Professor james campbell. James campbell is the ed grebe robinson professor of United States history at stanford university. s research focuses on american and africanAmerican History as well as the broader history of the blackplanet. He is also interested in problems of historical memory or the ways that society tells stories about their past, not only in textbooks but scholarly monographs and also historic sites, museums, memorials, movies and political movements. His publications include songs of zion, the africanamerican Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and south africa raise nation and empire in American History and middle passages africanamerican journeys. He is currently completing a book on the history and memory of the 1964 mississippi summer project and he is certainly one of our most distinguished historians here at stanford, please welcome james campbell. [ applause ] thank you very much for those remarks. One of the problems teaching at a place like this is one often feels quite fraudulent and i tell you as we talk on the subject for the same program is Richard White, not to mention others who are not here today whove worked on this project, i can pretty much say im the person who knows least about the Transcontinental Railroad on your program. But, when they asked me to be in the program, the first thing i said was why me . And when they asked me for a title i said without a moments thought western railroad revisited. Ive spent a lot of the last couple weeks what was i thinking when i gave that suggestion. But after this morning, ive come to believe it might be exactly the title that i wanted. For those of you who are familiar with it, there was a reference to a 1947 story by Nathaniel Hawthorne entitled the railroad that recounts the journey of the narrator and the city of destruction to the celestial city. Its obviously a riff on the greatest of all christian text the pilgrims progress by john bunyan. The narrator in hawthornes tale has not forged a pass to the celestial city is christian did, solitary soul beneath a huge burden. Instead he is a whisked along on a newly constructed railway accompanied by the companies representative and shareholder. His baggage no longer born at his shoulder, snuggly deposit in the baggage car neater attended by an attentive railroad staff composed of preempts beelzebub using the railway as a negotiated rightofway. The engineer is none other than a poly on, the demon with whom christian fought a fierce battle in the valley of humiliation. And on a bridge of elegance and the pilings rest on countless of books of philosophy which have somehow congealed into granite but this is really funny people, you are a tough crowd. Including germinal german rationalism confucius and various and do sayers as well as a few ingenious commentaries. We follow our narrator through the hills of difficulty in the valley of humiliation in the valley of the shadow of death and the mountains. Along the way he and other passengers occasionally climbed out the window making derogatory comments about the old School Program plotting away on the footpath whose preposterous obstinance he prevents them from taking advantage of this most modern improvement. They laugh when he occasionally is seen in the face along the stop is a place called vanity fair, and ancient city of vanity now teaming with new arrivals and a veritable cornucopia he of commodity. Author writes, many passengers stopped to take their pleasure and make their profits instead of going on to the celestial city. Such are the terms of the place that the people help affirm it to be true and heaven, contending there is no other that those who seek fourth are mere dreamers and that the brightness of the celestial city be but a bear mile on the gates of vanity, they would not be fooled enough to go hither. Well, again, on reflection this is precisely where i would like to start. The point hawthorne was making overall is that the railroad was not sent when we and new mode of transport but a new way of being in the world which promise to transform human beings relationships to space and time and to the Natural World and one another between the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, hed concern the utopian promise of the railroad is not so much a myth as a parcel truth but the promise of the new technology of prosperity and material comfort also came at a cost. As my colleague james written the quintessential 19thcentury invention and at the millennia in which the movement of people and goods that depended on the wind or animal draft power on peoples own muscles, human beings not only harness the power but had put it on wheels. In the process, they did radically alter the experience of space and time and this is indeed true as most of you know this. But, the set of standard time zones that we still operate on today, actually arent innovation introduced in the 1880s by the railroad. This is when the sun is directly ahead and that means the moon is a different time for you 100 miles that way then it is for me. Imagine trying to make a Railroad Schedule in those circumstances. Even before this thered been some recognition of the need for some sort of ordination in the localities had devised their own time zones of the state of indiana had 22. Obviously you cant run a railroad under these circumstances and in 1883, the result is the system which we have to this day. Railroads also ratted he transformed the power of nations as Richard White had written the railroads were coproductive. Like the skin of our body halted the 19thcentury world. The first battle of the American Civil War that northerners called the first full run to place at a Railway Junction and the confederate victory on that afternoon were secured by the lastminute arrival of brigadier johnsons army of the shenandoah that arrived i rail. The impact of the railroad at the cultural level was equally profound. Crystallizing new ideas about progress which would come to be associated as we continue to associate it today in ways i think we can rarely reflect upon with acceleration. The railroad became an irresistible subject of examination by artists and writers from hawthorne to melville to monet. As a last example reminds us, railroads were not exclusively an american phenomenon. They were global institutions, the first commercial railroad was in england if you had gone to the chicago ohare in 1983, England Center here on a ship and drove it on the rails and you could actually buy a ride on it. By 1880 europe boasted hundred 80,000 railroad miles. The closest analogue we had to the Transatlantic Railroad stories is the election in the late 19th century of the Trans Siberian Railroad which was completed in the early years of the 20th century. Railroads would play a central role in the elaboration of european empire in asia and africa. The pattern by which the rails were laid tells us a great deal about the nature of colonialism and its legacy. Notwithstanding the great dream of her Transcontinental Railroad running north, south, and stretching from cape to cairo, along what roads and the dream of being a continuous plexus of british controlled africa. Most of the railways that were erected in africa had a very different geography. But again this tells us pretty much we need to know about european colonialism. These railroads have nothing to do with developing political or even market economy but what they do is they connect deepwater ports, copperfield, the densest set of networks right around johannesburg and into kimberly the diamond field. Institutions designed to suck out the material good of africa and as efficiently as possible. Let me tell you the story briefly of just one line. The uganda line. We promise to connect the port of mombasa with the nile river system conjuring and african analog for the american system in which rails and water propelled by steam connected a vast internal market. At the same time that the line promise to accelerate the extraction of the bounty of the continent, they also promised to facilitate the highlands which would eventually become home to some 30,000 coffee and tea plantations. This deadly business, so deadly that contemporaries called it the lunatic line. Like the Transcontinental Railroad in the United States, the lunatic line was constructed by indentured asian labor in this case from south asia. At least 2500 of them died along the way, she figures slightly less for the Transcontinental Railroad. At least 100 of those died at the hands of a singularly clever pride of lions which learned to hunt workers. They were eventually shot and you can still see today in chicagos museum of Natural History. At least 500 people died in their short lives at the railroad traverse. This is hardly a history to be proud of but the line was hailed in its time as an emblem of european intrepidity and enterprise, a beefing of light and progress, consider the description of these members who rode the line in 1908, the railroad, wild man, wild beast does not differ from what it was in europe. That passenger was an american, u. S. President , theodore roosevelt, he come to africa on a hunting expedition on behalf of the smithsonian and what would become the museum of Natural History in new york city. Members of the party called thousands of specimens, roosevelt himself trapped more than 500 animals including 17 lions, 11 elephants and 20 rhinoceros i many of those animals you can still see today when you visit New York Museum of Natural History. So, the railway is a global story but, nowhere was its impact, economically, culturally and politically more profound in the United States expect to the case of the American Railroad , but not to the Transcontinental Railroad. To the east and midwest the possibility of the railroad are most dramatically so the story , as i imagine you know probably begins in the Early National period with debates over the propriety of federal support for internal improvement , initially for turnpikes leader for canals and eventually for railroads. All of these were seen as a central means not only to bind together the territories of the young nation but also to support Economic Growth by helping farmers settling in the bounty of the interior of the country to gain access by urban markets. Let us find the republic together with the perfect system of roads and canal declared john calhoun, let us conquer fate. Out of fear that a strong Central Government might institute savory but that the expression in the program of the whig and later the Republican Party embodied by such leaders as architects of the american system and the protigi, abraham lincoln. Lincoln who served one term in the Illinois State legislature which he devoted primarily to try to secure navigation improvement in the Sangamon River in order to help its constituents gain access to the mississippi and threw it to the market in the world. Abraham lincoln is the only american president who has a patent. The nature of the patent and heres a copy of it tells you a great deal about the world im trying to describe. This action, this inflatable balloon was set up to help net the draft of wrath. Lincoln knew a bit about that since floating down to new orleans by raft. Didnt make any money off of it. The most celebrated canal project and ultimately the canal system, this was completed in 1825 not from support of the federal government but of the state of new york. This allowed the perverse system of some 363 miles an elevation gain over 500 feet that connected the great lakes after much of the interior of the United States for the Hudson River Valley in new york city into the atlantic world. They pay less attention to it although in some ways it was the early consequential than what was happening at the other end the illinois and michigan canal started in 1836, open for traffic in 1848, it connected chicago with Lake Michigan to the mississippi. Insuring the entire mississippi drainage basically, vertically the entire United States east of the Rocky Mountains was now integrated into one steam driven market. Here is a slide of traffic of the illinois michigan canal. This economic historian has argued that the entire Railroad System was superfluous in terms of explaining american Economic Growth arguing that much the same could of been accomplished if the country had simply continued to build canals. Im not sure thats true but in any event its not what happened. The canal would be displaced by the railroad. By significant coincidence the completion of the illinois michigan canal in 1847 through 1848, coincided with two other singular developments. The first is the appearance of Cyrus Mccormicks mechanical reefer that enabled two men and a horde to harvest as much weed in a day as 10 men previously could. 1847 and 1848, also saw the completion of the first 10 miles of railroad moving west northwest out of the city of chicago, that would become the nine illinois united railway, short line to connect farmers in chicagos northwest hinterland with the market. Paid for, not by federal grants but by local communities themselves, it might seem like a quick adventure but in for five years something on the order of the million bushels of weed per year would carry chicago on its rails. Other railroads followed suit and by the end of the century something on the order of 30 different Rail Networks converged on chicago. Together hauling on average several million bushels of wheat per day into the city. They find an endless array of these maps, i will show you maps of two of the networks that give you some sense of how the rails actually operated and the density of the interconnection. This is the chicago Pacific Railway but the pacific is very much an afterthought. This one is closer to my heart, chicago northwestern and its closer to my heart because i grew up in that town right there. A little town called morrison, an Agricultural Community that owes its existence to that rail and it tells you also by county its the home of ronald reagan, draw your own conclusion. This internet thing im sure is going to catch on. This, one passenger train per day used to pastor my town when i was a kid coming west from chicago into central iowa then coming back at night it was called the k charlie and i remember this because it was quite old. Its an inspiring story, as a child, little girl gone out in a blizzard with a lantern to alert a train that a bridge was out and you could always tell when it was coming because at night in the wintertime, unlike other trains the light was not just a beam it rotated. Well, you get the point. The point of all of this is that this like any other way, they were simply wrong as they are good for this classic study of this metropolis, the western frontier was not so much a rescue from the city as the offspring. To be sure the vast grasslands of the middle east were nominal National Bounty and what made them viable for settlement was the access to the market of chicago and through chicago to the markets of the world. Its worth dwelling on this point a little bit because chicago would become the center of the nations Transportation Network but also aside of extraordinary economic innovation. Grain denominated in bushels was traditionally sold in bags. Like a bottle of vino noir, each bag was produced by individual growers and sold to an individual purchaser. That system remained a system that operated in chicagos rival, st. Louis. But, in chicago, the presence of the railroad, the endless procession of cars in the city each loaded with more than 300 bushels of grain and in dates necessitated a different system. Once graded for quality, grain was mixed in railcars and stopped up in cowering grain elevators, using innovation archimedes grew that it actually had been developed by ancient egyptians. Stored in these massive grain elevators, you can still see them all around the United States and then marketed in bulk through the chicago board of trade. What we are talking about here is the beginning of what we would call commodity trade which still operates for agricultural good for the city of chicago. The system came complete with an innovation so familiar to us that we sometimes forget how bizarre it is including the futures contract. A world in which people routinely bought and sold grain that they never actually possessed and never intended to possess, grain that in many cases has not even been grown, grain that was routinely bought and sold 10 or 20 times before it even found its way. The chicago board of trade today and one could tell similar stories about rails and other commodities and the Upper Peninsula of michigan about white pine, about cole and preeminently about cattle. This is the Union Stockyard and the time of the civil war and part of what the railroad did, talking a bit more about this momentarily, was allow the eradication of the buffalo, opening the vast grasslands for the term cowboy did not refer to people all who strummed guitars or five indians or shot each other at high noon, it actually referred to the people who drove cattle, the railhead, the places like abilene kansas and once they could be with the union stock car yards and initially the process of production was a mess , hogs and cows were driven through the streets. What you see here are the stockyards set up south of the city in 1865. There was an industry quickly controlled by a tiny number of meatpacking firms and youll recognize their name. Most firms developed a factory system , progress and acceleration. The first to do so was the armor fact which used steam power to create a set of steam hoists which basically allowed a carcass to be carried through and essentially butchered in a matter of minutes, effectively a disassembly line distract thing and extracting everything one contemporary said producing not only meet but hides, leather, glue, fertilizer, ammonia and gelatin. The occasion, we travel to the promissory start summit in utah where the railroad was completed. 150 years ago the Transcontinental Railroad was complete after river tycoon Leland Stanford hammered in a golden spike to mark the linking of the Central Pacific railroad from the west and the union Pacific Railroad from the east. Stanford University Professor tells the story about four key investors in the project that became known as the big four, hosted by the Stanford Historical society, this is 45 minutes. Good morning everyone. 150
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