The total mileage of the United States expanded in ten years after 1840 from 2,800 to upwards of 9,000 miles of line. For some time not over four or five hundred miles annually had been constructed; but suddenly the new mileage laid down in 1848 jumped to more than fourteen hundred miles. This was a presage of the great expansion to occur in the next few years,—an expansion made possible partly as a result of important mechanical improvements and inventions. Notable among these was the substitution of the solid iron rail for the primitive method of plating beams with thin strips of iron. The manufacture of rails in the United States, begun in 1844, did much to stimulate the subsequent growth. The repeal of the law of 1832 permitting free entry of railway iron which took place in 1843, marks the beginning of a new era. During these eleven years almost five million dollars in duties on rails was refunded.
The utmost activity in railroad building obtained from 1848 until the panic of 1857, interrupted only by a minor disturbance in 1854. The total mileage expanded more than threefold, attaining a total of 30,000 miles by 1860. A veritable construction mania prevailed in the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Not very much, relatively, was accomplished in New York and Pennsylvania, and very little in New England, which was already well served. A dominant influence in promoting the new construction at this time was the imperative need of the South for foodstuffs. Cotton culture was in full swing in the lowlands of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. An enormous steam and flat boat tonnage on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers had grown up to care for this trade.[7] By 1845 the river shipping amounted to nearly two million tons. Fifteen hundred out of four thousand steamboat arrivals at New Orleans in 1859, came from the Ohio river and the upper Mississippi. The vessels had also greatly increased in size. The flat boats which in 1820 carried only thirty tons of freight, were enlarged tenfold in tonnage and threefold in length by 1855, and in that year first began to be towed back up the river. A rapid increase in coal shipments down stream from Pittsburg also took place during the forties. From 737,000 bushels in 1844, to 22,000,000 bushels in 1855 and 37,900,000 in 1860, represents an enormous development of internal commerce. The lead mines of Missouri shipping through St. Louis had become important after 1832 and quadrupled in volume by 1848, attaining a total of 42,400,000 pigs of sixty pounds each. This traffic steadily dwindled, however, falling away by one half within the next ten years. Memphis was rapidly growing, outstripping the city of Natchez which had formerly played a more important part in the southern trade. But the most important element in this Mississippi river business was the shipment down stream of food stuffs. Produce received at New Orleans was valued at $26,000,000 in 1830, $50,000,000 in 1841, and $185,000,000 in 1860. About thirty per cent. of this consisted of farm produce from the Northwest, together with horses, mules, implements, and clothing. The need of ampler transportation facilities to accommodate all this business was apparent. A response came in plans for new north and south lines of railway. The difficulty of financing these enterprises was solved in part by the expedient of land grants by the different states. These amounted to no less than eight million acres under President Fillmore, attaining a total of nineteen million acres under the Pierce administration. By 1861 these grants, mainly in aid of railroads, had reached a total of no less than 31,600,842 acres,—more than equal to the area of either of the states of Ohio, or New York.[8] The Illinois Central grant in 1851 was the largest among these. Congress in 1850 had made over a tract of 2,700,000 acres to the state of Illinois to be used for this purpose. This gift was soon followed elsewhere by grants to aid the building of the Mobile & Ohio and the Mississippi Central, together with smaller roads in Alabama and Florida. The Gulf of Mexico was thus reached by through lines from the west in 1858-1861. In other parts of the country railroads were pushed well out in advance of population. The Mississippi was reached by the Rock Island system in 1854, quickly followed by the Alton, the Burlington and the predecessor of the present Northwestern system. The Hannibal & St. Joseph was the first to reach the Missouri river in 1858. There is no doubt that the discovery of gold in California greatly stimulated interest in all these far western enterprises.
Despite this remarkable record of growth, a corresponding development of long-distance communication between different parts of the country had not yet taken place. While the all-rail routes were open, they still consisted in large part of disconnected local lines. The New York Central with difficulty in 1853, and in spite of intense local opposition, succeeded in effecting a consolidation of what were originally eleven separate lines; but the union with the Hudson River Railroad was not to follow until 1869. The Boston & Albany was still a local enterprise, although built with larger ends in view. At this time the possibility of long-distance carriage of grain was only very dimly appreciated. Fast freight lines to operate without breaking bulk over independent roads, constituted the first step in this direction. Such companies on the New York Central in 1855 and on the Erie two years later, were operating in the eastern trunk territory. The so-called Green lines were engaging in long distance business by way of Ohio river connections between the territory to the northwest and the great grain and pork consuming cotton belt. But railroad traffic as a whole was still relatively unimportant as compared with water carriage. The culmination of steadily increasing receipts on the Erie Canal did not occur until 1856. River tonnage went on steadily increasing for another twenty years. The years just before the war seem to have marked the turning point in respect of canal competition; but the total volume of railroad shipments, nevertheless, still appears insignificant by comparison with the present day. The total traffic in 1859 on the Pennsylvania Railroad was only 353,000 tons east bound and 190,700 tons west bound; while on the New York Central it was 570,900 and 263,400 tons, respectively. The important point was that the cost of shipment was steadily declining. According to H. C. Carey, the passenger rate from Chicago to New York had fallen from about seventy-five dollars to seventeen dollars in 1850; while the freight rate per bushel on wheat had fallen to twenty-seven cents; and per barrel of flour to eighty cents. Nothing but the development of a large surplus production in the West was needed to create a great traffic; and this was dependent upon the spread of population and improvements in agricultural production which had not yet occurred. Transportation as yet waited upon the progress of invention; not in instruments of transportation alone, but in all the other fields of industrial endeavor.
The panic of 1857 and the increasing bitterness of the slavery question, followed by the outbreak of the Civil War, quite diverted the attention of the country from internal development. Railroad construction had already declined from 3,600 miles in 1856 to 1,837 miles in 1860. It fell to less than 700 miles in 1861. Brisk recovery set in after 1865; but it was not until 1868 that any rapid growth again ensued, or even a resumption of the activity of the preceding decade. All of the southern lines were prostrated; the north and south roads, like the Illinois Central system, stood still. The western railway net alone was slowly expanding. The Burlington grew from 168 miles in 1861 to over 400 miles in 1865; and the Chicago & Northwestern then succeeded in bridging the Mississippi. The Erie was still a more important route by fifty per cent., measured by ton mileage, than the New York Central; although its evil days, under the control of Jim Fiske and Jay Gould in 1866-1869, were about to begin. The Mecca of trade from the Atlantic ports was still St. Louis, although Chicago outgrew it during the decade. The predominant direction of trade is shown by the widespread public interest in New York in the newly opened Western & Atlantic railroad, which by a spur from the Erie road at Salamanca, was to shorten the time of shipment of goods from New York to Cincinnati from one month to a week. The commercial star of New York was steadily rising. A great aid thereto was, of course, the progress of consolidation among the connecting links to Chicago. Vanderbilt and Scott were busily engaged in this constructive work. The former had shifted his interest from steamboats to railroads, and became dominant in the Harlem and Hudson River roads in 1863-1864. Three years later he secured control of the New York Central from Albany west, and consolidated it with the Hudson River line. These trunk line roads, the Pennsylvania and the New York Central, both finally secured connections with Chicago in 1869. A channel for new through currents of trade merely awaited the growth of business.
It is important to realize the relative primitiveness of transportation at the close of the Civil War.[9] The Bessemer steel process was not perfected until the latter half of the decade.[9] Iron rails still rendered light rolling stock necessary. But after 1868 the price of steel rails rapidly declined, from about $166 (currency) per ton in 1867 to $112 in 1872, and to $59 in 1876.[10] This doubtless gave a tremendous impetus to the developments of later years, although its effects were not evident for some time. One of the most troublesome features of the time were the differences of gauge which rendered through traffic difficult. In New York and New England, the standard gauge was four feet eight and one-half inches. West and south of Philadelphia it was four feet ten inches. In the Far South it was five feet; and in Canada and Maine, either five feet six inches or six feet. Between Chicago and Buffalo five different roads still had no common gauge. Clumsy expedients of shifting car trucks, three rails or extra wide wheel flanges were adopted. Even as late as 1876 Albert Fink refers to the celerity with which trucks could be changed at junction points, not over ten minutes being requisite.[11] The first double tracking in the country, that of the New York Central, was not accomplished until the war period. There was not even a bridge over the Hudson at Albany until 1866, and no bridge at St. Louis, although the Northwestern had bridged the Mississippi higher up. No night trains were run generally. No export grain trade existed, although feeble beginnings had been apparent at New York for some years. Philadelphia did not even have a trunk line as late as the end of the war; and neither Boston nor Philadelphia had regular steamer lines to Europe. For the great staples of trade, the canals and rivers were largely utilized. The Erie Canal during the war, took twice as much freight as the Erie and New York Central together. Even in 1865 the ton mileage of the Erie Canal—844,000,000—compared with a ton mileage of 265,000,000 for the New York Central and 388,000,000 for the Erie Railroad. And in 1872, eighty-five per cent of the freight between New York and Philadelphia still went by water.
Railroad construction during the next decade to 1880 was extremely active. East of the Mississippi developments were confined in the main to building branches and feeders. One new through line in the East was opened, by the entrance of the Baltimore & Ohio into New York in 1873 and into Chicago in the following year. Another important enterprise was the building of the Air Line route to connect Atlanta with Richmond by a road traversing the fertile Piedmont belt. The completion by the state of Massachusetts of the Hoosac Tunnel line, providing a new outlet to the west from Boston, was also a notable achievement. This route was at last opened in 1874 after a painful experience extending over twenty years, involving an expenditure by the state of about $17,000,000. Most of the new railroad building of the seventies took place in the upper Mississippi valley. The states of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, (eastern) Nebraska and Kansas were rapidly gridironed with new lines. Much of this construction took place after 1868, activity culminating in 1871 with the building of no less than 7,379 miles of line. The panic of 1873 put an end to all this, except in California where expansion went on unabated. Nearly one thousand miles of new line were added to the systems of this state during the five years to 1878,—nearly doubling its mileage during this period. Elsewhere in the country little was accomplished during the protracted hard times. In 1875, for instance, only seventeen hundred miles were constructed. This cessation of development did not change for the better until the resumption of general prosperity in 1878. The net result of ten years building was, nevertheless, considerable, represented by an expansion from 53,000 to upwards of 93,000 miles of line. Railroad building, in fact, increased about two and one-half times as fast as population. So that by 1880 the United States was already more amply furnished with transportation mileage than any country in Europe.
Among the important events to be associated with this period was the opening of the first transcontinental route, marked by the joining of the Union and Central Pacific railroads in 1869. The history of its construction under liberal land grants from the Federal government belongs in another place. Aside from the political effect, the economic results were immediate. Population at once flowed over onto the Pacific slope. And a large volume of trade was at once deflected from the sea route round Cape Horn. The value of goods shipped by water between New York and San Francisco, which in 1869 amounted to $70,000,000, fell in the next year to $18,600,000, and in 1872 to less than $10,000,000. The success of the enterprise, together with growing interest in the Pacific states, doubtless led to the opening of construction of the Northern Pacific as a transcontinental route in 1870.
The rapid development of an export trade in grain to Europe between 1870 and 1874 was a direct result of improvements in agriculture and the opening up of a surplus grain-producing area. As yet this territory lay mainly east and south of Chicago. Even as late as 1882, over four-fifths of the eastbound trunk line traffic originated not further west than Illinois. Wisconsin and Iowa contributed less than ten per cent. of this business. The methods of handling wheat were still quite primitive. During the Civil War thousands of men were employed to unload the grain by hand, every tenth barrel being weighed. Elevators had been used in Chicago for some time but no eastern city had them until 1861. Prior to 1872, when the first grain elevator was set up at Baltimore, the cost of thus unloading grain by hand amounted to four or five cents per bushel. At Boston until 1867, all the export grain was still unloaded back of the city and hauled across to the waterfront.
The volume of exportable surplus products of the country rose rapidly after 1870. An increase from five or six bushels of wheat production per capita in 1860, to nearly nine bushels in 1879, left a large margin for foreign sale. The growth of such traffic, big with importance for the carriers, is indicated by the opposite diagram. The large total of 59,000,000 bushels of wheat and (equivalent) wheat flour reached in 1862, partly as a result of the closing of markets in the southern states, was not again surpassed for more than a decade. The most notable increase ensued after 1873, when the level rose about fifty per cent., to become established thereafter upon a permanently higher plane. A second sudden boost occurred again in 1877 when wheat exports rose rapidly to a total of 180,000,000 bushels within three years. The disastrous failure of European crops in 1879, with a coincident bumper yield in the United States, led to the immediate climax of the movement in 1881. These exports, moreover, which fifty years earlier, owing to the cost of carriage, were almost exclusively in the form of flour, were now in 1880 about three-fourths constituted of raw wheat. Examination of the diagram with its steep pyramid of development at this time is convincing as to the stimulus thereby given to the railway interests. Foreign trade in cattle and beef products also enormously increased during these years. In 1876 only 244 steers were exported, while in 1877, 71,794, and in 1881, 134,000 head were shipped abroad. The value of preserved meats exported quadrupled in one year after 1877, and grew eightfold by 1880. Doubtless part of this disposition of products abroad during the seventies was due to a cessation of demand at home owing to the prevalent hard times; but the important discovery was incidentally made that the demand abroad existed, and merely required cheap transportation for its successful development.