It would be easy to dismiss the fire that destroyed P. T. Barnum’s American Museum in 1865 as a freak occurrence: accidents happen, sometimes even to whales. But that wouldn’t explain just how often they happened to Barnum. In his memoirs, the impresario listed five times when his home, museum or circus burned down entirely. And he wasn’t counting near misses, like a blaze that brought his home ‘as near destruction as it well could’ or the failed attempt made in 1864 by Confederate agents to firebomb his museum. Barnum took perverse glee in the ‘dash & fire which attend my way of living’ and boasted of his readiness to bounce back from disaster. ‘I have been burned out so often’, he reflected, that ‘I am like the singer who was hissed on the stage. “Hiss away”, said he, “I am used to it” ’.
Barnum wasn’t the only one used to it. This was a country, as Jill Lepore has written, where ‘daily life was a fire hazard’. The White House famously caught fire in 1814, and, by 1865, so had the Capitol, Mount Vernon, Monticello, the Hermitage, the Confederate White House, the Smithsonian, the Patent Office, the Treasury, the War Department and the New York Stock Exchange. By then, two-thirds of states had suffered fires in their capitols or former capitols, and four had watched their capitols burn down multiple times.
Why did this keep happening? A simple answer leaps out: wood. Whereas much of Eurasia faced acute timber shortages from the early modern period on, the United States contained what Alexis de Tocqueville called an ‘ocean of foliage’, with trees covering its eastern half and western coast. Slack-jawed Europeans regarded its ‘boundless’ forests as ‘sources of ever-fresh wonder’, the poet Emmeline Stuart-Wortley wrote. The British reformer William Cobbett gasped to see New Yorkers felling valuable oaks for firewood, a wastefulness he blamed on an ‘abundance of timber that men knew not how to dispose of’.
Such abundance meant that US material culture, from its architecture to its furnishings, was thoroughgoingly wooden. And, consequently, that it was alarmingly combustible. By around 1900, when statistics were first collected, US fires were eight times costlier per capita than European ones. And those measurements were made at the close of the United States’ wooden age; it was surely even more of a fiery outlier earlier.
In this article, I ask how this important (if under-studied) feature of the United States’ nineteenth-century environment relates to an important (and much-studied) feature of its nineteenth-century economy, namely its dramatic adoption of capitalist institutions. Fire isn’t often discussed in the history of capitalism. But it should be, as it connects to a central scholarly debate. One interpretative strain — call this ‘cold capitalism’ — sees the market’s spread as encroaching rationalization. The other, ‘hot capitalism’, instead stresses its volatility.