Unfortunately for the British investors, a corruption scandal engulfing the ICR president (who had fraudulently issued $1 million of stock for another railroad that he directed) and the financial panic of 1857 (which prevented the farmers who had purchased land from the company from paying their mortgages) frustrated hopes of easy riches. The company coped with these setbacks by exercising its right to demand additional payouts from its shareholders—meaning that London investors had to pony up an additional $35 per share (totaling about $5 million in the higher-value currency of the time).102 Closer to home, the ICR gave extensions on the notes that were due to it from settlers. It also accepted payment in kind, which generally meant corn. So many farmers took them up on this offer that the ICR had to construct cribs to hold the two million bushels of payments. That policy enhanced the ICR’s popularity in the state, but it won them few friends in England, especially after the stocks fell in value to below par.103
Unhappy with their losses, the British stock and bondholders selected two delegates to investigate the company’s management. After meeting with ICR officers and going through the company’s books, the investigators won some oversight.104 But their most important discovery did not come in the boardroom, it came on the train itself, as the agents inspected the initial stretch of rails.105 Looking out at the prairie, one of them had an epiphany: “This is not a railroad company; it is a land company.”106 Upon realizing that the path to profitability lay in land sales, British investors turned into real estate agents.
They were helped in this endeavor by James Caird, a member of Parliament with agricultural expertise who sang the praises of the ICR lands following a trip to the United States and Canada in 1858. In Prairie Farming in America, Caird marveled at the amount of land granted to the ICR: “nearly equal to the fourteenth part of all England.” It had sold half of that already and could sell the remainder at much higher prices, but since its goal was to create traffic for the railroad, it was offering bargain rates. And what land it was! The rich prairie soils “excel our best lands,” wrote Caird. Although only a tenth of Illinois was cultivated, the state already produced more grain than both Ireland and Scotland and twice as many pigs.107 Caird promised sure riches to large-scale investors, writing that lots placed under “prudent skillful management . . . could not fail to return a handsome annual dividend; and, in the course of a few years, by the mere lapse of time and the progress of wealth and population, to double in value.”108
William Scully took the bait. The younger son of an Irish landed family, Scully purchased tenant farms in Illinois, Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri in the 1850s. At the height of his career as an American landowner, he held almost 220,000 acres, worked by over twelve hundred tenant families. Scully managed his holdings from London, with visits to Illinois about every other year after 1855. Though reviled in Ireland in the 1860s for “all that was evil in landlord-tenant relations,” he escaped protest in the United States prior to the 1880s.109 When a movement arose against alien land ownership in the 1890s, Scully obtained U.S. citizenship. This financial move notwithstanding, he and his heirs continued to live mainly in London.110
Besides pitching Illinois to potential landlords, Caird strove to entice emigration. To “young farmers of activity and intelligence . . . with some capital at their command” and to “intelligent, hard-working farm laborers,” Caird forecast a prosperous future on the prairie.111 Sharing his goal of settlement and sales, the Illinois Central distributed tens of thousands of copies of Caird’s puff piece in Great Britain and Canada.112
Caird talked up the promise of emigration as if he had discovered Illinois himself, but there were already plenty of emigrants from the British Empire in the lands traversed by the ICR. Irish laborers had laid much of the track that Caird traveled. The ICR trolled for workers in the port cities where Irish immigrants landed, and at least one of its contractors recruited workers in Ireland.113 Although Irish track layers were not as likely to turn farmer when the line was completed as their German coworkers, some did take up the plow. Even after the completion of the railroad, Irish emigrants continued to flow into central Illinois, driven by a desire to escape famine-inducing British imperial policies as much as by a desire to make their fortune in a new land. Among these post-railroad-boom emigrants was Champaign County resident Bernard Hannan, born near Dublin in 1845 and later known for his Berkshire hogs.114
RECIPROCAL REPLENISHMENT
Following along on the rails laid by Irish workers came settlers from other points in northern Europe, so many so that shortly after the line went through, the Urbana Union noted that “our town does not appear as of yore; its once vacant streets are being thronged with strangers, who have come among us to seek an abiding place.”115 The 1850 census identified 19 percent of the immigrants to Champaign as English (with no Scots or Welsh reported) and 34 percent as Irish. The 1870 census identified about 22 percent of foreign-born immigrants to Champaign County as English, Scottish, and Welsh and 36 percent as Irish. (In 1850, the immigrant population was less than 2 percent of the county total; by 1870 immigrants constituted nearly 10 percent of the county’s inhabitants.)116 If Irish emigrants came in part to escape English power, those from England, Scotland, and Wales had reason to see their emigration as a means to advance it.
In the 1880s, proponents of Greater Britain worried that the outflow of emigrants to the United States drained the lifeblood of the British Empire. With such concerns in mind, they tried to redirect emigration to imperial outposts. But in the 1850s, the United States struck British emigration advocates as a kind of imperial outpost, never mind the nation’s political independence.117 This view of the quasi-colonial status of the United States can be seen in emigration tracts that emphasized the benefits that would accrue to England. An 1859 guide to Illinois Central lands told would-be settlers from England that they could “profitably contribute to supply the wants of the old country, whose land can no longer meet the demands of her dense population.” After pointing out that England “consumed each day the produce of ten thousand acres of foreign land,” it called upon Englishmen “to take their share in its supply.”118 Emigration, in other words, would not necessarily mean a break from England; it could be a way to nourish it.
The disastrous harvest of 1845 added to the persuasiveness of such arguments. In the aftermath of that harvest, Britain repealed the agricultural tariffs known as Corn Laws, with corn in this context meaning the common grain of the country.119 Over the next three years, the importation of cured beef, bacon, and pork increased sixfold.120 Further tariff reductions came in 1853 before being eliminated altogether in 1860.121 In addition to reducing hunger among the working classes, these imports enabled Britain’s poor to eat more meat. As meat consumption rose, so did expectations that even the poor should eat meat on a regular basis. To maintain this standard of living, Britain needed to import more food.
It was not only the poor who needed American imports to thrive—the entire nation needed them in times of war. With the closure of the Baltic and Black Seas to British shipping during the Crimean War (1853–1856), Britain turned to Canada and the United States to make up the resulting grain deficits.122 Illinois farmers increased their wheat production to meet the heightened British demand. The wheat crop of 1855 was triple that of 1850; by 1856, the value of Illinois wheat outstripped that of Illinois corn. Emigration tracts did not mention that as the end of the conflict brought the midwestern wheat boom to a close it also ushered in the financial panic of 1857.123 Instead, they reminded British readers that American agricultural production contributed to British security.
British emigrants may have had their own nationalistic reasons for seeking British export markets, but Illinois farmers did not need to hail from England, Scotland, or Wales to share aspirations of feeding the British people. From its formation, the Illinois Central insisted that it would be the vehicle for crowding the quays of Liverpool with Illinois beef, pork, and lard.124
This promise implied two major changes: lower transportation costs and more northerly trade. The railroad delivered on both. When farmers complained about the rates in 1856, the ICR catered favor by reducing them, from $33 to $15 per carload for cattle, and down to $12 per carload for hogs.125
Along with reducing the expense of getting pigs to market, the ICR changed the location of the market. Before the 1850s, the reliance on downstream river transportation directed midwestern pork toward the lower-end markets of the South or necessitated its reshipment through eastern ports. The railroad, in conjunction with the halt to southern shipping during the Civil War, redirected these older patterns of trade northward to Chicago.126
As rail connections expanded its hinterland, Chicago became the nation’s leading meat-processing center. By 1890, Chicago packers prepared over a third of all meat produced in the United States. They slaughtered over 8.5 million hogs in 1891, as many as 74,551 in one day.127
Thanks to British capital investments in U.S. railroads and the invention of refrigerated cars, Corn Belt livestock fatteners could export fresh meat to the high-end British market. This rendition of a loaded American refrigerator car comes from a volume on Britain’s meat supply.
George E. Putnam, Supplying Britain’s Meat (London: George C. Harrap and Co., 1923), plate after 92.
In addition to shifting the meat trade to the north, the railroad infrastructure financed by British capital and built of British iron facilitated transatlantic trade. Whereas recent U.S. pork exports have gone mainly to Latin America and East Asia (with the U.S. withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, efforts to renegotiate NAFTA, and the onset of a trade war with China causing concern for present-day pork exporters), earlier exports flowed mostly across the Atlantic.128 Buyers from England, Scotland, Germany, France, Belgium, and “nearly every other important country on the globe” coursed through the Chicago stockyards.129 Upon placing their orders, they could rely on Chicago’s transportation links to carry the goods to docks of the Northeast, where Europe-bound ships lay in wait.
In their quest for export markets, midwestern pig farmers owed debts not only to British railroad investors and manufacturers, but also to the British merchant marine. In 1870, U.S. vessels carried only about a third of the country’s commerce by sea. That proportion fell in the ensuing years. In 1880, the commercial journal Bradstreet’s counted 160 to 175 cargo vessels departing weekly from northern ports, most of them British, followed by German, Belgian, Dutch, Danish, French, and Spanish vessels. “It is a foreign fleet,” noted Bradstreet’s, “that carries the whole, almost, of the flood of western produce, grain and provision which is now the daily necessity of Europe.”130 By the mid-1890s, U.S. vessels carried only 8 percent of U.S. seaborne trade. The ships that ferried U.S. pork products to foreign shores flew, more often than not, British flags.131
SALT PORK FOR DINNER
In the aftermath of the Civil War, the United States became a pork-exporting powerhouse—a status it has retained to this day, with annual exports of several million metric tons bringing in billions of dollars to farmers. In 1896, the president of the Illinois Swine Breeders’ Association estimated that the United States exported over 6.4 million hogs, basing this amount on the assumption that 175 pounds of pork products equaled a hog.132 The Illinois Agriculturist marveled at the magnitude of this trade, finding that “if we count all of the exported horses and mules, all of the cattle and fresh and salted beef products, all of the sheep and mutton and all the butter and dairy products sent to alleviate the hunger and wants of the people in foreign lands, they foot up to a total less than we realize from our surplus hogs, and their products which we send abroad.”133
Where did all that pork end up? The president of the Illinois Swine Breeders’ Association boasted that the United States sold its hog products in “nearly every country in the world.”134 Although American pork did circulate widely, such sweeping assertions hide geographical patterns. The first lay to the south. Midwestern farmers had a long history of exporting pork to the West Indian sugar colonies, especially Cuba.135 Their product also traveled to a range of other imperial outposts. But in the late nineteenth century, American pork bound for export mostly traveled east, to Europe.
Whereas the United States had about eighty hogs for every hundred people, Europe had only fifteen, a discrepancy full of possibilities for U.S. pork producers.136 Prior to 1879, about 9 percent of U.S. pork exports went to Belgium and the Netherlands (which reexported most of this to other destinations on the continent). Another 8 percent went to France and 10 percent to Germany. Sales to Germany collapsed, however, in 1879, when Germany banned the import of U.S. pork, ostensibly due to the discovery of the deadly parasitic worms known as trichinae.137
Midwestern pork exporters were quick to point out that no German trichinosis deaths had been traceable to American pork. They also downplayed the threat, noting that the worms could be killed by thorough cooking. If only German housewives would be a little more careful, nobody would sicken. With the insinuation of bad housekeeping to back them up, they claimed that it wasn’t so much health considerations that underlay the restrictions, but the trade imbalances favoring the United States.138 Not wanting to anger working-class consumers by passing more protectionist tariffs, the German government had seized on trichinosis as the excuse to exclude American meat.139 If heated complaints could cook meat, the Germans would have had no need to worry. But they maintained the restrictions.
The combination of health fears and economic anxieties that had led to German prohibitions soon led to restrictions in Italy, Portugal, Greece, Spain, France, Austria-Hungary, Romania, and Turkey. Denmark eventually excluded American pork as well, lest it lose the German export market for its own pork products. (This followed the discovery that some of the “Danish” product had actually originated in the United States.) Exclusionary measures lasted until the U.S. government began inspecting slaughterhouses and forcefully retaliating against nations that continued to discriminate against American pork.140
Despite claims of English farmers that American pork was “to a large extent, infested with noxious insects capable of destroying human life,” Britain did not join the list of nations that banned it during the trichinosis scare. Britain’s larger commitment to free trade militated against restrictions. Health inspectors admitted that restrictions would have been ineffectual because “a large proportion of the objectionable meat would have been sent to this country by a circuitous route.”141 The decision not to restrict U.S. pork was a major boon for midwestern hog farmers, because Britain absorbed close to 60 percent of American pork exports even before the trichinosis restrictions on the continent increased its share.142 Britain’s unparalleled appetite for U.S. pork continued through the 1890s, by which time Britain was absorbing three-fourths of the U.S. ham and bacon exports.143 These exports were considerable: in 1895, for example, the United States sent to Britain roughly 346 million pounds of bacon, 90 million pounds of hams, and 15 million pounds of pork.144
One of the companies most bent on suiting the British taste was the Anglo-American packing company of Chicago, the third-largest pork packer in the United States. With a killing capacity of eight thousand hogs a day, it slaughtered over a million hogs a year. This gave it the “proud distinction of being the largest exporters of American hog products to England.” Owned by the Fowler Brothers of Liverpool, the company had the advantage of agents in all parts of England.145 The British grocery magnate (and later tea baron) Thomas Lipton, who had started in the business by selling American hams and bacons in Glasgow, also invested in U.S. pork processing, by purchasing an Omaha packing plant in 1887 and the Myer Packing House in Chicago shortly thereafter. The Myer plant disassembled over two thousand hogs a day, shipping some to Lipton’s chain of British stores.146 Other U.S. pork packers developed relations with British commission agents such as William Simpson, Ltd., of Liverpool. Simpson sold U.S. hog products thr
oughout the United Kingdom, promising to “handle these goods to the fullest advantage and benefit of consignors.”147
The major selling point was price. Despite Berkshire breeders’ insistence that Berkshire ancestry produced a product indistinguishable from the British product, even if fed on corn, the struggle to fully crack the upscale British market persisted. Meat products known to be American continued to sell at lower prices than those known to be British. The preference for the home product was so pronounced that butchers reportedly cut American hams in half, marking one part as “home cured” for 10 d (the denotation for ten pennies in the money system of the time) and the other as “American” at half the price. Even more tellingly, they claimed that “the ‘home cured’ is speedily bought up, while the same article with a different name, and at half the price, is left untouched.”148 In various hearings over legislation requiring foreign meats to be marked as such, witnesses testified that consumers preferred British meat.
Some of this preference can be attributed to concerns about food safety, extending beyond trichinosis to a disease known as hog cholera.149 Occasional reports that people who had eaten American pork had fallen violently ill—like the ham eaters seized with colic, diarrhea, and vomiting so severely that eventually “four or five” of them died—did little to foster consumer confidence.150
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