Water Closets

The 1856 guide to designing and furnishing “American village homes” also declared that “Health, comfort and decency, all demand that every dwelling, however humble, should have a water-closet under its roof, accessible with ease and without exposure to the external air.” Installing a toilet was simple if the dwelling had running water and drainage but took more care and cost if not. Essential for any indoor toilet was a chimney pipe to draw the foul smells away from the dwelling. Where indoor toilets were not yet provided, there were outhouses (also referred to as privies, necessary houses, and back houses). Trips to the outhouse at all hours and in inclement weather were unnecessary when a chamber pot or a night pot served its purpose.

A study of rented tenements in Boston in the early 1890s found that in the city as a whole, 91.9 percent of families had access to water closets, and the rest (8.1 percent) had access only to privies. The different wards of the city showed considerable diversity: in three wards more than 99 percent of the families had access to water closets while in another ward 35 percent had access only to privies. Access to a water closet was not always exclusive: in one ward as many as eighteen families shared one, and in two wards as few as four families shared one. We may assume that thirty years earlier, water closets were substantially less prevalent. They also would have been less common in less built-up areas. Frederick Law Olmsted, in recounting his travels in Texas in the 1850s, told a story (probably apocryphal) of a German gentleman who settled in a town in Texas and built a “water-closet” (almost certainly an outhouse). Nothing like it existed in town. He was assailed for indecency, and his water closet disappeared at night. He built another, and it too disappeared. Persisting, he built a third. It remained, and two or three others appeared in town. Several months later, 12 or 15 water-closets stood in a line beside the public square.

Theater

Theater was a form of popular entertainment. Larger cities might have several theaters, and traveling companies would play smaller venues. The plays offered were both newly written works and revivals of old favorites and classics. The newly written works included stage adaptations of popular fiction such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The year 1860 saw productions in New York City of works by William Shakespeare including “Hamlet”, “Richard the Third”, “Romeo and Juliet”, and “Macbeth”. In addition Fitzgerald Tasistro recited “Othello” and “Hamlet” entirely from memory, each on its own evening.

Theater thrived on controversy, as it does today. In December 1859 the Winter Garden Theatre produced “The Octoroon”. The timing was either fortuitous or deliberate, opening just days after the execution of a militant abolitionist, John Brown, who had raided a federal armory in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Wild rumors about the play circulated before it opened as its subject was slavery, but the play, although intense, was more melodrama than abolitionist invective. The story involved a woman named Zoe who was born to a slave mother and a slaveholder father and whose appearance and education “places her on a footing of equality with whites”. Zoe had been wooed by a man named McCloskey, whom she had rejected. The slaveholder father died impoverished, and his estate was being sold to repay the debts. Zoe was one of the assets, and McCloskey was a prospective buyer. According to the reviewer, the “defect in the play” lay “in the fact that the serious interest outweighs the comic to the extent that there is barely a moment of relaxation permitted to the spectator.”

Illumination

The various liquid fuels listed in the 1860 census were derived from animals, plants, and minerals. Sperm oil came from the oily matter found in the heads of certain types of whales; it was what remained when spermaceti, a solid component of the oily matter, had been removed. Whale oil was produced by rendering blubber. The census enumerated 422 whale hunting firms in four states, which employed 12,300 hands and produced products having an annual value of $7.7 million. Massachusetts had an 86.9 percent share of the business. The other whaling states were Connecticut, Rhode Island, and California.

A whaling ship not only carried the hunters in pursuit; it was a factory that stripped the whale’s carcass of its valuable parts and rendered the fat into oil that could be stored for the duration of the voyage. Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick, although not popular when it was first published in 1851, presented a reasonably accurate picture of the hunt, the shipboard rendering of blubber into oil, and the harvesting of spermaceti. Whale fishery products also included whale bone, a fibrous material taken from the mouths of certain whales that was prized for its flexibility, strength, elasticity, and lightness. It was used for umbrella ribs, stiffening stays, and the frameworks of hats. When heated, whalebone was flexible and retained the shape into which it was molded.

Kerosene and coal oil were distilled from coal. At a later time, kerosene would be known as a distillate of petroleum. Lard oil was made from the fat of butchered swine. Camphene, burning fluid, and rosin oil were all derived from turpentine, which was distilled from the sap of pine trees. Camphene, also referred to as oil of turpentine, was a distillate of turpentine, and burning fluid was a mixture of turpentine and alcohol. Rosin oil was a distillate of rosin, a product of distilling turpentine. Camphene and burning fluid were explosive and responsible for much injury and fire damage. In spite of the danger, people used camphene because it was cheap. Lamps intended for use with camphene or burning fluid generally had one or more narrow cylindrical burners that rose an inch or more above the top of the reservoir that held the fuel – keeping the flame at a distance from the fuel reduced the risk of an explosion.

The Light-House Board, an administrative body that was a part of the federal government, operated 425 lighthouses and lighted beacons and 47 light-vessels along the coasts and waterways of the United States in 1860. A combination of a Fresnel lens and an Argand lamp produced an intense beam of light that made a lighthouse visible for miles at night. The Fresnel lens was a beehive-shaped apparatus composed of glass or glass and metal. Lenses and prisms surrounded the lamp and redirected the light into the horizontal plane.

The Argand lamp burned a hollow, cylindrical wick that encouraged an upward draft to form both inside and outside of it. This caused the flame to burn more intensely. Depending on the importance of the lighthouse, the lamp might have had as many as five wicks burning.

In 1860 all but one of the lights and beacons used Fresnel lenses. At an earlier time, the Light-House Board had used sperm oil in its lamps, but the cost encouraged them to seek a substitute. Colza, or rapeseed oil, gave a satisfactory light at a lower price, but the supply in the United States was not adequate to keep all the lighthouse lamps burning. Although lard oil burned badly in the lamps, when heated it proved to be a suitable replacement for the colza, and so in 1860 the Light-House Board was in the process of switching over.

Illuminating and lubricating oils were distilled from petroleum, which came from pools and springs in various places around the world. Petroleum had not gained much notice as a fuel or lubricant because it appeared to be available only in small quantities that were not commercially valuable. An oil well drilled by Edwin L. Drake in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859 changed that assessment. The burning fluid distilled from petroleum yielded a light deemed superior to sperm oil’s at less than half the cost. Petroleum production, about 20,000 gallons in 1859, rose to 2 million in 1860 and to 20 million in 1861. A cartoon published in the April 20, 1861, issue of Vanity Fair bore the caption “Grand Ball Given by the Whales in Honor of the Discovery of Oil Wells in Pennsylvania” and showed a group of whales in formal evening attire, celebrating and toasting one another with champagne.

Wood

The number of saw mills producing lumber in 1860 is an indication of the importance of wood in the United States. The census showed that 19,600 establishments employed 71,000 hands to produce lumber having a value of $91.6 million. During the colonial period and the early days of the republic, sawmills were local enterprises due to the difficulty and expense of transporting timber or lumber any distance. Circumstances had changed by 1860. In relatively new states such as Michigan and Wisconsin, which were being drawn upon as major sources of lumber, larger than average saw mills were being built at the mouths of rivers, and the rivers were used to transport the logs from the timbering sites to the mills.

As reflected in the 1860 census, Pennsylvania produced lumber with the greatest value ($10.7 million), and New York produced the next greatest value ($9.7 million). The lumber industry showed a great deal of variation from state to state in terms of the numbers of mills and hands and the value of product relative to state population. States above the national average included Michigan, Florida, Oregon, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. These states had recently been admitted and were experiencing above average levels of population growth. Two exceptions were the older states, Maine and New Hampshire; both experienced low population growth, were heavily wooded and were probably supplying lumber to the other northeastern states.

States below the national average were older, with lower than average population growth, such as Rhode Island, Maryland, Connecticut, and New Jersey. The exception was Illinois, a recently admitted state that experienced population growth of more than 100 percent, but its value of sawed lumber produced per capita was far below the national average. The reason for this appears to be that by 1860, a substantial lumber market had developed in Chicago, which was the recipient of lumber harvested and sawed in Michigan and Wisconsin for distribution into the plains. Chicago made Illinois a lumber conduit rather than a lumber producer.

The Economy: An Overview

We speak habitually of “the economy” in generalizations as though they are the reality being described and not merely placeholders for the myriad individual transactions that constitute the commercial, business, and financial activities of a society. The danger in making economic generalizations is the same that arises from speaking of any of the social sciences as the interaction of impersonal forces – it divorces understanding from both the human motivation and the accidental occurrences responsible for causing most events. The problem, of course, is that the fundamental economic activity is so vast as to make most individual transactions irrelevant. That alone would lead us to seek more meaningful information in the measures that show the accumulated effects of multiple transactions, in the way that most of the economic activity undertaken by a business firm over the course of a year can be summarized in its financial statements. At the same time, we try to look behind the balance sheets and income statements to understand who the individuals who engaged in the transactions were and what they hoped to achieve.

Population Movements

Aside from slavery, among the most striking differences between the northern and southern sections of the country were those associated with immigration and internal migration of the free white population. The nineteenth century saw a massive increase in the number of immigrants coming to the United States with the overwhelming majority – 86.7 percent of the foreign born – living in the northern states. The Emigrant’s Manual, a travel book intended for Britons interested in moving to the United States, warned the emigrant that

the slave states are unsuitable for his purposes. The mechanic and farm-labourer will not seek a country where honest industry is associated with bondage and all its degradations. But what is more material, there is no room for him…However dear slave labour may be made in a slave state, it will always be cheaper than free labour; were it not, the masters would abandon their slaves.

The pattern of internal migration, as reflected in the 1860 census, also reinforced the slave-state versus free-state dichotomy. People born in free states tended to settle in other free states when they migrated while people who were born in slave states tended to settle in other slave states, although the tendency of people from slave states to move to free states was greater than the tendency of people in free states to move to slave states. According to the 1860 census, 350,700 free people born in free states were residing in slave states whereas 709,600 free people born in slave states were residing in free states. Given that ten million more people lived in the northern states than the southern states, the fact that twice as many people left the southern states for the northern states than went the other way has significance.

Panama

The alternative to traveling between the east and west coasts by stagecoach or wagon was to go by water. In 1849 the journey around the tip of South America took between 180 and 300 days by sail. The gold rush created such a demand for passage by water to California that the cost rose as high as $1,000. The physical and temporal remoteness of the western states created a scarcity of goods and news that raised the local price of both: one traveler to California took 1,500 copies of the New-York Tribune and other newspapers that he purchased in New York City for pennies a copy and sold them in California over the course of two hours a dollar each. Improved information about winds and currents that was made available by 1851 enabled mariners to reduce voyages to San Francisco from on average 187.5 days to 144.5 days, and a fast clipper ship could make the voyage in about 110 days. As more vessels sailed the route, the cost of passage fell to around $100.

The 1850s also saw the development of ground transport across the Isthmus of Panama – part of Colombia, which was then called New Grenada – to avoid sailing around South America and shorten the travel time. Initially the journey by way of Panama took six weeks, but by the early 1850s it had dropped to three or four weeks. Travel across Panama was further facilitated by the construction of 47 miles of railroad, ocean to ocean, completed in January 1855. When regular operations began, the trip by rail generally took three hours. Passengers, mail, and freight traveled in both directions, and on a number of occasions the locomotives and rolling stock moved 1,500 passengers, US mail, and the freight of three steamers across the isthmus in half a day. By 1860 steamships made the trip from New York to Panama in eight or nine days and from Panama to San Francisco in about ten days. The Panama railroad also became a significant transfer point for cargoes and passengers moving between other Pacific and Atlantic destinations.

Farm Acreage

The 1860 census enumerated 2.0 million farms of three acres or more, although the average farm had about 200 acres. Farm acreage included both improved and unimproved land. Improved land included all cleared land used for grazing, grass, or tillage and land lying fallow. Unimproved land had not been cleared and would include a wood lot, for example, although it omitted land that was not improvable, such as a marsh that could not be drained, and large ponds and lakes over ten acres in surface area. These figures do not give an indication of the number of acres under cultivation or the intensity of the cultivation in terms of intended cash yield per acre.

The average size of the individual farms within each state reveals a distinct regional pattern. The average farm in most of the southern slave states was substantially in excess of 200 acres (the national average) while the average farm in most of the northern states was 175 acres or fewer. In Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri – slaves states that had lower proportions of slaves than the states of the lower south – the average farm size tended toward the national average. Slavery contributed to the larger average farm size in the states of the lower south. Large plantations employed slaves as gang labor to produce cash crops – cotton, sugar, and rice – on a vast scale. Of the 20,289 farms that were between 500 and 1,000 acres, 83.4 percent were in southern states. Of the 5,348 farms that were 1,000 acres and larger, 85.5 percent were in the southern states. The average farm size in the Pacific coast states was also significantly higher than the other northern states. In Oregon 6.7 percent of the farms were 500 acres or larger, and in California 4.3 percent of the farms were of that size. In the other northern states, less than 1.0 percent of the farms were 500 acres or larger.