North America — Volume 2

by Anthony Trollope

Nothing can be much uglier than the State House at Harrisburg, but it commands a magnificent view of one of the valleys into which the Alleghany mountains is broken. Harrisburg is immediately under the range, probably at its finest point, and the railway running west from the town to Pittsburg, Cincinnati, and Chicago passes right over the chain. The line has been magnificently engineered, and the scenery is very grand. I went over the Alleghanies in mid-winter when they were covered with snow, but even when so seen they were very fine. The view down the valley from Altoona, a point near the summit, must in summer be excessively lovely. I stopped at Altoona one night with the object of getting about among the hills, and making the best of the winter view; but I found it impossible to walk. The snow had become frozen and was like glass. I could not progress a mile in any way. With infinite labour I climbed to the top of one little hill, and when there became aware that the descent would be very much more difficult. I did get down, but should not choose to describe the manner in which I accomplished the descent.

In running down the mountains to Pittsburg an accident occurred which in any other country would have thrown the engine off the line, and have reduced the carriages behind the engine to a heap of ruins. But here it had no other effect than that of delaying us for three or four hours. The tire of one of the heavy driving wheels flew off, and in the shock the body of the wheel itself was broken, one spoke and a portion of the circumference of the wheel was carried away, and the steam-chamber was ripped open. Nevertheless the train was pulled up, neither the engine nor any of the carriages got off the line, and the men in charge of the train seemed to think very lightly of the matter. I was amused to see how little was made of the affair by any of the passengers. In England a delay of three hours would in itself produce a great amount of grumbling, or at least many signs of discomfort and temporary unhappiness. But here no one said a word. Some of the younger men got out and looked at the ruined wheel; but most of the passengers kept their seats, chewed their tobacco, and went to sleep. In all such matters an American is much more patient than an Englishman. To sit quiet, without speech, and ruminate in some contorted position of body comes to him by nature. On this occasion I did not hear a word of complaint—nor yet a word of surprise or thankfulness that the accident had been attended with no serious result. "I have got a furlough for ten days," one soldier said to me. "And I have missed every connection all through from Washington here. I shall have just time to turn round and go back when I get home." But he did not seem to be in any way dissatisfied. He had not referred to his relatives when he spoke of "missing his connections," but to his want of good fortune as regarded railway travelling. He had reached Baltimore too late for the train on to Harrisburg, and Harrisburg too late for the train on to Pittsburg. Now he must again reach Pittsburg too late for his further journey. But nevertheless he seemed to be well pleased with his position.

Pittsburg is the Merthyr-Tydvil of Pennsylvania,—or perhaps I should better describe it as an amalgamation of Swansea, Merthyr-Tydvil, and South Shields. It is without exception the blackest place which I ever saw. The three English towns which I have named are very dirty, but all their combined soot and grease and dinginess do not equal that of Pittsburg. As regards scenery it is beautifully situated, being at the foot of the Alleghany mountains, and at the juncture of the two rivers Monongahela and Alleghany. Here, at the town, they come together and form the river Ohio. Nothing can be more picturesque than the site; for the spurs of the mountains come down close round the town, and the rivers are broad and swift, and can be seen for miles from heights which may be reached in a short walk. Even the filth and wondrous blackness of the place are picturesque when looked down upon from above. The tops of the churches are visible, and some of the larger buildings may be partially traced through the thick, brown, settled smoke. But the city itself is buried in a dense cloud. The atmosphere was especially heavy when I was there, and the effect was probably increased by the general darkness of the weather. The Monongahela is crossed by a fine bridge, and on the other side the ground rises at once, almost with the rapidity of a precipice; so that a commanding view is obtained down upon the town and the two rivers and the different bridges, from a height immediately above them. I was never more in love with smoke and dirt than when I stood here and watched the darkness of night close in upon the floating soot which hovered over the housetops of the city. I cannot say that I saw the sun set, for there was no sun. I should say that the sun never shone at Pittsburg,—as foreigners who visit London in November declare that the sun never shines there.

Walking along the river-side I counted thirty-two steamers, all beached upon the shore with their bows towards the land,—large boats, capable probably of carrying from one to two hundred passengers each, and about 300 tons of merchandise. On inquiry I found that many of these were not now at work. They were resting idle, the trade down the Mississippi below St. Louis having been cut off by the war. Many of them, however, were still running, the passage down the river being open to Wheeling in Virginia, to Portsmouth, Cincinnati and the whole of South Ohio, to Louisville in Kentucky, and to Cairo in Illinois, where the Ohio joins the Mississippi. The amount of traffic carried on by these boats while the country was at peace within itself was very great, and conclusive as to the increasing prosperity of the people. It seems that everybody travels in America, and that nothing is thought of distance. A young man will step into a car and sit beside you, with that easy, careless air which is common to a railway passenger in England who is passing from one station to the next; and on conversing with him you will find that he is going seven or eight hundred miles. He is supplied with fresh newspapers three or four times a day as he passes by the towns at which they are published; he eats a large assortment of gum-drops and apples, and is quite as much at home as in his own house. On board the river boats it is the same with him, with this exception, that when there he can get whisky when he wants it. He knows nothing of the ennui of travelling, and never seems to long for the end of his journey, as travellers do with us. Should his boat come to grief upon the river, and lie by for a day or a night, it does not in the least disconcert him. He seats himself upon three chairs, takes a bite of tobacco, thrusts his hands into his trousers pockets and revels in an elysium of his own.

I was told that the stockholders in these boats were in a bad way at the present time. There were no dividends going. The same story was repeated as to many and many an investment. Where the war created business, as it had done on some of the main lines of railroad and in some special towns, money was passing very freely; but away from this, ruin seemed to have fallen on the enterprise of the country. Men were not broken-hearted, nor were they even melancholy; but they were simply ruined. That is nothing in the States, so long as the ruined man has the means left to him of supplying his daily wants till he can start himself again in life. It is almost the normal condition of the American man in business; and therefore I am inclined to think that when this war is over, and things begin to settle themselves into new grooves, commerce will recover herself more quickly there than she would do among any other people. It is so common a thing to hear of an enterprise that has never paid a dollar of interest on the original outlay,—of hotels, canals, railroads, banks, blocks of houses, &c., that never paid even in the happy days of peace,—that one is tempted to disregard the absence of dividends, and to believe that such a trifling accident will not act as any check on future speculation. In no country has pecuniary ruin been so common as in the States; but then in no country is pecuniary ruin so little ruinous. "We are a recuperative people," a west-country gentleman once said to me. I doubted the propriety of his word, but I acknowledged the truth of his assertion.

Pittsburg and Alleghany, which latter is a town similar in its nature to Pittsburg on the other side of the river of the same name, regard themselves as places apart; but they are in effect one and the same city. They live under the same blanket of soot, which is woven by the joint efforts of the two places. Their united population is 135,000, of which Alleghany owns about 50,000. The industry of the towns is of that sort which arises from a union of coal and iron in the vicinity. The Pennsylvanian coalfields are the most prolific in the Union; and Pittsburg is therefore great, exactly as Merthyr-Tydvil and Birmingham are great. But the foundry-work at Pittsburg is more nearly allied to the heavy, rough works of the Welsh coal metropolis than to the finish and polish of Birmingham.

"Why cannot you consume your own smoke?" I asked a gentleman there. "Fuel is so cheap that it would not pay," he answered. His idea of the advantage of consuming smoke was confined to the question of its paying as a simple operation in itself. The consequent cleanliness and improvement in the atmosphere had not entered into his calculations. Any such result might be a fortuitous benefit, but was not of sufficient importance to make any effort in that direction expedient on its own account. "Coal was burned," he said, "in the foundries at something less than two dollars a ton; while that was the case, it could not answer the purpose of any iron-founder to put up an apparatus for the consumption of smoke." I did not pursue the argument any further, as I perceived that we were looking at the matter from two different points of view.

Everything in the hotel was black; not black to the eye, for the eye teaches itself to discriminate colours even when loaded with dirt, but black to the touch. On coming out of a tub of water my foot took an impress from the carpet exactly as it would have done had I trod barefooted on a path laid with soot. I thought that I was turning negro upwards, till I put my wet hand upon the carpet, and found that the result was the same. And yet the carpet was green to the eye,—a dull, dingy green, but still green. "You shouldn't damp your feet," a man said to me, to whom I mentioned the catastrophe. Certainly Pittsburg is the dirtiest place I ever saw, but it is, as I said before, very picturesque in its dirt when looked at from above the blanket.

From Pittsburg I went on by train to Cincinnati, and was soon in the State of Ohio. I confess that I have never felt any great regard for Pennsylvania. It has always had in my estimation a low character for commercial honesty, and a certain flavour of pretentious hypocrisy. This probably has been much owing to the acerbity and pungency of Sydney Smith's witty denunciations against the drab-coloured State. It is noted for repudiation of its own debts, and for sharpness in exaction of its own bargains. It has been always smart in banking. It has given Buchanan as a President to the country, and Cameron as a Secretary at War to the Government! When the battle of Bull's Run was to be fought, Pennsylvanian soldiers were the men who, on that day, threw down their arms because the three months' term for which they had been enlisted was then expired! Pennsylvania does not in my mind stand on a par with Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Illinois, or Virginia. We are apt to connect the name of Benjamin Franklin with Pennsylvania, but Franklin was a Boston man. Nevertheless, Pennsylvania is rich and prosperous. Indeed it bears all those marks which Quakers generally leave behind them.

I had some little personal feeling in visiting Cincinnati, because my mother had lived there for some time, and had there been concerned in a commercial enterprise, by which no one, I believe, made any great sum of money. Between thirty and forty years ago she built a bazaar in Cincinnati, which I was assured by the present owner of the house, was at the time of its erection considered to be the great building of the town. It has been sadly eclipsed now, and by no means rears its head proudly among the great blocks around it. It had become a "Physico-medical Institute" when I was there, and was under the dominion of a quack doctor on one side, and of a college of rights-of-women female medical professors on the other. "I believe, sir, no man or woman ever yet made a dollar in that building; and as for rent, I don't even expect it." Such was the account given of the unfortunate bazaar by the present proprietor.