As social historian Gordon (Quinnipiac Coll.) ably demonstrates,
the creation of a national railroad was anything but an easy ride.
Early proponents of an interstate rail network faced enormous
troubles. There were Luddites, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, who
objected to the noise and smell of progress; legal battles, such as
the Supreme Court case in which a man named Beers was awarded
damages when a train killed several of his oxen (the court found
for the plaintiff because the train had been "speeding" at 20
m.p.h.); tensions between the rural and urban populations; and not
least of all, the budding conflict between North and South,
involving sectionalism and slavery, that would eventually explode
into the Civil War. Railroads were so deeply associated with the
industrial, urban North that they became a natural metaphor for
emancipation. No wonder railroad "union" was almost as difficult to
attain in that era as national union was. Gordon analyzes the
various disputes that went into the making of the railroads, and
she offers plenty of railroad lore along the way, citing liberally
from James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, and Charles Dickens,
among others, all of whom had much to say about the American
railways. Of the casual rural stations, for example, Dickens noted
wryly: "The train calls at stations in the woods, where the wild
impossibility of anybody having the smallest reason to get out is
only to be equaled by the apparently desperate hopelessness of
there being anybody to get in." And mores of railroad travel had
more than one contemporary observer up in arms: "To restore herself
to her caste, let a lady move in select company at 5 miles an
hour," declared one disgruntled gentleman. A solid, readable
history of America's fledgling railroad system. (Kirkus Reviews)
How the railroads transformed American life between 1829 and 1929,
and why the cost of their achievements was so damaging to the
social and economic life of the nation. A quite wonderful
book...richly textured and intellectually stimulating. Elizabeth
Blackmar, Columbia University. Selected by Choice as an outstanding
book for 1997."
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