The proliferation of steamboat companies and railroad lines in the first half of the nineteenth century brought dizzying changes to American life. Overland journeys that in 1810 had required weeks of travel and careful planning by 1860 could be achieved in mere days with the purchase of a ticket. Scholars tend to emphasize the economic implications of these shifting patterns of movement, pointing to the role that fast, regular, mechanized transport played in early industrialization and the spread of plantation slavery. Aaron W. Marrs's new book, The American Transportation Revolution, takes a different tack. Marrs argues that the advent of steam transit altered not only conditions of production but habits of mind in the decades before the US Civil War. His book synthesizes two decades of scholarship on race, gender, technology and mobility while adding new perspectives derived from his deep engagement with nineteenth-century print and material culture. The result is a study of the cultural and social dimensions of steam-powered travel that shows how everyday users adapted these new, transformative technologies to their own ends. At the same time, Marrs shows that the experience and effects of steam travel varied greatly along lines of race, gender and age.
Few diarists in pre-Civil War America failed to record their first encounters with steam transport; they recognized the steam engine as a dynamic new force in American life. In the first four chapters, Marrs describes how encounters with this novel technology altered social relations and artistic production in the United States before the Civil War. The steam engine emerged as a metaphor for a fast-paced age. ‘Steam transit’, Marrs writes, ‘quickly exploded in the cultural realm to be a conduit for talking about a plethora of topics’ (p. 102). The language of speed and pressure became standard features of the American vernacular, and schoolhouse lectures and Sunday sermons deployed the steam engine as a motif. On a more practical level, the commodification of mobility – the transformation of travel into something provided by a company and purchased with a ticket – changed both the experience and the meaning of travel. Distance itself appeared to shrink with the spread of steam locomotion; travellers marvelled at the prospect of taking their morning tea in one city and their evening meal in another. Commodified steam travel also introduced new kinds of experiences and expectations for travelers. Rail and steam companies’ strict schedules underscored the importance of punctuality, for example, and etiquette books instructed readers on how to comport themselves amidst strangers in the confined space of a railroad carriage.
The pundits and politicians (mostly white men) who surveyed these changes found it easy to speak of the steam engine as the embodiment of a spirit of progress that they believed characterized the nineteenth century. But, as Marrs is careful to show, the implications of mechanized travel varied significantly according to one's social position. The last three chapters address the experiences of African Americans, white women and children on steam transit and the divergent ways they responded to these new technologies. The chapter on black travellers in the age of steam is of particular note. Here Marrs builds on recent work by scholars of black mobilities to offer a nuanced portrait of African American engagement with steam transit. For free black travellers, the promises of commodified transit were contingent on the whims of conductors and white fellow passengers and subject to the indignities of segregation. Black northerners fought some of the first American civil rights campaigns to secure equal access to travel. For enslaved African Americans, the creation of rail and steamboat lines posed distinct perils. Construction and operations of transport infrastructure in the US South often depended on forced labour, and rail and steamship lines facilitated the family separations and forced migrations that characterized the domestic slave trade. At the same time, the rapid travel made possible by the steam engine abetted the escapes of many of the people who fled bondage in the years before the Civil War. Rail and steamboat journeys on the Underground Railroad looked nothing like the commodified travel enjoyed by white passengers – enslaved people had to stow away, plot their own routes, bribe conductors and conceal their identities. In doing so, they turned these transit technologies to ends that railroad and steamboat executives distinctly did not intend.
The American Transportation Revolution makes a convincing case that historians should think of the development of steam transit not only as an economic phenomenon but as a social and cultural one as well. Historians of the United States seeking a primer on the cultural influence of these technologies will benefit from Marrs's synthesis, and historians of technology will appreciate his sensitivity to the ways in which everyday users interact with new inventions. Americans’ early engagements with steam transit may resonate as well with twenty-first century readers who are trying to come to grips with the role information technology has played in shaping patterns of thought and social expectations today. Marrs alludes to these parallels only briefly at the end of the book, but the point is clear. The age of steam is not as distant from our own as it may at first appear.
