USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts. 1630-1880, Vol. IV > Part 14
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In this short journey he may witness the working of the great economic laws by which human welfare is assured in the end, however much it may have been retarded by obstructive statutes enforcing slavery or preventing commerce among men and nations. He may prove one proposition which underlies all progress; namely, that the more completely the productions of the factory, the field, the forest, or the mine are compassed by the applica- tion of machinery, the less the number of persons needed in the art, the shorter the hours of labor, the higher the wages or earnings, and the lower the cost of the finished commodity. In a seven-days' journey the citizen of Boston may still study the industrial facts of two hundred and fifty years' progress, and witness with his own eyes most of the arduous conditions of life to which his ancestors were subjected; while the citizens of the late slave-stricken States may in an equal time, by visiting New England, find evidence of the opportunity for welfare and progress which has been opened to them only within the present generation by the removal of the curse of slavery.
The writer has attempted to bring into view the necessary development of manufactures in a free community ; first, as handicrafts, sometimes pur- sued in the factory, but mainly in the workshops and homes of the people ; second, in the modern factory, in which complex machinery operated by water or steam power is applied, and the work is so divided that it may happen that a single small cam must pass through various processes and machines operated by sixty different persons, before it is ready for its place in the sewing-machine of which it forms a part.
This development has proceeded in Boston under the grave disadvan- tages of frequent change in the system of national taxation, by which the direction in which its citizens might safely use their capital has been con- stantly altered. It has witnessed many periods like those predicted by Mr. Webster in the great speech to which reference has been made, when
BOSTON AS A CENTRE OF MANUFACTURING CAPITAL. 109
" agriculturists have been taxed to-day to sustain manufactures, com- merce taxed to-morrow to sustain agriculture, and then impositions pro- posed upon both manufactures and agriculture to sustain commerce," by means of subsidies and bounties. The first chapter of the next Memorial History may record the fact, that, soon after this Memorial was written, the conclusion had become general which was presented by Mr. Webster more than sixty years since, as the spokesman of the great merchants and manu- facturers of Boston by whom that Faneuil Hall meeting was then called, " that when government had exhausted its invention in these modes of legislation, it found the result less favorable than the original and natural course of things," and they were then given up.
Fortunately for this nation, the perpetuity of the Union of these States was assured by that provision of the Constitution which forbids any State law being passed, interfering with or obstructing commerce between thè sev- eral States. The commerce of a continent thus united must ever be vastly greater than any foreign traffic across the sea ; and under its beneficent work- ing the conditions of manufacturing in Boston, and the application of its capital, have been fostered and promoted more than they could be harmed by the interruption to its foreign commerce, on which the town so much de- pended in its early history. The railroad has overcome the obstacles of time and distance; and by bringing the cost of moving a year's subsistence of flour and meat a thousand miles to the measure of a single day's work of a good mechanic, it has effected a vast development of manufactures in and around the city, thus giving employment to persons who without this power would have been forced to labor arduously in the effort to glean a more scanty subsistence from our sterile soil. Coincident with the working of the railway have come the application of steam power, the use of gas, the elevator, and the application of complex machinery to every variety of work. Under the combined action of these forces the upper stories of the , great warehouses of the new city have become one vast factory.
But the necessity or convenience of living near their work has caused an unwholesome concentration of the working people in the narrow streets of the older parts of the city. Within the municipal limits, however, are still great areas of almost unoccupied territory, in which the mink may be trapped and musk-rats are the most numerous inhabitants. When the next Memo- rial History is written, the record of the last two decades of the nineteenth century will cover the effects of the telephone, of the elevated railroad, of the diffusion of steam-power over wide areas, of the electric light, and perhaps of the transmission of power by electricity. It may then, possibly, be writ- ten that at about the present date, or a little later, the manufactures of Boston were moved from the upper stories of the crowded centre, and were spread over the whole area of its territory in low and broad factories, well lighted and ventilated, to which the power and the light were trans- mitted from the seaboard where the coal was landed; and that at the same time the working people were transferred from the unwholesome
IIO
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
streets, courts, and tenement-houses in which they had been confined to detached dwellings, each occupying its own small parcel of land; while the owners and managers remained in the central offices, using the telephone in the direction of the work, and passing quickly to the factory over elevated roadways, free from the obstruction of snow or of the city traffic, and on cars worked by electricity.
To this record of the change in the city factory system, it may perhaps be added that the rediscovered method of saving green crops in pits had made it possible for the working people in the factories to spend the greater leisure which the constant improvement in machinery in their factory work had enabled them to enjoy, in keeping cows and poultry, and in establishing gardens on small parcels of land which had never before sufficed for such purposes. In such event, it may be written that the more the few had gained in wealth the more the many gained in welfare; that both capitalist and laborer had learned, once for all, that all interests are harmonious; and that personal liberty, under laws enacted for the sole purposes of pro- moting education and establishing justice, with the least possible interfer- ence with the freely chosen pursuits of the people, had proved to be the key to the greatest prosperity of all classes of society.
Edward arkincon
CHAPTER V.
THE CANAL AND RAILROAD ENTERPRISE OF BOSTON.
BY CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, JR. Member of the Massachusetts Board of Railroad Commissioners from 1869 to 1879; and Chairman of the Board from 1872 to 1879.
T `HE Erie Canal was opened in 1825. The success of that great public work, and the consequences more or less remote which it involved were at the time matter for very serious reflection to those having the ma- terial future of Boston at heart. So far as the interior of the continent and the commerce of the great lakes were concerned, these were questions by themselves. They hardly came within the New England business horizon. What the more far-seeing Bostonians then had in view was the supremacy of their city as a local centre. This, the success of the Erie Canal greatly jeopardized; for that canal was part of a growing system of interior com- munication, which system had now in turn received from it a strong impe- tus. Canal navigation, however, naturally followed the course of the rivers, and none of the considerable New England rivers were tributary to Boston. On the contrary, the Blackstone flowed by Providence, and the Connecticut by Hartford; both of which towns were but stopping-places on the way to New York. It was obvious, therefore, that a natural development of any New England canal-system would make all the interior counties of Massa- chusetts tributary to New York, and leave Boston isolated.
The problem of 1825 was, then, how to overcome, or, if not to overcome, at least to counteract in so far as might be, the natural disadvantages of situation. Nor was this problem now presented for the first time. The scale was merely somewhat enlarged. As respects diversion of traffic, the Merrimac had once threatened to be to Boston what the Blackstone and Connecticut were now becoming. Improvements in the channel of that river had made it inevitable that, unless something was done to control events, the whole interior of New Hampshire would look to Portsmouth as its point of distribution, instead of to Boston. The Middlesex Canal had then solved the difficulty. This, the first considerable thing of the sort undertaken in America, had been projected very shortly after the close of the Revolutionary struggle: indeed, it was characteristic of the people that just so soon as politics and war ceased to occupy their whole thoughts, their
II2
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
surplus mental activity directed itself towards questions of internal improve- ment. The idea of a canal, intended to connect the upper waters of the Merrimac with Boston Harbor, was then conceived.
The act incorporating the company authorized to build this canal passed the Legislature in June, 1793, and received the signature of Governor Han- cock, then in the last year of his life. Among the corporators were James Winthrop of Cambridge, Oliver Prescott of Groton, James Sullivan of Bos- ton, and Jonathan Porter of Medford. No amount of capital or number of shares of stock was fixed. The original plan was to connect the Merrimac at some point in Chelmsford with the Mystic at a point in Medford; but the charter was subsequently so amended that the southern outlet was at tidewater in Charlestown, on the Charles. The surveys were made by an English engineer named Weston, educated in the James Brindley school of canal constructors; and it is said that the first levelling instrument ever made use of in America was used in the location of the Middlesex Canal.1 The whole process of the work was superintended by Loammi Baldwin, the elder of the name. Baldwin was a native of Woburn, and had been a colonel in the Revolutionary army. A son of his, also a civil engineer, later bore the same name and title, which thus became closely associated with all the early schemes of internal improvement in Massachusetts.2
Twenty-seven miles in length, this canal, in going northward from tide- water, ascended one hundred and seven feet by means of thirteen locks. It reached its highest altitude in North Billerica, where it drew its supply of water from the Concord River. Then crossing that river it descended twenty-one feet, by means of three locks, striking the Merrimac above the Pawtucket Falls, in what was then East Chelmsford, subsequently, in 1824, incorporated as Lowell. The bed of the canal was four feet deep and thirty wide. It was navigated by boats of twenty-four tons burden, which occupied twelve hours in the average passage through it; and, by means of improve- ments in the Merrimac, water-connection was made as far north as Concord, New Hampshire, some seventy-five miles from Boston.
While the Middlesex Canal was in course of construction, a project for a similar work to connect Worcester County with the seaboard at Boston was also agitated. Its route even had been surveyed by General Knox, of Rev- olutionary fame, in 1791. It encountered however another project, much better designed, for a canal along the Blackstone to Providence; and, be- tween the jealousies excited by the two conflicting schemes, nothing at this time came of either.
1 Stuart's Civil and Military Engineers of America, p. 129.
2 The surname is, however, more familiar in another connection. One autumn day, while sur- veying the route of the Middlesex Canal in Bill- erica, old Colonel Baldwin chanced across an apple tree, the fruit of which was very red and handsome ; upon trial he found it, also, to be so
excellent in flavor that he thereafter took pains to grow an orchard from that tree, which thus became the progenitor of the famous Baldwin apple ; which seems likely to perpetuate its dis- coverer's name long after the canal he built, already abandoned and filled up, shall be forgot- ten. [See Colonel Wilder's chapter in this vol- ume .- ED.]
113
THE CANAL AND RAILROAD ENTERPRISE OF . BOSTON.
In 1825, therefore, the whole practical experience of the people of Boston in the matter of canals had been limited to the Middlesex. Neither had that experience been of at all an encouraging nature. The canal itself, and the river improvements of the Merrimac necessarily involved in the enterprise, cost together upwards of half a million of dollars, -a very large sum for the time, when the whole assessed valuation of Boston was but fif- teen millions. It meant probably much more than an investment of twenty millions would have meant in 1880. Begun in 1794, the canal was opened to traffic in 1803, and during the next thirty years was of great commercial use in bringing to Boston the lumber and produce of the region tributary to the upper Merrimac, and carrying general merchandise back; but the terri- torial area thus drained and supplied was after all insignificant in extent, and neither rich nor populous. The gross annual income of the canal company was accordingly never much over $20,000, and during the first fifteen years of operation no dividends were paid on its stock. After 1818, and until the railroad was built, they averaged about one and a half per cent a year. They then ceased altogether. Financially, therefore, the un- dertaking was far from being a success. After 1835 traffic fell rapidly off, and the receipts failed to meet the expenses of repair; consequently, busi- ness was finally suspended on June 1, 1853, and in 1859 the charter of the company was declared forfeited.1
The Middlesex Canal had, therefore, been twenty-two years in operation, when in October, 1825, Governor De Witt Clinton, of New York, made his triumphal passage in a state barge from Lake Ontario to the mouth of the Hudson, and symbolized the union of the two by mingling their waters. The people of Massachusetts, however, had not waited for this event before they began to bestir themselves. While practical men were turning over the plans and estimates for a canal like the Middlesex, as far at least as Wor- cester County, and possibly to the Connecticut, some of the more visionary had suddenly enlarged the horizon, and were looking to the Hudson. In fact, stimulated thereto by the eager confidence of these believers in the possibilities of the future, the Legislature had already, by a resolve which bore date on Feb. 25, 1825, provided for a commission "to ascertain the practicability of making a canal from Boston Harbor to Connecticut River," and " of extending the same to some point on the Hudson River in the State of New York, in the vicinity of the junction of the Erie Canal with that river." The report of that commission, a bulky document, for those days, of two hundred and sixty pages, was transmitted to the Legislature by Governor Lincoln, on Jan. II, 1826. Subsequent experience has lent a peculiar interest and significance to it. It illustrates very forcibly the dif- ference between estimates and actual cost.
.
1 [Caleb Eddy published an Historical Sketch of the Middlesex Canal in 1843; and this and various other bibliographical items regarding it are given in Hunnewell's Bibliography of VOL. IV. - 15.
Charlestown, 1880. See also Amory's James Sullivan, i. and ii .; and Drake's Landmarks of Middlesex, and History of Middlesex County. - ED.]
.
114
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
The surveys were made by the younger Colonel Loammi Baldwin, the elder having died in 1807, and were in two parts. One covered the route from Boston to the Connecticut River; the other, that from the Connecticut to the Hudson. . The eastern part of the proposed work presented, com- paratively speaking, few difficulties. There were two practicable lines found, - the southern by way of Worcester, and the northern by way of Fitchburg. The northern, or Miller's River route, was finally recommended for two reasons : (1) because the Berkshire Hills, west of the Connecticut, could be passed only at one point, and that in direct continuation of the Miller's River route; and (2) because it was "to be presumed that when boats have passed down the [Connecticut] River over the serious difficulties which exist from the mouth of Miller's River, they will continue on to Hart- ford, - the channel being clear and the distance short, - rather than pro- ceed to Boston; and consequently all the country above Miller's River, instead, as is ardently desired, of looking to the latter city as a great market for sale and purchase, may gradually seek and ultimately find one in another direction, which would render a canal that shall intersect Connecticut River at Springfield of little comparative consequence to Boston."
A strong preference accordingly was expressed for the northern line. The rise and fall to be overcome was reported at one thousand nine hundred and fifty-six feet, calling for about four hundred locks. The approximate cost of the work was estimated at $3,000,000, - of which $20,000, it was thought, would suffice for land damages and water rights, and $20,000 more for building the necessary reservoirs. The cost of the canal proper was estimated at an average of $8,000 per mile.
Crossing the Connecticut, the problem became in one sense far more difficult to solve, though in another sense it was almost distressingly simple. There was but one point at which the Berkshire range could be penetrated by a canal at all, and that was at the point where the Deerfield River, on the east side of the Hoosac Mountain, and the Hoosac River, on its west side, are but four miles apart, - the point where the Hoosac Tunnel now is, the idea of which was thus first suggested. The canal-tunnel project was adopted by Colonel Baldwin as the only alternative to a system of locks crossing the hills through the Stamford and Reedsborough gorge in the same vicinity, but beyond the Vermont line. Not that he considered this last method of overcoming the difficulty at all impracticable. On the con- trary, his surveys, he claimed, made its feasibility very probable. His objections were based on the increased length of route involved, the conse- quent cost, and the loss of time in operating. There would have to be, he argued, two hundred and twenty locks in eighteen miles of canal, requiring two days in the passage. The cost of these extra eighteen miles of lockage was estimated at $2,090,000. The tunnel, on the contrary, would require only one hour and twenty minutes in its passage, "provided it is furnished with a towing path, which should be the case."
The cost of this tunnel, Colonel Baldwin then went on to report, "it
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THE CANAL AND RAILROAD ENTERPRISE OF BOSTON.
is difficult to ascertain with much exactness, although great exertions have been made to collect information on the subject." In view, however, of the subsequent experience of the State in piercing that very mountain, Colonel Baldwin's now long-forgotten original estimate is one of the curiosities of engineering literature. It was made, it is true, when the purchasing value of the dollar, as respects both labor and material, was much greater than it now is; but on the other hand this advantage was far more than off-set by the facts that tunnelling had not then become a science, and that the work was to be done by hand-drilling, with the use of no explosive more power- ful than gunpowder. Indeed, it may, in the light of subsequent experience, well be doubted whether under such circumstances it was, humanly speak- ing, possible to tunnel the mountain at any cost. Colonel Baldwin, however, made his estimates with caution, availing himself of all the light which ex- perience could then afford. He said : " In a tunnel four miles in length, of the size named, there will be two hundred and eleven thousand two hun- dred cubic yards of stone to excavate, which at $4.25 per cubic yard amounts to $920,832." But in reaching this result the highest price which any tunnel has cost per cubic yard had been assumed, in order to put his estimate " beyond a doubt." He then added: "Thus it appears that the construction of a tunnel will be $1,169,168 less than the expense of cross- ing the mountain in Vermont."
These conclusions did not at the time pass unchallenged. David Hen- shaw, a prominent Democratic politician, afterward collector of the port of Boston, argued in the columns of the Courier, that on one basis of estimate the time required to complete the work would be fifty-two years ; and upon another basis it would be one hundred and eighty-two years. The last esti- mate would probably, under the circumstances of the time, have proved the more nearly accurate of the two, had the work been attempted; which it fortunately was not. The idea, however, thus thrown out by Colonel Baldwin obtained a lodgment in the public mind. It was, it is true, years before it germinated ; but when it did germinate, as will presently be seen, it gave in later times and under altered conditions a false and disastrous direction to the thoughts and energies of the State. Just fifty years 1 after Colonel Baldwin's report was presented, the Hoosac Tunnel was opened through the mountain from side to side. Instead, however, of having proved " not more difficult than the cut on the 'Mountain Ridge' on the Erie Canal," which would have made its total expense $370,000, it had in fact cost at least thirty times that amount, and some ten-fold that original estimate which was " beyond a doubt." And yet Colonel Baldwin's report was extremely conservative in tone, and undoubtedly justified by everything,-except the stubborn facts of subsequent experience.
The entire cost of the canal from Boston to the Hudson, including the tunnel, was estimated at $6,023,172. The commissioners of 1825, therefore, presented as part of their report a financial scheme. As it was proposed to
1 February 9, 1875.
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
construct only the canal to the Connecticut at once, the amount required was but $3,000,000, -- the annual interest upon which, estimated at $150,000, was to be provided for by a canal fund. This fund it was proposed to raise from six different sources, the discussion of one of which-a State lottery- affords a suggestive illustration of the great progress in ethics, as well as in finance, which has since been made in Massachusetts.1
The report of the canal commissioners was laid before the Legislature in January, 1826. Perhaps that body was alarmed at the magnitude of the scheme; or it may have been discouraged at the length of time which would be required to carry it out: possibly the argument in regard to lotteries . failed to commend itself to all. In any event nothing further was done; and, in disregard of the Governor's recommendations, not only was a resolve , authorizing further surveys laid upon the table, but that under which the surveys had already been made was repealed. The canal project was, how- ever, by no means abandoned ; it had its friends, and they were active and in earnest. It so happened, however, that in this very Legislature it en- countered another project from which it would hardly have been supposed that it had anything to fear, but which soon gave a wholly new direction to men's thoughts.
On June 17 in the previous year the corner-stone of the Bunker-Hill Monument had been laid by Lafayette. The occasion was a memorable one, and among those who took part in it was Gridley Bryant, a builder by trade, but also a self-educated engineer. Born in Scituate in 1789, Bryant was at this time thirty-six years of age; and in the ceremony of lay- ing the corner-stone he officiated as master builder .. A man of the George Stephenson type, - inventive, energetic, and full of resource, - Bryant had
1 The commissioners say : "Enquiries have been prosecuted to ascertain the sum annually expended in this State for the purchase of lot- tery tickets, and from the best information which can be obtained, there is no doubt that it amounts to over $250,000 ; and this large expenditure has been made when there is a law of the Con- monwealth prohibiting the traffic altogether ; which shews conclusively that the public voice is against legislative interference or restraint.
"Having been arranged under the generic term gambling an effort has been made, from the purest and best motives, to discountenance and suppress lotteries ; but it now becomes a serious question of investigation, whether too harsh an epithet has not been given to one of the ordinary modes of raising funds, under the sanction of the highest legislative enactments, both in Europe and this country, for literary, eleemosynary, and various other great and excellent purposes. If it has been proved that the legal countenance which this State has formerly given still induces a disregard of existing statutes, is it not more politic so to amend them as shall secure to the
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