The Year of Decision 1846, page 30
On July 23 or 24 he went into the village to get a shoe which he had left at the cobbler’s to be mended. Meeting a town officer, he received a final demand for his poll tax. Emerson had told him to give the poor cow its handful of clover, but he would cut its throat. He refused the tax — time for an honest man to rebel. So Sam Staples locked him up in Concord jail, and “it was like traveling into a far country, such as I had never expected to behold, to lie there for one night.” … That was the extent of his rebellion, a refusal to “recognize the authority of the state,” and at the extremity he was human clay, went scot-free the next morning when his aunt paid the tax, and was almighty mad at Emerson for not hurrying to bail out the revolutionist even earlier than that. No matter. The ripples of that pebble cast in Walden Pond were widening out, and the America of ’46 had at last seen a cause attached to an effect in the nakedest light. “They calculated rightly on Mr. Webster,” Emerson wrote. “My friend Mr. Thoreau has gone to jail rather than pay his tax. On him they could not calculate.”
One by one, as the days went on, there would be others whom the calculations would no longer fit, coming more slowly than Thoreau, perhaps with greater pain, certainly with less clearness of mind, to stand in their various ways beside him. In August some of them would sound an alarm bell in Congress, the bell that long ago had roused Thomas Jefferson from his rest. In August a tide was making inland sluggishly that would go on flooding for fifteen years.
Yet only a few saw that they were moving down the diagonal between Mr. Emerson’s perception that the people had given their will a deed and Henry Thoreau’s perception that you must squat here or squat somewhere. Even these moved down it in bewilderment, with a sickness of heart also very difficult to understand. A sickness of heart which got a good many diagnoses besides the right one and which, so far as it affected the great middle order that is America, was altogether new to our national life.
It was a faintness, a shrinking back while the feet moved forward in darkness, a premonition more of the lower nerves than of the brain. Something had shifted out of plumb, moved on its base, begun to topple down. Something was ending in America, forever. A period, an era, a social contract, a way of life was running out. The light artillery at Palo Alto had suddenly killed much more than the ardent, aimless Mexican cavalry, and it was intuition of this death that troubled the nation’s heart.
No one can be sure he knows the mind of John C. Calhoun. It was a maze of metaphysical subtleties too fine for anyone but Calhoun to understand; tides of destruction he did not understand and could not govern compelled it; it was beyond normality in most qualities, especially in hate, vanity, and trance. No man had willed the event longer than Calhoun, but when it happened he repudiated his agency, shrinking from the deed he had helped produce. The same sense of approaching doom that oppressed lesser minds took hold of his, and he said in the Senate: “I said to many of my friends that a deed had been done from which the country would not be able to recover for a long time, if ever; and added, it has dropped a curtain between the present and the future, which to me is impenetrable … it has closed the first volume of our political history under the Constitution and opened the second and … no mortal could tell what would be written in it.”
Thus the metaphysician of political desire. Mr. Emerson had an earthier image: “The United States will conquer Mexico but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.”
INTERLUDE
World of Tomorrow
NOT only war was fixing the destiny of the United States in May, 1846. In the last week of the month the bill to extend American jurisdiction over Oregon came up in the Senate, and Thomas Hart Benton rose to speak about it. He talked for three days, and the passages of analysis must have exhausted such of his colleagues as sat them out, for Old Bullion could be windy and achingly dull. But it was a great speech nevertheless, and when it was over Benton’s longest study had come into fruition and the republic was nobly served by its great expansionist. His speech gave final substance to a lifetime’s love and vision and when he finished it everyone knew that, when the Oregon question should be reopened, as it was about to be, nothing beyond 49° would be asked for. Also, during this month from time to time the bill establishing the Smithsonian Institution kept coming up when either house had a moment to spare, and at last something was to be done about the funds which the Englishman James Smithson had bequeathed to democracy for the “diffusion of knowledge” and which, unhappily, had been invested in state bonds now in default. Hitherto Congress could not agree on what kind of agency would best diffuse knowledge, but agreement neared. The bill was finally passed in August. Fifteen Regents were appointed, among them Robert Dale Owen, Rufus Choate, and Richard Rush. And since the government had need of Matthew Maury in his present place, it called our other first-rank scientist, Joseph Henry, from Princeton. Too bad that in making him an administrator it put an end to his researches.
More striking, however, was the National Fair, which opened in Washington on May 22 and taxed the boarding houses with additional crowds besides those that had swarmed in for military appointments and contracts. Mr. Polk visited it on the second day and, thin-lipped, thought the exhibits “highly creditable to the genius and skill of our countrymen,” but was sure that the manufacturers had organized it “to prevent a reduction of the present rates of duty imposed by the oppressive protective tariff act of 1842.” The President was maneuvering to repeal that act, and there was doubtless something in his suspicion. Certainly the Whig press exhaustively derived protectionist morals from the show. Democratic editors were cool toward it, except the tail-twisters, who found it horridly pro-British in sympathy and concluded that it was financed by British gold.
If it was, the British had been shortsighted.… Let us simply sprawl into some lists. The city of Lowell’s products which so rudely transgressed the Brook Farmers’ theories: calicoes, satinets, cambrics, cashmeres, muslins, balzarines, bed quilts, blankets, carpetings, laces, silks … Parchments, wrapping papers, glazed and colored papers, wallpapers, window shades, oilcloths … Binders’ leathers, cordwainers’ leathers, saddlers’ leathers, harness leathers, military leathers, trunks, valises … Alum, epsom salts, rochelle salts, copperas, quinine, morphine salts, nitrate of silver … Mustard, chocolate, “prepared” cocoa, rice flour … Puddled boiler-plate iron, bar iron, rod iron, hoop iron … Steel pens, gold and silver pens, brass wire, steel wire, door latches, coffee mills, stair rods, locks, nails, saws, augurs, house bells, church bells, school slates, candelabra … Ice-cream freezers, sausage cutters, meat cutters, honing mills, washing machines, forges, hot-air furnaces, parlor stoves, cooking ranges, plows, scythes, shovels, spades, bullet molds, platform scales, water filters … Portable steam boilers, portable steam engines, a hydrostatic valve. A wheat fan, a seed and grain planter, a “tubular steam penetrator.” Jackson Roberts’ wheat-threshing machine … Bath heaters, patent refrigerators (ice water circulated through hollow shelves), welded wrought-iron tubes, tobacco presses … Hussey’s reaping machine, McCormick’s reaping machine. Cotton looms. Spinning frames. Patent weaver’s shuttle. Card-making machine. Rotary backing-tool. Revolving stand premium pump … On and on for pages.
If you have observed certain goods that were extending the American empire southwestward, hauled in the wagons of the Santa Fe trade, be informed that the energies signified by the above list had, just last summer, produced an iron durable enough to be used in the axles of those wagons. Such axles were a startling innovation, which was already spreading. In 1846 William Kelly of Pennsylvania discovered that he could make malleable iron and steel from pig iron with no intermediate stage by blowing cold air through it when molten. The discovery was so revolutionary that his friends and family wanted him certified as insane, but it happened to anticipate the process of Henry Bessemer.1 In 1846 the mills at Lowell were being repowered with a significant new engine, Uriah Boyden’s water turbine which had the undreamed-of efficiency of 82%. In 1846 at Dover, New Hampshire, the schoolmaster Moses Farmer (who had invented a machine for manufacturing some of the window curtains listed above) was tinkering with a model electric railroad. It ran by a motor powered from a wet battery and he demonstrated it publicly the following year.
In 1846 the Sea Witch slid down the ways, was rigged and fitted, and on December 23 weighed anchor on her maiden voyage, out of New York, bound for Hong Kong. She made it in 104 days, and homeward bound reached New York 82 days from Whampoa. She was a sharp model, very beautiful, and her figurehead was a Chinese dragon with open mouth and partly coiled tail ending in a dart. Three years before, the Rainbow had been built for the same carriers, the first exemplar of the theories of design fathered by John W. Griffiths to which all the clippers were built, and in ’46 John Currier built Ariel at Newburyport. All three were less extreme than the ships which Donald McKay and his followers were to be building in just a few years more for the California trade — and, in building them, were to make the most beautiful objects any American artists have ever made. But Sea Witch was a clipper right enough, and her times outward and homeward bound mark the beginning of a new era in transportation. If it was to be Donald McKay’s era, it was also John W. Griffiths’, who had created the theory of design and rigging, and Matthew Maury’s, who had worked out the mastery of winds and currents. The American scientist, the American artist, and American technology had collaborated in a climax, a decision.
In 1846 Richard M. Hoe perfected and patented his method of attaching printers’ type to a rotating cylinder, and in 1847 the Philadelphia Ledger installed the first of his new presses. It had four of these cylinders grouped together, and printed eight thousand newspapers in an hour — four times as many as the fastest press before it had been able to turn out. So the penny papers got an instrument that enabled them to reach their audience. The center of American journalism shifted to its foredestined place. The Union, the National Intelligencer, Niles’ Register, and the like no longer kept the center of editorial opinion so dangerously close to the center of political power. Greeley, Bryant, Bennett, and Raymond came into their own. Democracy had gained a new weapon and a new tool.… Two years after the Ledger installed its new press, a technologist in England proved conclusively that type could not be made to hold to a rotating cylinder.
Look at the Patent Office. U. S. Pat. No. 4,464, April 18, 1846, to Royal C. House. A printing telegraph. Thus, two years after there was a public telegraph, long before there was a typewriter, there was a teletype. But what was significant in House’s invention was the exquisite, exact, automatic production of successive operations in fixed sequence. Or U. S. Pat. No. 4,704, August 20, 1846, to Thomas J. Sloan. A simple thing: a wood screw which had a gimlet point and so turned itself into the wood instead of having to have a hole bored for it, the screw you used yesterday to put up a wall bracket. Or patent to Washburn Race of Seneca Falls, N. Y., for a self-acting register for stoves. Or patent to Erastus B. Bigelow, power loom for two- and three-ply ingrain carpets — next year he will patent looms for tapestries and Brussels carpets. Or a double handful of patents improving the textile machinery of Lowell, self-acting mules, new Jacquard Frames for figured fabrics, till one is dizzy making notes. Patent for hat-body machinery to H. A. Wells — and there are shifts and regroupings at Danbury. Patents to F. Langenheim of Philadelphia, W. A. Pratt of Alexandria, Virginia, and several others — improvements in the materials, processes, and mechanics for making reproductions by daguerreotype.
And U. S. Pat. No. 4,750, September 10, 1846, to Elias Howe. Covering three basic features of the first sewing machine: a grooved needle with the eye at the point, a shuttle operating on the opposite side of the cloth from the needle to form a lock stitch, and an automatic feed.
Bearing in mind what was to come out of Elias Howe’s patent, one may glance back over the exhibits at the National Fair and understand how far, in 1846, the United States had already advanced in the World of Tomorrow. If you had spoken the phrase, “The American System,” to Mr. Polk or any of his supporters or opponents, it would have meant to him the domestic policy fathered by Henry Clay and supported by the Whig Party, inherited by the Republicans, and maintained by them until usurped by the Democrats. That is, strong centralized control, development of the internal market, systematized public works, and the protective tariff. But in England and Europe the phrase had already acquired a different meaning. It meant a kind of factory production new to the world, which had made a large share of the manufacturers’ exhibits. It meant: the displacement of hand labor by machine labor to an ever-increasing extent, the application of machine labor to successive operations, increased precision, the production of finished objects by such exact duplication of parts that the parts were interchangeable and so independent of the finished object, the progressive rationalization of processes and techniques, and the development of straight-line manufacture and automatic machine tools. It meant that, by 1846, the American industrial order had so matured that it was manufacturing tools for the manufacture of the goods exhibited at the Fair — specifically that in various places, especially the Naugatuck Valley and along the banks of the Connecticut River as far north as Windsor, Vermont, the modern machine-tool industry was well established. (Such men as Richard Lawrence, Frederick W. Howe, and Henry D. Stone, gunsmiths by training, were making machine tools in ’46, had already developed jigs, dies, presses, planers, drop hammers, profile machines, and milling machines which are still serving their craft, and in a couple of years more would develop a turret lathe.) It meant that when Elias Howe put his sewing machine into production, he could manufacture it in a factory which, in the rationale of processes, was essentially any factory of today. It meant that Eli Whitney, by the exercise of what was primarily a Yankee passion for economy, neatness, and logical order, had made the world over.
As, in the summer of ’46, Samuel Colt found out. From 1836 to 1842 Colt had manufactured about five or six thousand of his patent revolvers, the first successful repeating firearms. Bad financial management — outside Colt’s control — had forced the closing of the factory and he had gone on to experiment with electrically controlled submarine mines and had laid the first successful submarine electric cable. But his revolvers had been tested in the Seminole War and had worked into the possession of the Texas Navy and the Texas Rangers — and of Santa Fe traders, such mountain men as Kit Carson, and other practical men who had to deal professionally with the Plains Indians. They had promptly worked a revolution in warfare comparable to and more immediately important than that heralded by the American light artillery at Palo Alto. They had proved themselves the first effective firearm for mounted men,2 and had given the Texans and other frontier runners the first weapon which enabled white men to fight with Plains Indians on equal or superior terms.3 Nearly all of the primordial five or six thousand had, by 1846, gravitated to the place where they were needed, the Western frontier. Most of the journals quoted in this book speak admiringly of their use and value in the West; nearly every writer who discusses outfits for emigrants recommends them.
As soon as Taylor was ordered to the Rio Grande, officers of his who had used Colt’s revolvers in Florida began clamoring to have them made standard equipment, and the demand was supported by the Texas Rangers when they were incorporated in the army. The War Department bought up all those available in secondhand shops and brought Colt back to the armament industry with a contract for one thousand revolvers, which was supplemented with a second contract for the same number before the first was completed. Colt had kept none of his revolvers and could not buy one, and so had to make his model from memory. He improved it by simplifying it, which is emblematic of the American System, but more striking is the progress that had been made in four years. When his factory closed down in 1842 there remained many operations which had to be performed by hand. In 1846, when he began manufacturing again, it proved possible to perform nearly all of them by machine.
He went to the Whitney Arms Company, just outside New Haven, where Eli Whitney’s son was carrying on and developing the methods of his father — and was helping the government switch the army from muskets to the “Harpers Ferry” percussion-cap rifle. (Though far from fast enough to equip the troops now necessary for the war.) With Whitney, Whitney’s toolmakers, and Colt himself collaborating, new machine tools were designed. They passed into Colt’s possession at the completion of the first contract, and the factory which he then set up at Hartford was the most advanced application of the American System so far seen. It was so advanced that when, a few years later, Colt set up a factory in England he could not satisfy his sense of commercial diplomacy by employing local industry and workmen. No foreign machines of the necessary precision could be found or made, and he had to bring them in from the United States. Bringing them in, he could not find mechanics sufficiently skillful to operate them, or sufficiently habituated to thinking in terms of complex machines to be trained. There had been a complete reversal in less than a generation, since the Lawrences and Lowells had had to smuggle out English mechanics to design their textile machinery. The Yankees now led the world.
The establishment of the Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company thus concentrates in a single item the full significance of the National Fair of ’46. Colt or Elias Howe — or Cyrus McCormick, who got three hundred of his reapers made for him this year and would presently move to the Middle West and erect his own factory — signify the extreme spearhead of the industrial drive. They merely inherited, however, what the remaker of societies, Eli Whitney, had put into motion before the turn of the century. For if Whitney’s cotton gin had dramatically reversed social trends and created an economy, his long-term revolution in manufacture (arrived at simultaneously, be it remembered, by another gunsmith, Simeon North, his neighbor twenty-odd miles away) was reorganizing the world. That revolution had been quietly accelerating all along, so that when, for instance, the clockmakers of Connecticut learned how to make brass works for their products, fully fifteen years before our period, they could apply the American System and achieve the mass production of identical, serviceable, cheap articles. But the further point is that by ’46 that acceleration had become from one point of view prophetic, and from another, catastrophic. No Henry Adams attended the National Fair to spin an elegant metaphysical meditation into a theory of physical force. Since none did, it would have been extremely intelligent of Mr. Polk, or his supporters, or more especially John C. Calhoun, to spend laborious hours studying the exhibits and meditating on the future of the United States.
