Despite the superiority of the new iron age that quickly followed the widespreading canal movement, there was a generous spirit and a chivalry in the "good old days" of the stagecoach, the Conestoga, and the lazy canal boat, which did not to an equal degree pervade the iron age of the railroad.When machinery takes the place of human brawn and patience, there is an indefinable eclipse of human interest.Somehow, cogs and levers and differentials do not have the same appeal as fingers and eyes and muscles.The old days of coach and canal boat had a picturesqueness and a comradeship of their own.In the turmoil and confusion and odd mixing of every kind of humanity along the lines of travel in the days of the hurtling coach-and-six, a friendliness, a robust sympathy, a ready interest in the successful and the unfortunate, a knowledge of how the other half lives, and a familiarity with men as well as with mere places, was common to all who took the road.As Thackeray so vividly describes it:
"The land rang yet with the tooting horns and rattling teams of mail-coaches; a gay sight was the road in those days, before steam-engines arose and flung its hostelry and chivalry over.To travel in coaches, to know coachmen and guards, to be familiar with inns along the road, to laugh with the jolly hostess in the bar, to chuck the pretty chamber-maid under the chin, were the delight of men who were young not very long ago.The road was an institution, the ring was an institution.Men rallied around them; and, not without a kind of conservatism expatiated on the benefits with which they endowed the country, and the evils which would occur when they should be no more decay of British spirit, decay of manly pluck, ruin of the breed of horses, and so forth and so forth.To give and take a black eye was not unusual nor derogatory in a gentleman: to drive a stage-coach the enjoyment, the emulation, of generous youth.Is there any young fellow of the present time, who aspires to take the place of a stoker? One sees occasionally in the country a dismal old drag with a lonely driver.Where are you, charioteers? Where are you, O rattling Quicksilver, O swift Defiance? You are passed by racers stronger and swifter than you.Your lamps are out, and the music of your horns has died away.
Behind this change from the older and more picturesque days which is thus lamented there lay potent economic forces and a strong commercial rivalry between different parts of the country.The Atlantic States were all rivals of each other, reaching out by one bold stroke after another across forest, mountain, and river to the gigantic and fruitful West.Step after step the inevitable conquest went on.Foremost in time marched the sturdy pack-horsemen, blazing the way for the heavier forces quietly biding their time in the rear--the Conestogas, the steamboat, the canal boat, and, last and greatest of them all, the locomotive.
Through a long preliminary period the principal center of interest was the Potomac Valley, towards whose strategic head Virginia and Maryland, by river-improvement and road-building, were directing their commercial routes in amiable rivalry for the conquest of the Western trade.Suddenly out from the southern region of the Middle Atlantic States went the Cumberland National Road to the Ohio.New York instantly, in her zone, took up the challenge and thrust her great Erie Canal across to the Great Lakes.In rapid succession, Pennsylvania and Maryland and Virginia, eager not to be outdone in winning the struggle for Western trade, sent their canals into the Alleghanies toward the Ohio.
It soon developed, however, that Baltimore, both powerful and ambitious, was seriously handicapped.In order to retain her commanding position as the metropolis of Western trade she was compelled to resort to a new and untried method of transportation which marks an era in American history.
It seems plain that the Southern rivals of New York City--Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Alexandria--had relied for a while on the deterring effect of a host of critics who warned all men that a canal of such proportions as the Erie was not practicable, that no State could bear the financial drain which its construction would involve, that theories which had proved practical on a small scale would fail in so large an undertaking, that the canal would be clogged by floods or frozen up for half of each year, and that commerce would ignore artificial courses and cling to natural channels.But the answer of the Empire State to her rivals was the homely but triumphant cry "Low Bridge!"--the warning to passengers on the decks of canal boats as they approached the numerous bridges which spanned the route.When this cry passed into a byword it afforded positive proof that the Erie Canal traffic was firmly established.The words rang in the counting-houses of Philadelphia and out and along the Lancaster and the Philadelphia-Pittsburgh turnpikes--"Low Bridge! Low Bridge!" Pennsylvania had granted, it has been pointed out, that her Southern neighbors might have their share of the Ohio Valley trade but maintained that the splendid commerce of the Great Lakes was her own peculiar heritage.Men of Baltimore who had dominated the energetic policy of stone-road building in their State heard this alarming challenge from the North.The echo ran "Low Bridge!" in the poor decaying locks of the Potomac Company where, according to the committee once appointed to examine that enterprise, flood-tides "gave the only navigation that was enjoyed." Were their efforts to keep the Chesapeake metropolis in the lead to be set at naught?
