The “Railroad Scheme” of Massachusetts

By the 1820's, New England was in ferment. Unitarianism had shattered the old religious orthodoxy and, while the Dedham case provided a material dowry for the new religion, the sermons of William Ellery Channing furnished a theology and creed. In politics the dogmas of regional Federalism were weakened and soon Daniel Webster was to celebrate the virtues of an embracing nationalism which Pickering and his fellow conspirators of an earlier period would have found incomprehensible. Along the Merrimack were arising the cotton-mill towns, symbols of a new industrialism. An old order was giving way to a new. Once begun, change accelerated and touched one by one the institutions and ideas of the region. Of the economic factors that gave momentum to this transformation, the railroad was the most important. For it was the railroad that after 1830 tied New England into the nation. No longer was it to be a fringe of Hanseatic ports communicating with the rest of the world and with America by sea; it was to become a section in a developing nation. When Emerson wrote of Massachusetts, “From 1790 to 1820, there was not a book, a speech, a conversation, or a thought in the State,” he should have added that there was not a railroad. For the railroad, even though it may not have opened wider prospects, at least revealed different ones.