Art and Commerce in Jacksonian America: The Steamboat Albany Collection

(62.) Peale's Harpers Ferry is reproduced in Wilbur Hunter, The Peale Family and Peale's Baltimore Museum, 1814-1830 (Baltimore: Peale Museum, 1965), no. 18.

(63.) For example, see James Stuart, Three Years in North America (Edinburgh: Cadell, 1833), vol. 1, 44--45.

(64.) Moving panoramas were exhibited on the stage of many early 19th century American theaters. A moving panorama of the Hudson River opened in New York in the fall of 1828. Based on engravings by William Guy Wall published in the Hudson River Portfolio (1821--25), it traced a steamboat trip up the Hudson River from New York to Catskill. The scenery unrolled behind stage props suggesting the top deck of a steamboat, and a parade of silent actors mimed the actions of passengers. See William Dunlap. A Trip to Niagara; or Travellers in America (New York: Clayton, 1830); and James T. Callow, Kindred Spirits: Knickerbocker Writers and American Artists, 1807-1855 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 148--49.

(65.) The literature on the reorganization of class and the democratization of gentility in early 19th-century America and New York is vast. See especially Wilentz (as in n. 11); Stuart M. Blumin, "The Hypothesis of Middle-Class Formation in Nineteenth-Century America: A Critique and Some Proposals," American Historical Review 90 (1985): 299-338; Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815--1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage, 1992).

(66.) Grier (as in n. 32), 29. Grier is alert to the training in civility that went on in commercial parlors, but her main argument is that commercial parlors in 19th-century hotels, steamboats, railroad cars, and photographic studios served as model interiors for the creation of private parlors. See also Bushman (as in n. 65), 361; and John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990).

(67.) E.G., "The Hudson River," Knickerbocker 46 (1855): 272. Browder (as in n. 27), 39, reports that the Fulton-Livingston Fair had been five dollars.

(68.) New York Evening Post, Aug. 25, 1826, 4, col. 4, and Aug. 28, 1826, 2, col. 2. Nichols, 8, reports that in July 1827, passage on the Albany cost four dollars, meals included. B. Hall (as in n. 31), vol. 2, 337. The quoted phrase appears in Hall's description of an 1827 trip from Philadelphia to New York. The entire passage is worth quoting because it explicitly describes efforts the transportation companies took to maintain class boundaries. When steamboats land at one of the transfer points on the Delaware River, "and a dozen or two of carriages dash down to the wharf, each adapted to carry ten passengers, a scene of indiscriminate confusion and intermixture might occur, unless steps were taken to preserve some classification of the company. The fitting arrangements to maintain order, and prevent disagreeable propinquities, without hurting the dignity of anyone, are accomplished by a simple enough contrivance. The captain of the boat goes about the decks during the voyage, and having taken down the nam es of all the passengers, he judges from appearances what persons are likely to be agreeable coach companions to one another. He then tells each person what the number of the stage is in which it is destined he shall proceed after landing. The passenger, on learning his number, points out his luggage to one of the crew, who marks with a piece of chalk all the trunks and other things with the same number as the coach."