The Pennsylvania Railroad, Volume 1

Building an Empire, 1846-1917

Albert J. Churella

• Editorial: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780812207620
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: North American History

"Do not think of the Pennsylvania Railroad as a business enterprise, " Forbes magazine informed its readers in May 1936. "Think of it as a nation." At the end of the nineteenth century, the Pennsylvania Railroad was the largest privately owned business corporation in the world. In 1914, the PRR employed more than two hundred thousand people—more than double the number of soldiers in the United States Army. As the self-proclaimed "Standard Railroad of the World, " this colossal corporate body underwrote American industrial expansion and shaped the economic, political, and social environment of the United States. In turn, the PRR was fundamentally shaped by the American landscape, adapting to geography as well as shifts in competitive economics and public policy. Albert J. Churella's masterful account, certain to become the authoritative history of the Pennsylvania Railroad, illuminates broad themes in American history, from the development of managerial practices and labor relations to the relationship between business and government to advances in technology and transportation.Churella situates exhaustive archival research on the Pennsylvania Railroad within the social, economic, and technological changes of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, chronicling the epic history of the PRR intertwined with that of a developing nation. This first volume opens with the development of the Main Line of Public Works, devised by Pennsylvanians in the 1820s to compete with the Erie Canal. Though a public rather than a private enterprise, the Main Line foreshadowed the establishment of the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1846. Over the next decades, as the nation weathered the Civil War, industrial expansion, and labor unrest, the PRR expanded despite competition with rival railroads and disputes with such figures as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. The dawn of the twentieth century brought a measure of stability to the railroad industry, enabling the creation of such architectural monuments as Pennsylvania Station in New York City. The volume closes at the threshold of American involvement in World War I, as the strategies that PRR executives had perfected in previous decades proved less effective at guiding the company through increasingly tumultuous economic and political waters.

Chapter 1

The Way West

1682–1826

Philadelphia, the city founded by William Penn in 1682 as a religious refuge for Quakers, lay atop a narrow strip of land separating the Delaware River from the Schuylkill. For the next hundred years, most of the settlement in the town—it could hardly yet be called a metropolis—clustered along the broad river that ran south toward the Delaware Bay, the Atlantic Ocean, and the wider world. By the end of the colonial period, Philadelphia was the leading commercial center in the mid-Atlantic region, surpassing New York and Boston. The merchants who dominated the economic, political, and intellectual life of the city collected raw materials from the surrounding hinterland while distributing to more rural locales the manufactured goods of an industrializing Britain.

The rising tide of capitalism did as much as the increasing demands for political liberty to sever the ties that bound Britain to its most valued colonial possession. The revolution that began in Boston soon spread to Philadelphia, a city that played a role second to none in shaping the destiny of the early republic. The authors of the Declaration of Independence, meeting in Philadelphia, did not advocate a rebellion against government, but instead demanded that governments be responsive to the will of the people, particularly those prosperous white men of property who chafed under British trade policies.

After the Revolution, mercantile elites insisted that economic growth would ensure the survival of the new nation while simultaneously promoting the public good. In 1787, the Constitution, also crafted in Philadelphia, created a system of political federalism, in which the central government and the states shared both the protection of the commonweal and the oversight of business activity. The Constitution included a commerce clause that gave the national government, and the national government alone, the power to oversee trade among the states. It would take many decades, and a great many cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, to delineate the parameters of federal and state involvement in the economy and in the affairs of business corporations. From the protection of individual physical and intellectual property rights to the creation of a stable national government, however, the Constitution gave notice that business and government would operate as allies rather than as enemies.

A great war had raged in the decade that separated the Declaration of Independence from the Constitution. The British had occupied Philadelphia, ready to hang anyone who had betrayed king and empire by affixing their name to Thomas Jefferson's document. The Continental Congress had fled west in 1777, across the gently rolling landscape, past the farms of the German Anabaptists who had been drawn to the area by Penn's experiment in religious tolerance. The Congress settled in Lancaster, and then in York, anxious to escape the wrath of the king's men. In the years following independence, both the national and state capitals resided in Philadelphia, yet they too soon migrated, one going north to New York and then south again to Washington, and the other moving progressively west, by 1812 reaching the site of the ferry that trading-post operator John Harris, Sr., had established in 1733, on the banks of the Susquehanna River.

Figure 1. Jack's Narrows, near Mt. Union, Pennsylvania, provided an excellent illustration of the role of geography in shaping the Main Line of Public Works—whose location in turn dictated much of the route of the Pennsylvania Railroad. From right to left are the Juniata River (which the commonwealth's General Assembly had decreed to be a free waterway, open to navigation by all); the Juniata Division Canal and adjacent towpath, a part of the state-owned Main Line of Public Works; and the Pennsylvania Railroad, which mixed private and public ownership.

Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Pennsylvania State Archives.

Cities such as Lancaster, York, and Harrisburg were geographically proximate to Philadelphia, but their residents were more apt to look southward, along the Susquehanna River, to Baltimore. On the journey from western Pennsylvania and upstate New York, the wide, shallow Susquehanna, Algonquin for “muddy water,” and the longest river in the eastern United States, passed Harrisburg, then split Lancaster and York counties before entering Maryland and flowing onward to Chesapeake Bay. As an artery of commerce, the river proved far superior to the local roads and did much to divert Pennsylvania's trade away from Philadelphia.

To the north and west of Harrisburg, the Juniata carried the clear, cold waters of the Appalachians down to the Susquehanna River. Above the headwaters of the Juniata lay the summit of the Alleghenies. Later generations of Pennsylvania Railroad train crews—brakemen standing atop swaying boxcars, their ability to leap from one to the other their only protection against death, and their skill with a brake club the only defense against catastrophe, enginemen straining to make out the signals cloaked by the fog that rose, wraithlike, from the hollows—would refer to this area simply as “The Mountain,” but for now the great gray-green mass lay still and silent, pristine in its wildness. For generations, those mountains constituted a serious impediment to westward expansion, but they also concealed some of the world's richest deposits of coal, the essential fuel for the first industrial revolution.

West of the summit, some of the waters flowed down the valley of the Conemaugh and eventually toward the Allegheny River. They went past Johnstown, barely a clearing in the woods before the Western Division of the Pennsylvania Canal and then the Pennsylvania Railroad accelerated settlement there, building a community that would one day be obliterated by the most catastrophic flood in American history.¹ The Allegheny joined the Monongahela River, forming the Ohio, whose waters flowed down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, two thousand river miles away. That too was a natural trade route that long predated the arrival of the railroad, as flat-boats set off from Pittsburgh, bound for New Orleans. The city that saw them depart had once been

Fort Duquesne, where an overconfident and inexperienced George Washington, a colonel in the Virginia militia, failed to take the French stronghold, surrendered his own garrison at Fort Necessity, and started the Seven Years’ War. In that conflict, General Edward Braddock, in charge of a British army that, in 1755, was very much still allied with the colonials, traveled through the same area before leading his Redcoats to their slaughter at the hands of the French and their Indian allies.

A hundred years later, the French, the Indians, and the British had all been driven from the land between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. In their place lay the burnished iron rails of the Pennsylvania Railroad, a company that would soon become the mightiest railroad in the United States and, by some measures, the largest business corporation in the world. The geography of Pennsylvania shaped that state's history and likewise dictated the path that the Pennsylvania Railroad would follow across the mountains. But geography alone was not destiny, and the people of Pennsylvania shaped their own course and that of the Pennsylvania Railroad. They did so not merely by creating a “private” company, but by blending the public and private spheres into a mixed enterprise, one that was shaped as much by the government as by the marketplace.

In 1846, Philadelphia's merchant elite brought the Pennsylvania Railroad into existence. They were able to do so, however, only within the public policy framework that the Constitution had established in 1787. The federal government had provided the political and legal structure in which the company operated, and it had made states the primary incubators of internal improvements and economic growth. Legislators who gathered at the state capital in Harrisburg had ushered into existence turnpikes, canals, and railroads that delineated Pennsylvania's economic landscape. They also granted the corporate charter that created the PRR and made that railroad the commonwealth's economic champion.

The PRR was by no means the first attempt to employ internal improvements to bind together the people and the places of the commonwealth. Before there was the Pennsylvania Railroad, there was the Main Line of Public Works, the peoples’ thoroughfare that linked Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The development of the Main Line, and of the other components of Pennsylvania's vast system of internal improvements, was a product of geography, but even more so of government. The resulting artery of commerce was far from ideal, but it largely established the spatial, economic, and political parameters that shaped the early development of the Pennsylvania Railroad. In 1846, when Philadelphians obtained a legislative charter for the PRR, they were the inheritors of many decades of public policy. The route that they subsequently followed, between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, had been laid out before them.

Improving the New Republic

By the time of the Early Republic, a broad spectrum of the new nation's residents supported the federal government's role in the process of national improvement. Such zeal for expanding the reach of government was hardly inconsistent with the republican tendencies of the revolutionary generation. Instead, it represented a widespread belief that government should play a critical role in safeguarding hard-won freedoms by enhancing transportation, commerce, defense, and education in order to promote the well-being of the body politic. By the early years of the nineteenth century, however, internal improvements had increasingly come to mean transportation improvements, both to ensure national security and to promote commercial development.²

In the years immediately following the American Revolution, private enterprise promised to deliver the economic rewards associated with improved transportation. Such was the case with the Patowmack (Potomac) Company, established in 1785 as a mechanism for improving navigation along its namesake river. At a time when private investors possessed little basis for evaluating a company's worth, the naming of George Washington as the president of the enterprise afforded the project substantial public respect. Washington suggested that the company would provide great benefits for the new nation, yet Washington's native state of Virginia and his lands in the Ohio Valley were certain to receive the largest reward. Even though Washington's love of country seemed above suspicion, Marylanders harbored grave doubts about his fellow Virginians, and they did their best to postpone a canal that would benefit one state more than another.

Most of the early privately sponsored postwar internal improvement projects—including the Potomac Company—were unsuccessful. The newness of the nation, shortages of capital, and a scarcity of skilled canal engineers undoubtedly contributed to the failures. However, many Americans saw through the noble republican rhetoric of internal-improvement promoters and believed that the elites, and the federalists in particular, had supported these projects solely for personal gain. Improved transportation was too important to a vibrant economy and national security, they argued, to be left to private enterprise. It was likewise a national goal, and the rights of states should not be allowed to interfere, as had been the case with the long-standing feud between Virginia and Maryland over the right to improve the Potomac River. Thus, where local private enterprise had failed, they assumed that national government would set things right.³

Curiously, the desire of many Americans to safeguard transportation from the elites conflicted with their other goal of formulating a national internal-improvement policy. Alexander Hamilton, scion of the federalists, drew considerable criticism for his insistence that the future of the United States must be tied to the economic welfare of the moneyed gentry. In addition to his efforts to restore the nation's tarnished credit, through the federal assumption of state debts and the creation of a national bank, Hamilton favored industrialization and internal improvements, following the British model. In his 1791 Report on Manufactures, he suggested that tariffs could be used to subsidize domestic production, and to finance a network of roads and canals that would tie the nation together.⁴

Thomas Jefferson, one of Hamilton's most ardent critics, disagreed with most of the recommendations contained in the Report on Manufactures, including federal support for road and canal construction. Yet Jefferson and his allies were not ideologically opposed to internal improvements, or to public support for such ventures. After all, Albert Gallatin, secretary of the treasury to both Jefferson and James Madison, became the best-known advocate of federally sponsored internal improvements. Although he was a Jeffersonian republican, Gallatin overcame his initial opposition to Hamiltonian federalism and soon came to appreciate the need for government-fostered economic growth. Unlike Europe, he noted, the United States suffered from a low population density and a scarcity of capital. Those two characteristics retarded commercial development and constituted a serious obstacle to the nation's success. The federal government could circumvent such problems through support for transportation improvements, thus underwriting economic growth and in effect magnifying the efforts and resources of a small national population. In 1808, Gallatin presented his comprehensive internal-improvement plan to Congress, in the form of a Report of the Secretary of the Treasury on the Subject of Roads and Canals. Among other projects, Gallatin called for four isthmian canals: at Cape Cod, between the Hudson and Delaware rivers in New Jersey, across the Delmarva Peninsula, and connecting the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia and Albemarle Sound in North Carolina. More ambitiously, Gallatin envisioned several routes from the Atlantic seaboard to the interior, including one along the Susquehanna, Juniata, and Allegheny rivers in Pennsylvania, to be composed of river improvements, canals, and turnpikes.⁵

Gallatin's report was in part an innovative agenda for an integrated national transportation network, and in part a compilation of local infrastructure proposals. By the time that Gallatin issued his recommendations, near the end of Jefferson's second term, it was apparent that the local orientation had triumphed over the national perspective. There was the practical matter that—despite Gallatin's optimistic budget predictions—the federal treasury lacked the money to pay for such an ambitious slate of projects, but the principal objections were constitutional, not financial. The Constitution did not explicitly grant the federal government the authority to undertake transportation improvements, or for that matter to levy tariffs for any purpose other than to raise revenue. During the administrations of Jefferson and his successors, members of Congress were engaged in often-rancorous debate as to whether they possessed the authority to fund any internal-improvement projects at all. Furthermore, many Americans worried that federal aid would unavoidably give preference to some states and locales above others, leading to divisiveness that the young republic could ill afford. Such largess, they believed, would also spawn corruption, as unscrupulous promoters would feed at the public trough, enriching themselves at the expense of the people. They perceived the potential for endless debates, favoritism, corruption, and influence peddling, attendant to the allocation of federal funds to particular local interests, making a mockery of the republican ideals associated with the Revolution. Reflecting widespread mistrust of a large standing army, some insisted that a more efficient transportation system could extend the reach of federal power, although Gallatin's supporters argued that rapid deployments would enable a smaller and less threatening military to guard national borders.⁶

Concerns over the limits of federal authority paralyzed Congress, ensuring that only a few select types of internal improvements received national aid. Congress established the constitutionality of assistance for lighthouses and harbor improvements, based on the clear constitutional prerogatives of commerce and national defense. Federal oversight of post offices and post roads was deemed acceptable, because a postal system provided immediate and tangible benefits to virtually every citizen, and because one locale did not benefit at the expense of another. Although a series of prominent political leaders spoke out in favor of federal support for other internal improvements, claiming to be acting for the good of the nation and all of its people, their altruistic rhetoric often thinly camouflaged personal motivations and local orientations. In that context, citizens were inclined to be suspicious of any proposal to unite disparate locales through internal improvements, particularly if those projects promised to confer the bulk of their benefits on a small group of elites.⁷

Ultimately, however, federal government support for internal improvements, such as it was, occurred because the people wanted better transportation. They instructed their elected officials to get what they could from the federal treasury, confident that they would be the winners, and other locales the losers. With the federalists out of power, the national government seemed less despotic and more of a resource, with funds to be withdrawn as needed. Naturally, virtually every politician who advocated a local project sought to connect that work to some grand scheme of national betterment, but most people understood that that rhetoric only made the exploitation of government more palatable, and more in keeping with republican ideals.⁸

As such, relatively few projects truly offered the potential for interregional transportation. Chief among them was the National Road, seen as a mechanism for binding the Northwest Territories to the existing states. The 1802 Enabling Act, in addition to granting statehood to Ohio, specified that a portion of public land sales be set aside for road construction, relieving the federal treasury of any financial burden. The choice of route was nonetheless highly politicized, with members of Congress from both Pennsylvania and Virginia voicing displeasure at the decision to build westward through Maryland. Pennsylvanians demanded and received an alteration in the route to include the settlements of Uniontown and Washington, confirming the fears of those who believed that sectional rivalries would take precedence over the national good whenever federal funding was involved. In any event, the March 1806 act that authorized the building of the National Road lay dormant until 1811, when construction finally commenced.⁹

The War of 1812 created deep political divisions in the United States while exposing the embarrassing weaknesses of American coastal defenses and the difficulty of moving troops and supplies with any degree of speed. By the time peace returned in 1815, Americans were anxious to use the power of the federal government to rectify each of those problems. The federalists, those who would be most likely to support nationally sponsored public works, had by that time lost much of their influence. The Hartford Convention, which met in December 1814 and January 1815, illustrated the depths of New England's opposition to the war, ...