David Schley - Steam City: Railroads, Urban Space, and Corporate Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Baltimore

Edited by Lilia Fernndez, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Becky M. Nicolaides, and Amanda I. Seligman

James R. Grossman, Editor Emeritus

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DAVID SCHLEY

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2020 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-72025-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-72039-5 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226720395.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Schley, David, author.

Title: Steam city : railroads, urban space, and corporate capitalism in nineteenth-century Baltimore / David Schley.

Other titles: Historical studies of urban America.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Series: Historical studies of urban America | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020004121 | ISBN 9780226720258 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226720395 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company. | RailroadsMarylandBaltimoreHistory. | CapitalismMarylandBaltimore.

Classification: LCC HE2781.B35 S35 2020 | DDC 385.09752/6dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004121

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI / NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Jessica

The railroad age in America kicked off with a grand parade through Baltimore. On the morning of July 4, 1828, thousands of people lined the streets and leaned out of windows to watch a procession of tradesmen, sailors, farmers, and politicians as they marched toward the western fringes of the city, where construction on a new rail-roadthe first of its kind in the United Stateswas to begin. The celebrants anticipated that this enterprise, dubbed the Baltimore & Ohio (B&O) Railroad, would in due course connect their city to the fertile Ohio River valley. First, though, it would have to cross hundreds of miles of mountainous, sparsely populated terrain, an engineering challenge of unprecedented dimensions. To commence work on this audacious project, the companys founders tapped ninety-year-old Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the last living signer of the Declaration of Independence and one of the B&Os principal investors. Carroll sat in a horse-drawn open carriage near the head of the column making its way through the city. He had agreed to dig the first shovelful of earth for the railroad, an act that he asserted to be the second-most important of his life, eclipsed only by his signature of the declaration fifty-two years earlier. When the parade reached the designated site and Carroll sunk his spade into the ground, he inaugurated another kind of revolution.

Nineteenth-century writers recognized the significance of this undertaking immediately. By running fossil-fueled steam engines on straight iron rails, the B&O and the many railroad companies founded in its wake promised to liberate overland travel from the age-old constraints of inclement weather and muscle fatigue. Pundits wrote of the annihilation of time and space as they marveled at the social and economic changes wrought by railroads and other novel modes of communication within their lifetimes. Generations later, these transformations seem no less profound. Historians have documented the important role played by railroad enterprise in the making of industrial capitalism. Whether excoriated as the tools of rapacious robber barons or praised as models of rational organization, railroad companies have long been recognized as the progenitors of the corporate forms and practices that structured the American economy after the Civil War.

In some ways, this end pointthe postbellum rail corporation, its iron bands spanning the continent, its smoking locomotives hauling industrial products, its middle managers coordinating a large and diffused workforce, its bosses cutting backroom deals with congressmenseems prefigured in the ceremony that launched the B&O. Speeches by the fledgling companys leaders in 1828 stressed the power of this new technology to level mountains and shrink the continent, rhetoric that railroad boosters continued to deploy with little modification half a century later. When it came time to break ground, however, the founders revealed a vision for the railroad very different from the modern corporate enterprise it was to become. Carroll did not till the earth to clear space for a rail or a golden spikehe instead made room for a cornerstone, a squat slab of marble embossed with the words FIRST STONE of the BALT & OHIO RAIL ROAD. Inaugurating the company with a cornerstone ceremony figured the B&O as a civic undertaking, akin to a new public building or monument. Even as the railroad prepared to stretch hundreds of miles beyond the city limits, the stone grounded it in Baltimore, marking it as a public initiative with a distinctly urban character.

The B&O was not unique in this regard. Other early railroads, founded in an era wary of corporate power, reflected a limited vision of private enterprise and an expansive vision of urbanism, in which citiesthat is, urban publics acting collectively, often through their mayors and city councilsset in motion initiatives intended to reshape economic geography. At the dawn of the railroad age, writers described the B&O as an urban project, launched by Baltimore, that would bolster the citys lagging economy by capturing a hinterland in the trans-Appalachian West. Boosters from other eastern entreptsPhiladelphia, New York City, Boston, and Charlestonlikewise conceived of railroad corporations as instruments of urban development. In the 1840s, many of these state- and city-sponsored internal improvements failed amid a general depression, and most subsequent railroads incorporated as private enterprises, but even then, the B&O and many other major railroads remained dependent on municipal aid and subscribed to an urban mission.