Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Jacksonian New England. By Michael J. Connolly. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. xii, 210 pp. $44.95, isbn 0-8262-1499-1.)

Abstract

This book, a revision of a recent doctoral thesis on entrepreneurial politics and railroad development, offers useful contributions to debates over the market revolution and capitalist transformation in antebellum New England. It explores politics, economic ideas, and party differences over economic development, and it seeks to offer an interpretation that transcends the distinction some historians have made between market and nonmar-ket ideologies. I must declare an interest: I have been associated with the “moral economy” perspective on early American development with which Dr. Michael J. Connolly takes issue. The book examines debates over the creation of railroads in two regions, the state of New Hampshire, and Essex County, Massachusetts. Connolly outlines the New Hampshire “railroad war” of the early 1840s, when radical Jacksonians blocked railroad construction by curbing the state's eminent domain powers. He plausibly suggests that those radicals were not antimarket but rather were defending existing decentralized commercial networks against what they feared as metropolitan and corporate encroachment. Whigs and conservative Democrats who joined together to oppose them argued for railroads' developmental potential and in 1844 rolled back the restrictive legislation. In Essex County, meanwhile, Whigs feared economic ruin as Salem's overseas commerce declined; they advocated railroads as a panacea. As in New Hampshire, railroad building prompted disputes over property seizures, routings, and the claims of rival settlements. Whig political dominance and Essex County's consciousness of its emerging status as a satellite of Boston helped keep such issues localized, and they never achieved the level of legislative conflict that beset the Granite State.