"The Most Developing Force."

Charles Francis Adams decided to devote his public career to studying and writing about railroads because over the middle decades of the nineteenth century they became, as he put it, "the most developing force and largest field of the day." After a burst of construction over the 1850s, in which the nation's railroad mileage grew from 8,879 to 30,626, the railroads emerged as a key industrial infrastructure, and at the same time as the country's biggest business and one of the era's most pressing public policy issues. In other words, the new economy was not only carried by railroads; it was driven by railroads. As sources of transportation they pinned together the new agricultural and industrial landscape, and as businesses they themselves led many of the transformations reworking the national economy. By the time of the Civil War the railroads dwarfed...