From the very first there were some men who felt the importance of the railroads as national lines of communication. The idea was present in the minds of the projectors of the Baltimore & Ohio, of the Erie, and of the Boston & Albany. But it was not until 1850 that it became a controlling one; nor was it universally accepted even then. As late as 1858 we find that there was a violent popular agitation in the State of New York to prohibit the New York Central from carrying freight in competition with the Erie Canal. It was gravely urged that the railroad had no business to compete with the canal; that the latter had a natural right to the through traffic from the West, with which the railroads must not interfere. It is less than thirty years since a convention at Syracuse, representing no small part of the public sentiment of New York, formally recommended "the passage of a law by the next Legislature which shall confine the railroads of this State to the business for which they were originally created."
But matters had gone too far for effective action of this kind. Besides the New York Central, the Erie and the Pennsylvania were in condition to handle the through traffic which Western connections were furnishing. These connections themselves were rapidly growing in importance. Prior to 1850 there were very few railroads west of the Alleghanies. In 1857 there were thousands of miles. The policy of land-grants acted as an artificial stimulus to the building of such roads; and a land-grant road, when once built, was almost necessarily dependent on through traffic for its support. It could not be operated locally; it was forced into close traffic arrangements which paved the way for actual consolidation.
The war brought this development to a stand-still for the time being; but it was afterward resumed with renewed vigor. It is probable that the final effect of the war was to hasten rather than to retard the growth of large systems. In the first place, it familiarized men's minds with national ideas instead of those limited to their own State. It is hard for us to realize that our business ideas were ever thus confined by artificial boundaries; but if we wish proof, we have only to look at the original location of the Erie Railway from Piermont to Dunkirk. Both were unnatural and undesirable terminal points; but people were willing to submit to inconvenience and to actual loss in order that the railroad might run as far as the New York State limits would allow, and not one whit farther. Similar instances can be found in other States. Hard as it is to understand, there seems to have been a positive jealousy of interstate traffic. The war did much to remove this by making the different sections of the country feel their common interest and their mutual dependence. It also had more direct effects. It produced special legislation for the Pacific railroads as a measure of military necessity; and this was but the beginning of a renewal of the land-grant policy, no longer through the medium of the States, but in the Territories and by the direct action of Congress. All the results in the way of extension or consolidation which had been noted in the first land-grant period were more intensely felt in the second. Never was there a time when business foresight and administrative power were more needed or more richly rewarded than in railroad management during the third quarter of the century.
J. Edgar Thomson.
In 1847 J. Edgar Thomson, an engineer of experience, entered the service of the Pennsylvania Railroad, of which he afterward became president. Three years later, a young man without experience in railroad business applied to him for a position as clerk in the station at Duncansville, and was, with some hesitation, accepted. Not long after—so runs the story—an influential shipper entered the station, and demanded that some transfers should be made in a manner contrary to the rules of the company. This the clerk refused to do; and when the influential shipper tried to attend to the matter himself, he was forcibly ejected from the premises. Indignant at this, he complained to the authorities, demanding that the obnoxious employee be removed from his position. He was—and was promoted to a much higher one. This is said to have been the beginning of the railroad career of Thomas Alexander Scott. Edgar Thomson was a sufficiently able man to appreciate Scott's talent at its full worth, and took every opportunity to make it useful in the service of the company. Both before and after the war the system was extended in every direction; and the man who in 1850 had need of all his nerve to defy a single influential shipper was a quarter of a century later at the head of 7,000 miles of the most valuable railroad in the country.
Thomas A. Scott.