69. Early anecdotes of the railroad [238] on the part of the Federal Government, to reduce this State to obedience; but that we will consider the passage, by Congress, of any act authorizing the employment of a military or naval force against the State of South Carolina, her constituted authorities or citizens . . . as inconsistent with the longer continuance of South Carolina in the Union: and that the people of this State will ... forthwith proceed to organize a separate Government, and do all other acts and things which sovereign and independent States may of right do. ... Done in Convention at Columbia, 24 November 1832. A NEW PARTY Fanny Kemble, the famous English actress, who visited America in 1832, gives the following amusing description. of a journey by boat, stage, and railroad from New York to Philadelphia. The party embarked on the Philadelphia boat at six o'clock on an October morning, at the docks at the foot of Barclay Street, and crossing New York Bay sailed a few miles up the Raritan River. At about half-past ten we reached the place where we leave the river, to proceed across a part of the State of New Jersey to the Delaware. The landing was beyond measure wretched: the shore shelved down to the water's edge; and its marshy, clayey, sticky soil, rendered doubly soft and squashy by the damp weather, was strewn over with broken potsherds, stones, and bricks, by way of pathway; these, however, presently failed, and some slippery planks, half immersed in mud, were the only roads to the coaches that stood ready to receive the passengers of the steam-boat. Oh, these coaches! English eye hath not seen, English ear hath not heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of Englishmen to conceive the surpassing clumsiness and wretchedness of these leathern inconveniences. They are shaped something like boats, the sides being merely leathern pieces, removable at pleasure, but which, in bad weather, are buttoned down to protect the inmates from the wet. . . For the first few minutes I thought I must have fainted from the intolerable sensation of smothering which I experienced. However, the leathers having been removed, and a little more air obtained, I took heart of grace and resigned myself to my fate. Away walloped the four horses, trotting with their front, and galloping with their hind legs; and away we went after them, bumping, thumping, jumping, jolting, shaking, tossing, tumbling, over the wickedest road, I do think the cruellest, hard-heartedest road that ever wheel rumbled upon. Through bog and marsh, and ruts wider and deeper than any Christian ruts I ever saw, with the roots of trees protruding across our path; their boughs every now and then giving us an affectionate scratch through the windows; and more than once a half-demolished trunk or stump lying in the middle of the road lifting us up, and letting us down again, with the most awful variations of our poor coach body from its natural position. Bones of me! what a road! Even my father's solid proportions could not keep their level, but were jerked up to the roof and down again every three minutes. Our companions seemed nothing dismayed by these wondrous performances of a coach and four, but laughed and talked incessantly, the young ladies at the very top of their voices, and with the national nasal twang. . . . ... 1 At the end of fourteen miles we turned into a swampy field, the whole fourteen coachfuls of us, and, by the help of Heaven, bag and baggage were packed into the coaches which stood on the rail-way ready to receive us. These carriages were not drawn by steam, like those on the Liverpool rail-way, but by horses, with the mere advantage in speed afforded by the iron ledges, which, to be sure, compared with our previous progress through the ruts, was considerable. Our coachful got into the first carriage of the train, escaping, by way of especial grace, the dust which one's predecessors occasion. This vehicle had but two seats, in the usual fashion; each of which held four of us. The whole inside was lined with blazing scarlet leather, and the 1 The Liverpool and Manchester railway was opened in 1830. The Stephensons' prize locomotive, the Rocket, weighing four and one-half tons, drew cars at the rate of fifteen miles an hour, and demonstrated the success of the steam engine for rapid railway locomotion. windows shaded with stuff curtains of the same refreshing colo which, with full complement of passengers, on a fine, sunn American summer's day, must make as pretty a little miniatu hell as may be, I should think. The baggage-waggon, whi went before us, a little obstructed the view. . . . This railro is an infinite blessing; 't is not yet finished, but shortly will so, and then the whole of that horrible fourteen miles will performed in comfort and decency in less than half the tim In about an hour and a half we reached the end of our railro part of the journey, and found another steamboat waiting us, when we all embarked on the Delaware. . . . At about four o'clock we reached Philadelphia, having p formed the journey between that and New York (a distance o hundred miles) in less than ten hours, in spite of bogs, ruts, a all other impediments. The manager came to look after us and goods, and we were presently stowed into a coach which convey us to the Mansion House, the best reputed inn in Philadelph Miss Kemble had hardly left our strenuous shores wh another still more distinguished Englishwoman, M Harriet Martineau, historian, essayist, economist, came a two years' visit. The results of Miss Martineau's ext sive and discriminating observations on our politics, industries, our commerce, our manners and morals, our w and our worship, our charities and our children, were bodied in two remarkable volumes entitled "Society America." Miss Martineau writes of her journeys in South in the spring of 1835: The only railroads completed in the south, when I was th were the Charleston and Augusta one, two short ones in States of Alabama and Mississippi, and one of five miles f Lake Pontchartrain to New Orleans. There is likely to be so magnificent line from Charleston to Cincinnati; and the line f Norfolk, Virginia, to New York, is now almost uninterrupted My journeys on the Charleston and Augusta railroad by far the most fatiguing of any I underwent in the cour The motion and the noise are distracting. Whether this is owing to its being built on piles in many places; whether the fault is in the ground or the construction, I do not know. Almost all the rail-road travelling in America is very fatiguing and noisy. I was told that this was chiefly owing to the roads being put to use as soon as finished, instead of the work being left to settle for some months. How far this is true I do not pretend to say. The railroads which I saw in progress were laid on wood instead of stone. The patentee discovered that wood settles after frost more evenly than stone. The original cost in the State of New York, is about two thousand dollars per mile.1 One great inconvenience of the American rail-roads is that, from wood being used for fuel, there is an incessant shower of large sparks, destructive to dress and comfort, unless all the windows are shut; which is impossible in warm weather. Some serious accidents from fire have happened in this way; and during my last trip on the Columbia and Philadelphia rail-road, a lady in the car had a shawl burned to destruction on her shoulders; and I found that my own gown had thirteen holes in it; and my veil, with which I saved my eyes, more than could be counted.2. . . There are many rail-roads in Virginia, and a line to New York, through Maryland and Delaware. There is in Kentucky a line from Louisville to Lexington. But it is in Pennsylvania, New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, that they abound. All have succeeded so admirably, that there is no doubt of the establishment of this means of communication over nearly the whole of the United States, within a few years, as by-ways to great high-ways [rivers] which Nature has made to run through this vast country. . . . I believe the best-constructed rail-road in the 1 The average cost of modern railroad construction in the United States is given by Webb at $70,000 per mile. - New Dictionary of Statistics, p. 513. London, 1911. 2 These annoying injuries to apparel were not the only dangers of the early railroads. The first American-built locomotive, the Best Friend, unning on the Charleston railroad in 1830, was blown up "because an attendant, annoyed by the sound of the escaping steam, fastened down he safety-valve"! 70. Labor unrest in the thirties [238] States is the Boston and Lowell in Massachusetts; length, twent five miles. Its importance, from the amount of traffic upon may be estimated from the fact that some thousands of dolla were spent, the winter after it was opened, in clearing away fall of snow from it. It was again covered, the next night. Another line from Boston is to Providence, Rhode Islan forty-three miles long. This opens a very speedy communicati with New York; the distance, 227 miles, being performed twenty hours, by rail-road and steam-boat. ... There is now an uninterrupted communication from t Atlantic to the far end of Lake Michigan. It only remains extend a line thence to the Mississippi, and the circle is comple The decade 1830-1840 was marked by a great number enterprises, reforms, and innovations which showed awakening of interest among the people at large in pol cal and social questions, and a participation of the peop at large in such questions, to an extent never before kno in our history. The widening of the suffrage, the substi tion of elective for appointive offices, humanitarian refor in workhouses, asylums, and prisons, the multiplication inventions, the frequency of mass meetings and conventio the organization of temperance societies are all differ aspects of the "new democracy." One of the most int esting features of this social ferment is the labor agitat of the decade, of which Professor McMaster gives following summary: Along the sea-board, the hard times which followed the moval of the deposits [1833], and the depressed state of busin of every sort, caused by the State banks refusing loans, followed by a reduction of wages, and discontent among workingmen everywhere. . . . Four eastern factories had missed eleven hundred men. The blast furnaces of New Je would soon be put out. In Philadelphia but eight building mits had been issued during 1834, as against six hundred |