Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America
Book Review by: Thomas A. Kinney
For Citation: Business History Review 83 (Autumn 2009)
If studies like this are any indication, the horse is finally getting its due in the literature on American industrialization. Long employed by scholars as a symbol of an agrarian past, or as a mere foil for advances in inanimate power, the horse’s role in industrialization has been largely overlooked. This is changing, and studies like Ann Greene’s Horses at Work are leading the way. An insightful examination of draft horses during nineteenth-century American industrialization, the book refutes a popular misperception in its assertion that “horses were not a marginal segment of the industrial economy; horses defined the economy.” Seven chapters and twenty-five illustrations supply the how and why of that contention, reminding us that the industrial revolution ran on oats and sweat as well as on coal and steam. Each chapter considers horses from a different perspective: from industrial power sources and silent workers, to visible representatives of a complex “energy landscape” and beneficiaries of a sizable support infrastructure.
Additional chapters examine their vital roles in the Civil War and during their early twentieth-century decline. A recurring feature of Greene’s work is the conceptual shift necessary to remove the horse from its accustomed place in popular memory. Not the first to note our misidentification of them primarily with the countryside, she goes further by reminding us of their many roles, apart from conveyance. Stationary power drove the machinery of American industry, and, in many settings, that power source had hooves. Harnessed to the sweeps of whims or confined to the endless inclines of treadmills, horses provided the steady torque necessary to propel grain mills, hay presses, and mine hoists.
Of course, transportation receives the coverage due such an obviously important application. The conceptual shift comes into play here as well, as when Greene takes the Erie Canal, familiar as heroic civil engineering, and employs it as an example of a system wholly reliant on horses. Her treatment of the horse railroad as a successful adaptation of animal power—rather than simply an inefficient precursor to electric traction—underscores the value of weighing horses on the scale of actual utility. Another observation, as evident to nineteenth-century Americans as it is surprising today, is that horses served the railroads as much as the railroads served them. Teams assisted in their construction and later shifted people and freight between railheads, services as vital as those provided by the most efficient steam locomotives.
If horses thus impacted American industrialization, the opposite was also true. Greene explores numerous instances of industrialization’s equine impact, whether in attempts to reduce friction in wagon axles, to improve breeding (here Greene gives the batch–mass typology a biological application), or to supply mass-produced horseshoes. The limited malleability of a living being frustrated some of these endeavors, whether freight companies’ efforts to increase loads or Civil War quartermasters’ attempts to work around the equine gestation period. Still, in another sense, horses are themselves a form of mechanism, both a conceptually useful tool for historians and a common nineteenth-century understanding of the animal. There are numerous instances of the author’s illuminating use of the “living machine” motif. The ubiquity of horses as power sources—more central to industrialized America than the steam engine, Greene argues—seems to contradict her characterization of them as “niche” power sources. There are a few places in the book where similar inconsistencies, none major, appear, as well as the occasional technical gaffe, such as in the discussion of oxen in logging or the physics of vehicle springs. Few readers will note such matters, though specialists may take issue with another: for a work of obviously high scholarly quality, the absence of a bibliography or bibliographic essay is surprising. Those curious about Greene's sources will quickly tire of the work necessary to divine them from endnotes, however copious. If such an omission is a cost-saving measure by the press, one hopes it will find alternatives to shearing away a long-standard scholarly apparatus.
In the end, Horses at Work epitomizes one of the historian’s cherished roles: shedding fresh light on a familiar subject. Far more than simply what came before automobiles, horses have a history too, if one quickly forgotten. That very forgetting has sometimes ironic consequences, as with the currently fashionable excoriation of internal combustion. Critics of the automobile seem blissfully unaware of its humanitarian role, one that permitted Americans to achieve speed via foot pressure rather than beatings. Whether moral advance trumps environmental impact is a fair question, but one unasked by a society ignorant of its own equine past. Courtesy of thoughtful works like this, we are beginning to recover that rich and complex history.