Was Pittsburgh's Economic Destiny Set in 1815?

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Was Pittsburgh’s Economic Destiny Set in 1815? EDWARD K. MULLER

first read The Urban Frontier as a graduate student in historical geog- Iraphy many years ago. I naturally focused on the geographical impli- cations of Richard C. Wade’s thesis that towns emerged on the Ohio Valley frontier along with the earliest pioneers, “held the West for the approaching population,” and accelerated its transformation to a settled region.1 This critical insight into the settlement process anchored my dissertation.2 His view that “towns were the spearheads” and not the cul- mination of the settlement process, overturned the conventional Tu rnerian interpretation of frontier urbanization and spurred the work of many subsequent scholars.3 At the time of my initial reading, I paid little attention to Wade’s comparative methodology and comprehensive topical coverage. Returning to The Urban Frontier often in the ensuing years, I gained an

______Edward K. Muller is Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. Among his recent pub- lications is (with John F. Bauman) Before Renaissance: Planning in Pittsburgh, 1889-1943 (2006). 1Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790-1830 (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), 342. 2Edward K. Muller, “The Development of Urban Settlement in a Newly Settled Region: The Middle Ohio Valley, 1800-1860,” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1972); Muller, “Selective Urban Growth in the Middle Ohio Valley, 1800-1860,” Geographical Review, 66 (April 1976), 178-99; Muller, “Regional Urbanization and the Selective Growth of Towns in North American Regions,” Journal of Historical Geography, 3 (January 1977), 21-39. 3Wade, The Urban Frontier, 1.

INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY, 105 (September 2009) 2009, Trustees of Indiana University. 204 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

appreciation of his research, which encompassed five cities and the examination of forty to fifty years of local newspapers, municipal records, and other primary materials. As if unraveling the economic and geographical roles of five cities were not enough, Wade also wrote on everything from municipal governments’ structures and their evolving responsibilities to racial relations, cultural activities, and emerging social configurations. He presented a story of a rapidly developing and surprisingly sophisticated urban life on the frontier despite the towns’ small populations and relatively brief existences. In this narrative, citi- zens ambitiously pursued the myriad high-risk economic opportunities of these newly developing regions, while (in another challenge to Tu rnerian interpretations) they simultaneously emulated older eastern cities by bringing “established institutions and ways” to their towns.4 Twenty years after Harvard University Press published The Urban Frontier, I joined the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh and found myself faced with teaching a course on the city’s history. I discovered a wealth of writing on the struggle between France and Britain in the mid-eighteenth century for control of the peninsula formed by the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers. I also found a vigorous and growing literature on the city’s industrial era that began a century later. Enthusiastic and productive graduate seminars in American social history begun during the 1960s at both the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University emphasized the seven decades of rapid and extensive industrialization between the 1850s and the end of World War I. Pittsburgh’s importance to the nation’s industrialization in this period, especially with respect to the iron and steel industry and the labor movement, attracted national and international attention from industrial and social historians beyond the local universi- ties. Accordingly, there was an outpouring of books, theses, and seminar papers on this era of Pittsburgh history. This extensive body of work contrasted with the shockingly thin literature on the city as it had devel- oped in the first half of the nineteenth century.5 This imbalance in the writing of Pittsburgh history remains. Leland D. Baldwin’s 1937 history of Pittsburgh from 1750 to 1865 is the

______4Ibid., 318. 5Samuel P. Hays, ed., City at the Point: Essays on the Social History of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1989). PITTSBURGH 205

only extant comprehensive volume for the frontier and antebellum peri- ods. Baldwin wrote for a general audience, and although he based his book on newspapers, manuscripts, and other primary sources, he admit- tedly emphasized “feeling, drama, and atmosphere rather than textbook completeness.”6 Even as he dramatized and romanticized some events, in other places Baldwin resorted to list-like compilations of city-building achievements and social and cultural developments. In keeping with his generation of historians, he produced a book more in the style of older city biographies than the interpretive scholarly studies of cities which came after Wade. A decade later, Catherine Elizabeth Reiser wrote a richly empirical study of Pittsburgh’s economic growth down to 1850.7 In her view, the evolution of evermore efficient and far-reaching commercial capabilities served the manufacturing goals of the city elite. Despite being impressed with the city’s growth of manufacturing, Reiser spent most of her book carefully describing transportation improvements, the emergence of commission merchants and marketing, and developing efforts at economic organization. Further, her analysis involved the evolution of a prodigious trade in goods, largely unrelated to local manufactures, with points on the East Coast and in the Ohio Valley. Like many who wrote in the years after her, Reiser interpreted Pittsburgh’s antebellum past through the lens of its later industrial strength. Besides the typical turn-of-the-century subscription-based city and county histories and a smattering of essays and research notes (often written by history buffs), Wade had only Baldwin’s and Reiser’s works, and a handful of graduate theses and articles, on which to draw. On economic matters, he referenced Reiser several times, but clearly he pre- ferred to depend on his own research. There is no evidence that he used Baldwin’s story of Pittsburgh, which offered little critical interpretation. In contrast, Wade advanced generalizations about the early Ohio Valley cities on a great variety of urban topics. In one passage, he pulled togeth- er the various strands of social change to plausibly capture the situation in Pittsburgh until nearly mid-century, when significant industrial

______6Leland D. Baldwin, Pittsburgh: The Story of a City, 1750-1865 (1937; Pittsburgh, Pa., 1970), xi. 7Catherine Elizabeth Reiser, Pittsburgh’s Commercial Development, 1800-1850 (Harrisburg, Pa., 1951). 206 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

growth and social change began to transform the young city. Writing about the city as it appeared in 1830, he concluded:

Larger populations and the expansion of commerce and industry created new groups and interests, thus adding to the complexity and sophistication of city life. Already stratified after a generation of growth, these communities found lines sharpened, class divisions deepened, and the sense of neighborliness and intimacy weakened. The fragmentation caused by the increasing special- ization of urban economies and the greater size of the towns meant the easy familiarity of small-town life more and more gave way to the impersonality of city living.8

Ranging across a broad variety of political, social, and cultural topics, Wade both supported his own conclusion and foreshadowed later scholarship, as sparse as it is. Thirty years after Wade’s pathbreaking study, a few scholars reached back to the initial decades of the nineteenth century in the course of preparing topical overviews covering the city’s full history. They brought to their essays fresh perspectives based on the relatively recent literature of social history and on a handful of graduate student papers on antebellum Pittsburgh. Joel Tarr’s essay on infrastruc- ture, Laurence Glasco’s on African Americans, Paul Kleppner’s on poli- tics and government, John Ingham’s on elites, and my own on hinterland relationships all confirmed and went beyond Wade’s observations.9 Even with the addition of Scott Martin’s excellent book on leisure and culture, however, the paucity of scholarly investigations into early Pittsburgh leaves Wade’s generalizations about class, fragmentation, and diminish- ing intimacy inadequately tested.10 By examining the five major urban centers of the Ohio Valley frontier, Wade avoided the pitfalls of the single case study approach and strengthened his argument. His comparative approach, however, may have had the unintended consequence of overemphasizing Pittsburgh as

______8Wade. The Urban Frontier, 203. 9Hays, ed., City at the Point. 10Scott C. Martin, Killing Time: Leisure and Culture in Southwestern Pennsylvania, 1800-1850 (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1995). PITTSBURGH 207

a manufacturing city during the first third of the nineteenth century. Wade recognized Pittsburgh’s greater development of, and dependence on, manufacturing compared to that of the other Ohio Valley towns. By 1815, only Lexington seemed to depend as much on manufacturing. In this essay, I suggest that while Pittsburgh’s industrial development did distinguish it from its rival river towns, its business leaders—like those of Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis—were first and foremost intent on creating the great trading depot of the continental interior. At the time, hinterland and long-distance trade formed the basis of successful urban growth in the nation and within the larger Atlantic arena, of which the fledgling Ohio Valley towns were a distant extension. The development of a market-based economy in the newly settling frontiers required access to this trade and demanded that urban centers organize and conduct the critical exchange function.11 As Diane Shaw has observed about the frontier cities of the nation’s antebellum interior, “the spatial hierarchies inherent in the functionally, architecturally, and socially sorted cityscape suggest the power of the merchant and professional classes and the presence of dominating commercial motives in the discourse and practice of city building at the time.”12 Only as Pittsburgh came out of the lengthy depression of 1839-1843 did its leaders begin to accept that Cincinnati, St. Louis, and, perhaps, Chicago would be the gateways to a new, more distant West and that their city’s future lay more with manufacturing than with river-based commerce. The difficulty of interpreting the character of Pittsburgh’s early economy lies in discerning the relationship between its commercial and manufacturing activities. Even before the beginning of the nineteenth century, as Wade recounted, Pittsburgh assumed the role of gateway to the West by virtue of its location at the head of the Ohio River, the primary route to the rapidly settling territories (soon-to-be states) of Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The former military routes that Generals Edward Braddock and John Forbes carved out of the wilder- ness in their quests to defeat the French in the 1750s became the early

______11James E. Vance Jr., The Merchant’s World: The Geography of Wholesaling (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1970), 80-128. 12Diane Shaw, City Building on the Eastern Frontier: Sorting the New Nineteenth Century City (Baltimore, Md., 2004), 8. While Shaw wrote specifically of Rochester and Syracuse, two New York cities that were contemporaries of Pittsburgh, she meant her observations to apply more broadly to interior cities of the era. 208 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

An 1812 map of Pittsburgh. The confluence of three rivers provided the young city with connections to eastern goods and western markets. John Melish, Travels in the United States of America . . . (Philadelphia, 1812) PITTSBURGH 209

roads through the Allegheny Mountains. They connected the eastern port cities of Philadelphia and Baltimore, respectively, to the Ohio Valley frontier at Pittsburgh, where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers also converged. Between 1790 and the end of the War of 1812, the city provisioned federal troops, marketed regional products, and outfitted migrants exhausted from their arduous, trans-mountain journey and preparing to embark on the Ohio River for the next leg of their migra- tion. Artisans made goods for these markets, while retail storekeepers sold both the products of the southwestern Pennsylvania countryside and goods imported from eastern merchants, such as cloth, spices, tea, and coffee. With the expansion of settlement in the Ohio Valley during these early years, the demand for eastern goods rose, requiring the services of middlemen or commission merchants to handle the growing volume of trade at this transshipment point from overland to river transportation. Reiser found evidence that Pittsburgh’s first commission merchant may have dated to 1805; by 1815 twenty commission merchants appeared in a local directory along with ninety-three other merchants and twenty-one storekeepers.13 As they did in other frontier cities across America, early Pittsburgh tradesmen produced goods on a small scale for food, shelter, clothing, and transportation needs. They recognized that the mountains added a transportation premium on the cost of eastern goods, some of which could be locally manufactured more cheaply and profitably. The distinc- tion between retail stores and artisan shops is unclear in the documen- tary record and functionally blurred in practice. Boot- and shoemakers, tanners, tailors, weavers, and blacksmiths, some with shops separate from their residences, joined boat builders, wagonmakers, saddlers, and others vital to transportation to make Pittsburgh a city full of busy work- shops. Wade and later historians particularly noted the nascent iron foundries and rolling mills, glassworks, naileries, textile mills, and steam engine manufactories, which are distinctive from the typical array of processors, transportation services, and necessity manufactures of

______13Reiser, Commercial Development, 128, 134-35, based in part on James M. Riddle, Pittsburgh Directory for 1815 (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1815). Reiser described the function of the commission merchant as follows: “When trade was in its infancy, there was no need for commission merchants because the business was too small to support a middleman. As business expanded and goods were sent on longer journeys and in greater amounts, one man found that he could make a living by distributing goods for merchants and manufacturers” (p. 134). The commission merchant placed goods on appropriate boats, held auctions, and ran a warehouse. 210 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

American frontier cities. As the years of embroilment with Britain, especially during the war, greatly stimulated these manufacturers, surveys of the city’s manufacturing in the 1810s placed iron and glass among the leading industries. Wade described these industrial developments and argued that by 1815 Pittsburgh had turned its business emphasis to manufacturing. Like other western towns, he asserted, its “direction of growth . . . had been pretty well set.”14 Nearly all young, ambitious American cities of this period dreamed of commercial greatness and engaged in rivalries for regional and long- distance trade. One might wonder, then, why Wade lost sight of the extent of Pittsburgh’s commercial aspirations and emphasized the manufacturing activities of a town self-designated as the gateway to the West. To be sure, Wade grounded his interpretation on the impressive extent of the city’s manufacturing. In 1815, for example, the city directory reported 1,960 persons (out of a total population of between 8,000 and 9,000) employed in industrial activities. He duly noted contemporary descriptions such as an 1810 characterization of the city as “a large workshop” or John Melish’s comment that “in the course of my walks through the streets I heard everywhere the sound of the hammer and the anvil.” He gleaned other contemporary references to its being called the Birmingham of America and already displaying a smoky, dirty atmosphere.15 Moreover, Wade, like Reiser a decade earlier, noted that some Pittsburghers in these initial years of the century believed that manufacturing was the city’s path to increased trade and prosperity.16 In this vein, he pointed to the dependence of early manufacturers on the capital of merchants and to the mixing of these roles, as a few merchants also start- ed manufacturing enterprises. In many frontier cities, merchants who accumulated capital from their trading activities often purchased real estate in or around the city and farm acreage in the hinterland. Land was a familiar investment for early Americans, who found it a more attractive and stable investment than manufacturing. Wade, however, proposed that the poor, already-

______14Wade, The Urban Frontier, 42; Reiser, Commercial Development, 11-21. 15Wade, The Urban Frontier, 43. Although one attributes Pittsburgh’s legendary smoky atmosphere to industry, residential burning of coal also contributed to the city’s darkened skies. 16Ibid., 69. Reiser makes this observation a primary tenet of her study. It is possible that Wade was influenced by, or accepted, this view as he began to research Pittsburgh, but it is more likely that he based his conclusion on his own research. PITTSBURGH 211

settled lands of southwestern Pennsylvania did not siphon off Pittsburgh’s investment capital, as the more agriculturally suited hinter- lands of the other Ohio Valley towns did. Accordingly, he reasoned that manufacturing would have been an attractive alternative investment for Pittsburgh merchants. An examination of the city’s elites, however, throws doubt on Wade’s speculation. Lingering Indian hostilities and Pennsylvania land policy had delayed settlement of the lands north of Pittsburgh so that opportunities for speculation certainly existed. More importantly, like members of their class elsewhere in the nation, many of the city’s wealthy, including, for example, James O’Hara, John Ormsby, John Herron, and John McClure, added investments in urban land and farms about the region to their commercial portfolios.17 They also fre- quently invested in manufacturing, perhaps to a greater extent than their downriver peers. A scarcity of opportunities for real estate speculation does not seem to be a likely explanation for the merchants’ financial support of local manufacturers. The devastating impact of peace and depression on Pittsburgh’s manufacturing activity further convinced Wade of the city’s distinctive economy. When the War of 1812 ended, British merchants flooded American markets with manufactured goods. Pittsburgh felt the impact almost immediately—before the other Ohio Valley cities—and the depression that enveloped the national economy worsened the city’s plight. By 1819, both industrial employment and the value of produc- tion declined to approximately one-third of their 1815 peaks. The 1820 census recorded a population decrease in the city during these hard times. Pittsburghers commented on the closed factories, empty houses, eerie silences, and less smoky skies about the town. Further, Wade observed, Pittsburgh took longer to recover from the depression than did its peers, not reaching former economic levels until the middle of the 1820s. While manufacturing and commerce were flourishing a few years later, the 1830 census showed that Cincinnati had surpassed Pittsburgh in population. In Wade’s view, the Queen City had become the Ohio Valley’s commercial powerhouse. Like Baldwin and Reiser before him and historian John Ingham years afterward, he deemed man-

______17Joseph F. Rishel, Founding Families of Pittsburgh: The Evolution of a Regional Elite, 1760-1910 (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1990), 36-38, 48-55. 212 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

ufacturing the primary engine of Pittsburgh’s economic life as it entered into the second third of the century.18 Besides the evidence of its manufacturing activity, two additional points may have contributed to Wade’s interpretation that Pittsburgh had already become an industrial city, even on the frontier. First, Wade accentuated Pittsburgh’s distinctiveness by the manner in which he viewed Cincinnati. In discussing the Queen City’s extensive commerce, he included packed meat as its “central export item” and reported that the city had already become known as “Porkopolis.” He appeared not to have considered meat packing as a manufacturing activity, although most historians include agricultural processing as part of a city’s manufacturing complex. Like Pittsburgh’s ironworks, Cincinnati’s slaughter- houses not only were a prominent presence in the landscape with the constant bellowing of their raw material, odiferous operations, and stream-fouling wastes, but they also spawned substantial linked manufacturing (such as coopering) and by-product firms turning out brushes, combs, buttons, and a host of other goods. Viewed in this light, Cincinnati’s economic profile takes on a more industrial cast, and Pittsburgh’s appears less distinctive.19 Secondly, Wade may have adopted a retrospective view of the Iron City. Given the unprecedented expansion and transformation of the iron and steel industry only a few decades after 1830, both amateur and academic historians (including Reiser) have concluded that Pittsburgh was destined from its beginnings to become the Steel City. With iron ore available in the Allegheny Mountains, an abundance of coal nearby in the southwestern corner of the state, and access to the rivers, the small iron foundries and rolling mills of these initial decades were the precursors of the massive iron and steel industry of the future, and could be seen, therefore, as evidence of its destiny as a great industrial city. Few have resisted the temptation to interpret the early city in light of its spectacular industrial development at the end of the nineteenth century. Wade may have undervalued the commercial aspirations of Pittsburgh’s leaders to become and remain the great entrepôt of the American interior. In his concluding chapter, he emphasized the impor-

______18Wade, The Urban Frontier, 166-69, 194-95; Reiser, Commercial Development, 21-27; Baldwin, The Story of a City, 152-53; John Ingham, Making Iron and Steel: Independent Mills in Pittsburgh, 1820-1920 (Columbus, Ohio, 1991), 22. 19Wade, The Urban Frontier, 196-97. PITTSBURGH 213

tance of the five cities’ commercial rivalry for supremacy in their own region, in the Ohio Valley, and the West more generally: “Indeed, one of the most striking characteristics of this period was the development of an urban imperialism which saw rising young giants seek to spread their power and influence over the entire new country.”20 Although Wade focused on Pittsburgh’s manufacturing in the century’s first few years, there is little question that most of the city’s leaders saw river-based commerce as the source of its economic growth and prosperous future. The spirit of urban imperialism infused the merchants’ rhetoric and actions; the rapid settlement and economic development in the western country spurred the city’s middleman trade. As Reiser points out, the earliest efforts at economic organization strove to enhance trade by expanding and stabilizing the export markets for the region’s agricultural and manufacturing products.21 The choice of Wheeling as the Ohio River terminus of the National Road, completed to that town in 1818, challenged Pittsburgh’s middleman position and its transshipment of goods between the East and the Ohio Valley. The spirited rhetorical exchange in the two cities’ newspapers, gleefully reported by Wade, underscored the high stakes of commercial rivalry.22 The war’s stimulus to manufacturing and its dramatic decline after the war set up the 1820s as a critical decade for determining which type of economic activity would drive the city’s recovery from depression. The close relationship of merchants and manufacturers, however, when combined with the unevenness of economic data, cloud the picture of the recovery process. Reiser, Wade, and Ingham all believed that manufacturing recovered more quickly than trade and that by mid-decade it had become the leading activity. The transport and sale of the city’s manufactured products to Ohio Valley markets took up the slack until commerce robustly recovered in the second half of the decade. By 1830, both manufacturing and commerce had far surpassed their 1815 levels.23 The quicker recovery of manufacturing did not mean that city leaders decided to relinquish their commercial horizons to downriver

______20Ibid., 322, 336. 21Reiser, Commercial Development, 173-90, 125. 22Wade, The Urban Frontier, 322-27. 23Ibid., 180, 194-95; Baldwin, The Story of a City, 185; Ingham, Making Iron and Steel, 22-23. 214 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

The first Pittsburgh Market and county courthouse, from an 1866 illustration. Despite Wade’s emphasis on manufactures, commerce was also an integral part of the early city’s economy. Darlington Family Papers, 1753-1921, Darlington Memorial Library, University of Pittsburgh

rivals. Historians agree that the threats to trade by the National Road, Erie Canal, Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, and the Ohio canal system (the last two begun in the late 1820s) worried the city’s merchants and spurred them into action. As a means to protect their western trade, they directed their considerable political energies towards the construction of a Pennsylvania turnpike (opened in 1818) and a statewide canal (completed in 1834), state authorization of improved navigation on the Monongahela River, and federal government-funded improvements on the Ohio River between Pittsburgh and Wheeling. They also lobbied hard for protective tariffs that benefited manufacturing and thus trade. In the 1820s, the city’s merchants, exercising their municipal political power, upgraded the Monongahela wharf, instituted a wharf master, reg- ularized shipping news, and paved commercial streets.24 In conjunction with a booming western economy and the wide- spread adoption of the steamboat, the merchants’ efforts in the 1820s to

______24Reiser, Commercial Development, 44-46, 138-39. PITTSBURGH 215

strengthen Pittsburgh’s position in the nation’s growing transportation network seemed to bear fruit. By ending his study in 1830, Wade did not track the full revival of the western trade during the rest of the decade. Steamboats facilitated that revival throughout the Ohio Valley; by making upriver transportation a commercial reality, they especially aided Pittsburgh as the most eastern, upstream port. The improved overland routes to the East became quite busy, but it was the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal that had the greatest impact on the western trade. The city became a depot for western agricultural products and “southern gro- ceries” such as sugar, tea, spices, and coffee, while the re-export of eastern merchandise and “freight” joined with Pittsburgh’s iron products, glasswares, hardware, and machinery to dominate the downriver trade. By 1836 the estimated value of trade doubled that for manufacturing. Reiser claimed that there were sixty to eighty wholesale establishments in the 1830s, the successors to the commission merchants. As Baldwin wrote, “Before many years an increasing share of the intersectional commerce began to find its way back through Pittsburgh in order to utilize its improving transportation facilities.”25 Manufacturing also continued to expand well into the 1830s, and the merchants did not lose sight of its importance for their trade and as a source of profit. Indeed, commerce and manufacturing always went hand-in-hand in Pittsburgh. The merchants’ development of markets and capital was critical to the rise of manufacturing. The mutual economic interests of Pittsburgh’s merchants and manufacturers eased the flow of merchant capital into manufacturing. Wade and the other historians point to, for example, the investments of wealthy merchants Joseph McClurg and James O’Hara in the city’s first iron foundry and glass works, respectively. The growth of manufacturing, especially iron products, in the 1820s and 1830s required considerable capital that the merchant community largely provided. The lack of surviving company records for the period makes it impossible to gauge the level of merchant support, but in summarizing scholarship on antebellum iron manufacturing, Ingham recounts the importance of iron and hardware merchants, private bankers, and others with capital who invested in the industry.26 In these same years, merchants were prominent among the city’s leaders. Former military men, large landowners, and merchants, often

______25Ibid., 27, 135; Baldwin, The Story of a City, 185. 26Ingham, Making Iron and Steel, 23-25; Reiser, Commercial Development, 128. 216 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

Pittsburgh in 1839. The city’s development into a major manufacturing center is already obvious in this view. Daniel Adams, Modern Geography in Three Parts (Boston, 1839)

Scots-Irish and Presbyterians, formed a small patrician class used to pro- viding leadership. Despite his emphasis on manufacturing during this period, Wade described these leaders as having a “commercial outlook” and exercising a “merchant supremacy in local affairs.” They advocated wharf and transportation improvements and organized trade-enhancing institutions. Ingham calls their power a “mercantile aristocracy.”27 In this manner, Wade and Ingham closely align the outlook of Pittsburgh’s leadership with that of Diane Shaw’s New York frontier cities, Rochester and Syracuse. Wade and Ingham describe a challenge in the 1820s to the mercantile leadership, with the inevitable aging of the patrician generation and the rising significance of manufacturing. Manufacturers—including some who were not originally Pittsburghers—gained political office and joined the major business institutions, producing a more inclusive lead-

______27Wade, The Urban Frontier, 77-79; Ingham, Making Iron and Steel, 22; Rishel, Founding Families of Pittsburgh, 22-45. PITTSBURGH 217

ership. Nevertheless, commercial and professional men still predominat- ed in the expanding city councils—comprising 58 percent of the repre- sentatives in 1828, with the proportion peaking in the following decade—and they similarly dominated the new Board of Trade and Bank of Pittsburgh in the 1830s. The growth of the city’s population and increase in its ethnic diversity, the spatial expansion of districts for council representation, and the rise of manufacturing, all evident by the 1830s, broadened economic and political leadership such that in the next decade merchants no longer enjoyed a majority position, even though they remained the largest single business group before the depression.28 The embarrassingly slim scholarship on Pittsburgh during the initial third of the century leaves open to interpretation the question raised in this essay. Wade and other historians assume that the city’s manufacturing greatness was set in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century. Wade concludes that manufacturing had become Pittsburgh’s leading economic force by 1815. Henceforth, it was a manufacturing city and commerce was subordinate. Merchants, however, remained in power into the 1830s, increasingly sharing their leadership with manufacturers with whom they were closely associated both eco- nomically and socially, apparently without antipathy. The political struggle of the anti-Masons in the early 1830s was more the result of the older generation trying to hold onto leadership than of an explicit division between manufacturers and merchants.29 The merchants actively worked to regain the city’s commercial position in the West in the 1820s, steered municipal expenditures towards commercial ends, and enjoyed the fruits of their labors until the onset of the 1839 depression. Even though trade continued to grow for several years after its recovery in the 1840s, the nation’s economic geography had irrevocably changed. Cincinnati’s commercial supremacy in the mid-Ohio Valley (espied by Wade as evident in 1830), the burgeoning market for industrial products, and the completion of railroad networks connecting the East with the West in the early 1850s spelled the end of Pittsburgh’s commercial dreams. Agricultural development had moved north

______28Paul Kleppner, “Government, Parties, and Voters in Pittsburgh,” in Hays, ed., City at the Point, 154-59. 29Ibid., 157-59. 218 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

towards the Great Lakes and west to and beyond the Mississippi Valley. At first, this spatial shift favored Cincinnati and St. Louis, but soon, and more dramatically, Chicago took advantage of it. The railroads that benefited Chicago so greatly after 1850 rapidly eclipsed the nation’s long-distance canals and destroyed Pittsburgh’s middleman role at the head of the Ohio River for western-moving merchandise and eastern- directed agricultural products. Moreover, critical changes in the market for iron goods, in particular the burgeoning appetite for railroad rails and the demands of the Civil War, presented excellent opportunities for Pittsburgh’s ironmasters if they could successfully adapt—and adapt they did! The future for the gateway to the West truly became manufacturing; the city’s businessmen, including merchants like Benjamin F. Jones and James Laughlin and railroaders like Andrew Carnegie, pursued the new industrial horizon with astonishing success. Wade aptly recognized most of the merchants’ relationships to manufacturing and placed these commercial men at the top of the social hierarchy. However, by ending his study on a census year instead of on the more natural economic moment of the depression in 1839—when an expansion of fifteen or more years came to an end—Wade missed the revival of Pittsburgh’s western trade and, like others before and after him, stressed the more robust manufacturing sector in the initial years of recovery in the 1820s. Additionally, this perspective allowed little con- text to understand fully the merchants’ transportation strategy and its consequences. Without studying the composition of the city’s political leadership, he could not evaluate the continued power of the merchants in the face of manufacturing’s “challenge” to commerce. Wade’s interpretation of Pittsburgh as a manufacturing city since the second decade of the century, in fact since 1815, is convenient and compatible with later developments. But it deflects our attention away from the central, driv- ing motivation of the city until the 1840s, and in so doing might well miscast our view of its social and political life. Wade’s history of early Pittsburgh, as well as that of the other Ohio Valley cities, demonstrates his superb abilities as an historian. With the exception of its undue emphasis on the city’s manufacturing at so early a period, The Urban Frontier remains essential reading for understanding Pittsburgh in the initial three decades of the nineteenth century.