CHAPTER 1A Family in Motion
Money and the promise of it circulate with people, news, and rumors. Entering a world of constant motion, three generations of Pullmans chased material self-improvement during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Along with countless others, their mostly voluntary movement took family members across an ocean, along a coast, inland to a canal zone, and finally through the Great Lakes to Chicago. Two Pullman brothers, Albert and George, settled there but remained in motion. They constructed railroad cars for wealthy passengers, travelled across the country to finance and demonstrate them, and came to dominate an industry that barely existed when they entered it. They used the cars they built in a restless quest for profit and publicity. Movement remained central to their endless hunt for affluence.
Movement was a Pullman way of life, a dynastic and generational necessity. Impatient and mobile, the Pullman family moved from Great Britain to Maine early in the colonial era; then to Boston and Rhode Island; and, finally, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, to Onondaga County, New York. Kinship connected Pullman households, and motion shaped family members, but Baptist and then Universalist beliefs defined their spiritual life and social ethos. Theirs was a contradictory faith, simultaneously liberating and smothering, projecting a rational otherworldliness demanding secular success in the name of their Christian God to prove the strength of their belief and to demonstrate their worth. Like other Protestant Northerners of their day, they believed wealth was an outward sign of inward grace and virtue, though they enjoyed only modest material success until Albert and George made their surname famous around the globe. Tossed about by economic forces beyond their control and by institutions they could barely perceive, the family farmed, became carpenters, and literally moved buildings before striking it rich in the post–Civil War railroad boom.
When George and Albert's paternal grandparents, Psalter and Elizabeth Pullman, left Rhode Island around the year 1800, they joined a stream of migrants heading for New York. The state of New York, constituted barely twenty years before their arrival, presented a remarkable contrast between the metropolis bearing its name, with its ordered streets and settled agricultural hinterland, and the rural areas beyond its immediate reach. Situated on Manhattan Island between two navigable rivers and a bay leading into the Atlantic Ocean, New York City stood astride a global commodity trading network. The port attracted merchants and manufacturers from around the world and became a crucial cog in the sale of cotton cultivated on Southern plantations with enslaved labor, insured by Northern financiers and marketed by Northern merchants. It proclaimed loudly its glorious history, recorded in the chronicles and newspapers of the day. Famously captured from the Dutch by a British navy squadron in 1664, the town remained a cosmopolitan crossroads. The founding of the Bank of New York in 1784 signaled the rise of financial institutions as a fulcrum around which the city could expand.1
The outback beyond the island-bound municipality, past the farms selling their goods to the urban center, proved to be an attractive, fertile region for settlers, especially those trying to draw a living out of New England's exhausted fields or inhabiting its overcrowded towns. The Pullmans settled in Onondaga, an area of natural salt springs and, shortly before their arrival, a bustling center of the Iroquois Confederacy.2 By the time the Pullmans appeared, the Iroquois, known today as the Haudenosaunee, had largely left the region, pushed out by empty treaties with the US government and the intimidating presence of white settlers. Financiers then sold the Native American lands in “a saturnalia of speculation.”3 The family moved onto the rich soil formerly cultivated by Haudenosaunee women and cleared some of the remaining forests for farming. Once established in Onondaga County, Elizabeth and Psalter Pullman, along with their son Lewis, grew wheat and traded goods with the slowly expanding settlements in their vicinity, including the tiny village of Syracuse, soon to gain prominence as a center of salt mining. Farmers like the Pullmans sold their harvests to local brokers who funneled the region's grain, salt, and potash into the flow of commodities making its way to the rest of the country and into a Europe embroiled in the Napoleonic wars.4
Following in his father's footsteps, as so many sons did, Lewis tried his hand at farming. To do so, he left home and moved to the Finger Lakes county of Cayuga, where, in 1825, he married Emily Caroline Minton and settled in Auburn. Subsistence farmers themselves, the Mintons could offer no financial support to the newlyweds but did endow them with their good name and a reputation for honesty. Low on cash like everyone else in their world, barter provided much of their food and clothing. Lewis apprenticed to a carpenter and learned that trade, which he would pass on to his own sons, to earn money in the winter.
But the opening of the Erie Canal in the same year as their wedding changed life for the Pullmans and their neighbors. The canal, the longest of its kind in the world, brought goods, people, and capital to the hitherto economically neglected region. Funded by the state of New York, it cost ten times more than the value of the largest contemporary manufacturing company and helped to create the Manhattan financial market that would eventually settle around Wall Street.5 The northern half of New York State became fully integrated into the transatlantic economy when the new channel linked the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean through New York City. In addition to an economic stimulus created by canal construction, the variety of skills needed to build, maintain, expand, and operate the artificial waterway proved a boon to the people of the region through which it flowed. The demand for Lewis's carpentry skills increased overnight.
Lewis and Emily drew on their faith for strength and motivation. Brought up in Baptist and Presbyterian families, they experienced the Second Great Awakening, a period of intense religious revival that spread from upstate New York, known as the burned-over district, across the northeastern United States. Seated at its epicenter, the Pullmans could hardly avoid the passion and condemnation heaped on lazy pastors, on a public grown soft and materialistic, and on the rampant immorality of the flawed republic. Righteous wrath fueled new sects as itinerant preachers evangelized at emotionally charged camp meetings and revivals. The Universalist creed of equality and opportunity resonated with the young couple. Soon after they married, Lewis abandoned the Baptist faith of his parents and convinced Emily to turn her back on her family's Presbyterianism; they converted to the new denomination.
The Universalist message was a particularly positive one, promoting the idea that everyone would be saved by God's grace and no one would suffer eternal damnation. Universalism sat comfortably alongside the democratic belief that any hardworking man could elevate himself, a strand of gendered thinking to which the Pullman family adhered strongly. Hell, so much a reality for many Americans, held no fear for the Pullmans. God loved all people and wanted all people to succeed. That some did not was, for Universalists, no one's fault but their own. Like many at the time and after, Universalists believed a person's actions set their life course and that anyone with an open mind could share their beliefs. In its origins, Universalism took the ideal of the small community and projected it onto the whole world. As the historian Ann Lee Bressler writes, Universalist theology grew out of the egalitarian soil of places like upstate New York and posited a prosperous future for all people.6
The demands of farming and carpentry along with faith in the future provided a rationale for having large families, and Emily and Lewis Pullman did their best to meet that particular social expectation. Emily gave birth to ten children, of whom six boys and two girls survived infancy.7 Two of the boys became prominent churchmen; two more grew into successful businessmen; and the others enjoyed varying degrees of accomplishment in banking, the law, the army, farming, and manufacturing. The daughters, keen observers of family life with lively intellects, married well. The children would stay in touch throughout their lives, held together by their mother and their habit of sharing news. They wrote and visited and remained in reach of and available to each other. Circular letters became their common form of communication, with recipients habitually adding their own news and passing the epistle on to other family members. All, that is, except Albert.