tunnels, whereas the Peabody plan ran across tidal salt flats. Despite the vociferous debate, the bill easily passed the House in midApril 1836 and the ERR was chartered.11 After building contracts went out in June 1836 and work commenced in Lynn that August, the issue of a rail line along the eastern sections of Essex County seemed at a close, but as construction was completed in mid-1838, another problem arose. Some in Salem began suggesting that the line stop and not extend northward, thereby making Salem a terminus and not a way station between Boston and New Hampshire. This logic had been considered by ERR backers in 1835. By making Salem the ERR’s northern terminus, the city could attract county business south to its tracks. With trains running on a regular schedule after September 1838, the “terminus idea” gained popularity in Salem and enmity in the coastal towns, especially Ipswich. In addition to risking Newburyport as a station to railroad promoters in Haverhill and the Merrimack valley (who could build eastward from the A&W), not building the ERR to the state line was a Salem plot. If the ERR was given 11. Essex Register, March 3, 1836; Boston Daily Advertiser, reprinted in the Essex Register, April 15, 1836.

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public money and public power, how could it fail to complete its line as promised? By so doing, one writer to the Gazette complained, the railroad would “make the State contributors to the partial and the local instead of the general and public”: Stop the Eastern road at Salem, and, amid disappointment and righteous dissatisfaction against the stunted, abortive rail road which the Public Eastward of this city would necessarily experience, where would that travel from the Eastward which is now, upon the section of the Railroad already opened, and which heretofore in stages, has enlivened our streets? . . . Stop the Eastern Railroad at Salem? By so doing you provide an avenue from Salem to the Metropolis, but, you open no channel flowing into Salem from beyond her. . . . Cut off the railroad where it now is, and you have a very good drawer-off but no filler-up.

Extension concerns were voiced at a stockholder meeting on September 24, where it was voted that the line should be completed northward. Construction began that November in Beverly, and trains were operating between Boston and Newburyport by mid-1840.12 The extension question had greater implications in the fight for state aid for the ERR that same year. Aid problems first arose in 1837 when Representative Andrews battled for an ERR on the House floor, claiming sectional discrimination in favor of western Massachusetts projects like the Western Railroad (WRR) and against eastern roads like the ERR. Doubting the ability of private capital to carry through construction in an increasingly tight economy, he begged for state help and the amity of his fellow legislators: “Ought not the North and the South, the East and the West to receive the same fostering care?” The following year the problem of an aid bill resurfaced when the Panic of 1837 deepened into a wide-scale depression and three thousand ERR stockholders could not pay their assessments. Needing another $100,000 to complete the line, a new aid bill was requested. So many petitions in support of the bill poured into the Senate Railroad Committee that Senator Charles Hudson of Worcester quipped they were like the “Frogs of Egypt” 12. Salem Gazette, June 9, 1836; Essex Register, August 9, 1836; June 11, 1835; Salem Gazette, September 17, 1838; October 20, 1838; September 24, 1838; November 29, 1838.

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plaguing the General Court. Senate passage was difficult, and when the bill’s future looked dim, the Gazette played the sectional card, complaining “[n]o other section of the State has received less, or deserves more of its favor, than old Essex.” After Hudson fashioned a compromise bill giving 2 percent of the ERR’s annual income back to the state for loan repayment, it passed on March 7 and moved into the House.13 Much like the previous year, the ERR bill came up for a third reading on March 24 and was defeated 84-157. Andrews rose in defense of his hometown’s railroad. The Gazette’s correspondent claimed that rejection was “attributable mainly to the prevailing impression, which was countenanced by some of the advocates of the bill, that there is no intention of continuing the road beyond Salem.” Several stockholders with connections to the General Court had informed some legislators that they opposed extension to New Hampshire, and opinion—east and west—quickly turned against the ERR. On April 11, the bill was reconsidered but again rejected, 138-159, with significant Boston & Lowell help, and “excited very general surprise and dissatisfaction” among Essex partisans. The Gazette turned bitter—why did the WRR get government money, but not the ERR? The bill is therefore lost—and the County of Essex, after sustaining, heart and hand, all those great projects of internal improvement, which have involved the state to an immense amount, of which, a very large proportion, is left in this time of pecuniary difficulty and distress, and in an emergency, amounting to a question of life and death, with regard to the only project in which she has a particular interest—is left to take care of herself, and whistle to the winds for aid!

The Whiggish Newburyport Daily Herald explained to its readers that the bill failed because of fear that there would be no extension, that the 13. Essex Register, April 18, 1837. The bill was refused a third reading, reconsidered, and then passed; Salem Gazette, January 18, 1838. In purchasing stock, investors were charged two fees: one when the initial stock was purchased, and another when periodic assessments were announced and investors were forced to pay an extra sum for the company’s unforeseen expenditures. If assessments were not paid, investors risked losing their stock altogether. Salem Gazette, February 26, 1838; March 1, 1838; March 8, 1838.

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ERR was not “a State work,” and that “Boston and Salem were too wealthy too [sic] ask for the aid of the State.” In addition, A&W interests, “who have always been secretly and busily at work, leaving no stone unturned to throw any obstacle in the way of the progress of the lower road,” lobbied legislators into opposition.14 Almost immediately, however, a compromise bill was drawn up (giving the ERR $90,000 over three years, ensuring it was used on a northern extension), introduced in the Senate on April 16, and passed four days later. On the last day of the session, April 25, the bill was passed in the House, over Haverhill and Lowell opposition, by a vote of 154-86. Stabilized by state credit, ERR construction continued for four more years, extending to Portsmouth in 1841, and Portland, Maine, in 1842.15 Out of the desperation to connect Salem with the growing network of railroads across northern New England, stretching inland to Canada and the west, came a novel plan to build a tunnel through Salem. The Salem tunnel was never part of the original 1836 Eastern Railroad charter. The planned ERR, proceeding along the seaside from the East Boston Ferry to the New Hampshire border, was slated to pass above ground, slightly to the east of downtown Salem, through the Old Burying Ground (a controversial plan in its own right) and some residential neighborhoods. In early October 1836—less than three months after ERR construction began—Peabody, Stephen A. Chase (an ERR Director), and Colonel James M. Fessenden (ERR Engineer) appeared before the Salem City Council and asked permission to build a seven hundred foot tunnel underneath the length of Washington Street, the major boulevard of downtown Salem. An extension of the desperation for restoration many along the ERR route felt, such a tunnel would (according to the ERR) cause less property damage than the charter plan, disturb fewer people by plunging the locomotives under the city instead of through residential areas, and cost less money. More importantly, a tunnel would help create a straighter line north to Beverly, Ipswich, Newburyport, and coastal New Hampshire. Only the third such tunnel built 14. Essex Register, March 27, 1838; Salem Gazette, April 12, 1838; Newburyport Daily Herald, reprinted in the Essex Register, April 17, 1838. 15. Salem Gazette, April 19, 1838; April 23, 1838; Essex Register, April 20, 1838; Salem Gazette, April 23, 1838.

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in America, the ERR claimed it would be a great boost to Salem business and tourism.16 The request was odd. During the legislative battle for a charter, Peabody’s ERR allies in the Massachusetts House fought against a rival charter for a more inland route through West Lynn and Danvers because it would necessitate the building of expensive, labor-intensive tunnels. Six months later, they had apparently changed their minds. Not surprisingly, once it became clear that such a tunnel meant excavating a seven-hundred-foot trench through downtown Salem for a period of three to six months, and that the railroad would use its state-granted land-taking privileges to tear down all the obstructing buildings on the eastern side of Washington St., several prominent opponents spoke up at the council meeting. According to these men, the benefits to Salem’s business and people did not outweigh the damage it would cause—the city authorities should not give the ERR power to build a tunnel through the center of Salem.17 Judge Daniel Appleton White, “a strong Federalist of the school of Washington and Hamilton,” former U.S. congressman, Hartford Convention member, and now a county probate judge, opposed the plan, not only because it would run next to his house, but because of the public danger. “[H]e thought this ought to be the last place where they should pass the city with their locomotives, or ‘juggernauts’ as he termed them,” the Whiggish Essex Register reported. “Horses would be frightened—travel interrupted—the danger to the living he considered much more alarming than the intrusion upon the burying ground.” For Judge White, it was a question of which destruction mattered more. He thought the destruction of buildings and the “interruption” of downtown trade outweighed the ERR’s claims of short-term destruction with the hope of future rewards. Salem merchant Captain Joseph Ropes agreed, claiming that in addition to his house being “walled up,” the ERR was acting in bad faith. Essentially accusing the ERR of having tunnel plans all along, he claimed that railroad officials had deceived townspeople into supporting the line by never mentioning a tunnel in the charter: “If they 16. Salem Gazette, October 4, 1836; Essex Register, October 3, 1836; Wallace F. Williams, “The Story of Salem’s Ancient R.R. Tunnel,” 6. 17. Salem Gazette, April 15, 1836.

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had petitioned for this route, half of the inhabitants of the town would have opposed it—they never would consent to have your locomotives blowing out in their most public streets.” Perhaps the most devastating opponent was Salem shopkeeper Philip Chase. He had been one of the original subscribers of the Eastern Railroad and was a proponent of railroad connections to Salem as early as 1832. At the council meeting, he was so disgusted at the tunnel idea he suggested that the ERR should never have been built at all: “[I]t would be better to dispense with the Rail Road altogether, than to cross the city as now proposed.”18 Such opposition had no effect on Whig mayor Leverett Saltonstall and the Salem City Council, eager backers of the ERR. Less than two weeks later, the council voted 18-1 to allow the railroad to begin tunnel construction as soon as they saw fit. Actual construction did not begin until 1839, and the process was long, difficult, and expensive. A 712foot-long trench was opened along the whole length of Washington St. in June 1839 and not entirely covered until mid-November. Due to Salem’s “sandy soil,” workers had to fight cave-ins and the danger of building collapses as they set up the tunnel’s granite walls and arches. When it was completed (seriously over-budget), it became something of a local novelty and a tourist attraction. As late as the 1890s, however, Salem’s tunnel was still controversial—some townspeople suggested that it should be “abolished” because it had been unsafe since its construction.19 18. Salem Gazett, October 3, 1836. Daniel Appleton White (1776–1861) grew up in Methuen, Massachusetts, and later sold his family estate there to the industrialists building the “new city” of Lawrence. He graduated from Harvard in 1797, was a Newburyport teacher and a lawyer, and as a state senator and U.S. congressman was a well-known Federalist. Moving to Salem in 1817, he was a prominent town benefactor and local booster. Memorial Biographies of the New England Historical Genealogical Society, 248–69; Francis B. C. Bradlee, “The Eastern Railroad: A Historical Account of Early Railroading in Eastern New England,” 243. Chase was also an active local booster and on the board of the Salem and Danvers Aqueduct Company. 19. Essex Register, October 14, 1836; June 27, 1839; September 12, 1839; Salem Gazette, November 12, 1839; Willams, “Ancient R.R. Tunnel,” 5; Augustus J. Archer, “Shall the Tunnel be Abolished?” Archer noted that the railroad had to post guards at the tunnel to prevent people from wandering inside, and that the dangers to horse and carriage at the grade crossings on the depot end of the tunnel made it expendable.

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Once the ERR reached Salem in July 1838 and discussion began over when to begin extending the line northward and building the tunnel, another equally vexing problem arose. At the northern end of Washington St., directly over the planned route of the tunnel, stood the Essex County Court House. Built in 1785 by the famous Salem architect and Federal designer Samuel McIntire, the building was a county landmark. George Washington had addressed Salem from its balcony, and the street it stood on was soon named in his honor. Although originally owned by both the county and city, Salem sold its share of the courthouse back to Essex County in 1817. By 1839, the county’s building stood in the way of the ERR’s tunnel, and many began to wonder how and whether the courthouse could be saved.20 The first suggestions on what to do with the courthouse came in the newspapers. After urging cooperation between the city and the ERR in quickly building the tunnel, a letter to the editor of the Essex Register was published declaring the courthouse was blocking construction—it ought to be sold to the ERR, ripped down, and another built nearby. The paper picked up on this idea and proposed an interesting three-way deal between Essex County, the City of Salem, and the Eastern Railroad: the County would give the courthouse to the ERR for a small fee, the city would buy and give the county a plot of land to build a new one, and the ERR could build their tunnel without delay. A model of publicprivate cooperation, all sides would benefit. Nagging both county and city, the paper painted a hellish picture of what would happen if nothing was done immediately: “The County of Essex then would have a Court House, with locomotive engines thundering under it, within two feet of its floor, air-holes before and behind putting up clouds of steam and smoke, without a cellar or an outhouse. Such will be the state of things unless something is forthwith done. Whose business is it to attend to it?” When Whig mayor and prominent railroad booster Stephen C. Phillips came out days later agreeing with the Register that the old courthouse had to be torn down to accommodate the ERR, the matter seemed at an end. “The present edifice from its conspicuous situation, and its peculiar architectural merits,” Phillips regretfully announced, 20. “Court Houses of Salem.”

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“has long been regarded as one of the principal ornaments of the city, and many will regret even to surrender it to the claims of improvement.”21 Phillips’s remarks were somewhat prophetic. As soon as word began to spread across the county that the courthouse was being torn down for the ERR tunnel, the dominant emotion was anger, not regret. Jacksonian papers like Haverhill’s Essex Banner claimed with unsurprising ferocity that the ERR corporation was “defrauding” Essex County citizens by taking the courthouse. As a result of the railroad’s ability to take what it wished with the immense public power of its charter and with the acquiescence of public authority, county taxes were sure to rise to pay for an expensive new building. “Are the inhabitants of Essex County prepared to pay $30,000 for the purpose of helping the Eastern Railroad through Salem, when the Road offers nothing in return; and worse than this offers to help itself, in pulling down the present Court House in the insufficient sum of $3000!” Haverhill citizens and those in the northern extremes of the county had to remain vigilant on the issue, however— Salem, Newburyport, and the eastern towns along the planned ERR route were “interested” in such projects “and of course, in favor of tunneling Salem.” As much a geopolitical dispute as an ideological one, Jacksonian papers raised the cry of northern towns versus Salem and the east.22 That Democratic editorials would complain about ERR power and Whig acquiescence is hardly surprising, but there were also Whig attacks. A letter to the editor of the Register wondered why the city had anything to do with the courthouse process. The county owned a building the ERR needed—let them solve the problem themselves and not ask for city aid: “[I]t is said, ‘the city must find the site;’ would this be right? The city has nothing to do with it. The question of removing the old one, is between the Eastern Rail Road and the [County] Commissioners, and the site for a new one, with the Commissioners alone. The city ought not to interfere—certainly not to tax the inhabitants any thing beyond their proportion of the County taxes.” Salem probably 21. Essex Register, February 25, 1839; March 4, 1839; March 14, 1839; March 21, 1839; March 28, 1839. 22. Essex Banner, April 27, 1839.

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gave land for the present building in 1785 and “did not ask to have the Court House moved” anyway.23 More devastating were the questions raised by the Essex Gazette, published in Haverhill and co-edited by railroad promoter, developer, and prominent local Whig, Dr. Jeremiah Spofford. Calling the courthouse a “venerable, elegant, and useful building,” the Gazette assaulted the planned demolition as taxation without representation. Salem Whigs were “giving” public property to the ERR for a minimal fee, and county citizens were being taxed higher as a consequence—in other words, Salem benefited and county taxpayers footed the bill. “If the whole county were to vote on the subject,” the Gazette suggested, “you would find one eighth of the votes in favor of paying $1000 to alter or improve the house or accommodate the railroad. What will they say then when they find themselves taxed $20,000 or $30,000 on that account? We shall see.”24 Taking offense that Haverhill Whigs would cast doubt on the wisdom and fairness of selling the county courthouse to the Eastern Railroad, the Ipswich Register even denied that the ERR had anything to do with demolition. Instead, the building needed to be torn down because it was unhealthy, too small, and too noisy—the ERR gave Essex County the excuse to do something that needed doing anyway. Spofford and the Gazette scoffed at this reasoning as opportune. Size and noise troubles at the courthouse were new complaints: “[A]ll this is truly lamentable, and it is astonishing that it was not discovered before the project for tunneling the city was made.” Health concerns were nothing but cover for the railroad project. “We indeed cannot tell how many have died in consequence of setting as jurymen in those crowded rooms,” the Gazette ridiculed, “and no one can tell but him, who knows all things. We hope the architect if he is living will not be arraigned as accessory to any one’s death.” In addition, if the Salem and Ispwich people were so concerned with excess noise, why were they proposing to the county that the new courthouse be built next door? The real truth remained with the ERR tunnel and the unfortunate location of the courthouse: “[T]hey have found themselves involved in a sad dilemma.” To cover that conundrum, 23. Essex Register, May 2, 1839. 24. Jeremiah Spofford, M.M.S., Reminiscences of Seventy Years; including Half a Century in the Practice of Medicine in this Place. Delivered in the First Church of Groveland, June 22, 1867; Essex Gazette, May 17, 1839.

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ERR interests were inventing health problems and thanking the tunnel project as an opportunity to solve them. Taxes were high enough and the existing building sufficient, replied Spofford’s Gazette. Leave the courthouse alone.25 While the Whig papers bickered, the ERR, the city, and the county began to move quickly. The county and the ERR negotiated (without the city, apparently) a deal based on the plan announced in the Essex Register the previous March. The Essex County Commissioners would give the courthouse back to Salem, the city would give the county two plots of land abutting Washington St. (one had been bought by the city earlier for $4,000, the other, owned by Salem attorney and railroad promoter Joseph A. Cabot, was purchased that spring for $2,000) for a new courthouse, and the city would sell the courthouse to the ERR for $2,800. In the end, the complicated courthouse land transaction cost the city of Salem $2,200 (the new courthouse cost the county $80,000 when it was opened in 1841, a remarkable $60,000 over budget). The land plan was passed at a special city council meeting on Saturday, May 25, 1839, and ERR president Peabody urged Mayor Phillips the same day to move quickly on giving the county its new courthouse land: “[I]t is very important to all concerned that there should be a speedy settlement of this subject.”26 The ERR began destroying the courthouse only two days later, and by May 30 nothing remained of the building. The controversy lingered, however. First, Essex County refused to take any land from Salem if the city insisted on earmarking it for courthouse use. The commissioners wanted land as compensation but did not want the city to tell them how to use it. Oddly, Peabody wrote to Mayor Phillips informing the city of the problem—the county was speaking through the ERR and not directly to city authorities. Essex County was “unwilling” to accept the city’s land, wrote the ERR president. “[T]hey expected to receive a deed 25. Ipswich Register article reprinted in the Essex Register, May 27, 1839; Essex Gazette, May 31, 1839. 26. The original courthouse was built in 1785–86 for $7,145; “Court Houses of Salem,” 118; Essex Register, May 27, 1839; Peabody to Phillips, May 25, 1839, Eastern Railroad Co. Correspondence between George Peabody, president of the Eastern Railroad Co., and Stephen C. Phillips, mayor of Salem, Mass., Essex Institute Historical Collections, PEM.

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free from any qualification whatever,” he stated, adding that such details were agreed upon during the ERR-county negotiations over the courthouse. Mayor Phillips could not understand the dilemma, since the city had done everything required by both county and railroad. It had sold the courthouse, bought new land, and given it to the county. What more was required? “[T]he City has complied exactly and entirely with the terms of the agreement,” an exasperated Phillips replied. “I am at a loss to understand why any alteration should be desired for the accomplishment of the only purpose proposed, contemplated, or within the competency of the respective representations of the County and the City.”27 Second, the transfer did not quiet editorial anger from either Whig or Democratic papers. Instead, it instigated a backlash against Salem and the ERR. The Jacksonian Banner declared that the county commissioners, with their ability to take land for road-building and now public buildings for railroad projects, had shown themselves to be too powerful in the courthouse affair. Hearing rumors that Spofford might run for a commissioner seat in the fall, they boosted his candidacy, albeit reluctantly: “Dr. Spofford, it is said, has hinted that he should stand candidate for one of this board. He is opposed to removals of any descriptions whatever, and in this opposition character of his, he must succeed.” The entire ERR-courthouse affair was “an outrage,” and the Banner held out hope that voters would remember the scandal come November and cast Whigs out of office. The Whiggish Essex Gazette was equally disgusted. Raising the geopolitical flag, the paper claimed the western towns were being taxed unfairly to help eastern “improvements.” In addition, the county commissioners were subverting the will of the people by taxing them “without their consent.” “We have always thought it quite enough for our Courts or Commissioners to build and repair jails and court houses all along the coast, and tax the people for the expense, that it was rather arbitrary and anti-republican; if they are to be pulled down and built over again, just when they or a corporation see fit to run a road against them, we see no end and no limit to the expenses.” The old Essex County Court House would still be standing if public officials had stood firm against the ERR. “If the Engineers of the Eastern railroad had 27. Peabody to Phillips, June 19, 1839, Eastern Railroad Co., PEM; Phillips to Peabody, June 22, 1839, Eastern Railroad Co., PEM.

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not skill and ingenuity enough to go under the court house they should not have been permitted to have gone near it.”28 It is an open question whether the ERR-courthouse issue hurt Whigs in the 1839 election cycle, but they certainly fared much worse in traditional Whig strongholds. Edward Everett, the popular and perennial Whig gubernatorial candidate and incumbent, lost votes from his 1838 totals in nineteen of the county’s twenty-seven cities and towns, including lower returns in Whig strongholds like Salem, Newburyport, Newbury, Rowley, Beverly, Ipswich, and Danvers—all towns served by the ERR.29 The battle within Whiggery over the boundaries of and access to public authority reappeared throughout the 1840s—an era of intense railroad development in Essex County—in the issue of “parallel railroads.” After the completion of the ERR along the eastern coast of the county and of the Boston & Maine Railroad (formerly Andover & Wilmington and Andover & Haverhill) along the northwestern edge of the county in the early 1840s, a new rift opened up in Whiggery between the interests of existing “trunk” lines and those of new railroad promoters. The ERR, B&M, and the neighboring Boston & Lowell Railroad in Middlesex County ceased arguing that railroad development was an unqualified benefit to local communities and began opposing all future building as a violation of “vested rights,” a waste of scarce resources, and a sign of hypercompetitive speculation that led to overbuilding and a lack of economic security for Massachusetts investors. An exigency did not exist in these new promotions; in fact, with such dangers, the exigency was against building new lines. If they were built, sapping the strength of the original trunks, monopoly would surely result. The 1840s promoters called these charges hypocrisy, claimed development was “accommodation” of the public will, and celebrated free competition while denying their projects were speculative. As much an exigency existed for their projects as existed for the first wave of railroads built in the 1830s. If these new lines were not built, allowing the original trunks to dominate regional transportation, monopoly would also be the result. Hence, each side in this battle of competing claims to public authority held up exigency as their standard and monopoly as their foe. 28. Essex Banner, June 8, 1839; July 6, 1839; Essex Gazette, June 21, 1839. 29. Newburyport Daily Herald, November 13, 1839.

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Faced with the threat of competition and additional railroad development, Whigs supporting the “rights” of the original railroads reaffirmed their belief in public exigency but altered the definition slightly. Whereas in the mid-1830s, economic emergency allowed railroads like the ERR to take public power liberally, by the 1840s and 1850s, with the interests of the older lines threatened, the threshold had changed. The great North Shore attorney and Whig politician Rufus Choate, in arguing against a parallel line near the Essex Railroad in Salem and Danvers, admitted the power of exigency: “[I]f an emergency is made out sufficiently great, we may put a Railroad any where; we may cross another track on the same grade, we may lay the track not only within seven feet of another, but within the seven-thousandth part of a barleycorn of another.” But access to that power was restrictive, certainly not as open as it had been only ten years earlier. To build a new line, the exigency must “really be great, must be certain, must be one which cannot be overlooked.” Not only must the need be great, but if granted it must cause little harm to the local patterns of life, “to work the least possible public inconvenience, and the least possible private wrong.” Choate left it open to opinion whether a parallel line could ever meet that standard. His Whig associate and Boston attorney Charles Greeley Loring left no doubt—in his opinion, a parallel road could never meet the exigency standard. Such ideas were a far cry from those in the 1830s that allowed the building of the Salem tunnel, the destruction of the Essex County Court House, and the razing of the Newburyport Bridge.30 Beyond matters of exigency, charters for parallel lines faced charges of violating the “exclusive” or “vested” rights of existing railroad corporations. Vested rights were those held by corporations given charters to operate uniquely “public” businesses—like bridges, turnpikes, and rail30. Rufus Choate, Application of the Salem and Lowell Rail Road Company for a Parallel and Competing Rail Road from Salem to Danvers. Application of the South Reading Branch Rail Road Company for a Right to Use the Essex Rail Road. Speech of Hon. Rufus Choate, before the Joint Legislative Rail Road Committee, Boston, February 28, 1851, 7–8; Loring, Argument of Charles G. Loring Esq. on behalf of the Remonstrants of the Boston and Lowell Railroad Co. against the Petition of Joseph S. Cabot and Others, for a Railroad from Salem to Lowell, Delivered before the Joint Committee on Railroads and Canals, February 1848, 2. Loring (1794–1867) was born in Boston, graduated from Harvard in 1812, and worked as a lawyer and in the insurance business. A prominent Webster Whig, he served in the state senate in 1862.

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roads, as opposed to taverns or stores—in a particular geographic area, and, by definition, denied those same rights to like businesses. The logic of denying those rights to other competitive corporations came from a theoretical “promise” given by the state to the stockholders of the vested corporation that they not only had a right to do business, but that their investment was safe from competition. Therefore, a turnpike given a charter to operate along a certain route was said to have an exclusive, vested right given by the state to do business in that area free from competition from other chartered turnpikes. The “public service” aspect of these businesses—citizens could do without drinks from a tavern but could not do without transportation—insulated them from competition and promised their backers a “fair,” unimpeded chance for profits. The doctrine went unchallenged until 1837 when the Jacksonian Democrat Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney and a Supreme Court majority ruled against the constitutionality of vested rights. Denying that the Charles River Bridge Company had an exclusive right to the toll bridge business between Boston and Cambridge over the Charles River, the court affirmed that competitive challenges to any and all American businesses were legal, proper, and a sign of healthy economic development. Bridges and taverns both served the public, but in different ways, and public service–oriented businesses like bridges and turnpikes had no more right to protection from competition than taverns and stores. The impact of the decision fell equally hard on railroads. Charters spelling out exclusivity, protection from competition, and time-limited vested rights (the Boston & Lowell Railroad charter stated that no other railroad could operate into Lowell or within five miles of the B&L Depot for thirty years) were now on tenuous legal ground. “Vested Rights Whigs,” however, continued making exclusivity arguments in defending roads from competition. While they could not make constitutional cases for vested rights, they instead turned to the “spirit” of exclusive charters, claiming that denying these would harm investors and passengers and undercut economic confidence in the Commonwealth. No longer a matter of law, chartering new roads was now a violation of the public trust. As spokesman for the original railroads, Loring kept the spirit of vested rights in his legal reasoning by switching terminology. “I do not propose to put this view on the strict grounds of vested rights,” he testified to the Massachusetts Railroad Committee in 1845 on behalf of the

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ERR, “which seem to be becoming so unpopular, but solely on those of public policy and paternal justice, considering the Legislature as a wise parent, who, however supreme his authority will dispense his favors with regard to his children’s good, and the preservation of their confidence in his justice as well as in his liberality.” Since the Commonwealth could no longer legally act on behalf of exclusive rights, they must use a degree of fatherly common sense and fairness in not recognizing an exigency and granting challenging charters. In giving railroads the power of eminent domain and vast amounts of loans from the state coffers, Massachusetts invited private investment by placing public money at risk. New grants were bad faith, a violation of an unspoken but commonly assumed public promise that these original railroad investments were safe from competition: “[N]o expression of an intention to protect them in the enjoyment of their investment, could be more emphatic then the depositing of this large sum of the public money in their hands, as a pledge of their property as security. . . . Would not such an act, in private life, look like inveigling parties into an investment, for the benefit of the grantor [?]” Legal or not, according to Loring, “the existing charter of necessity confers an exclusive right—both because the Legislature can grant no other, and because the parties who invested their money under it did so in the faith that no other could be granted.” How could the Commonwealth simultaneously invest and promote investment in certain railroads, while granting charters to upstart competing railroads in the same place? Defending the Boston & Lowell Railroad against a charter for another line into Lowell from Salem in 1848, he again based his arguments on the exclusive right of the B&L and its investors. When the charter was given—or in Loring’s terminology, when the charter was “sold”—with all the public authority of eminent domain, it was “implied” that the state would not turn around several years later and charter challenging roads to endanger the B&L investment. Was not the state of Massachusetts violating the public trust? [I]f the state has granted [the land-taking] power to individuals, in consideration of their expending their money in supplying the public need, and they have done so; they of course have acquired the exclusive right to the use and enjoyment of that power. It is a sale to them of that power, or exclusive right, for a valuable consideration. And any grant to others of a

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like power while no other exigency exists, would be a direct and palpable violation of the necessarily implied promise of the state that the grantees should enjoy that exclusive right.

No longer a matter of law, vested rights were now the “implied promise” of a railroad charter. For Loring’s Whigs, the “public sphere” had extended far enough.31 Implied vested rights were also the mainstay of Daniel Webster’s testimony on behalf of the B&L in 1845 to prevent a parallel line from Andover to Lowell. Webster, in fact, eagerly defended the concept against “partizans” of the new railroads: “They are nothing but certain and settled rights; the fee simple to a man’s farm or house; his right to the property for which he has paid, which the law guarantees to him, and which no man without violence or fraud can deprive him of.” Like Loring, Webster also placed the original corporations’ case solely on the grounds of bad faith. If Massachusetts were to charter other railroads in the same region, challenging the original roads for the same business, they were violating the implication of the charters—that all investments would be guaranteed against competition. Instead of granting new charters, the Commonwealth ought to be protecting the old ones: “There should be caution in granting them, perfect good faith in not infringing them.” Webster went so far in defending the older charters that he commented favorably on the 1840 New Hampshire railroad law, overturned just weeks before in Concord. “I am not about to justify that doctrine,” he explained, “but I am bound to say that it is not so void of plausible argument in its support as has sometimes been imagined.” The other danger in new charters was in permanently shaking the faith of future investors in similar projects and the draining of investment capital from Massachusetts: “If men see that property in Rail-roads is not secure, and that it is yielding to the claims of speculators, do you suppose that capitalists are going to invest in them under this state of things?” New charters would be felt like a “chilling blast” by expectant stockholders. In short, holding 31. Loring, Argument of Charles G. Loring, Esq., on Behalf of the Eastern Railroad Company at a Hearing on the Petitions of David Pingree and Others, and W. J. Valentine and Others before the Railroad Committee of the Massachusetts Legislature, Boston, March 7, 1845, 33–44; Loring, Argument of Charles G. Loring, Esq., on Behalf of Boston and Lowell Railroad, 14.

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against competitive challenges to the original railroads, Webster noted, “I shall presume to stand on the great conservative character of the community.”32 The fear (and the tactic of using the fear) that these new railroad projects were speculative and that they would shake the economic confidence of potential investors was widespread. The Eastern Railroad, opposing another line connecting Salem to Boston in 1845, wrote to the legislature that such a new charter would “destroy all confidence in the security of property in the Commonwealth” and “banish capitalists from a community” where their investments were never safe. By endangering the original investments, new charters giving public powers to these railroads “would in fact ROB one set of citizens of their property for the benefit of another set.” An anonymous 1846 writer known only as “N.” opposed a line from Danvers to Boston (thereby paralleling the ERR) because it would cause a spread of speculative ideas into railroad projects: “It spreads the infection everywhere, and instills its poison into every undertaking, however beneficial, or requisite for the public good. When such vast amounts of property are found to be sacrificed by the fever of speculation or of jealousy, the chill that follows is as destructive to the energies of mind as the first has been to the contents of the pocket.” Webster made the same point. Unlike the earlier railroad projects, which, according to him, were driven more by public spirit than private zeal, these new charters were speculative schemes based on greed. “There is a danger that a spirit of private interest unconnected with public improvement may spring up for the sake of creating a stock which may for a time stand high in market, and enable certain projectors to make profitable bargains.” Whereas in 1835, railroad boosters were using public power for the public good, according to Webster, 1845 boosters were merely zealous moneymakers using public power for private gain.33 Aside from the dangerous speculative attitudes new charters would 32. Webster, Argument of Daniel Webster on Behalf of the Boston and Lowell Railroad Company, at a Hearing on the Petitions of William Livingston and Others, and Hobart Clark and Others, Before the Railroad Committee of the Massachusetts Legislature, 11, 16, 20, 30. 33. Remonstrance of the Eastern Rail-Road Company, January 18, 1845, 2–3; “N.,” Papers that appeared after the disposal of the petition of D. Pingree and others, by the Railroad Committee of the Massachusetts Legislature, 13; Webster, Argument of Daniel Webster on Behalf of the Boston and Lowell Railroad Company, 16.

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promote, more railroads in Essex County could not claim a public exigency because they would be a waste of precious, limited resources and invite overbuilding. The mysterious pro-ERR writer “N.” suggested that parallel roads wasted all the labor and capital put into the older projects: “[B]y parallel Railroads not only is all the labor used in their construction thus wantonly squandered, but good land and good materials, both of which if not so appropriated could have been profitably employed, are literally annihilated.” Loring lamented that all the work and promise of the old lines would become “so much dead loss—as entirely so as if thrown into the sea.” Little hamlets in isolated rural areas dreaming of commercial glory endangered all railroad projects. “It cannot, in the nature of things, be, that every town can be accommodated with a separate road to the metropolis,—merely because that would be most convenient and desirable for that town. Such a doctrine would lead to the loss of vast amounts of capital uselessly invested in parallel roads.” Webster found the situation almost comic. How many towns could seriously expect accommodation? “I am quite sure that a Rail-road from man’s house to man’s house, from every little village to its neighbor is no such exigency, it is a small and inconsiderable convenience. Will the convenience of three neighbors justify them in taking the rights of the fourth?” Wrapped up in these new railroad promotions of the 1840s, he thought, was not public spirit but a great deal of local presumption. In a world of finite resources and opportunities, not every village could aspire to the greatness of a Boston or Lowell. Mocking Andover boosters’ ideas of connecting their town with the opening frontier, Webster laughed, “That is quite a rousing idea for old Andover! The whole of the great West is presented to the imagination of the professors and students of the Theological Seminary at Andover!”34 Perhaps the most fascinating fear of the “Vested Rights Whigs” was that these new railroads represented competition. It was not only that these new projects were speculative or that they endangered the earlier railroad investments of the 1830s—competition itself came under fire as harmful. Spokesmen like Loring and Webster, whose names and deeds were nearly synonymous with mercantile wealth, industrial growth, and 34. “N.,” Papers, 13; Loring, Argument of Charles G. Loring, Esq., on Behalf of the Eastern Railroad Company, 14, 20; Webster, Argument of Daniel Webster on Behalf of the Boston and Lowell Railroad Company, 16, 26.

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market society, now argued that competition represented a threat to American business and should not be promoted by reckless grants of public power. As much a source of promise as danger, competition was a force to be watched but never trusted. “N.” claimed that competition—at least as regarded railroad development—harmed the public: “[T]hat it may be the death of those who engage in it will be abundantly obvious if ever [more development] be fully carried out. If it be not, it will [be] because the public itself, which brings the monster into existence, becomes the prey.” Loring doubted that American business or public improvement owed its success to competition. He scoffed, “Competition, we are told, is the secret and soul of all enterprise and progress; that wherever it exists we behold the greatest advancement in economy, safety and comfort; that monopoly begets annoyance, cupidity and disregard of public safety and convenience; in short, that the history of competition is but the history of improvement, and that we have only to establish competition, and we at once obtain perfection,—or, at least, are traveling with railroad velocity towards it.” Cleverly comparing competition to fire, he remarked that it brought as much misery as progress and, unless carefully regulated, promised destruction of many public enterprises: “[I]f the history of civilization be on one hand the history of improvement, it is upon the other the sad record of restless aspiration, of broken friendships, of envious discontents, of blasted public and private faith, of unblushing frauds, of gambling speculations and ruined hopes.” He accused those rallying to the cry of railroad competition of “base” intentions, as opposed to the public-interested “duty and justice” of the older corporations. “I would remember the old adage, applied to fire, that it is a good servant and a bad master. I would use it as a means of attempting something else, not regard it as an end to be itself attained. . . . The spirit of competition and of speculation are inseparably connected in all these enterprises.” Competitive market society, in the mind of Loring, was an unhealthy prospect. If anything, public power should be used to regulate competition, not unleash it.35 The result of all these factors, “Vested Rights Whigs” said, would be a railroad monopoly leading to terrible public service. Despite their 35. “N.,” Papers, 14; Loring, Argument of Charles G. Loring, Esq., on Behalf of the Eastern Railroad Company, 62–63.

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arguments against competition and the chartering of competing lines, they claimed they were seeking to prevent a monopolized transportation system. It was those using public authority to create a competitive system who posed the greatest danger of monopoly, they proclaimed. The logic was odd, but worked as follows. If the original corporations like the ERR were challenged along their routes, they would naturally be forced to compete for area business. To do so, they would have to reduce fares, which would in turn lead to reductions in revenues, capital improvements (like double tracks and new equipment), and public safety. This “safety danger in competition” idea appeared at times like a vague threat by the original corporations—make us compete and people will get hurt. “[N]one are so poor but will prefer public safety, life to money,” “N.” ominously warned. The ERR noted in 1845 that if the legislature chartered another railroad from Salem to Boston, revenues would plummet and cause “an increased risk of injury to passengers.” After a prolonged period of competition, with service problems caused by short revenues, trimmed expenditures, and safety issues, one railroad would inevitably rise as victor and swallow the defeated, bankrupt line. At this point, a railroad monopoly would emerge. Elias Hasket Derby, railroad promoter and scion of a Salem mercantile dynasty (his grandfather, the East India merchant of the same name, was the nation’s first millionaire) described the process: There being two lines, there is, of course, fierce competition for a time, until one or the other of the two, is broken down—as is eventually sure to be the fact. In this event, both Roads become the property of one Company who immediately raise the fares, without fear of competition, because nobody else can compete and no more charters will be granted. They raise their prices just as they please, in order to indemnify themselves for the cost of both lines, and the losses made by each, during the ruinous and dangerous race between them.

Loring pictured the devastating monopolizing process in similar fashion. Once another road was chartered, capital doubled to handle a static demand, and everyone—companies and the public—suffered as a result. “The greater the number of roads dividing the travel, the greater must be the expenses, not only in the original outlay, but of daily management, and, of course, the less perfection of the road, and cars, and

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engines, the less frequency of communication and a higher rate of fare.” A terrible, almost fated process was set in motion: Is it to be believed that the old road will stand by and see its custom withdrawn? Certainly not—but as is usual in such cases, it will probably reduce its fare even lower; and thus the other must be compelled to an equal or corresponding greater reduction—and so they will proceed until one breaks down, and the strongest will swallow up the weakest. Or a combination between the two will take place, and then, having the possession of both roads, and the public in its power, the fares will be raised high enough to pay a high profit on the cost of both—or to indemnify the victor for the losses sustained in the contest.

Instead of whittling away railroad capital with reckless public grants, promoters and legislators should not charter any more roads, have faith in the public spirit of the old lines, and wait. In time, with greater patronage—not competition—fares will decrease and service will improve.36 This reasoning on the process of monopoly leaves questions. First, the exigency claimed by the newly promoted railroads was that the ERR was a monopoly already. The vast public power accorded to the older railroads was now needed by the new. It is hard to understand how without competition or pressure the original road would lower their rates or offer improved service, other than a vague promise that they were motivated by public spirit and good will. How one situation was a monopoly (after competition) and the other was not (before competition) is hard to fathom. What was the incentive to improve service? Second, while the state certainly helped these original roads in their difficult infancy, this support was hardly a contract to stop all future development. Public accommodation, “improvement,” and the opportunity for profits were at the heart of these original projects and motivated later boosters as well. Risk, even speculative risk, was no less present in George Peabody’s ERR project in 1835 than it was in Danvers’ many 36. “N.,” Papers, 19; Remonstrance of the Eastern Rail-Road Company, January 18, 1845, 1; Derby, Argument of E. H. Derby, Esq., in Behalf of the Eastern Rail-Road Company, at a Hearing of the Petition of David Pingree and Others, before the RailRoad Committee of the Massachusetts Legislature, Boston, February 20, 1846, 27; Loring, Argument of Charles G. Loring, Esq., on Behalf of the Eastern Railroad Company, 15–16.

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appeals for a railroad connection ten years later. If anything, speculation was more present in the older roads because of greater risk—untested technological innovations were much in doubt. Denying public authority on these grounds was weak. Third, “Vested Rights Whigs” advanced the idea of the economy as a finite pie, or, as later economists phrased it, a zero-sum game. In this scenario, railroads in a certain territory accommodated the maximum amount of demand. There were limits to growth. Parallel railroads went beyond those limits and forced more and more roads to compete for a static amount of passengers and freight. This argument is equally spurious. As passenger returns, freight volume, and dividends constantly testified, railroads created more wealth than previous transportation had accommodated. If anything, the exigency of wealth creation added greater weight to new charters than in protecting the old. Sensing these weaknesses and seeking new connections across Essex County, railroad boosters of the 1840s ridiculed the charges of the original roads. The idea that any enterprise had an exclusive or vested right to conduct business in a certain area was pernicious. Derby, arguing on behalf of petitioners in favor of a cross line between Lowell and Andover, derided the claims as “mere naked right,” without legal precedent or practical need. “Let us not forget,” he answered Webster, “that under the mask of conservatism, doctrines may be urged as subversive of all improvement and as injurious to the rights of others, as the effects of the wildest radicalism.” “Vested Rights Whigs” seemed to have ignored the Charles River Bridge case. Choate also denied the existence of such rights and claimed that the legislature could charter as many railroads as it wanted, anywhere it wanted, and never violate the rights of any other railroad corporation. Quoting Taney, he noted that the “time for that argument has long gone by.” In addition, the idea that new charters would violate a sacred trust between the Commonwealth and investors was “insincere, fraudulent, and untrue. The grant would impair no contract, stain no faith, break no honor!” Russell, Choate’s legal associate, quoted liberally from British railroad articles in the Westminster Review, stressing that the law could recognize no monopoly in the protection of the public interest, and drew clear comparisons between their fight for railroad development and the contemporaneous British debate over the infamous Corn Laws:

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We think there can be little doubt of the tendency of existing railway companies to become a great amalgamated private monopoly, to which the only corrective is the construction of new lines, protecting the public by efficient clauses, or the voluntary surrender of the mischievous features of their monopoly to the revision of the Board of Trade. . . . Shallow-minded men are they who deem that this can endure, that a whole nation can be deprived of its just rights, for the benefit of a few. If, under any pretext of amalgamation, if even by law specially made, they could obtain a monopoly; if every line into London had a clause inserted in its act, that no more lines should ever be made, still the law could not be maintained. It would be a law robbing every man of his birthright, it would be a law to hedge round man’s dwellings, and make them pay a capitation tax for the privilege to go forth. Talk of corn laws!

As the counterparts of Richard Cobden and John Bright, Choate, Derby, and Russell saw themselves as American Mancunians.37 Equally as preposterous to these “Opportunity Whigs” was the exaggerated fear of competition. Every enterprise in New England grew and strengthened under a competitive regime that forced businesses and individuals to improve, adapt, and innovate or face oblivion. Were taverns and hotels dangerous because they competed for each other’s business? If speculation was rampant in railroad projects, as Webster had asserted, why then had dividends been so high over the past fifteen years? “And why should not commerce and art continue to advance, until this GREAT WORK OF HUMAN AMELIORATION, which reduces the actual cost of transport from seventy to ninety per cent, shall reach the humblest village in the state, restoring to deserted lives the animation lost, giving back to stores and hotels their departed value, giving birth to new settlements, bearing the express-letter, and package to the doors of the humblest inhabitant?” For Choate, “competition is the life of trade and the great promoter of the public good.” Both he and Russell again pointed to the British experience in these matters, noting that competition led to better service and more choices for the public. Instead of the state acting like a meddlesome parent, resisting public demands with a 37. Derby, The Case of Wm. Livingston and Fifteen Hundred Others Citizens of Lowell, Petitioners for a Cross Rail-Road from Lowell to Andover, 3–4; Choate and Russell, Abstract of the Arguments of the Hon. Rufus Choate and Charles T. Russell, Esq., for the Petitioners, 42–44, 14–15.

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parochial “common sense,” government ought to acquiesce to its public. “[I]t would seem to be the inclination of a just and parental government, to give its citizens the accommodation they seek in the way they seek it, if that mode be not unjust or capricious.”38 A “just” state responds positively to citizen demands. Accommodation, a central concept, had two meanings. First, and most clearly, accommodation of the public meant allowing railroad projects that responded to existing and possible business, not covered by (or covered poorly by) the original roads; or in Russell’s words, “whether there is business enough.” Second, public accommodation rested upon the receptivity of the state to its citizens. A government that refused to accommodate a public demand over private interest was unjust. “Let those who are not accommodated be accommodated,” Derby proclaimed. “Let us at the outset resist the doctrines, from whatever source they spring, that each existing line is to a harsh and rigid monopoly, a barrier to all improvement unless consistent with private interests.” Explaining the claims of Danvers against the ERR, Choate pictured a plutocratic few obstructing the needs of the wider Essex County public: “It is the ordinary case, simply, of the many against the few. The great interest of the great public, against the minuter interest of a small portion of that public. . . . It is the travelling public on one side, and the men who live by selling travelling accommodation, on the other—and that is all.” When the ERR claimed that their profits were put at risk by these new projects, Choate discounted dividends in the face of accommodating citizens. “[W]e say that, if by permitting the choice of roads, a perceptible, and large increase of general public accommodation can be secured, then the Legislature ought to disregard this consideration. . . . If an increase of the public welfare or accommodation is the result, the consequent loss to the original monopolist is a matter entirely unworthy the attention of the Legislature.” Small branch lines chartered by the state to connect towns with the larger original railroads was not what the public wanted. These towns wanted their own lines, independent from the ERR, the B&M, and the B&L. If the state forced these towns onto branch lines with corporations they disapproved, how was this 38. Derby, The Case of Wm. Livingston and Fifteen Hundred Others Citizens of Lowell, 8–13; Choate and Russell, Abstract of the Arguments of the Hon. Rufus Choate and Charles T. Russell, Esq., for the Petitioners, 39.

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responding to the public will? Choate and others framed the question as one of self-government: “[I]t becomes a question of extreme interest to all inter-lying populations to know which road they belong; ‘under which king, Bezonian, speak or die!’ Who owns us? Who is to make our branch?” Just governments accommodated popular demand, even when that demand was for competing railroad charters. After all, “rail-roads were made for the people, as the Sabbath is made for man, not the people for the rail-roads.”39 More confident in the evolving role of public power to ensure prosperity than their Jacksonian Democratic opponents, Whigs sought an expansion of the public sphere to accommodate the demands of railroad development and internal improvement in the antebellum era. This often-shocking expansion came at the expense of the private sphere and contending public powers like bridge companies and other railroads. These endeavors were not without controversy, however, as Whigs split on whether to protect existing enterprises or extend power and opportunity to accommodate public demands. Far from fearing the illiberal dangers lurking in such broad grants of public power, Whigs firmly believed that the restoration of past wealth and prominence demanded arcane methods. New England’s future as a region—declining in political power, economic prestige, and population—depended upon it.

39. Derby, The Case of Wm. Livingston and Fifteen Hundred Others Citizens of Lowell, 11; Choate and Russell, Abstract of the Arguments of the Hon. Rufus Choate and Charles T. Russell, Esq., for the Petitioners, 30–31, 40–41, 45, 60.

Four Desperation and Restoration Essex County Whigs and the Economics of Railroads

With the history of the Georgetown road you may be all acquainted From the time the ground was broke till the depot here was painted Some people may be ignorant of this prodigious track, But none will e’er forget it who’ve been to Newburyport and back. CHORUS: O the Georgetown Railroad is getting all the go— The Maine and Eastern they go so mighty slow, They may puff and blow and whistle, but t’will never do to talk, They may think it’s ’gainst the law to run faster than a walk. There’s now and then a traveller who lives to get clear through. But when he gets to the other end he don’t know what to do; The people look so different and he’s grown old and grey, He’s sorry he hadn’t gone afoot, or hired a horse and shay. Stephen Osgood, “The Georgetown Railroad” (ca. 1855)

Essex County Whigs made cavalier use of public “exigency” powers in fear that their economic lives were in danger. Formerly secure and prosperous relationships were tottering, and their future material well being was in doubt. The building of the Middlesex Canal from Lowell to Boston and the various railroads built from Boston westward had cordoned off

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the North Shore and lower Merrimack valley, and by 1830 the ocean trade was in a steady decline. Stemming this decline and inaugurating a period of economic restoration motivated the building of new railroad lines in antebellum Essex County as much as new wealth creation. Like Jacksonian radicals and “Vested Rights Whigs,” however, some Whigs with “interests” in the regional market, like stagecoach promoters, tavern and inn owners, turnpike managers, ferry services, and other railroads, fought these attempts at development as destructive of existing economic relationships. In addition, prorailroad Whigs were oftentimes so confident in the inevitable benefits of railroads that they fought bitterly with each other in competing towns and endangered development by hopelessly dividing political and financial support. Coming to a consensus on policies and candidates for national and state office, they imploded on local issues like railroad development. These three dynamics—fighting decline, fearing capital destruction, and feuding with neighboring towns on restoring prosperity—dominated the early years of Essex County railroad development in the secondary seaport towns of Salem and Newburyport. Both towns fixated on the development of Lawrence. From a noname farming crossroads containing 150 people in 1845, to a thriving river city of nearly 18,000 people and America’s leading woolen manufacturing center in 1860, Lawrence was the mesmerizing focus of county railroad development after 1845. After both Salem and Newburyport were connected to Boston via the Eastern Railroad between 1836 and 1840, city promoters and boosters turned their attention to this planned industrial settlement damming the Merrimack River midway between Lowell and Newburyport. All the business lost to Boston after 1800 could now be recaptured, they fantasized, by becoming the entrepôt for Lawrence. Vast amounts of bricks, lumber, cotton, wool, and coal all had to be transported to and from this “New City.” Since the river was too shallow, railroads were the only answer. The question remained, however, who would supply a track?1 In the mid-1830s, Andover farmer and wool manufacturer Daniel Saunders discovered a long-abandoned plan to build a canal from Lowell to the ocean. Since this suggested a rapid drop in the level of the Merri1. Maurice P. Dorgan, Lawrence Yesterday and Today (1845–1918), 218.

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mack River somewhere below Lowell, he and an assistant scouted and measured the banks, discovering that the river dropped fifty feet across several falls in the towns of Methuen and Andover. He then proceeded to slowly buy up land and water rights along one of these rapids—Peter’s Falls—and, in 1843, joined with his law student son, Daniel, Jr., Andover mill owner Nathaniel Stevens, and Lowell manufacturers John Nesmith, Thomas Hopkinson, Jonathan Tyler, and Samuel Lawrence to form the Merrimack Water Power Associates. This new company continued the process Saunders had begun and bought up more land and rights along the falls, placing “themselves effectually in a position to control all the power on the river below Lowell.” With Saunders as land agent, the company had purchased almost one hundred farms comprising three to four thousand acres by 1845.2 On March 20, 1845, the Massachusetts General Court chartered the Essex Company to build a dam and canals for the future construction of a new industrial city. That same day, the new corporation’s directors and major stockholders—among others, Saunders, manufacturers Abbott and Samuel Lawrence, railroad and industrial promoter Patrick Tracy Jackson, and the brilliant civil engineer Charles S. Storrow—walked across the rickety wooden Andover bridge spanning the Merrimack River and discussed their project. Retiring to Lowell that night, they voted to merge the Water Associates with the Essex Company. Abbott Lawrence was elected president, and Storrow treasurer, secretary, and chief engineer. On August 1, 1845, Gilman & Carpenter Company, under Storrow’s supervision, began building the dam. Built from stone quarried only eight miles away in Pelham, New Hampshire, the Lawrence Dam was completed three years later; for a time, it was the largest in the world. A canal cutting four hundred feet into the northern bank of the river was also begun in 1845 by Storrow’s assistant, Charles Bigelow, a captain in the Army Corps of Engineers, whose previous job was constructing stone army forts in Boston Harbor. More than fifty-three hundred feet long and up to one-hundred-feet wide at one point, it formed an island that would house the mills also being planned and designed by Storrow. When the legislature chartered the new town of Lawrence, named in 2. Horace A. Wadsworth, The History of Lawrence, Massachusetts, Portraits and Biographical Sketches, 41; J. F. C. Hayes, A History of the City of Lawrence, 9; Wadsworth, History, 43–44, 48.

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honor of the Essex Company’s president and Massachusetts’ greatest manufacturing family, in April 1847, the hopes of the seaside towns rose. If they could connect their ports to Lawrence and offer transportation services cheaper than Boston, they could recover some of the trade they had lost over the previous thirty years. Even though Lawrence had produced not one stitch of cloth—no mill was in operation before 1849—locals saw an opportunity they could not pass up.3 The local leader with the keenest appreciation of this opportunity was former Salem mayor Stephen Clarendon Phillips. Phillips (1801– 57), unlike many of his fellow merchants who fled to Boston, remained in Salem throughout the antebellum era, retaining his trading business with the Far East, South America, and Canada. An active and prominent Massachusetts Whig, he served in the state legislature and the U.S. Congress in the 1830s. After one term as Salem mayor (1838), he joined Horace Mann on the Massachusetts Board of Education. In the mid1840s, Phillips emerged as a leader of the antislavery, “Conscience,” Free Soil wing of the Whig Party. Steadfastly opposed to Texas annexation and a critic of Daniel Webster and the Whig conservatives, he ran for Massachusetts governor as a Free Soiler in 1848 and finished second, eleven thousand votes ahead of the Democratic nominee. In addition to his political prominence, Phillips was an outspoken promoter of railroad development for his hometown of Salem. Anxious for Salem to become the port of entry for both Lowell and Lawrence, he zealously lobbied for development of the Essex Railroad (1847–48) and the Salem & Lowell Railroad (1848–50).4 The lesser known of the two lines, the Essex Railroad would connect Salem, via Danvers and the rural areas of central Essex County, to Lawrence and the Boston & Maine Railroad (B&M). As a conduit for the “New City,” Salem could now import building materials like bricks and lumber and later bring in coal and raw materials to fuel, heat, and 3. Wadsworth, History, 50; Frederick Morton Smith, The Essex Company on the Merrimack at Lawrence, 8–9; Dorgan, Lawrence, 21–22; Donald B. Cole, Immigrant City: Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1845–1912, 19; Dorgan, Lawrence, 26; Smith, Essex Company, 10–11; Dorgan, Lawrence, 27; Cole, Immigrant City, 19. 4. Robert F. Dalzell, Jr., Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made, 205; Phillips would die in his efforts to find markets for Essex County—he was killed when the steamship Montreal exploded on the St. Lawrence River in 1857.

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operate the many mills. Storrow, no stranger to the railroad business, broached the subject of a railroad connection with Phillips in April 1847. The son of a prominent Boston merchant, Charles Storer Storrow (1809– 1904) graduated first in the Harvard class of 1829 and studied civil engineering in Paris. Returning to Boston in 1832, he served as manager and chief engineer on the Boston & Lowell Railroad and gained notice in manufacturing circles with his 1835 Treatise on Water-Works. As treasurer and engineer for the Essex Company after 1845, he designed almost the entire city of Lawrence and served as its first mayor in 1853. He counseled Phillips that a railroad to Lawrence would recapture what Salem had lost.5 Central Essex County and the lower Merrimack valley were “the natural back country of Salem, & with which it was intimately connected before the Rail Roads had disturbed by their all absorbing influence, the old channels of communication,” Storrow wrote Phillips. Although no mills were yet in operation, “confidence in manufactures is now fully established in New England,” and Lawrence was sure to prosper like Lowell. Industrial cities, however, needed ocean outlets to dominate trade. This relationship was standardized by Manchester and Liverpool, England, in the past twenty years—could not Salem play Liverpool to Lawrence’s Manchester? In addition, Storrow believed, railroads had particular relevance to industrial cities because most of their population was transitory (“Hence a constant interchange of visits which fills cars with passengers”) and, being away from farms, had a high demand for goods they could not produce themselves. “By easy communication with this place, you will put yourselves in easy communication with the whole valley of [the] Merrimack River, covered as it is with a busy & thriving population, always in motion. Most of what they eat goes once over a Rail road. Most of what they manufacture goes twice.” These three products—goods for workers, raw materials, and finished products—would make a railroad thrive. Tantalizing Phillips, he reminded the Salem entrepreneur of Lowell’s achievements over the prior twenty-five years: “I see no reason why [Lawrence] may not become what Lowell is now.” In the meantime, a city had to be built, which meant vast supplies of brick and lumber needed to be shipped into the Merrimack valley. “To the 5. Dictionary of American Biography, 9:98–99.

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eastern coasters, & not to the rafts and boats on [the] Merrimack River, we look for many of these things. Call them coasters to your wharves & put your cars in motion; the market will be ready.”6 Stephen C. Phillips needed little convincing. One month later, he gave an address at Salem City Hall promoting the Essex Railroad as a savior to Salem business. As machines of wealth creation, the effects of railroads were positive yet unpredictable. “[A]long their route,” Phillips lectured, “the manufacturing and agricultural interests, seizing upon the additional facilities afforded to them, and stimulated by the spirit of trade—as locomotive as steam power and inseparable from it—are speedily developed in forms and degrees of importance, which in no case were distinctly and fully anticipated.” Salem, faced with the indistinct promises of railroad development, had little to lose—it had lost so much trade already. A railroad connecting Salem and Lawrence—less than twenty miles in distance, but connecting to lines stretching north, south, and west—should be built by locals to relieve themselves from the condition of stagnancy and comparative decline which has been too long endured, to recover the country trade of which they suffered themselves to de deprived, and far beyond what, until this moment, they have imagined to be attainable—to make their country trade, in more or less respects, as extensive as the most Northern and Western limits of steam communication, by land or water, within and beyond the country.

With visions of the Great West in his eyes, Phillips positioned the Essex Railroad as the first link in Salem’s connection with the Merrimack valley, New Hampshire, Vermont, Canada, and beyond.7 Phillips never mentioned, however, that a railroad would expand Salem’s manufacturing base, and indeed as a merchant, that was never his intention. With the exception of the leather business, Lowell, Lawrence, and Haverhill would always outpace Salem in manufacturing growth. Seeking to invigorate Salem’s dying traditional economy with a railroad, the city’s new role was to import what the interior factories and 6. Storrow to Phillips, April 30, 1847, Box 14: File 8, Phillips Family Papers, PEM. 7. Stephen C. Phillips, Unfinished Report given at Salem City Hall for the Essex Railroad (May 1847), Box 14: File 8, Phillips Family Papers, PEM.

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their workers needed, to act as an inexpensive, convenient funnel for incoming goods and raw materials and an equally useful port for shipping finished products out. He listed the dozens of products merchants could begin importing again if the Essex Railroad was completed to Lawrence— sugar, cocoa, and coffee from the West Indies and the Pacific, molasses from the Caribbean, salt and dry goods from Europe, wool from South America, hemp from Manila, spices, indigo, gums, drugs, rattans, rags, and whale oil. Hides for Salem’s emerging tanning industry could be brought in more cheaply than via Boston: “[B]ecause this is already so large a Hide market for the supply of local wants, it may legitimately become a still larger market.” The unglamorous lumber trade with Maine and the Maritimes (“an old and established trade”) would boom as the building material market opened up in Lawrence. Coal for the valley would be in heavy demand—thirty thousand tons a year were already being brought to Lowell—and inevitably cheaper overhead costs would make Salem a major coal port. If Phillips’s grander plans came to fruition and Salem, through the Essex Railroad, could be linked with the west, he even pictured the city shipping western flour “for the famishing population of Europe.”8 The most interesting commercial opportunity Phillips pictured for Salem after the Essex Railroad opened Lawrence was the cotton trade with the slave south. The southern trade had never been Salem’s strongest market, but a railroad could offer new venues for local merchants: “It will be likely to occur, that Salem vessels may occasionally be found at New Orleans, Mobile, &c. which can readily be procured to bring goods to Salem.” If that trade could be sustained over time and prove profitable, “it will be an object for us to keep vessels, it may be lines of packets, constantly running between Salem and the principal cotton ports.” Considering Phillips’s prominent antislavery opinions and his close relationship with American Free Soilers in the 1840s and 1850s, his suggestions to connect Salem with New Orleans, Mobile, and “the principal cotton ports” seem at odds. Whether reflecting an anxiety for profits or hypocrisy, Stephen Phillips’s remarks speak to the depth of Salem’s late antebellum concern that railroads offered a last chance of stemming commercial decline.9 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid.

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In the railroad race for Lawrence, Newburyport came last. Years of bickering over money and routes delayed its connection while other area cities built lines. The Boston & Maine Railroad, originally the Andover & Wilmington, stretched from Boston to Portland, and in March 1848 it opened a new mainline—five miles to the north of its original route— to accommodate Lawrence. In early July of that year, the Lawrence & Lowell Railroad opened between those cities, and two months later the Essex Railroad began service between Salem and Lawrence. When the Manchester & Lawrence Railroad opened its line in October 1849, the small young city on the Merrimack was better connected than any city in Essex County, with ties to Boston, Lowell, Salem, and the interior of Maine and New Hampshire. Newburyport, only fourteen miles away, was left out.10 The fear of isolation motivated canal fever in the 1810s and 1820s, as town leaders pondered water connections to the upper Merrimack valley to mitigate trade interruptions from the Middlesex Canal. When that project failed, fifteen years later the town successfully pushed for a place on the proposed ERR mainline to New Hampshire. Like Salem, some criticized railroad development as pretentious and an unwanted intrusion: “There is no more reason or propriety in making every thing bend to a depot near State Street, than there would be in anchoring a ship in the middle of our river, and building a wharf to her to unladen her cargo.” Although such attitudes would hamper Newburyport railroads for years, many saw the ERR and the building of steam cloth mills riverside as the beginnings of an economic revival. In 1840, almost twenty thousand passengers arrived via the ERR in Newbuyport; by 1847, that number swelled to more than forty-six thousand. “[T]he imaginary evils and disadvantages which the timid or the adversely interested had conjured up,” proclaimed the Whiggish Salem Register, “have not been realized, and the determined spirit of opposition or prejudice, (no where more distinctly visible than a few years since in the meridian of New England,) which the introduction of this mode of travelling had to encounter, has disappeared before its obvious benefits.” The ERR 10. The B&M held a stockholder meeting in Andover on February 7, 1846, and voted to move the line from Andover to North Andover, a five-mile shift to accommodate Lawrence. The estimated cost of the move was $160,000. Haverhill Gazette, February 14, 1846; Hayes, History, 58–59.

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appeared to facilitate the development of more lines by convincing locals of railroads’ restorative effect.11 That hope proved fleeting, however, as talk began over building a line inland to recapture the lost “country trade.” Convinced of the miraculous economic benefits of railroad development, area Whigs battled bitterly among themselves, made alliances with Democrats, and connived to attract a railroad to their communities and away from others. Such activities threatened to delay railroad construction in the lower Merrimack valley for years, if not destroy all hope of connection. The first rumblings of railroad development in central Essex County began in 1844 when the Georgetown Branch Railroad (GBRR) was chartered by the legislature. The line ran from Georgetown, a small but growing shoe manufacturing town, to the industrial river town of Haverhill. Although a relatively short line—no more than eight miles—GBRR stock subscriptions fell flat, little money was raised, and as the charter deadline approached, it appeared the road would never be built. In 1846, the Newburyport & Georgetown Railroad (NGRR) was chartered—another short line, amounting to no more than fourteen miles—and merged with the GBRR charter. One of the prime movers behind the charter was Denis Condry, a Whig representative from Newbury, who organized a petition drive for the NGRR. Again, money was hard to raise, and in the winter of 1847, the conservative Whig Newburyport Daily Herald, a major NGRR promoter, began agitating for development before this charter also expired.12 Considering the economic possibilities of interior New Hampshire and Maine, “filling up with a dense population,” cities like Concord and Manchester needed an ocean outlet. Everyone with a hundred dollars to spare should invest in the NGRR and connect the city to the railroad lines reaching inland, boosters argued. All the country trade, lost since the Middlesex Canal was built and Boston’s railroads expanded, could now be regained. Lack of an interior line cut off Newburyport from this trade “as effectually as a hostile army.” More importantly, Newburyport was miles closer to Lawrence than Salem, and since Boston merchants were overloaded with orders, the opportunities for the declining port to 11. Newburyport Daily Herald, January 12, 1836 (hereafter cited as Herald); Blake, History, 234; Salem Register, reprinted in the Herald, September 30, 1839. 12. Herald, May 3, 1848; February 6, 1846.

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become a freight inlet were obvious. A new interior railroad held the key. Warehouses and wharves could not be expanded, and the city could not prosper, unless a connection was built: “With it our business need only be limited by our capital, and when facility of internal communication is offered, if we have not capital enough here to avail ourselves of the facility, the cheapness of wharf and store property will attract it here.” Of special interest was a recent building supply shortage in the “New City” (bricks, lumber, and lime) that the B&M was having difficulty handling. Despite shipping 230 tons of bricks a day into Lawrence, the railroad undersupplied the city’s needs. The NGRR offered an opportunity to match the efforts of the “enterprising Bostonians” and establish Newburyport as Lawrence’s port. “[The railroad] cannot fail to make us with the capital we now have to rally around, again an important seaport.” Charges that the NGRR would never pay good dividends or be of use to the port were “groundless”: “This sort of croaking has followed many such enterprises, while experience has uniformly taught, that superior facilities always increase the amount of business.” Considering the improvement in the economic fortunes of the town since the ERR and steam mills, an interior railroad was the last step toward recovery.13 On February 1, 1847, a railroad meeting was held in Newburyport to discuss NGRR finance problems and plan a connecting line with Haverhill, fulfilling the earlier GBRR charter. Denis Condry chaired the meeting, and Newburyport merchant and conservative Whig Charles H. Coffin acted as secretary. A committee formed to “procure” more stockholders was made up mostly of Newburyport businessmen but also Haverhill editor and promoter Dr. Jeremiah Spofford, Tappan Pearson of West Newbury, and John T. Loring of Lawrence.14 Railroad meetings were interesting gatherings, mixing local political and economic leaders in a promotional effort to gain charters and effect development. The quintessential “booster” event, they were modeled after political meetings and all followed a similar pattern. Meeting in town 13. Herald, January 29, 1847; March 4, 1847; February 9, 1847; Haverhill Gazette, February 27, 1847. To help relieve the shortage, the B&M began running a special train from the Somerville brickyards into Lawrence. Merrimack Courier, reprinted in the Herald, February 25 and March 2, 1847; Herald, March 15, 1847; February 26, 1847. 14. Herald, February 3, 1847.

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halls, hotels, and churches and encompassing anywhere from five to seventy people, they first elected meeting officers, usually local ministers, state representatives, or prominent businessmen. Next, a series of speeches and presentations were given, usually three to five, explaining the possible routes, economic benefits, financial requirements, and a political plan of action. Lastly, two committees were formed: one to secure a surveyor and propose an appropriate route, a second to draw up a resolution asking the legislature to charter a route. The “leader” of the meeting or the committee would later present the resolution in Boston. The charter would be debated in committee, complete with testimony from local interests supportive or opposed to the line, and if passed out of committee would be discussed and voted on by both houses. All charters were given a time limit during which a company had to raise funds through stock subscription drives and build their line. The entire process was long, tedious, and difficult, and many railroads that were chartered were never built. Distinct from stockholder meetings, at least fourteen “railroad meetings” were held in the lower Merrimack valley between 1846 and 1851.15 Newspaper agitation, poor fundraising, and the February 1 meeting ignited a three-month booster battle as towns bitterly competed against each other to attract the NGRR. At least six different routes were suggested from Newburyport westward, but two proved most popular and contentious: a “river route” running from Newburyport along the edge of the Merrimack into Haverhill and the original NGRR charter running straight from Newburyport into Georgetown and thence over the Andover Hills into Lawrence.16 15. These were counted from meeting notices given in the Newburyport Daily Herald, Newburyport Daily Evening Union, and Haverhill Gazette between 1846 and 1851. Stockholder meetings were different gatherings, where stockholder votes were taken on company policy. These were usually annual events held at regularly scheduled intervals. For example, between 1846 and 1851, ten NGRR meetings were held in both Newburyport and Georgetown: seven were held in September (the standard date) and three at other times. 16. Among the other routes advocated were a line running northwesterly toward Manchester and Concord, New Hampshire; a line running on the north side of the Merrimack River and intersecting the B&M in Plaistow, New Hampshire; and several different versions of the Georgetown route running around the impassable Andover Hill.

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The river route boasted several advantages over the Georgetown route, according to its partisans. First, it encompassed a greater population, a greater number of businesses, and hence a greater possibility for profit. “[I]t would seem a great mistake for people to invest their money in the Georgetown route where there is not the least prospect of receiving fair dividends for the investments for the outlay,” one writer complained. “[T]his Georgetown route is peculiarly calculated to avoid as much as possible the business between the two termini, and never can be made a profitable or convenient route.” Running riverside, this line would accommodate ten thousand people in the towns of West Newbury and Bradford; the Georgetown route boasted only tiny Boxford with five hundred farmers. No wonder the Georgetown route could not raise money—it promised no business. Second, a river route was shorter and therefore cheaper to construct. Following the gentle contours of the Merrimack, it was a full two miles shorter and encountered no serious grades. The Georgetown route faced difficult hills, the Andover Great Pond, and would cost stockholders at least an extra fifty thousand dollars.17 Third, river route proponents were reacting to suggestions by Georgetown boosters that the NGRR ignore the charter of the old GBRR (the 1844 planned line running from Georgetown to Haverhill) and run straight to Lawrence. A West Newbury–river route would, therefore, be fulfilling the original charter of a line to Haverhill. The local leader most insistent on this point was the East Bradford doctor and real estate promoter Dr. Jeremiah Spofford. Spofford (1787–1880) was a teacher, doctor, and prominent booster of internal improvement projects in the lower Merrimack valley. He helped found the Merrimack River Chain Ferry in 1826, developed the street plans and house lots in East Bradford (present-day Groveland) during the 1830s, was a Whig editor and columnist in the Haverhill papers. In addition, he was a prominent railroad promoter in the valley and served in the Massachusetts State Senate from 1838 to 1839. According to Dr. Spofford, in October 1846, directors of both the GBRR and the NGRR united their charters and agreed to build a line combining both plans—Newburyport to Georgetown to Haverhill. In expectation of this, a committee had been appointed to con17. Haverhill Banner, reprinted in the Herald, February 26, 1847; March 17, 1847; February 26, 1847; March 4, 1847; March 15, 1847.

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fer with the B&M for coordinated arrivals and departures at Haverhill. Now Georgetown promoters were agitating to avoid the Haverhill link and drive the line straight to Lawrence. This violated the spirit and letter of the original charter and the subsequent agreements. When some in Georgetown complained that building a river route violated the NGRR charter, Spofford answered sharply. How was it that moving the line to the river was “a most atrocious interference with chartered rights” but ignoring Bradford and Haverhill was “a very fair business transaction?”All the energy behind a river route came from fear that Georgetown stockholders planned on driving toward Lawrence. End the squabbles of contending routes, he wrote, and build what was chartered.18 Lastly, river route supporters were sparked by a sharp dislike of Georgetown. Most of the towns’ homes were half-empty or “tenantless,” one writer rumored. Boxford farmers were being duped by the “schemes of Georgetown” and should ally with the river route. When one West Newbury writer was questioned about what he meant by saying that Georgetown was filled with “all sorts” of people, he coolly replied that “there are some ‘sorts’ we do not want” local railroads. The “newest” of local towns (Georgetown split away from Rowley and was chartered as a separate town in 1838), many thought Georgetown presumptuous and upstart. Giving voice to river route anxieties, two railroad meetings were held in East Bradford in March and April 1847, collecting funds and writing petitions. The meetings demanded a stockholder vote on a route change and vaguely threatened that the B&M could accommodate “this side of Lawrence for half a century to come, and is willing to afford us every reasonable accommodation” if the change was not made. Playing railroads against each other, local boosters hoped corporate fears of competition would compel them to build a line almost regardless of possible profit. In addition, Newburyport grain dealer and Bartlett Cotton Mill director John Wood organized a petition drive to change the line and send it to Boston.19 18. Spofford, Reminiscences of Seventy Years; Haverhill Gazette, March 20, 1847; April 3, 1847. 19. Herald, March 15, 1847; March 16, 1847; March 29, 1847; April 20, 1847; March 4, 1847; April 28, 1847; Haverhill Gazette, May 1, 1847; Herald, March 23, 1847; John E. Tilton, The Newburyport Directory, Containing a New Map of the Town, an Almanac, the Names, Residences and Places of Business, of the Inhabitants, Town

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Georgetown reaction was predictably bitter, and town promoters lashed out at every river route suggestion. A line along the river would meander its way to Haverhill along rocky and curvy river edges and save no money, they charged. Stockholders had no reason to believe such a route was shorter because, unlike the Georgetown route, it was never surveyed. Further, they spurned the idea that West Newbury and East Bradford promised more business to Newburyport. Pointing to the 1845 state census returns, these stockholders quoted economic and population figures to humble the West Newbury detractors. Writers mocked the business pretensions of river route towns: “We now learn that West Newbury is a great business place, demanding immediate rail road facilities to carry the many hundreds of tons of freight and the multitude of passengers, which must have been a long time accumulating; for who, in years past, ever knew where to find the West Newbury baggage wagon, if he wanted to send a case or bale from that place.” Georgetown, unlike West Newbury, had more to lose without a railroad connection in its growing boot and shoe industries. Business would flee and markets would shut if the railroad was not built: “[L]et West Newbury carry her freight in the good old way—each man take his own horse and go where he pleases; they have no large teams to be thrown out of employment, no large stables to be vacated, and no large stages to be stopped by the loss of business, if the railroad does not go through their place.” When West Newbury writers objected, pointing to the large number of their citizens employed in outwork, they were mocked. The number of combs twenty men could make in one week “can be packed in a shoe box and wheeled in a wheelbarrow,” a Georgetown writer sneered. When river route proponents further replied that West Newbury had steamboat and baggage wagon service, Georgetown boosters noted that they only passed through the town on their way to Haverhill twice a week: “There are also teams which pass through South Boxford on their way from [Georgetown] to Boston; but what has this to do with the business of Boxford?”20 and State Government, Societies, Banks, Institutions, Mills and Other General Information and Statistics, Interesting to Strangers as well as to Citizens. January, 1851, 70, 111. 20. Herald, March 10, 1847; March 22, 1847; March 29, 1847; March 15, 1847; March 16, 1847.

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No action was taken on route changes, however, as the legislature postponed any consideration until the next year. In the meantime, the NGRR finally organized as a corporation with Newburyport sea captain Micajah Lunt chosen president. Lunt (1796–1874) began his career as a sailor on board “letter-of-marque” ships during the War of 1812, helping capture at least four British freighters. By 1815, he had entered the French trade with his own ship, gained a considerable fortune, and become a leading advocate of Newburyport’s whaling industry. A prominent industrial promoter, he was also president of the Bartlett Cotton Mill and the Merchant’s Bank, a director of the ERR, and a longtime Whig. The NGRR Board of Directors included river route agitator John Wood, Newburyport tobacconist John Huse, longtime Georgetown postmaster Benjamin Little, Georgetown merchant Charles Tenney, and Dr. Spofford. “With cheap and speedy means of interior transit, “ the Herald proclaimed when the NGRR organized, “there is nothing to prevent Newburyport from becoming an extensive warehouse depot for the country trade, until the value of its wharf and warehouse property have advanced so much that cheaper storage may [not] be found at other points as convenient on the seaboard, and thus much warehouse and transportation business will no doubt be done here in addition to the regular trade of the place.”21 Despite the route battles and corporate organization, money remained difficult to raise, and the Herald began to prod locals to invest. Too many townspeople were skeptical of the NGRR’s prospects and were “ridiculing” the line. To be sure, the project represented tremendous risk and economic uncertainty, but that did not disqualify the line. All innovation carried risk: “We do not know what a railway will do for us in regard to interior trade; but we do know what no railway has done and will continue to do for us;—it has gradually and surely lost us almost our entire country trade.” Turning from landed businessmen to the ocean merchants, the paper explained in terms a sea captain would understand: “[W]e do not believe the risk is any greater than that 21. Herald, March 23, 1847; D. Hamilton Hurd, History of Essex County, Massachusetts, with Biographical Sketches of Many of its Pioneers and Prominent Men, 2:1789; Herald, May 19, 1847; Tilton, Newburyport Directory, 40; Municipal History of Essex County in Massachusetts, edited by Benjamin F. Arrington, 254–57. Little was postmaster for twenty-seven years, appointed by President Monroe in 1824.

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incurred in a Calcutta voyage.” When by October 1847, only one third of the necessary funds had been raised (roughly seventy thousand dollars out of an estimated total cost of two hundred thousand dollars), the paper again exhorted local merchants to subscribe to NGRR stock. Seventy thousand dollars was “not enough to build a 700 ton ship!” Farmers also fell under criticism for lack of enthusiasm and understanding. Tremendous money could be made by farms if they connected with railroads and kept track of the “changing and fastidious tastes of the fickle public.” The traditional farm products like wheat and corn could no longer pay well in competition with the west. Instead of abandoning farming altogether, farmers should tailor their products to urban demands. The NGRR could facilitate this process by connecting greater Newburyport to emerging urban centers like Lawrence, Haverhill, and Lowell, and providing quick information on consumer demand: “Our farmers should study the tastes and whims of the public more, remembering that articles of luxury, and of popular caprice always pay the highest profit.” If farmers understood the benefits of railroads, they would be eager investors.22 Instead of spurring subscriptions, the paper’s efforts reignited the booster battle, and Georgetown and West Newbury partisans raged at each other through the summer and the fall. Spofford blasted Georgetown for proposing a line straight to Lawrence in “utter disregard” for the river towns. No stockholder could be “so blind to their own interests as to consent to disregard the business of the river towns.” The 1844 plan, agreed to in the 1846 merger, called for a line from Georgetown to Haverhill. “If this plan is not to be carried out in good faith, the road ought never to go to Georgetown,” Spofford wrote. These words led some to wonder if the river towns actually wanted a railroad. “[Y]ou would rather see it sunk fifty fathoms deep than ever built at all,” a writer accused Dr. Spofford in the Georgetown Watchtower. “Doubtless you would like to have a railway, if other people would pay for it; and doubtless we should all like to have you accommodated; but even then, wouldn’t you want tickets free?” In the meantime, as the route fight continued and the Herald continued to berate Newburyport for its “indolence and lack of public spirit,” a regional railroad meeting was scheduled 22. Herald, June 1, 1847; October 4, 1847; June 26, 1847.

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in Lawrence. Calling business and political leaders from area towns, the rally would discuss the state of the NGRR and debate plans on creation of a new east-west line from Albany to the ocean, with Newburyport as the eastern terminus. The Merrimack now had a chance to be a major outlet, and local boosters were urged to attend.23 On January 25, 1848, a large group of Essex and Middlesex County leaders came together at Coburn’s Hotel in Lawrence to discuss a railroad connection to Newburyport. Dr. Spofford attended, along with John Huse and Charles Tenney. Dr. George Cogswell, an important Bradford railroad enthusiast and Free Soil Whig, also participated in the meeting. Cogswell (1808–80?) graduated from Dartmouth Medical School in 1830 and opened an office in Bradford, Massachusetts. During the early 1840s, he traveled widely in Western Europe observing hospitals and, after returning to America, promoted banking development. He also became very active in the temperance and antislavery movements. Later, he served on the Republican Nathaniel Bank’s Governor’s Council in the late 1850s and was IRS commissioner for the Merrimack valley under presidents Lincoln and Grant. During the NGRR controversy, Cogswell actively promoted railroad development on the lower Merrimack, especially in his adopted hometown. Charles J. Brockway, the new president of the NGRR and treasurer of Newburyport’s James Steam Mill, was also there. A presentation was given to this distinguished gathering, complete with a large area map, by lawyer and prominent Lowell Democrat Benjamin F. Butler and the Lawrence physician Dr. Moses L. Atkinson (the city’s first doctor). Explaining how a Newburyport to Lawrence line could link up with railroads west of Lowell like the Fitchburg and the Stony Brook, they claimed that Albany would be thirty-three miles closer to the coast by this route than via the Western Railroad to Boston. Such a significant saving of distance could seriously effect Boston business. NGRR chief engineer George A. Parker followed with an explanation of distances, grades, and construction costs. Finally, a motion was passed to draw up a legislative petition supporting a railroad connection between Lowell 23. Herald, September 3, 1847; Georgetown Watchtower, reprinted in the Herald, September 25, 1847. The Spofford-Georgetown correspondence in this period was especially bitter and extended far into the fall; Herald, January 20, 1848; January 21, 1848; January 24, 1848.

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and Georgetown. Butler delivered the document to Boston eight days later.24 Sensing a danger to their cause, river route backers redoubled their efforts. Surveys were completed by a Lowell engineer confirming that a river route was possible and slightly shorter to Haverhill than the Georgetown route. The block of pro–river route stockholders in Newburyport was growing as well—one supporter claimed fully half were river route partisans by early March. Supporters also launched petition drives in the winter of 1848, requesting alteration of the NGRR charter. In Haverhill, incoming U.S. congressman James Henry Duncan and others posted a petition in the post office supporting the river route. Duncan (1793–1869), like Cogswell, was deeply involved in regional railroad development. A graduate of Philips Exeter and Harvard (Class of 1812, with Charles Greeley Loring), he studied law with Congressman John Varnum of Haverhill and Leverett Saltonstall of Salem and passed the bar in 1815. A diehard Whig, he served in the U.S. House for three years (1848–51), representing the lower Merrimack valley, “the largest manufacturing district in the United States.” In addition to large real estate holdings and railroad promotions around Haverhill, he also had “interests” in Cape Cod and Rhode Island railroads and served on the Brown University Board of Fellows. “Will every voter who understands the process by which Rail Roads are building up the towns and villages wherever they pass[,] step to the Post Office and add his name to the list,” the Haverhill Gazette asked readers. Thirteen days after Butler, Duncan’s petition reached the state legislature and a Third Special Committee on Railroads convened to sift through the NGRR’s growing route controversy.25 To solve the route problem and discuss company matters, NGRR stockholders met in Newburyport on March 13, 1848. River route supporters motioned to alter the route to the river but were defeated 24. Russell Leigh Jackson, The Physicians of Essex County; Hurd, History of Essex County, 2:2109–2110. Cogswell became the third president of the NGRR when Charles J. Brockway resigned in 1855; Tilton, Newburyport Directory, 18, 111; Herald, January 27, 1848; Haverhill Gazette, January 29, 1848; Herald, February 4, 1848. 25. Haverhill Gazette, January 22, 1848; February 26, 1848; March 4, 1848; Hurd, History of Essex County, 1:xlvi–xlviii; James H. Duncan Papers, Folder 4, PEM; Haverhill Gazette, February 12, 1848; Herald, February 17 and 23, 1848.

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210-136. Petitions requesting leave to alter the line—and corresponding ones urging against a change—continued to pelt the legislature. A bill, accompanied by a report, passed in May giving NGRR permission to alter the line if the stockholders agreed. The report invalidated the March river route vote, however. Apparently, NGRR president Charles J. Brockway refused to let stockholders vote who had not paid their assessments. This nonvoting group was almost entirely populated by river route proponents who withheld funds to prevent construction to Georgetown. In Brockway’s mind, since they had violated their obligation to pay the assessments, they forfeited their right to vote and shape company policy. The Special Committee disagreed, claiming the refusal was an illegal trick to alter the vote. All 149 Georgetown holders voted, but only 161 Newburyport holders were allowed, and 131 of these supported the river route. “Had the usual practice regulating stockholders’ meetings, which is to allow all subscribers to vote, until, according to the charter or the by-laws, they have forfeited that right, the majority would have been very large in favor of a change of location.” The committee, although it gave the stockholders final say, advocated the river route: it was shorter, cheaper, and would restore lost trade to “their old and natural channel.” Haverhill’s interests were also better served by a river route, as witnessed by the fact that the city sent a “public agent” to the committee to observe and advocate relocation. “The river route is, unquestionably, the natural route for a railroad from Newburyport to Lawrence, and it was diverted towards Georgetown by the earnest movements of the Georgetown people” who “fixed the projects to Georgetown as a pivot.” Despite the committee’s advocacy, the final decision remained with the stockholders.26 Still, a decision was slow in coming. Stockholder meetings in June and September came to no conclusions on a change of route. Sometime in the fall of 1848—likely a stockholder meeting held on September 25— presentations were made by both sides and their respective engineers and surveyors. Another route vote was held, and the Georgetown line once again prevailed. A circular printed by the NGRR the next year 26. Herald, March 13, 1848; March 14, 1848; April 21, 1848; April 29, 1848. Duncan sent still another proriver route petition, and one Georgetown petition contained more than 740 signatures; Herald, May 3, 1848. The entire report was republished in this issue of the paper.

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explained that “the route originally chartered and agreed upon, before any collision of interests had occurred, or any prejudices had become enlisted, was the most favorable both for the interests of the stockholders, and of the community.” Money remained very difficult to raise, and the Herald continued to boost the line and castigate Newburyport for a lack of support. “We shall by this monopolize not only the present travel which goes to the interior, the travel of business people, and farmers, and manufacturing operatives to and from the manufacturing establishments on the line, but a large pleasure travel to the seaside.” In comparison to other cities like Portland, Salem, and Portsmouth, Newburyport was derelict in its duty to support railroad projects. “Not another town in the whole circuit of the U. States has shown such sluggishness in procuring communication.” Instead of listening to the “doleful misgivings of croakers”—who doubted the benefits of the ERR ten years prior— investors should subscribe and pay the assessments: “We are utterly ashamed of the recreancy manifested by most of our townsmen.”27 When word came to the Herald that some wealthy townspeople opposed railroads and were deliberately avoiding NGRR investment out of fear that Newburyport was becoming too modern and busy, the paper countered that stasis was not an option. “[Q]uiescence exists in no part of God’s creation, neither in the heavens above nor in the earth beneath—all is motion,” a particularly philosophical editorial replied. “Neither mind nor matter—individuals nor communities can remain still, all must be moving forward or retrograding.” The only people in society who could afford not to move or strive for betterment were the established, the comfortable, and the rich. Stillness was a luxury that the young and poor could not afford. The leaking of locals to the west came from such attitudes, the rich man’s prejudice against the modernization efforts offering greater economic opportunity: “[T]he destiny of the young would be either starvation or emigration. The tendency of population, unless pressed down by famine, pestilence or war, is to increase faster than opportunity is given for them to step into dead men’s shoes, and new resources must be developed at home, or the young must be sent abroad.” The charge that railroads were too “modern” and “busy” 27. Herald, May 31, 1848; August 3, 1848; September 6, 1848; September 15, 1848; Haverhill Gazette, March 10, 1849; Herald, December 9, 1848; March 14, 1849.

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was bogus nostalgia for a past age of quietude that never existed. “[H]uman nature is the same now as in former times, though it is frequently seen in different phases. There is no more competition in trade, no more fraud, no more recklessness now, than there has been at many former times.” If Newburyport wanted to retain its population and maintain any economic energy, everyone—particularly the hesitant rich—had to boost railroads like the NGRR.28 Although the NGRR failed to raise what it needed to complete the line, by early 1849 the company had ordered 650 tons of railroad iron from Wales and hired the Gilmore and Carpenter Company—the same contractors who built the Lawrence Dam and the much larger Fitchburg Railroad—to begin working on the line. Ground was broken outside Georgetown on February 15, 1849, and calls went out for more investors and for prompt payment of all assessments to “save the road from embarrassment.” Lack of funds also meant the railroad would have to be built in two parts: the road to Georgetown first, the extension westward second. Rumors that construction could be completed by summer turned out to be optimistic. One-third of the grading was done by June, and money was slowly raised to complete the work. Eighteen months of construction neared an end in the summer of 1850. “Our little and despised line of communication” was nearly complete, the Herald sneered. Despite the success of building the line, the paper bitterly attacked the wealthy merchants and businessmen who had failed to support it and delayed construction: There is a sad deficiency of public spirit and liberality on the part of many of our citizens, which has ever since our remembrance neglected too many opportunities to advance their own pleasure and prosperity as well as the business of the town, and if nothing else will cure it, we care not if the hard hand of adversity forever hold its rod over them, and their noble ships continue to carry merchandize across the ocean for the price which a dray man charges for crossing the street, their factories to work without dividends, their rents diminished, their distant investments melt down under improvident or swindling management, and taxes are ground out of them to build as many town halls as can be crowded into the space between Brown’s Square and the outermost bound of Common Pasture. 28. Herald, March 15, 1849.

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NGRR stockholders took the inaugural ride between Newburyport and Georgetown on May 22, and regular operation began the next day amid the fanfare of band concerts and cannon salutes at Georgetown depot.29 Whig bickering was only partially over. As mentioned, lack of funds led to only half the line being built. As the Georgetown link neared completion, discussion opened about where the second link would go. Lawrence promoters argued for a line straight through Boxford into North Andover and the “New City,” giving Newburyport a direct link to the industrial hubs of the lower Merrimack. Haverhill and Bradford boosters advertised their communities as population and industrial centers that offered more immediate business to Newburyport than the “promises” of a growing Lawrence. On May 23, 1850—the NGRR’s first day of operation—a railroad meeting was held in Bradford. Drs. Spofford and Cogswell, among others, gave speeches, and a motion supporting an extension through the new town of Groveland (formerly East Bradford) and Bradford passed unanimously. Sensing a dullness of feeling in Haverhill over the extension, the Gazette snapped at its readers in a sharp editorial sharing a column with the announcement of President Zachary Taylor’s death, “Was there ever in New England a concentration of business and people equal to that within a mile of Haverhill bridge, entirely indifferent to the question of a new railroad?” Dullness or not, promoters wasted no time in preparing for construction and completed another survey of the proposed route between Georgetown and Haverhill in late August.30 Friends of the Boxford route also moved swiftly. A LawrenceGeorgetown line had been chartered in the winter of 1850, and on August 27, seventy people from all over the lower Merrimack valley attended a Boxford railroad meeting to organize the new company. Much like the earlier squabbles between Georgetown and West Newbury, Haverhill and Lawrence began a six-month feud over who deserved the NGRR extension. Newburyport (with half the NGRR already built and benefiting from either extension) quietly advocated both. “Let it be as it should 29. Herald, January 5, 1849; February 17, 1849; Haverhill Gazette, February 24, 1849; Herald, June 28 1849; July 21, 1849; August 23, 1849; September 17, 1849; May 18, 1850; May 20, 1850; May 23, 1850; Haverhill Gazette, May 25, 1850. 30. Herald, May 26, 1850; Haverhill Gazette, June 1, 1850; July 13, 1850; August 24, 1850; August 31, 1850.

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always be among friends and neighbors, a strife not to see who can acquire the most advantage, but who is willing to yield the most to the other,” a suddenly pacific Herald asked.31 Boxford partisans claimed their route to Lawrence was straighter, promised a closer connection to Boston (away from the slow, dangerous ERR ferry), and placed Newburyport in an enviable position as the port of choice for Lowell and Lawrence. “It cannot be too short,” the Lawrence Courier claimed. “The shortest road may be too long for the competition with which it must contend. Turn, therefore, neither to the right or left for the paltry business of any town on the route, if you do you will ruin your road. Go straight ahead. Go from point to point. . . . If a road to Newburyport is aiming at the business of this town, it must aim straight or it will not hit it. The time has gone by for ‘circleshooting.’” For others, the real object of Newburyport should be the Boston market, not merely the Merrimack valley. Aspiring to better connections to Haverhill offered small rewards compared to a new and better Boston link: “Haverhill has been too much of a rival to cultivate a constant and close business intercourse with us.” Skepticism of the Haverhill route surfaced in the lack of enthusiastic local response. Subscriptions were apparently lagging, and an October 11 Haverhill railroad meeting drew only seven people. James Henry Duncan, chair of the meeting, bought only three shares; all of Haverhill, including Duncan, purchased eight. “Truly Newburyport must feel proud of their new friends on whom they were to rely mainly to carry through this enterprise,” a pro-Boxford writer taunted.32 The appeal of a better connection to Lawrence held out great allure for the Boxford route promoters. The city’s textile mills were just beginning to produce cloth, and its population was growing rapidly. In 1850, most of the mills’ raw goods, finished materials, and building supplies were being shipped over the roads and railroads from Boston or Salem. The expectation of future growth and the possibility of Newburyport as 31. Herald, September 2, 1850; Salem Register, reprinted in the Herald, August 27, 1850; Lowell Courier, reprinted in the Herald, September 4, 1850. 32. Lawrence Courier, reprinted in the Herald, September 12, 1850; Newburyport Daily Evening Union, September 11, 1850. The Union was a Democratic paper but supported the NGRR, albeit with less enthusiasm than the Herald; Herald, December 31, 1850; Haverhill Gazette, October 19, 1850; Union, October 21, 1850.

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a cheaper port enticed the Boxford proponents. “This is a world of changes. Any business aspect which any town in this county may present TO-DAY, may be changed to-morrow,” the Courier pleaded with possible stockholders. “In twenty years from this day Lawrence will contain more population than all the towns in Essex County, comprised in the third Congressional District, now contain—Lawrence itself excepted.” Haverhill and Bradford may have more business now, but Lawrence promised to be another Lowell with its waterpower advantages and vast capital. “Stop for a moment! Think of this matter seriously! Look ahead a few years! The big towns of to-day are to be the little ones of to-morrow. The mole-hill is to become the mountain[,] depend on it.” Giving a simple yet lucid explanation of how Newburyport could become Lawrence’s preferred port, the paper elaborated: Newburyport must hold out an inducement of some sort to people out of that town to come there and do business. . . . Newburyport must satisfy people that they can gain some pecuniary advantage by coming there to trade. For instance, if a cargo of lime, lumber or wood, be purchased in Newburyport and transported to Lawrence for $20, $10, or $5 or less then the same quantity can be purchased in Salem or Boston, of course Newburyport will secure that portion of the trade of our town. Now apply that principle of a saving in distance and you will arrive at our reason for urging the construction of the shortest route. A cargo of lime, lumber, wood or any other commodity can be delivered in this town from Newburyport for $3 to $5 cheaper by way of Boxford than by way of Groveland. So much then, is saved, beyond a peradventure of a doubt, to Newburyport. A single cargo amounts to but little, to be sure, but if this small saving on one cargo is multiplied by an equal saving on the thousands of cargoes which may be brought from there, it will satisfy any discerning man that by this means alone Newburyport holds out to the people of this town no mean consideration for its business.

This logic prevailed in Lowell, Lawrence, Andover, Boxford, and Georgetown. Newburyport, content with any connection westward, was ambivalent but occasionally peeved at Lawrence’s pretensions to economic greatness. The Courier went so far in advertising the city’s promise as to call Newburyport “an old broken down place,” a remark that stirred up considerable angst. The “New City” may have promise, but that was

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all, the Herald replied—the Courier should get down off “a very high horse.”33 Haverhill and Bradford promoters reacted sourly to Lawrence’s “worthless opinions.” First and most practically, the Boxford route was too hilly and not as straight as it appeared. Andover Hill, the highest point in Essex County, straddled the Boxford-Georgetown border, and any line to Lawrence would have to go around it, adding miles and significant grades to the route. In addition, on the other side of the hill was Andover Great Pond; this too would have to be circumnavigated by a Lawrence line, adding still more distance. These circuitous detours would force a Boxford line to connect with the Essex Railroad in Andover before entering Lawrence. The Boxford route, therefore, faced not only geographic difficulties but the inconvenience of connecting with another railroad. Second, echoing Dr. Spofford’s concerns two years earlier, the Haverhill-Bradford route still had a charter dating from 1844 and absorbed into the NGRR in 1846. Build “the original, protected, and chartered route,” supporters asked.34 Predictions of Lawrence’s economic greatness disturbed pro-Haverhill railroad promoters as much as they did those in Newburyport. By a Haverhill-Bradford branch, eight thousand people would be accommodated; via Boxford, five hundred people, plus the promises of a great Lawrence. Such a diversion of railroad resources was “absurd.” “[H]ow long shall we wait for this contingency and for it in the mean time, and forever shut ourselves out from and forego, all intercourse with and benefit from [Haverhill]?” a pro-Bradford writer wondered. Much like the river route controversy, some thought “shrewd and enterprising” Georgetown subscribers were the energy behind the Boxford proposal: “[T]hey disregard the business of four times as many people as there is in Georgetown.” If they succeeded and a Boxford route was built, “the matter will never rest till another road is made.” The lack of enthusiasm among Haverhill and Bradford citizens led to slow subscription sales and political trouble for James Henry Duncan. His paltry purchase of 33. Lawrence Courier, republished in the Herald, September 12, 1850; September 25, 1850; Union, September 30, 1850; Herald, September 12, 1850. 34. Haverhill Gazette, September 14, 1850; September 9, 1850; September 18, 1850.

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only three NGRR shares caused consternation among Whigs in the lower Merrimack valley who wondered at his commitment to industrial growth. Out of necessity, Newburyport had to bear the greater financial burden for the NGRR and, the Democratic Newburyport Daily Evening Union claimed, showed “negligence” if it refused to fund a Haverhill extension. A fully built NGRR would create new wealth and tear down the “narrow, contracted, indifferent spirit that has so long divided our citizens, limited our improvements, and retarded our growth.” Haverhill’s lackluster support of the NGRR was grounded in a fear that Newburyport would effect its market position, “tending to draw off business from them rather than increase it.” Secure in their industrial growth and current railroad connections, Haverhill businessmen invested warily: “Men thus situated, are always shy of any change, and we do not expect them at once to enter into the matter.”35 Slowly but successfully, money was raised for the Bradford extension throughout the fall and the Boxford plans quickly disappeared. In October, Newburyport congressman and railroad advocate Caleb Cushing and a group of wealthy local citizens subscribed to the NGRR, and a circular was printed exhorting more to give generously. On November 22, 1850, another railroad meeting was held in Georgetown and more money was raised. By mid-December, the NGRR was only five thousand dollars short, and contracts were signed for iron and construction. More than one hundred railroad workers broke ground in Groveland the last week of January 1851, and by April half the grading was complete. Rails arrived from Newport, Wales, in July, and track work was rapidly completed. The Newburyport Herald began to celebrate the nearing completion: “In a few weeks, the road will be open to Bradford, and if the success of that part of the line approaches in any measure, the business which has been absolutely created, (for little or none of it had any existence before the road was opened,) on the lower section, it cannot fail to become one of the best paying roads in the State.” Final opening of the NGRR’s second link was delayed weeks because of landowner troubles, when a Bradford farmer apparently quibbled with the amount given 35. Union, September 2, 1850; September 9, 1850; Herald, November 6, 1850; October 31, 1850; September 9, 1850; January 18, 1851; Union, October 28, 1850; Herald, January 18, 1851.

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him by the railroad. Massachusetts state senator Myron Lawrence, when told of the story, aloofly replied to the Haverhill Gazette editor, “I do not think much of these objections from land owners; the truth is, they always get twice as much for their land as it is worth. I wish they would take every inch of land I own for Railroads.” The trouble was solved, however, and after a stockholder excursion on September 22, the road was opened to the public without celebration. “In our apprehension, it will mark a new era in the prosperity of this place,” the Gazette quietly announced. Finally, after seven years of struggle, persistence, investment, and in-fighting, Newburyport completed its connection to the interior of Essex County. It, too, could reach Lawrence.36 For all the hopes and plans of Whig boosters like Stephen Phillips and Dr. Jeremiah Spofford, the results of railroad development were mixed. With better transportation and communication facilities, people did travel more. Prior to the building of the ERR, roughly 117,000 people traveled annually between Boston and Newburyport. In its first full year of operation, 1838–39, the ERR transported more than 287,000 people between Boston and Salem alone. By 1840, one Salem paper claimed that more than one million people had used the ERR between those two cities. Although railroads could not reignite the romantic East India trade of the eighteenth century, they were integral in making Salem a booming cotton and coal port in the 1850s. Historian Claude Fuess described the city’s unique position: “A great deal of competition arose between the Boston and Lowell and the Salem and Lowell [Railroads] in carrying raw cotton. The mill companies played one bidder against the other. When a satisfactory figure had been received from the lowest bidder, word was telegraphed to Mobile directing the cotton ships to proceed to either Boston or Salem for unloading to secure the most favorable rates.” Supplying coal for the growing Merrimack valley mills in Concord, Manchester, Lowell, and Lawrence, Salem was landing between four and six thousand tons of coal a week by 1855; fifteen coal 36. Herald, October 26, 1850; Haverhill Gazette, November 28, 1850; Herald, December 30, 1850; Haverhill Gazette, December 28, 1850; February 1, 1851; Haverhill Register, reprinted in the Herald, April 8, 1851; July 17, 1851; July 15, 1851; July 30, 1851; Haverhill Gazette, August 30, 1851; Herald, September 20, 1851; Haverhill Gazette, September 27, 1851.

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ships arrived at Phillips Wharf every day, and observers noted that coal was piled high on the docks.37 Similar growth occurred on the NPRR and momentarily improved the local staging business before the railroad was completed to Haverhill. In its first week of operation (May 23, 1850–June 7, 1850), 1,205 passengers rode between Newburyport and Georgetown, thence taking a stage for Haverhill or Lawrence. Georgetown Depot became a local railroad and staging hub—stage traffic increased 50 percent that first summer, and by the fall each train averaged one hundred passengers. One year later, the line carried two hundred passengers per day. In 1851, business improved as more people used and trusted their railroad (Table 1).

Table 1: NPRR Passenger Traffic, 1851 January: February: March: April: May: June: July: August:

1,835 passengers 2,189 2,466 2,622 3,041 2,822 5,123 3,690

The NPRR was especially popular on July 4, as citizens along the line traveled to Newburyport and beyond for the patriotic festivities: during July 1–5, 1851, more than two thousand people traveled over the NPRR. The railroad also acquitted itself well after a hurricane devastated the coastline in mid-April 1851. The ERR was washed out in Rowley, Lynn, Salem, and Hampton, New Hampshire, and the NPRR was the easiest link to Boston (connecting with stages in Georgetown to the B&M in Haverhill and Lawrence). Until the ERR was repaired, extra trains went into service to accommodate the extra passengers. Predictably, the extension to Haverhill added still more passengers: in its first two weeks of 37. Herald, September 30, 1839; Salem Observer, quoted in the Herald, November 2, 1840; Claude M. Fuess, The History of Essex County, 3:475; Herald, June 2, 1855; September 12, 1855.

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operation (September 22–October 7, 1851), 2,563 passengers rode between Georgetown and Haverhill. Railroad freight business also became more popular with local businessmen, and the company began buying extra merchandise cars to accommodate demand: one train in October 1850 carried more than thirty-six tons of goods down to Georgetown. The Herald urged Newburyport merchants to ship goods into the Essex County interior towns to reopen markets for their products. “[S]end goods to them. This is the way to create a market: these are the safest class of customers to which they can entrust their goods.”38 Despite such glowing statistics on usage and Whig hopes for prosperity, the effects of railroads were hardly universal. Much as it did in New Hampshire, railroad development affected towns differently depending on their territorial comparative advantage: their industrial “promise,” available resources, and distance from market centers. Division of labor improves the efficiency of economies by allocating labor to those best able to perform particular tasks. Labor skills specialize and increase, time is saved, technological innovation quickens, consumer prices drop, and the economy expands. A similar process takes place among cities, towns, and villages. Some locations are better able to produce certain goods based on their geographical advantages. When towns produce or till in ways appropriate to their environmental advantages, their economic standing relative to the surrounding towns improves; if they do not, their economy stagnates. Those towns with easy and existing market access, like ocean and river connections or a source of mill power, prospered, while those without good harbors, good market connections, and cost-effective waterpower suffered. Improvements in transportation and communication affected those with natural advantages, accentuating positives and exacerbating negatives. Railroads helped towns capitalize on existing comparative advantages and create new ones—for example, Lancaster, New Hampshire, found a market for its tamarack trees, and Salem was able to use its admittedly small harbor for coal ships—while also accentuating and creating comparative disadvantages. For example, Rowley and Newbury, with no major harbor 38. Herald, June 7, 1850; August 29, 1850; October 22, 1850; September 29, 1851; June 3, 1851; August 5, 1851; September 8, 1851; July 7, 1851; July 8, 1851; April 17, 1851; April 18, 1851; April 21, 1851; October 6, 1851; October 22, 1850; May 10, 1851; April 24, 1851.

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facilities, no water power, and few agricultural resources outside salt marsh hay, floundered. In geographically advantaged towns, railroads helped spur specialized urban labor, increase economic opportunity, and expand the economy. In the geographically disadvantaged towns, no amount of railroad connections could improve their territorial position relative to their neighbors. For Rowley and Newbury, the trains just passed through. Both the Merrimack valley and the North Shore towns held significant comparative advantages over their central town counterparts at the time of initial railroad development. The valley—towns bordering the Merrimack to the sea—were graced with water connections on both the river and the Atlantic Ocean and developed easy communications with both the upper valley in New Hampshire, the seacoast, and Boston. Taking advantage of this lack of isolation and market access, manufacturers were lured into Haverhill and Newburyport and helped both towns grow steadily as business centers over the antebellum period. By 1860, Haverhill, Lynn, and a network of outwork shoemakers in Essex County towns and southern New Hampshire accounted for nearly onesixth of the country’s shoe production. In addition, the fall of the river in Lawrence attracted industrial promoters in the early 1840s and helped build one of the country’s largest mill towns by 1860. The North Shore—a string of towns stretching from Saugus and Lynn in the south to Gloucester and Rockport in the east—also held considerable advantages over its sister towns. Salem and Gloucester both used their port facilities to maintain a market niche (with leather and fish, respectively), despite the disadvantages of their shallow births. Lynn became a major producer of boots and shoes by 1860, and a small section of South Danvers and Salem called “Blubber Hollow” headquartered 75 percent of America’s leather tanning and currying industry. The dramatic success of both sections helped make Essex County one of America’s most heavily industrial and tremendously wealthy regions in 1860.39 Railroads accentuated these successes by offering efficient transportation of three items: goods (both raw and finished), people (and their services), and information. Transportation of raw goods for milling 39. Robert Greenhalgh Albion, “From Sails to Spindles: Essex County in Transition,” 132–33.

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and finished products for export or consumption at quicker speed to more distant markets gave industries in the valley and the North Shore a comparative advantage over those regions without railroad facilities, too far from markets or without cost-effective industrial facilities (like suitable water power or a good port). What was once too expensive to produce for sale because of prohibitive transportation costs was now a feasible business project. Existing advantages increased and market share grew. Transportation of people (laborers, salesmen, factory “operatives,” tradesmen, speculators, tourists, commuters, etc.) increased the mobility of the work force, as historian Robert Doherty has shown, and, as citizens could more easily travel and explore, offered more opportunities for work and investment in more distant places. Transportation of information, particularly economic (market forecasts, prices at other cities, harvest quotes, supplies of distant goods) stabilized market relationships and prices across a wider region and led to the progressive formation of a national market economy. Striking at the heart of speculation, businessmen could now instantly know prices in distant ports and sell for profits or buy for bargains. Market relationships, once confined by poor information and slow travel to insular counties, states, and regions, were now liberated from their former small confines and extended across a wider country. Railroads made up a considerable portion of the overall industrializing, urbanizing trend of the antebellum era and are admittedly difficult to separate from mid–nineteenth century modernization. Since Essex County was the most densely “railroaded” area in Massachusetts—in 1854, the county had one mile of track for every three miles of surface, while the state average was one to seven—and only three of the county’s thirty-four towns were nonrailroad by 1860 (West Newbury, Essex, and Nahant), measuring the demographic and economic effects of Essex County railroads is necessarily synonymous with measuring the scope of urban society, and not (like New Hampshire) railroad vs. nonrailroad towns. Understanding railroad development in this way—as an extension of antebellum urbanization—it is nearly impossible to establish with certainty what railroad development did to these towns; i.e., how much of the prosperity was tied to a railroad connection. Considering that some railroad towns declined over the period, however, we can establish what railroads failed to do. In these towns, the boosters

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were wrong, and Whiggery overestimated the effects of technological innovation.40 A thorough rendering of county statistics between the years 1837 and 1860 reveals three distinct subregions within Essex County: the Merrimack valley towns in the northern extremes of the county, the North Shore towns of the south, and a core of central hill and shore towns. Despite railroad development in each, the valley and North Shore prospered over the period, while the central towns consistently suffered.41 Over the antebellum period, Essex County population as a whole grew steadily (Table 2).

Table 2: Essex County Population, 1837–60 1837 1840 1850 1855 1860

93,689 94,987 127,170 151,018 165,611

+1 percent +25 percent +16 percent +9 percent (+23 percent for entire decade, 1850–60)

When broken down by town, however, these increases tended to be localized in the Merrimack valley and the North Shore. From the period 1837–60, the areas around Salem, Lynn, Newburyport, and Haverhill showed dramatic increases, sometimes more than 75 percent. Broken down further, in 1850–55 and 1855–60, the trend continues: rapid growth in Lawrence, Haverhill, Salem, Lynn, and Gloucester. Towns with 40. Herald, February 11, 1854. 41. Essex County statistics were taken from: John P. Bigelow, Statistical Tables: Exhibiting the Condition and Products of Certain Branches of Industry in Massachusetts, For the Year Ending April 1, 1837; John G. Palfrey, Statistics of the Condition and Products of Certain Branches of Industry in Massachusetts, For the Year Ending April 1, 1845; Francis DeWitt, Statistical Information Relating to Certain Branches of Industry in Massachusetts, For the Year Ending June 1, 1855; Francis DeWitt, Abstract of the Census of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Taken with Reference to Facts on the First Day of June, 1855; Barbara M. Solomon, “The Growth of the Population in Essex County, 1850–1860.” To gain a perspective on Essex County growth over the entire period 1837–1860 and alleviate the difficulty of new towns, town statistics were regressed from 1855 and 1860.

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significant declines in overall population tended to come from the central hill and shore region, particularly Essex, Ipswich, Rowley, Hamilton, Newbury, Boxford, Topsfield, and Georgetown. All but Essex had a railroad connection by 1860. Although the county expanded impressively over the period, that growth was localized. Essex County was also comparatively young. In 1855, 63 percent of the Massachusetts population were under the age of thirty, while only 6 percent were over sixty. Essex County followed these averages almost exactly, being only a fraction older than the state average (6.5 percent). Broken down by town, the valley and the North Shore were Essex County’s youngest regions. Measuring the 1855 state census returns, Lawrence and Newburyport reported more than 70 percent of their citizens were under the age of thirty. Another impressive phalanx of towns along the shore and valley recorded under thirty cohorts between 60 percent and 70 percent. Not surprisingly, these towns also had low percentages of people over sixty—only 586 people out of 16,111 (under 4 percent) were over sixty in Lawrence in 1855. A block of central and northeast towns (again, led by Newbury, Rowley, Ispwich, Hamilton, and others) registered populations with the lowest percentages of under thirty citizens and the highest of older, over sixty people. Despite railroads, these towns lacked the entrepreneurial lure and industrial advantages of the valley and shore towns, giving young people no reason to stay, and their populations aged. Once again, county change was localized.42 Antebellum industrial statistics further illustrate the economic divisions of Essex County. Between 1837 and 1855, capital investment rates increased rapidly along the North Shore and Merrimack valley. Although much of the regional business expansion stalled between 1837 and 1845, it quickly recovered and showed impressive returns. A solid block of towns from Rockport and Gloucester to Lynn and Saugus increased capital investment by more than 100 percent. Much of this was tied to 42. Suffolk County (Boston) had the state’s lowest percentage of age 60 and older citizens at 3 percent, followed by Middlesex (undoubtedly influenced by the large young population of Lowell) at 5 percent, Norfolk at 6 percent, and Hampden and Essex both at 6.5 percent. Nantucket and Dukes County had the largest older population, both at 10 percent. Dewitt, Abstract of the Census. Returns for Newburyport and Newbury are skewed because of the 1851 annexation of a populous portion of Newbury by Newburyport.

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investment in fishing, especially in Gloucester, where by 1860, 86 percent of the county’s catch was hauled. From 1845 to 1855, much of the valley also boomed, especially the rapidly growing wool center of Lawrence. Newburyport and its environs recovered from their earlier malaise: in 1837, the town noted more than $450,000 in investment; by 1855, investment topped $1.5 million. The four surrounding towns of Salisbury, Amesbury, West Newbury (with no railroad), and Newbury increased their collective capital investment from more than $525,000 in 1837, to $757,000 in 1845, to more than $1.25 million in 1855. Throughout this period of expansion, the central towns lagged. The total capital investment of Rowley, Ispwich, Topsfield, Boxford, and Georgetown dropped from $123,000 in 1837 to $59,000 in 1855. All of these towns had railroad depots by 1855. Some towns were entirely drained of capital investment over the period. In 1837, Rowley boasted more than $10,000 in investment, dropping slightly to $6,800 in 1845. By 1855, the town registered no capital investment and unimpressive agricultural returns. The railroad may have destroyed business—a former Rowley freight agent for the ERR remembered running freight wagons from Rowley to Georgetown before the NPRR was built. “The moment the iron horse with its shrill whistle or merry bell made his debut into their village, all was over,” he recalled. “‘Our occupation was gone.’ Chopped off as square as a brick.” The arrival of the ERR in 1840 had not been a business boon to Rowley.43 43. Census returns give two indices indicating the size and nature of Massachusetts businesses in 1837, 1845, and 1855: capital investment and value of product. Some businesses have both listed, some just value of product. Capital investment industries are those which labor alone cannot complete. They demand some amount of financial investment in equipment and overhead, be it a millstone for a grist mill, saws and belts for a saw mill, looms and spindles for a cotton mill, or netting and anchors for a fishing boat. Value of product industries are those which do not require significant investment in equipment to operate. These tend to be firewood businesses, boot and shoe outwork, carpenters, brick makers, blacksmiths, cigar rollers, etc. Although different from one another in the amount of overhead and their market focus—capitalized industries tend toward wider, exterior markets, value of product businesses tend toward regional and interior markets—both were market oriented and responsive and connected to market demands. Albion, “From Sails to Spindles,” 124; Daniel N. Prime, The Autobiography of an Octogenarian, containing the genealogy of his ancestors, sketches from their history, and of various events that have occurred during his protracted life; his theological views, &c.,

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The number of employees working in capitalized businesses also rose for much of the county. Measuring the density of these employees among the town population finds a creeping but identifiable trend of increased capital employment in the valley and shore. In 1837, the density of capitalized employees was high only in the fishing centers around Newburyport, Gloucester, and Marblehead, and in the small river-mill town of Methuen. By 1845, the density slowly increased, especially along the valley, Salem, and Gloucester. Matching earlier population and industrial statistics, by 1855 three clear regions of employment had developed in Essex County: two highly capitalized areas in the valley and North Shore, and a noncapitalized business region in the central hill towns. Far from creating wealth and transforming Essex County into an enterprising model for others, railroad development brought mixed results. For some towns, railroads helped the process of urbanization and led to increased population, employment, investment, and wealth. They brought a growth economy back to Salem and Newburyport and helped “new” cities like Lawrence, Lynn, and Haverhill develop into prosperous New England mill towns. Other towns, like Rowley, Boxford, and Topsfield, without industrial promise or agricultural ability, became “bedroom communities” in the early development of suburban America, rural outposts for wealthy city dwellers rather than integral cogs in the fast-growing nineteenth-century American economic machine. Here, railroads offered communication with a wider world through the doors of the depot, but little else. As many Jacksonian radicals suggested, the Whig promise of universal prosperity from better transportation, communication, and connection with wider markets was long on promise but short on delivery.

&c, 143; Until 1850, most of the shoes made in Georgetown were shipped by wagon to Rowley Depot for shipment south. After the NPRR was built, and the connection to Danvers in 1854, these shipments ceased. Hurd, History of Essex County, 1:845; Municipal History of Essex County, 254.

Conclusion

Members of every generation fear that innovations in transportation and communications technology will tear their world asunder and leave their communities unemployed, uncivil, and alone. This process became particularly bitter and acute in the nineteenth century, when industrial innovations made Americans rethink the foundations and redraw the boundaries of their political and economic lives. New England Jacksonian Democrats debated among themselves the wisdom of railroad technology, its influence on political power, and its effect on regional economies; they remained skeptical of how this invention would improve their lives. Radical New Hampshire Democrats voiced serious concern that railroads would shrink private rights against the government and destroy the existing market economy, all while making northern New Englanders the minions of business interests far away in Boston, New York, and Canada. It would be incorrect to portray these concerns and the political action that accompanied them as naïve. From cities and towns in the most settled and highly developed areas of the state, these radicals detailed a sophisticated and sometimes prescient understanding of political economy. The private sphere of property rights was progressively shrinking and was increasingly less secure in the face of corporate and public demands. The older local and regional market economy was being hurt by railroad development, as national and international markets began to undercut

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many New Hampshire producers. In their minds, “war” against the railroads was not a strike against markets—it was a strike for markets. It remains one of the great ironies of the New Hampshire Railroad War that, rather than railroads representing rising capitalism, crashing across the farms and fields of New England in service of industry, the railroads symbolized nonmarket society. They would destroy markets, not create them. If the railroads had their way, the radicals insisted, producers would be forced out, consumers would be slaves to “foreign” goods, and market society would dry up. Far from being agricultural simpletons, nostalgic hill folk, or heroic rural yeomen opposing a growing capitalistindustrial nemesis symbolized by the railroad, Jacksonian radical Democrats were effective politicians and sophisticated economic thinkers who, considering American economic change in the nineteenth century, had a more nuanced grasp of political economy than the men often credited with being the progenitors of American industrial growth, the Whigs. The radical Jacksonian refrain remains a powerful critique of capitalist political economy. One hundred years later, Austrian economist Joseph A. Schumpeter gave credence to the theory in his magisterial Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. This is not to say that Schumpeter was attempting to explicate Jacksonian Democratic economics. The concerns over growth, the political complications, and the portrayal of market society over time given by the Jacksonians, however, are echoed in Schumpeter’s analysis. Schumpeter remade the perceptive Marxian point that capitalist economies die of their own success—they are so efficient in allocating goods and services that they inevitably lead to monopolies and the death of the entrepreneurial spirit. With the passing of this spirit, capitalism no longer possesses the tools that make it a viable economic system—what Schumpeter calls “creative destruction”—and society inevitably proceeds toward some variety of regulatory socialism. But Schumpeter’s “synthetic system”—integrating economics with history—was careful to delineate two types of capitalism, liberal and illiberal, not the monolithic dialectic (capitalism and noncapitalism) of Marxist terminology. The Schumpeterian distinction between liberal and illiberal capitalism is crucial to correcting Marx’s observations on the capitalist dynamic,

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altering the growing consensus between moral economy and market historians, and, more importantly for this study, understanding the divisions within New Hampshire Jacksonians over the railroad issue. Though written in a different time, with different intentions, and with a different terminology, the Schumpeterian lens helps us understand the New Hampshire Jacksonian world. Radical Democrats spoke of remarkably similar concerns: that market society would be a victim of self-erosion, gently undermining itself through innovation and success. These concerns separated them from the Whigs. Whigs remained ebullient over how railroads would transform their political and economic lives, improve the lot of every New Englander in the long run, and rescue a dying region from social oblivion. Danger came in not developing railroads. Whigs, blinded by boosterism and a limitless faith in the power of human innovation, were unable to appreciate how railroads would effect different areas differently. Since railroads promised quicker communication and transportation, they assumed the change brought about in everyday life would be better for all. All pain was short-term in the ongoing journey into a progressive future. This “progress” appeared so important to Whigs that they were willing to extend public power to a remarkable extent: bridges were destroyed, courthouses demolished, land and buildings taken. Less sophisticated in economic understanding than the Jacksonians, Whigs never worried over illiberal capitalism. If anything, they welcomed it. Yet, capitalism was the great consensus between Jacksonians and Whigs—no one opposed markets. The divide grew when debating what shape that capitalism should take. This was the antebellum conflict, not over whether America should be a market society, but what shape those markets should take; not over whether government should have power over private rights, but to what extent states could impose it upon private citizens. At the center of this debate was the railroad.

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Index

Abbot, Amos, 128 Accommodation: as a political concept, 151–52 Adams, John, 40 Albany, N.Y.: and Newburyport railroads, 169 Amoskeag, N.H. See Manchester, N.H. Amoskeag Canal, 78 Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, 87 Amherst, N.H., 28, 40, 49, 67, 77, 106 Andover, Mass., 128, 143, 145, 149, 154, 176 Andover and Haverhill Railroad Company, 139 Andover and Wilmington Railroad Company: opposed to Eastern Railroad charter, 128, 131; mentioned, 126, 139, 160 Andrews, Charles A., 128–29 Atkinson, Moses L., 169 Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad Company, 115 Baker, Albert: biography, 32–33; antirailroad radical Democrat, 32–37; and Mary Baker Eddy, 33n13; and Franklin Pierce, 44n29; mentioned, 21, 88, 102n30 Baker, Nathaniel, 3, 42, 46, 61–62, 102n30 Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company, 27, 88 Banks, 23–24, 32

Banks, Nathaniel, 169 Barton, Cyrus: and Patriot ownership controversy, 28–29; mentioned, 42, 83, 84n13 Beverly, Mass., 123, 127, 129, 131, 139 Boardman, Benjamin, 49–50 Boston, Mass.: Suffolk banking system, 23–24; radical Democratic fear of, 96–97, 99; threat to Salem business, 123–26 Boston and Lowell Railroad Company: opposed to parallel railroads, 141–43; mentioned, 6–179 passim Boston and Maine Railroad Company: responsible for New Hampshire Railroad War, 26–27, 38, 90; mentioned, 117–80 passim Boston and Providence Railroad Company, 6 Boston and Worcester Railroad Company, 1, 6 Boxford, Mass.: support for Newburyport Railroad’s “Boxford Route,” 174–78; mentioned, 164, 165, 166, 185, 186, 187 Bradford, Mass.: support for Newburyport Railroad’s original Haverhill route, 177–79; mentioned, 164–65, 169, 174, 176 Bright, John, 150 Brockway, Charles J., 169, 171 Buchanan, James, 28 Burke, Edmund: biography, 47n34; counsels end to New Hampshire

205

206

Index

Railroad War, 47–48; mentioned, 4, 51, 52, 54, 55, 60, 72 Butler, Benjamin F., 169–70 Calhoun, John C., 36 Canada, 25, 75, 101, 114, 131, 158 Capitalism. See Illiberal Capitalism; Liberal Capitalism Carroll, Henry: biography, 38–39n21, 102n30; mentioned, 62–145 passim Charles River Bridge Case (1837), 141, 149 Charlestown, Mass., 78, 127, 128 Charlestown, N.H., 37, 80 Chase, Philip, 133 Chase, Stephen A., 131 Choate, Rufus: opposes parallel railroad, 140; argues against vested rights, 149–52 Cobden, Richard, 150 Cogswell, George, biography, 169; mentioned, 170, 174 Colby, Anthony: defeat in 1843 N.H. gubernatorial election, 55; defeat in 1844 N.H. gubernatorial election, 61–62 Competition: as a destructive force, 145–49; as a productive force, 150–51 Concord, N.H.: geographic rivalry with other N.H. cities, 86–92; mentioned, 3–115 passim Concord Railroad Company: and Isaac Hill, 25, 28, 41, 45, 83, 84; city of Concord allowed to purchase stock in, 30; exempted from 1840 Railroad Act, 31–32; radical opposition to CRR exemption, 32–36, 50; and antirailroad violence, 53, 54; mentioned, 4, 46, 58, 67, 86, 90, 101, 108, 117 Concord Railroad Explanatory Bill (1840): passage of, 31–32; radical opposition to, 32–36; geographic location of votes on, 88–91 Condry, Dennis, 161, 162

Conservative Democrats: and 1842 election, 3–4, 40–45; split from radical Democrats, 31, 36–37; and 1843 election, 51–55; and 1844 election, 61–63; and the economics of railroads, 105–10 Coos County, N.H.: and election of 1842, 45; and western emigration, 82; geographic rivalry with Concord, 86, 92, 96; mentioned, 115 Crosby, Dr. Dixi, 59 Curry Letter (1841), 37, 49 Cushing, Caleb, 178 Danvers, Mass.: and possible ERR routes, 123, 127, 128, 132; and 1839 election, 139; and parallel railroad lines debate, 140, 144, 148, 151; and Essex Railroad, 156 Dartmouth College, 32, 37, 59, 67, 101, 102n30, 108, 169 Democratic Party. See Conservative Democrats; Radical Democrats Derby, Elias Hasket: and dangers of parallel lines, 147; opposes vested rights, 149–51; mentioned, 5 Dover, N.H.: and Huntoon Bill vote, 92; regional rivalries, 92, 96; mentioned, 25, 58, 75, 77 Duncan, James Henry: biography, 170; and Newburyport Railroad route petitions, 170, 171n26; chairs railroad meeting, 175; political trouble, 177–78 Dunstable, N.H. See Nashua, N.H. East Bradford, Mass., 164, 165. See also Groveland, Mass. Eastern Railroad Company: and Newburyport Bridge, 1–3; and post office, 27–28; and regional rivalries, 96; effect on Seabrook, N.H., 112–13; celebration at opening of, 119–20; opposition to and support for charter of, 123–26; controversy over different

Index routes, 126–28; debate over extension and state aid, 128–31; and Salem Tunnel, 131–33; and Salem Court House, 133–39; and parallel lines, 139–51; and Newburyport, 160; and passenger traffic, 179; mentioned, 75, 90, 172, 175, 180, 186 Eddy, Mary Baker, 32, 33n13 Election of 1841, N.H., 34 Election of 1842, N.H.: Democratic party split, 3–4, 41–44; suspicion of Isaac Hill, 44–45; results, 45 Election of 1843, N.H.: conservative Democratic meeting, 51–52; radical Democrats fear railroad issue, 52–55; results, 55 Election of 1844, N.H.: radicals nominate Steele, 57; results, 62–63 Enfield, N.H.: and effect of railroad on, 110, 111, 114–15, 118 Erie Canal, 107 Essex Company: and development of Lawrence, Mass., 155–56 Essex Railroad Company: Storrow’s promotion of, 156–58; Phillips’s promotion of, 158–60; mentioned, 140, 177 Exeter, N.H., 26, 49, 54, 72, 73, 77, 86, 99 Fitchburg Railroad Company, 6, 169, 173 Flanders, Walter, 36 Francestown, N.H.: effect of railroad on, 110, 111, 114–15, 118; mentioned, 79 Franklin, N.H.: effect of railroad on, 110, 111, 114, 118; mentioned, 79, 101 Georgetown, Mass.: and building of the Newburyport Railroad, 161–74; and building of Newburyport Railroad extension, 176–77; and passenger traffic, 180–81; mentioned, 153, 185–86

207

Georgetown Branch Railroad Company, 161, 164 Gilman and Carpenter Company, 155, 173 Gloucester, Mass., 127, 182, 184–87 Groveland, Mass., 164, 174, 176, 178. See also East Bradford, Mass. Haddock, Dr. Charles: biography, 101–2; on cheaper transportation and business failures, 102–3; on fear of outside markets, 103–4; on New England’s need for railroads, 104–5; mentioned, 65n60, 67, 108 Hale, John Parker: attorney for farmers against railroad, 26–27; debates Hill, 53; mentioned, 72 Hampton, N.H., 75, 101, 112 Handerson, Phineas, 58 Hanover, N.H., 59, 101 Haverhill, Mass.: and Salem Court House, 136–37; and Newburyport Railroad extension controversy, 174–79; and passenger traffic, 180–81; mentioned, 75, 126–87 passim Haverhill, N.H., 36, 44, 81, 88, 97 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 6–7 Hibbard, Harry: biography, 35n16; urges resistance to railroads, 38; opposes renomination of Hubbard, 56–57; opposes Northern Railroad exemption bill, 59; attacks Upham speech, 64–65, 110; opposes Haddock bill, 67; mentioned, 35, 36, 71 Hill, Isaac: and 1842 Concord riot, 3–4; supports railroad development, 24–26, 83, 84, 107; on reasons for Railroad War, 27; biography, 28; and Patriot ownership fight, 28–29; and bid to regain control of Democratic party, 41–43; and 1842 campaign battle with radicals, 43–47; attacks unlimited liability bill, 50; organizes 1843 conservative Democrat meeting,

208

Index

51–52; makes railroads 1843 campaign issue, 52–55; and regional rivalries, 86; and Boston connections, 97; mentioned, 6, 63–110 passim Hillsborough, N.H., 32, 33, 36, 73, 90 Hoit, John, 61, 63 Hubbard, Henry: biography, 37; on railroads as private companies, 37–38, 48–49, 57–58; and 1842 election, 42–45; and 1843 election, 52–55; dropped as gubernatorial candidate, 56–57; mentioned, 40, 51, 61, 62, 63, 66, 71, 106 Huntoon, Harvey, 69, 72, 92, 95

Lunt, Micajah, 167 Lynn, Mass., 119–87 passim

Illiberal Capitalism: and Joseph Schumpeter, 15–16, 188–90; and radical Democrats’ fears, 73–74, 81, 85, 98 Ipswich, Mass., 131, 136, 139, 185–86

Nashua, N.H.: and geographic rivalry with other N.H. cities, 88–92; mentioned, 25–99 passim Nashua and Lowell Railroad Company, 90 Newbury, Mass., 139, 161, 181, 182, 185, 186 Newburyport, Mass.: and Newburyport Bridge, 1–3; and decline, 7–8; and Newburyport Railroad, 160–81; effects of railroad, 181–87; mentioned, 74–154 passim Newburyport and Georgetown Railroad Company, 161–74, 178 Newburyport Bridge Company, 1–3 Newburyport Turnpike Company, 1 New York City, N.Y., 5, 6, 7, 74, 122, 124 Norris, Moses, 68–69, 102n30 Northern Railroad Company: charter debate, 58–62, 66–67, 92, 94, 100–101; mentioned 48, 114, 115 Northwood, N.H., 110, 111, 113, 115, 118

Jackson, Andrew, 23, 28, 46 Keene, N.H., 58, 60–61, 74–115 passim Kendall, Amos, 28 Lancaster, N.H., 110, 111, 115–18, 181 Lawrence, Abbott, 155 Lawrence, Mass.: development of, 78, 154–56; and Essex Railroad, 156–59; and Newburyport Railroad, 160–79; and passenger traffic, 180–81; mentioned, 182, 184, 185, 187 Lawrence and Lowell Railroad Company, 160 Lebanon, N.H., 58, 64, 80–81, 108 Liberal Capitalism: and Joseph Schumpeter, 15, 188–90; and radical Democrats, 73–74, 81, 85, 98 Liberty Party, 43, 45, 55, 61, 63 Loring, Charles Greeley: biography, 140n30; and vested rights, 140–43, 145–48; mentioned 170 Lowell, Mass., 5, 7, 31, 73–179 passim

Manchester, N.H.: and geographic rivalry with other N.H. cities, 86–92; mentioned, 5, 31, 52, 74–179 passim Manchester and Lawrence Railroad Company, 160 Marblehead, Mass., 123, 127, 187 Merrimack Water Power Associates, 155 Middlesex Canal, 7, 77, 78, 153, 160, 161 Morrison, George, 100–101

Page, John: and 1841 message, 29; and 1841 election, 34; turns conservative, 51, 53; mentioned, 24, 37, 57, 84, 88 Passumpsic Railroad Company, 116

Index Peabody, George: and Newburyport Bridge, 2; and opening of Eastern Railroad, 119–20; and Eastern Railroad charter, 127–28; and Salem Tunnel, 131–32; and Essex County Court House, 137–38 Perkins, Thomas Handasyd: and Eastern Railroad charter, 127–28 Peterborough, N.H., 57, 79–80 Phillips, Stephen C.: and Essex County Court House, 134–35, 137–38; biography, 156; and Essex Railroad, 156–59; mentioned, 179 Pierce, Andrew, 59–60 Pierce, Franklin, 6, 33, 43–44 Portland, Maine, mentioned, 75–172 passim Portsmouth, N.H.: and geographic rivalry with other N.H. cities, 86, 88–96; mentioned, 31–172 passim Post Office, 27–28, 88 Radical Democrats: and 1842 election, 3–4, 41–47; emergence of, 26–29; and 1840 Railroad Act, 29–31; oppose CRR Exemption, 31–36; and Henry Hubbard, 36–41, 49, 57–58; and unlimited liability, 50; and 1843 election, 51–57; and John Hardy Steele, 57, 62–63; and NRR charter, 58–61; and 1844 election, 61–63; and repeal of 1840 Railroad Bill, 64–72; and the economics of railroads, 81, 84–86, 98–101 Railroad Act of 1840: passage of, 29–31; repeal of, 64–72; Webster’s support of, 143; mentioned, 4–119 passim Railroad Act of 1844: passage of, 68–72, 92, 95 Renton, Dr. Peter, 3, 42–43 Robinson, Joseph, 3, 35, 36, 42, 90 Rochester, N.H., 92 Rowley, Mass.: effects of railroad on,

209

180–82, 185–87; mentioned, 139, 165 Russell, Charles T.: and exigency, 122; critical of vested rights, 149–51 Salem, Mass.: and Eastern Railroad, 123–31; and Salem Tunnel, 131–33; and Essex County Court House, 134–39; and Essex Railroad, 156–59; effect of railroad on, 179–82, 184, 187; mentioned, 73–175 passim Salem and Lowell Railroad Company, 156, 179 Saltonstall, Leverett, 133, 156 Saunders, Daniel, 154–55 Sawyer, George Y., 36 Schumpeter, Joseph A.: on capitalism, 15–16, 189–90 Seabrook, N.H., 90, 110–13, 115, 118 Shaw, Lemuel, 1–2, 119 Spofford, Jeremiah: and Essex County Court House, 136–38; and Newburyport Railroad controversy, 162–65, 167–70, 174, 177, 179; biography, 164 Steele, John Hardy: biography, 57; election of 1844, 62; 1884 address, 66; mentioned, 60, 63, 100, 105 Stevens, Enos, 34, 43, 45 Stony Brook Railroad Company, 169 Storrow, Charles S.: biography, 157; on need of Salem-Lawrence rail connection, 157–58; mentioned, 155 Swasey, Samuel: charges Hill with corruption, 44–45; opposes repeal of 1840 law, 47–48, 51–52, 65; reaction to end of Railroad War, 72; on railroads and N.H. economy, 97–98; mentioned, 36, 71, 102n30 Taney, Roger Brooke, 141, 149 Treadwell, Thomas: opposes Concord Railroad exemption, 31–32, 35; supports unlimited liability, 50 Tuck, Amos, 49, 54

210

Index

Unlimited Liability (1842), 50 Upham, Nathaniel G.: biography, 108; railroads and western competition, 108–10; railroads and Boston, 109–10; railroads and N.H., 109–10; mentioned, 64, 65, 102n30, 110, 117 Van Buren, Martin, 28 Varnum, John, 170 Webster, Daniel: and vested rights, 143–45; mentioned, 1, 114, 156 Western Railroad Company, 25, 83n12, 129, 130, 169 West Newbury, Mass.: and Newburyport Railroad, 164–68,

174; effects of railroad on, 183, 186; mentioned, 162 Whig Party: in late 1830s, 23; and support of CRR Exemption, 31; and 1841 election, 34; and 1842 election, 43, 45; and 1843 election, 55; and 1844 election, 61–62; and the economics of railroads, 101–5 White, Daniel Appleton, 132, 133n18 White, John H.: biography, 42n26; and election of 1842, 42–43, 45; and election of 1843, 54–55; and election of 1844, 61–62 White Mountain Railroad Company, 115 Woodbury, Levi: supports Hubbard, 53; mentioned, 6, 37, 86