John H. White, Jr.’s Wet Britches and Muddy Boots: A History of Travel in Victorian America is a study of what, back in 1972, historian Glen E. Holt termed the “riding habit” that slowly came to dominate the lives of most Americans across the nineteenth century. ^{Footnote 1} Or, as White himself puts it, “the purpose of this book is to describe the travel experience in nineteenth-century America” (p. xiii). He recounts what it was like to ride the innovative stagecoaches, steamboats, sailing packets, ocean liners, and railroad cars that successively dominated the transportation infrastructure of the nineteenth-century United States. This book is written for a popular audience, without standard source citations (although each chapter has a brief bibliography), but with plenty of lively anecdotes about riding the roads, rivers, and rails of the period. It succeeds at describing the lived experiences of travelers in an exhaustive array of contexts, but it does little to explain why those experiences took the shape they did—and when White does inject analysis into his description, it often reduces the complex social and economic world of the nineteenth-century United States to a series of cardboard caricatures that obscure more than they reveal.

As one might expect of a historian who spent his career as the curator of transportation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, White is at his best when he is describing the material culture of American travel. His chapters detail stagecoaches, omnibuses, streetcars, ferryboats, canal packets, river steamers, lake steamers, coastal steamers, ocean sailing packets, ocean steamers, and passenger trains; this comprehensive subdivision of his subject allows him to describe the design and technology of each mode in fine detail. White has a talent for depicting the increasingly complex machines that transported nineteenth-century Americans; his descriptions of their industrial and aesthetic design, along with numerous and well-chosen illustrations, make it easy to envision them, and his explanations of their technology make it clear how they worked—or, on occasion, how they failed. The topical division of his chapters allows him to trace how the machines changed, by which he usually means improved.

White carefully weaves discussion of travelers’ experiences of these machines into each chapter. Although the lack of citations often makes it difficult to identify his sources, they collectively paint a vivid picture of a world of travel that could be expensive, dirty, uncomfortable, and dangerous, but that could also be liberating, awe-inspiring, and sometimes incredibly sumptuous for those who could afford it. White tends to emphasize the experiences of the elite, although this focus is at least partially unavoidable because travelers were understandably more inclined to record innovative technologies and exceptional journeys rather than routine ones. Any reader who is looking for visceral first-person accounts of what it was like to ride the latest and greatest transportation advances of the nineteenth century will be well served by White’s chapters.

However, a reader who is looking for a deeper explanation of why these experiences took the shape that they did will be struck by the thinness of White’s analysis. In most chapters, White is content to let the technology itself serve as the explanation for change. Although engineering innovations are undoubtedly an important part of a story of nineteenth-century transportation, they did not occur in a vacuum. As the readers of Enterprise & Society well know, social, economic, and political forces shape both technological innovation and the deployment of those technologies. Changing social values, local and national political contexts, and the organization of business enterprises all affected the growth of nineteenth-century transportation networks, but White pays little attention to these broader factors either in the interpretation of his sources or his engagement with the secondary literature. For example, White tells the story of American canals as one of engineering struggle and triumph, and eventual redundancy at the hands of railroads. However, historians from George Taylor to John Larson and Carol Sheriff have shown that canal construction was the product of multilayered political struggles, from national ideological disputes to interstate competition to local market politics. ^{Footnote 2} Similarly, White’s analysis of the transcontinental rail network is a story of an “overall plan [that] made sense because it was produced by hardheaded business leaders who wanted to make money” (p. 413). Such a simple story of free-market efficiency is starkly at odds with recent scholarship on the transcontinentals, most notably Richard White’s Railroaded. ^{Footnote 3} John White’s consistent disengagement from the larger currents of nineteenth-century life puts his analysis sharply at odds with current discussions of transportation.

White’s book is full of these implicit arguments that, though never overtly made, add up to a reflexively whiggish account of nineteenth-century enterprise and society. As we have seen, his Gilded Age railroad entrepreneurs were smart, sober businessmen rather than “robber barons” who made their millions through financial manipulation and political corruption. He is enthusiastic about the creation of monopolies, from J. P. Morgan’s attempted consolidation of transatlantic steam packet service to George Pullman’s domination of luxury railroad sleeper car service. In each case, he suggests that the monopolies’ efficiencies improved service and controlled costs, an assertion that most Gilded Age Americans outside Manhattan boardrooms would have found laughable. His explanation of the slow growth of railroad mileage in the antebellum South is even more troubling: “In a region devoted to fox hunting and genteel living,” White writes, “railroads seemed less necessary” (p. 429). The implication that Southerners did not build railroads because they were too refined for such boorish modern inventions—rather than that their cotton economy did not require them, or that their capital was tied up in human chattel, or that mobility was politically threatening in a slave society—partakes of an old-South romanticization that would have pleased those railroad-avoiding slaveowners deeply.

In none of these cases does White go out of his way to make an openly whiggish argument; he lets his reading of his sources do it for him. In general, he treats these sources as transparent reflections of historical reality, and this deeply credulous approach allows nineteenth-century American elites’ triumphant whiggishness to leak through into his analysis. Monopolies were benevolent because White is using documents generated in Manhattan boardrooms, not Kansas Grange halls, and slaveowners were anachronistic aristocrats because he is reading their interpretation of Southern society rather than that of the abolitionists. In his chapters on urban public transportation, he relies heavily on the popular, sensationalist “mysteries of the city” accounts, which shapes his depiction of omnibuses and horse cars as hothouses of urban danger rather than innovative means of everyday mobility for common city dwellers. As a result, Wet Britches and Muddy Boots might best be characterized as a description of what a relatively elite subset of nineteenth-century Americans thought “the travel experience of nineteenth-century America” was.

White is clear that his “volume is not for scholars or specialists but was written for students and the general reader” (p. xiv), so his privileging of description over analysis, and his reluctance to engage with the latest historiographical disputes in the field, may be forgiven. I am afraid, though, that in his rush to write an accessible and entertaining book, White has profoundly misrepresented the nineteenth-century United States, and presented a model of historical causation that is decidedly one-dimensional. “Students and the general reader” deserve more.