Jacobs and Stowe give detailed accounts of the travel and involuntary transportation of slaves (and fugitives) within the South, especially on the Mississippi and by sea. Faulkner also depicts river traffic along with wagons in the state of Mississippi. Hawthorne's short stories touch on New England's various modes of stage coach, sleigh, and carriage travel, as well as developing a railroad-based allegory. Thoreau mentions the state highway tax. Poe praises walking as better than railroads or carriages as the way to see the landscape, and he gives fanciful accounts of balloon travel. Walden expands the "iron horse" metaphor in a long celebration. The song, "Pat Works on the Railroad," points to the Irish workers who built the system. Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables contrasts small-town street traffic with the ability of the railroad to unite families and the nation, and to expand psychological horizons; these latter sentiments are echoed by Fuller.
Author: Harriet A. Jacobs (1813-1897)
Title: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself
Date: 1861
Systems: Ship, train, steamboat
Context: 1830-1850, North Carolina, New York, Boston
Now considered a classic example of the nineteenth-century slave narrative, Jacobs's Incidents recounts this ex-slave's remarkable escape by ship and train, and her subsequent maneuvers as a fugitive in New York and Boston. The details of her flight fascinate for two reasons: first, one realizes that no slave escaped entirely on his or her own - fugitives relied on the close cooperation of a powerful network of allies and multiple transportation links; each leg of the journey and every hiding place was supervised or arranged by friends, strangers, and industry insiders. Second, just as slave traders reaped considerable profits from circulating the enslaved in the south, captains, conductors and other middlemen reaped considerable profits smuggling fugitives north.
Harriet Jacobs grew up in a port city, Edenton, North Carolina. Once she deserts her master, she hides in her grandmother's attic for an incredible seven years. When she makes her way to this hiding place and when she finally departs, she disguises herself in a suit of sailor's clothes ("jacket, trowsers, and a tarpaulin hat"). The fellow slave who first helps Jacobs into this get-up coaches her: "Put your hands in your pockets, and walk rickety, like de sailors."
When Jacobs finally boards the vessel that will take her to Philadelphia, she joins another fugitive in a small comfortless cabin - "purchased at a price that would pay for a voyage to England." She also tells us that the captain was "paid handsomely" and promised "anything within reason" for conveying them north.
Although two of Jacobs's accomplices are "seafaring men" and dear friends, Jacobs is candid about her low opinion of sailing men: "Neither could I feel quite at ease with the captain and his men. I was an entire stranger to that class of people, and I had heard that sailors were rough and sometimes cruel." In retrospect, however, Jacobs praises the captain: "Southerner as he was ... if Fanny and I had been white ladies, and our passage lawfully engaged, he could not have treated us more respectfully." Jacobs closes the account of her voyage with a paean to Chesapeake Bay; her manner recalls Frederick Douglass's ode to sails in his Narrative. She and her fugitive partner watch "the sun rise for the first time in our lives, on free soil" (Ch. 30).
Once in Philadelphia, Fanny and Jacobs postpone the next leg of their journey until "some suitable" escort can be arranged. Says Jacobs, "I had a dread of meeting slaveholders, and some dread also of railroads. I had never entered a railroad car in my life, and it seemed to me quite an important event" (Ch. 31). In another passage, Jacobs links segregated rail travel to her entire disillusionment with the North. Realizing she had not received first-class tickets, she believes she has erred by not offering enough money to buy them. The man advising her sets her straight:
"O, no...they could not be had for any money. They don't allow colored people to go in the first-class cars." This was the first chill to my enthusiasm about the Free States. Colored people were allowed to ride in a filthy box, behind white people, at the south, but there they were not required to pay for the privilege. It made me sad to find how the north aped the customs of slavery.
We were stowed away in a large, rough car, with windows on each side, too high for us to look out without standing up. It was crowded with people, apparently of all nations. There were plenty of beds and cradles, containing screaming and kicking babies. Every other man had a cigar or pipe in his mouth, and jugs of whiskey were handed round freely. The fumes of the whiskey and the dense tobacco smoke were sickening to my senses, and my mind was equally nauseated by the coarse jokes and ribald songs around me. It was a very disagreeable ride. Since that time there has been some improvement in these matters" (Ch. 31).
Jacobs's first impression of New York is not dissimilar to what late twentieth-century visitors report: "When we arrived in New York, I was half crazed by the crowd of coachmen calling out, 'Carriage, Ma'am?'" She reports haggling with a "burly Irishman" for a ride, only to discover that the "decent conveyance" Jacobs had bargained for amounted to a seat atop her own trunk in the back of his truck (Ch. 32).
Life as a fugitive in New York, just after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, propels Jacobs through a series of quick getaways and "hairbreadth escapes." She tells of a close call in which she had to flee from New York to Boston by carriage, then board the steamboat Rhode Island with her little girl. Since that line "was much travelled by the wealthy," the colored were forced to sleep above deck. Knowing this might expose her to the wrong eyes, Jacobs is most grateful when the intercession of a lawyer friend gains her a berth below. The final leg of her journey is by train, and by some flukish chance the conductor is on board the boat; the boat captain speaks to train conductor and arranges for Jacobs's continued safety on the train (Ch. 36).
Jacobs takes employment as a governess and travels frequently with her white employers. These trips provide Jacobs with new material for her social critique. In a rhetorical move that will be repeated by such Authors as Anna Julia Cooper and W.E.B. DuBois, Jacobs holds that transportation systems are the measure of America's humanitarian, not technological progress. Though expected to travel with the white family, Jacobs is not allowed to eat with them. She is gruffly refused a seat and service on board the steamboat Knickerbocker. "I looked up, and, to my astonishment and indignation, saw that the speaker was a colored man. If his office required him to enforce the by-laws of the boat, he might, at least, have done it politely" (Ch. 35). Anna Julia Cooper (A Voice From the South) makes this same distinction regarding the discriminatory laws of the land and the lack of civility with which they are enforced. Jacobs uses her travel to England as almost a direct counterpoint to this situation. She declares "for the first time in my life I was in a place where I was treated according to my deportment, without reference to my complexion" (Ch. 37).
Edition used: Jean Fagan Yellin, ed. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1987.
Author: Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
Title: Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly.
Date: 1851-52 (serial publication in The National Era)
Systems: Steamboat
Context: 1840s-1850s, Mississippi river, Kentucky to New Orleans and Red River, Louisiana
Uncle Tom passes into the hands of his most saintlike master on board a steamboat; another steamboat delivers him into the hands of the dastardly Simon Legree. In both cases Stowe emphasizes the commercial purpose of steamboat traffic. In the passage introducing Tom's first ride on the Mississippi, the steamboats are eclipsed by the river itself. It is a river without vessels that seems to bear the cargo to the Gulf:
What other river of the world bears on its bosom to the ocean the wealth and enterprise of such another country? - a country whose products embrace all between the tropics and the poles! Those turbid waters ... that headlong tide of business which is poured along its wave.... Ah! would that they did not also bear along a more fearful freight, - the tears of the oppressed.... (Ch. 14).
Because the all-loving, ever-watchful Tom saves the cherubic Evangeline from those same "turbid waters," Tom is purchased by her grateful father, Augustine St. Clare. Tom thereby changes hands from bad master to better aboard ship. Not only does the steamboat setting emphasize the commerce in slaves, but it also shows that when Tom is able to turn "the headlong tide of business" in his favor, his old master Haley receives compensation as well.
Stowe shows how a slave's-eye-view of the river landscape differs from that of a slave owner's: "The traveller from the deck of the steamer, as from some floating castle top, overlooks the whole country for miles.... Tom, therefore had spread out before him...a map of the life to which he was approaching." Stowe tells us that, while most would in such cases share the view, by mail, with a wife or child, Tom could not write and his ties to his relatives were consequently severed forever.
Stowe gives us some details regarding the boat's landing. The boat "groans like a monster" as it approaches the "multiplied steamers at the levee" (Ch. 15). Like the levee, the boat itself is a "general bustle of expectation and preparation." The steward and chambermaid (only one of each) spiff up the "splendid boat, preparatory to a grand entree" (Ch 14).
This "grand" landing in New Orleans stands in marked contrast to the second passage by steamboat that takes Tom up the Red River, deep into Louisiana. The title of this chapter, "Middle Passage," alerts us to Stowe's ironic allegory. Tom's passage is not one from freedom to enslavement, but rather one from cultured, gentle slavery into a more harrowing version of the same institution. On board The Pirate, Tom wears heavy chains. His new owner, Simon Legree strips him of the dignified clothes the St. Clares had provided, forcing him to don slave's rags. His trunk and its contents are auctioned to the crew. Once again the steamboat passage emphasizes Tom's status as a commodity, but somehow, he is valued at an even lower rate on this trip than on the one previous (Ch. 31).
Edition used: Penguin Classics. New York: Viking, 1986.
Author: William Faulkner (1897-1962)
Title: "Red Leaves"
Date: 1930
Systems: Steamboat, wagon
Context: 1840s, Northern Mississippi
In this tale of Indians in slavery days, Doom, Issetibbeha's father, has dismantled the deck house of a steamboat for the family home. As a young man he took a keel boat to New Orleans; six months later a young woman, Issetibbeha's mother, boarded the St. Louis packet and landed near Doom's home - four Indians with a horse and wagon took her on the three-day ride to the plantation. This expropriated steamboat is the background throughout the story, and, like other accounts, these boats are notable for their diverse travellers and the relative anonymity which it affords.
Edition used: Charles Kaplan, ed. Literature in America: The Modern Age. New York: The Free Press, 1971.
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
Title: Selected short stories
Date: 1837-1850 Written: 1834-1849
Systems: Stage coach, railroad
Context: Contemporary, New England
Hawthorne's stories incidentally give us a picture of New England roads in the 1830s, with special emphasis on the stage coach. "The Ambitious Guest" (1837) describes the Notch of the White Hills, "the bleakest spot of all New England," which is a stage coach stop and "a great artery, through which the life-blood of internal commerce is continually throbbing" between Maine and the St. Lawrence River. The coach stop is praised by the guest for its warm welcome and cheerful fire. In "David Swan," written between 1834 and 1837, the title character sleeps and dreams about several street scenes while waiting for the coach; the noise of the wheels wakes him up and he finds "room on top" for his trip to Boston.
Aside from walking, Hawthorne uses the stage coach as a literary vehicle for bringing strangers together to interact.
The winter variant, the "stage-sleigh," appears briefly in "Peter Goldthwaite's Treasure" (written between 1837 and 1840) as part of a charming urban street scene which includes other sleighs bringing frozen pigs, sheep, and deer imported from Vermont, and local farmers delivering eggs and butter in a twenty-year-old sleigh.
"Mr. Higgenbotham's Catastrophe" (before 1837) shows how the roads can disseminate false rumors faster than what is possible on foot. A peddler in his mare-driven cart thinks he sees a murder and the news travels sixty miles in less than a day, since the mail stage also gets involved. The narrator speculates that this report can easily go from Maine to Florida and eventually to London, since the newspapers can pick it up. In passing, we learn that the operator of the toll house on the Kimbellton turnpike is also part of the rumor mill.
"The Celestial Railroad," from the 1840s is a sustained treatment of the newer system. Hawthorne uses Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress as the basis for the story. Mr. Smooth-it-away, the guide, is a director and large stockholder of the railroad. The engine, "a sort of mechanical demon," is run by the devil figure, Apollyon, Christian's enemy. The noises of the engine, the vibrating bridge they pass over, and the screaming whistle emphasize this association. A tavern keeper who had opposed the railroad is punished by the train's not stopping at his place of business. The final scene is of a noisy steam ferry which takes the pilgrim from the train station to the Celestial City.
Another story, "The Great Stone Face," written about the same time, charts Mr. Gathergold's aging through two eras where rich visitors to his isolated valley arrive in coaches driven by four horses to the new time where the celebrated poet comes by train.
Edition used: New York: Modern Library, 1937.
Author: Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Title: "Civil Disobedience" or "Resistance to Civil Government"
Date: 1849 Written: 1848
Systems: Highway
Context: 1846, Massachusetts
The famous incident of Thoreau's night in jail was precipitated by his not paying his poll tax which supported the Mexican War. However, "I have never declined paying the highway tax, because I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject."
Edition used: New York, Modern Library, [1937] 1965.
Author: Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
Title: The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe
Date: 1832-49 (career)
Systems: Boat accident, balloon
Context: 1840s, East coast
"Morning on the Wissahiccon" (1843). "Indeed, in America generally, the traveller who would behold the finest landscapes, must seek them not by the railroad, nor by the steamboat, nor by the stage-coach, nor in his private carriage, nor yet even on horseback - but on foot." Aside from the chronology which puts the most modern first, this sentence reflects Poe's preference in nearly all his stories to have characters on foot, and his skepticism about the progress afforded by the latest inventions. A couple of wrecked sailing ships are exceptions: "MS. Found in a Bottle" (1833) and "A Descent into the Maelström" (1841).
"The Balloon-Hoax" (1844) is a parodied newspaper story for the New York Sun about crossing the Atlantic by balloon from Wales to South Carolina. The coal-gas balloon had a fake propeller but actually got its power from an inclined plane launcher and an Archimedian screw. The sketch is filled with quasi- and pseudo-scientific specifications. The story reflects the fascination with real balloon flights in Europe and England, e.g., one in 1836 by Monck Mason, who is mentioned. "Hans Pfaal" (1835) is a longer, more fanciful account of an imagined balloon ride in Holland, while "Mellunta Tauta" (1848) is a commentary on science and politics, fancifully dated "On Board Balloon 'Skylark,' April 1, 2848." A person on the ground watches balloon traffic overhead.
Edition used: Stuart and Susan Levine, eds. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976.
Author: Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Title: Walden
Date: 1854 Written: 1846-1854
Systems: Railroad, ship
Context: Contemporary, Massachusetts
Walden gives a classic statement, extended and amplified, of America's mythologizing of the iron-horse image. Thoreau's sensuous enthusiasm is tempered by his concerns about the faster pace of industrial life.
The cabin at Walden Pond was 100 rods from the Fitchburg railroad and he used the causeway to walk to Concord. The tracks go through a cut in the pond's bank which is celebrated as the site of spring and as the symbol of universal organicism ("Spring"). The railroad is cited among other "modern improvements" which are "improved means to an unimproved end; an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York." As with other of Thoreau's writings, he prefers to go afoot, rather than by taking the cars and seeing the country. The distance is 30 miles and the fare 90¢, "almost a day's wages. I remember when wages were sixty cents a day for laborers on this very road" ("Economy").
Thoreau complains about the economy: "It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce… and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not…. If we do not get out sleepers [ties], and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to Heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them… And when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is." Thoreau here uses the economics of track laying and reports of accidents as striking images of the gap between spiritual and personal values and the nineteenth-century notions of progress ("Where I Lived…"). "[T]he wood-cutters, and the rail-road, and I myself have profaned Walden" ("The Ponds").
In "Sounds" Thoreau celebrates the noises from the trains along with those from animals. "The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer's yard, informing me that many restless city merchants are arriving within the circle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the other side. As they come under one horizon, they shout their warning to get off the track to the other, heard sometimes through the circles of two towns. Here come your groceries, country; your rations, countrymen!" A train loaded with timber will bring chairs to the city at 20 miles per hour and will strip the huckleberry hills and cranberry meadows for urban consumption. Cotton goes in one direction and woven cloth in the other; "up come the books, but down goes the wit that writes them." The trains move with planetary or comet-like motion, since its velocity makes it seem "not like a returning curve, - with its steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in golden and silver wreaths, like many a downy cloud which I have seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its masses to the light, - as if this travelling demigod, this cloud-compeller, would ere long take the sunset sky for the livery of his train; when I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the new Mythology I don't know), it seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it…." He watches the train's passage as he watches the sunrise. The "train of clouds" is "going to heaven while the cars are going to Boston"; it hides the sun and shades the fields, "a celestial train beside which the petty train of cars which hugs the earth is but the barb of the spear." Thoreau enjoys the way the "vital heat" is contained in the engine, and how a giant plow is, like snow-shoes, used to "plow a furrow from the mountains to the seaboard, in which the cars, like a following drill-barrow, [the trains] sprinkle all the restless men and floating merchandise in the country for seed. All day the fire-steed flies over the country, stopping only that his master may rest, and I am awakened by his tramp and defiant snort at midnight."
Thoreau continues in the same chapter. "The startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village-day. They go and come with such regularity and precision, and their whistle can be heard so far, that the farmers set their clocks by them, and thus one well-conducted institution regulates the whole country." It works miracles - people get to Boston on time, doing things "'railroad fashion'" is the byword. "We have constructed a fate, an Atropos, that never turns aside. (Let that be the name of your engine.)" The trains are like Wilhelm Tell's arrow: "the air is full of invisible bolts. Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then." Moving the train in the winter happens "notwithstanding the veto of a New England northeast snow-storm," as the men on the mould-board turn back the drifts. The freight train dispenses "odors" from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, and reminds Thoreau of foreign parts, coral reefs, Indian oceans, tropical climes, "and the extent to the globe." It makes him feel like a citizen of the world, although some of the goods are "the old junk, gunny bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails." He sees "rags in bales, of all hues and qualities, the lowest condition to which cotton and linen descend, the final result of dress." The catalogue includes salt fish (preserved food which can also be used as a sun and wind screen), Spanish hides, molasses (which puts Cuttingsville, Vermont on the map), "the cattle of a thousand hills" (bringing a pastoral valley or a stampede past his home). "Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am more alone than ever."
Thoreau uses imagery from shipping, mostly sailboats, throughout Walden, usually as metaphors for the human spiritual condition. Typical is this passage from "Economy": "If your trade is with the Celestial Empire, then some small counting house on the coast, in some Salem harbor, will be fixture enough. You will export such articles as the country afforded, purely native products, much ice [harvested from Walden Pond each year, some sent as far as India] and pine timber and a little granite, always in native bottoms." Thoreau then details all the jobs of running a commercial ship, from being pilot, captain, owner and underwriter, to keeping abreast of the markets and studying the charts - all of which indicate the complexity of strict economic and spiritual "business habits."
In "Visitors" the metaphor is psychological: "You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port." Sailing metaphors are central to the final chapter, "Conclusion." "Our voyaging [literal and spiritual] is only great-circle sailing." Our redeemed life is compared with explorations to Africa or the Northwest Passage or a South-Sea Exploring Expedition, but we need "to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being." The proper passage through life does not involve taking cabin passage, but going "before the mast and on the deck of the world." Even the image of hearing a different drummer is likened to being "shipwrecked on a vain reality."
Thoreau's preference, as noted, is to walk. There is a cart path behind the house which is, however, difficult to follow at night. Two visitors got back to town successfully one night, but couldn't find their homes until morning. "I have heard of many going astray even in the village streets, when the darkness was so thick that you could cut it with a knife, as the saying is." People come to town "a-shopping" on their wagons, but have to stay overnight. "It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods at any time" - in a snow storm, one can come to a well-known road but still not know how to get to the village ("The Village"). In keeping with the general themes of Walden, these images of the difficulty of moving about at night become metaphors for spiritual travel. In "Conclusion," this pattern is repeated: "How worn and dusty, then must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity."
The local roads had previously "resounded with the laugh and gossip of inhabitants," and become a physical reminder of "Former Inhabitants" in the chapter with that title. "In some places, within my own remembrance, the pines would scrape both sides of a chaise at once, and women and children who were compelled to go this way to Lincoln alone and on foot did it with fear, and often ran a good part of the distance." The changes are not just road improvements, but the widespread clearing of woods and swamps (where a road used to run on logs) have led to the modern highway. In the winter, the road is delineated by falling oak leaves which absorb the sun's rays and ease walking through the snow.
Edition used: New York: Modern Library, [1937] 1965.
Author: Not known
Title: "Pat Works on the Railway"
Date: 1844
Systems: Railway
Context: Contemporary, Irish construction workers
The stanzas are explicitly dated from "In eighteen hundred and forty-one." It charts a worker's annual progress, from putting on corduroy pants, leaving the Old World, meeting Molly McGee, traveling "the land from shore to shore," and finally to Biddy McGee's death, at which time "If she left one kid she left eleven," perhaps (biology notwithstanding) because it rhymes with "1847" and "heaven." The setting is presumably the eastern United States, where Irish immigrants did the bulk of the physical labor during this decade.
Edition used: Paul Lauter, et al., eds. The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 1. Lexington, MA, D. C. Heath, 1990.
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
Title: The House of the Seven Gables: A Romance
Date: 1851
Systems: Railroad, horse carts and carriages,
Context: Contemporary, after 1848, New England
The house of the title is on a side street in Salem, a small New England town, where its psychologically imprisoned characters spend much of their time watching traffic. The scene includes "an omnibus, with its populous interior, dropping here and there a passenger, and picking up another, thus typifying that vast rolling vehicle, the world, the end of whose journey is everywhere and nowhere," i.e., the traditional etymology of "utopia" (Ch. 11). This is in contrast with the railroad's fixed routes and schedules. The street scene also includes horse-drawn carts for the butcher, fish-seller, "countryman" (vegetables), and the baker, as well as pushcarts for the knife grinder, barrel-organ (Ch 11), and, later in the book, Uncle Venner's wheelbarrow used to collect garbage to feed his pigs (Ch 19). Road maintenance is an ongoing problem. There is a regularly scheduled water cart which goes through the streets to settle the dust (Ch. 11), and we are reminded of the water-filled puddles every time it rains, and in a hard rain, it's too muddy to walk in the streets.
On the psychological and symbolic horizon is the railroad, the agent of change. The somewhat crazed Clifford Pyncheon, a man in his 60s, regrets that there are "no stage-coaches nowadays," those being replaced by the railroad, whose "obstreperous howl of the steam-devil" he hears and whose "brief transit" he can see by leaning out of his window. The narrator comments that his attitude illustrates his "loss or suspension of the power to deal with unaccustomed things [echoing Coleridge], and to keep up with the swiftness of the passing moment." (Ch 11).
"The Flight of the Owls," Ch. 17, is an extended description of Clifford and his sister, Hepzibah, on a "strange expedition," their first train ride. The puffing train is "like a steed impatient for a headlong rush" and the travellers go "onward like the wind" and are thus "drawn into the great current of human life." The passing landscape is dream-like and surrealistic - towns grow up and then vanish "as if swallowed by an earthquake"; steeples seem "adrift from their foundations" - "everything was unfixed from its age=long rest." In the car, it is amazing that 50 people, under one roof, can sit quietly amid the "noisy strength." Passengers read and play catch; boys sell cakes and candy - "It was life itself." Hawthorne here sees the train as a microcosm, somewhat like the way boats are depicted by other contemporary writers.
Clifford buys tickets to the end of the line, and, while the conductor suggests they would be more comfortable in front of the home fire, Clifford sees the train as "destined to do away with those stale ideas of home and fireside, and substitute something better." We will re-enter the "nomadic state" since all human progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful figure, in an ascending spiral curve." Railroads "give us wings" and they "spiritualize travel." Another passenger echoes the narrator's line that, with regret, we now live "everywhere and nowhere." Clifford obliquely refers to his family's house with a corpse sitting in a chair as a sign of the fixed past he wishes to escape, the real estate "on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests." The train is linked to mesmerism, rapping spirits, and the telegraph, or "electricity, - the demon, the angel, the mighty physical power, the all-pervading intelligence" which will link people around the globe. The technical problem is that Clifford's effort to use the train to escape to a distant "city of refuge" can be thwarted by the telegraph which will alert the city to the fugitives.
Edition used: New York, Modern Library, 1937.
Author: Margaret Fuller (1810-1850)
Title: "Its Position in the Present Time, and Prospects for the Future" In American Literature
Date: 1846
Systems: Train
Context: Contemporary
In a passage expressing hope that "the fusion of races among us is more complete," Fuller notes that it will not happen until "this nation shall attain sufficient moral and intellectual dignity" or until "the physical resources of the country being explored, all its regions studded with towns, broken by the plow, netted together by railways and telegraph lines, talent shall be left at leisure to turn its energies upon the higher department of man's existence" (Emphasis added.). These sentiments are frequently expressed in the early railroad and telegraph decades, where transportation and communication are optimistically seen as promoting social benefits such as overcoming racial and regional barriers.
Edition used: Paul Lauter, et al., eds. The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 1. Lexington, MA, D. C. Heath, 1990.
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