Thinking Like a Historian: The Risks and Rewards of Technological Innovation

1. Speech by John B. Morris, a director of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, July 4, 1828, at the dedication of the first steam railway in the United States.

   Fellow-Citizens. … We have met to celebrate the laying of the first stone of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. … The result of our labors will be felt, not only by ourselves, but also by posterity, — not only by Baltimore, but also by Maryland and by the United States. We are about opening the channel through which the commerce of the mighty country beyond the Alleghany must seek the [Atlantic] ocean. … We are in fact commencing a new era in our history; for there are none present who even doubt the beneficial influence which the intended Road will have in promoting the Agriculture, Manufactures and Inland Commerce of our country.

2. Illustration of a passenger car built by M. P. & M. E. Green of Hoboken, New Jersey, for the Camden and Amboy Railway, linking New York City and Philadelphia, 1831.
   

   Source: Division of Work & Industry, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
3. Poster protesting the laying of tracks through the “most Beautiful Streets” of Philadelphia, 1839.
   

   Source: National Archives.
4. Opposition to the state financing of railroads from the Republican Compiler, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, October 6, 1851. As American track mileage grew from 3,000 miles in 1840 to 30,000 miles by 1860, entrepreneurs in Pennsylvania, assisted by the state legislature, led the nation in laying rail.

   The Governor’s organ [newspaper] is still harping about the Governor having paid off the State debt, and reducing the taxes. If the taxes have been reduced, why is it that every farmer finds that he has paid MORE TAXES the last year than he has ever paid in a single year before? … The true issue is that Gov. Johnston and his friends created the [huge state] debt. …

   The people remember that Gov. Johnston voted $405,000 to the Gettysburg railroad. …

   They remember that he voted $150,000 to the Danville and Pottsville railroad.

   They remember that he voted $140,000 to the Laughlintown and Pittsburg railroad, that never was incorporated.

   They remember that he voted $120,000 to the Norristown railroad.

   They remember that he voted for a bill appropriating over THREE MILLIONS OF DOLLARS to State and company improvements in one year, and that Gov. Ritner said that such appropriations would increase the State debt, in four years, to $45,000,000.

5. Lyrics to “The Waggoner’s Curse,” c. 1850.

   Come all ye bold wagoners turn out man by man

   That’s opposed to the railroad or any such a plan;

   ’Tis once I made money by driving my team

   But the goods are now hauled on the railroad by steam. …

   If we go to Philadelphia, inquiring for a load,

   They’ll tell us quite directly it’s gone out on the railroad.

   The rich folks, the plan they may justly admire,

   But it ruins us poor wag’ners and it makes our taxes higher …

   It ruins wheelwrights, blacksmiths, and every other trade,

   So damned be all the railroads that ever was made.

   It ruins our mechanics, what think you of it, then?

   And it fills our country full of just a lot of great rich men.

   The ships they will be coming with Irishmen by loads,

   All with their picks and shovels, to work on the railroads;

   When they get on the railroad, it is then that they are fixed

   They’ll fight just like the devil with their cudgels and their sticks.

   The American with safety can scarcely ever pass,

   For they will blacken both his eyes for one word of his sass

   If it wasn’t for the torment I as life would be in hell,

   As upon the cursed railroad, or upon the canal.

6. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or, Life in the Woods, 1854. The workers who built and ran the railroads suffered high rates of injury and death — facts noted by Henry David Thoreau, a critic of the market, transportation, and industrial revolutions of his day.

   We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man. … The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them … ; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon.

7. Senator L. J. Rose, from Testimony Taken by the United States Pacific Railway Commission, 1887.

   The railroads have made Southern California what it is to-day. Before the completion of the … Union and Central Pacific roads the southern half of California, which is now famous the world over as the most favored quarter in America in point of climate and soil conditions, was no more nor less than a barren sheep pasture. … Our redemption came in 1869, when the railroad people completed that gigantic and wonderful work … , giving California a direct rail connection with the East. The effect was marvelous and immediate. … We beheld ourselves in a day, as it were, surrounded by possibilities which made us a new and different people, in a new and completely changed land.