The Frozen-Water Trade

"For minds highly excited and in great activity there is no Sunday," wrote Frederic Tudor, the 19th-century "Ice King" who got rich selling ice when it was still considered a free commodity. America specializes in ambitious, greedy, obsessive men, driven by a single idea (think Henry Ford, Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan). Understanding the type goes a long way toward understanding this strange nation of ours. America engages in a perpetual struggle between its materialistic impulses and its idealistic hopes, realized in thinkers such as Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King. The tension keeps things moving and accounts for the peculiar paradox we appear to be to the rest of the world.

Gavin Weightman’s compelling but ultimately disappointing new book, The Frozen-Water Trade: A True Story (Hyperion, 288 pp., $23.95), promises an insightful look into Tudor and the quintessentially American industry he founded. That Weightman is a Londoner makes this promise all the more seductive. Americans love foreign observers, from de Tocqueville on, even if we don’t always love what they say. Yet Weightman veers off course into a gosh-and-golly account of the ice business as an instance of American ingenuity and entrepreneurial zeal, and of America’s early embrace of ice in daily use as a sign of superior modernization. As its protagonist, Frederic Tudor is necessary to this story, but Weightman has little interest in what makes him tick. Even more fatal to his project is Weightman’s uncritical approach to 19th-century culture, which he accepts too much on its own terms.

Part of the problem is the historical record. This couldn’t have been an easy book to research, and Weightman is to be commended for pulling together a wide range of sources from business accounts, newspaper articles in various countries, local histories, diaries and correspondence. (Unfortunately, the book lacks endnotes or a bibliography, limiting its value to the serious historian.) But Weightman fails to make the most of his materials, including Tudor’s ample diaries and letters, except as factual documentation. He glosses over the juicier portions, leaving the reader in a constant state of frustration.

Tudor’s own writings focus on his business dealings, especially his early setbacks, when his tone is self-pitying. Unsurprisingly, he isn’t a likable or reflective character; by the end of his long life he alienated everyone, from his wife to his staunchest backers, even as he succeeded financially. For Weightman, it’s the triumph that matters.

Tudor was born in 1783 into a wealthy Boston family. He was groomed to attend Harvard but wasn’t interested. On the family estate was an icehouse, then a luxury for the well-off. By the time he was 22, he was convinced that he could commercially ship ice to the tropics and enhance the family fortune. With prominent contacts in Cuba and the American South, he was confident of promoting his goods and, in most cases, securing an official trade monopoly. When his father lost everything in unwise speculations, Tudor’s determination solidified. His initial attempts were in the West Indies and the Cotton Belt states of South Carolina, Georgia and Louisiana. His hurdles were many. No one had ever shipped ice before. Conventional wisdom held it would quickly melt. Ship owners, consequently, didn’t sign on. Then there was the matter of handling the ice at the other end. Without icehouses, distribution systems or any demand from consumers, ice was a useless article even if it survived the long journey across tropical waters.

The technical difficulties presented by all this occupy much of the book, and rightly so. Tudor’s ingenious business schemes are also highlighted, along with the special challenges of the early 19th century in the form of yellow fever, pirates, shipwrecks, debt imprisonment and an appalling death rate. Tudor sent one unlucky young manager after another to the tropics only to have them succumb to the "chills." His older brother, a principal business partner, turned to magazine editing and then died. But Tudor slowly made inroads, especially in New Orleans, his first real success, where ice was transformed from a novelty to a necessity. As a fever-fighter and an ingredient in mint juleps, ice insinuated itself into the local culture as securely as rice and cotton.

For all these genuinely fascinating details, Weightman’s book never connects the dots on the larger cultural picture. The story of the ice trade is clearly the story of 19th-century socioeconomics, specifically imperialism and the American slave economy. Tudor began in the Spanish and French colonies but had little success until he supplied Charleston and New Orleans. With the American Civil War (which receives passing mention), Tudor’s company was forced to find other markets and turned to British India. It was there that Tudor had originally achieved financial security.

Whether in New Orleans or Calcutta, Tudor saw himself as bettering the existing conditions but not reforming them. He sympathized with the sweltering plantation owners and displaced British for whom ice could cool drinks and preserve fancy fruit. Slaves and Indian servants appear on just about every page of The Frozen-Water Trade but unself-consciously, as when Weightman writes, "The first agent, Marcus Bacon, had fallen ill and had returned to Boston, bringing with him as a present for his boss an Indian servant." No mention of the Indian is made again, nor is there any attempt to analyze what it meant to accept a human being as a gift.

Tudor was hardly the only Bostonian to make money trading with the Southern states. But with abolitionist protests, pro-slavery riots and the outbreak of the Civil War, he couldn’t have been oblivious to its meaning. But the question is never directly addressed in Weightman’s account, as evidenced by his intriguing discussion of Tudor‘s cutting ice at Walden Pond while Thoreau was in residence. No American was more acutely aware of Boston’s complicity in the slave economy, or more critical of Yankee acquisitiveness. Imagine the author of "Civil Disobedience" and the Ice King butting heads at Walden Pond! But here is Weightman’s uninspired narrative: "At the time the railway and Frederic’s ice harvesters arrived, Thoreau was at work in his log cabin on his most famous book, which he called simply Walden. It is an eccentric work in which he attempts to derive some deep philosophical meaning from his observation of the minutiae of daily life around Walden Pond." It’s refreshing when a critic refuses to worship a consecrated writer like Thoreau, but Weightman’s too-easy dismissal misses an opportunity to see where Tudor impacts not just the ice trade but larger cultural forces. Thoreau would have been the first to accept the label "eccentric"; he saw himself as heroically opposed to everything Frederic Tudor lived for.

By the end of Tudor’s life, ice became an important commodity throughout the North as well, with New York and Philadelphia consuming tons of the stuff, harvested from Massachusetts, Maine and increasingly Midwestern states like Wisconsin–but this ceases to be Frederic Tudor’s story alone. The Ice King set in motion a whole industry. It would have been satisfying to know more about what animated the Ice King himself.