Bain, Empire Express, 206-08.
As a set of rhetorical and cultural conventions, this species of friendship was hardly new. It resembled earlier commercial relationships between Virginia planters and British merchants in the eighteenth century, and political relationships in New York before and after the Civil War.
T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of the Revolution (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985), 84-123.
The literature on this is enormous and starts with Leo Marx's classic, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964).
Van Horne to Harry Abbott, Oct. 7, 1886, LB, 18, v. 3.
For the experience of travel, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986).