Historians have long assumed that new industrial machines and power
sources eliminated work animals from nineteenth-century America,
yet a bird's-eye view of nineteenth-century society would show
millions of horses supplying the energy necessary for industrial
development. Horses were ubiquitous in cities and on farms,
providing power for transportation, construction, manufacturing,
and agriculture. On Civil War battlefields, thousands of horses
labored and died for the Union and the Confederacy hauling wagons
and mechanized weaponry.
The innovations that brought machinery to the forefront of
American society made horses the prime movers of these machines for
most of the nineteenth century. Mechanization actually increased
the need for horsepower by expanding the range of tasks requiring
it. Indeed, the single most significant energy transition of the
antebellum era may have been the dramatic expansion in the use of
living, breathing horses as a power technology in the development
of industrial America.
Ann Greene argues for recognition of horses' critical
contribution to the history of American energy and the rise of
American industrial power, and a new understanding of the reasons
for their replacement as prime movers. Rather than a result of
"inevitable" technological change, it was Americans' social and
political choices about power consumption that sealed this animal's
fate. The rise and fall of the workhorse was defined by the kinds
of choices that Americans made and would continue to make--choices
that emphasized individual mobility and autonomy, and assumed,
above all, abundant energy resources.
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