American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  With his usual shrewdness Fulton sized up the steamboat possibilities of the Mississippi. Carrying freight by flatboat or keelboat was essentially one-way, time-consuming, and expensive. Farmers floated their products downstream to New Orleans on flatboats, sold off their boats for a pittance, and then usually had to walk home to Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana over the Natchez Trail to Nashville and points north. The miracle of steam would enable boatmen to breast the current and convert the Mississippi into a huge two-way traffic link. With Livingston and Nicholas Roosevelt, Fulton organized the Mississippi Steamboat Company in 1809 to navigate the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Natchez.

  Fulton and Livingston sent Nicholas Roosevelt west in the same year to study navigation opportunities on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and then build a steamboat at Pittsburgh. In April 1811, their company persuaded the territorial legislature of Louisiana to grant them the exclusive use of the lower Mississippi River for steamboats. Once again Livingston’s influence helped secure a steamboat monopoly—in this case because of his key role in negotiating the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The partners awarded Roosevelt a contract to build the Mississippi steamboat. Construction began in 1811 on the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh amid endless difficulties. Fifty mechanics had to be imported from New York City, materials were in short supply, and the Boulton and Watt engine did not arrive, forcing substitution of an earlier engine.

  The adventurous Roosevelt and his pregnant wife, Lydia, decided to make the first trip with no passengers. A crowd assembled as the New Orleans hissed and clanked down the Monongahela River, reaching Cincinnati by the second day. Bystanders lined the wharves of the Ohio River as the boat pushed its way behind the gentle current. By the fourth day, the New Orleans reached Louisville, where the boat docked because the falls on the Ohio River were too shallow for passage. The indomitable Lydia used this interval to have her baby. Then the couple renewed their journey; as if the baby were not enough, they had also taken on a Newfoundland dog. The steamboat tied up to shore at regular intervals to allow the crew to chop wood for the boiler. By the time the boat reached Natchez, thousands were lining the shore to see it, but the steamboat pushed on to New Orleans, reaching there by mid-January with wife, baby, dog, and husband still intact.

  The denouement was anticlimactic. Fulton kept the New Orleans in service only between New Orleans and Natchez, never going back upriver. Two years later, the New Orleans hit a snag and sank.

  Other steamboats quickly replaced it in the river trade. These vessels for the western waters had to be lighter in order to navigate through greater hazards of low water, falls, and floods, compared with steamboats on the protected northeastern waterways. Mississippi boats used high-pressure steam, which brought on more explosions and other accidents. The average life of western steamboats was four years, whereas boats using low-pressure steam in the Northeast lasted seven. Shifting sandbars and snags, rupturing boilers, and obstacles caused numerous casualties. More intense competition and higher operating expenses owing to heavier depreciation and costs seemed to be the lot of Mississippi steamboats.

  The steamboatmen were undaunted. Four years after the maiden voyage of the New Orleans, the Washington, piloted by Henry M. Shreve, a veteran keelboat captain, did make the return trip upstream to Louisville. A keel-boat with a cargo of from ten to forty tons and a crew of eight to twenty men had done well to pole six miles a day upstream, taking three to four months to reach Louisville from New Orleans. Shreve made the upstream trip to Louisville in twenty-five days. By 1817 seventeen steamboats, averaging about 190 tons each, were operating on western rivers; three years later there were sixty-nine. Fulton’s audacity and practicality had paid off.

  Despite all their theatrics, steamboats were slow to affect transportation as a whole. The early vessels were unreliable, dependent on the stage of the river, and too expensive to transport low-value heavy freight such as coal, lumber, and iron, which continued to go on keelboats until the middle 1830s. With more and better vessels, the value of goods received at New Orleans rose from $10 million in 1816 to $17 million by 1819, but the difference was not all due to steamboats, since the number of flatboats and the amount of freight they carried also rose. A dramatic effect of the steamboat, however, was on the lives of flatboatmen. Instead of one trip a year, midwestern farmers could now make four.

  One of them, a nineteen-year-old Indiana boy named Abe Lincoln, contracted with a farmer in April 1828 to take a flatboat full of farm produce to New Orleans. With another youth Lincoln left Rockport, Indiana, and floated down the Ohio and the Mississippi trying to avoid snags and sandbars along the 1,200-mile journey. Seven slaves set upon their flatboat as it lay at anchor near a river plantation outside Baton Rouge, where they had stopped to trade part of their produce for sugar, cotton, and tobacco. The youths were barely able to fight off their attackers and pull anchor. When Lincoln reached New Orleans, he gaped at the crowded wharves where over a thousand flatboats were tied up while farmers and slaves unloaded produce which would be reloaded on sailing ships bound for northeastern cities and for Europe. Returning home by steamboat, Lincoln landed in Rockport with twenty-five dollars in his pocket for three months’ labor.

  Steamboats also lowered passenger rates for upstream travel, from about one hundred dollars from New Orleans to Pittsburgh to less than half of that. Some farmers saved even this fare by working their way home. The drop in rates made it more profitable for northwestern farmers to raise and sell their produce at New Orleans since now this produce could pay for more eastern manufactures. Farmers had an incentive to expand production for the market; and settlement in the Midwest increased. Before the steamboat, it cost seven to ten dollars per hundred pounds to ship manufactures to Cincinnati or Pittsburgh; the steamboats carried freight for two or three dollars and then as low as one dollar per hundred pounds.

  As competition increased in western waters, the Fulton-Livingston monopoly, with no means to enforce it, collapsed by 1817. Their monopoly of New York State waters was also challenged. In 1824, John Marshall’s Supreme Court declared the New York grant an unconstitutional invasion of the right of the federal government to regulate interstate commerce. Steamboats on the Hudson River carried passengers and expensive freight, and after the opening of the Erie Canal, they pulled barges slowly along the canal as rates fell.

  As internal commerce expanded, each region of the country specialized—the South in cotton; the Northwest in foodstuffs; the Northeast in manufactures—with a growth of the internal market and diminishing dependence on Europe. Steamboats on western waters solved one bottleneck to the development of the Northwest—lack of markets for western farm products. Southwestern planters specializing in cotton production for national and international markets needed foodstuffs, and an important river trade, stimulated by steamboats, developed between the two regions. The southwestern planter found it more profitable to devote his slave labor to cotton; and the small farmer of the Northwest supplied the planter with the corn and pork he needed to feed his labor force. A host of cities were springing into existence—Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Louisville on the Ohio; Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez, and New Orleans; St. Louis, Clinton, Dubuque, and St. Paul on the Mississippi.

  By the 1820s the newest form of transportation—steamboats on inland, waterways—was coming into competition and combination with one of the oldest forms—canalboats pulled by horses or mules. While steamboats on the Mississippi and other western rivers were binding the South and West together in trade, the Northeast had lain isolated from the Northwest, locked behind the broad Appalachian range. Then, in a daring act of imagination, planning, and execution, some resourceful New Yorkers created a new waterway to the West that would transform the northern transportation system, and alter the whole pattern of American economic and social development.

  For years New Yorkers had dreamed of an opening to the West, centered on the Mohawk-Oswego water route running through a fifty-mile break in the Appalachi
an chain. It took men of vision—dreamers, even—just to conceive of a huge ditch that would run 360 miles from the Hudson to Buffalo, a ditch that would have to be cut through swamps, solid rock, dense forest; that would have to scour out some rivers and bridge others; that would have to climb hills and descend dales; that would need tens of thousands of men to build and thousands to maintain; and that would cost millions of dollars.

  Such a visionary was Elkanah Watson. Born in Plymouth, indentured as a servant to the wealthy Brown family in Providence, young Watson had later been entrusted with messages and money from the colonies to Benjamin Franklin in Paris during the Revolution. Fascinated by the Dutch canal system, Watson returned home, settled in New York, and organized the Bank of Albany. After persuading several leading businessmen and landowners to tour central New York with him in 1788, he helped win from the New York legislature a canal law authorizing the surveying of the Mohawk route. Watson was a director of two canal companies that improved that route, but it became evident that private enterprise could not alone build the big canal. Either the state or federal government must handle the job, but Jefferson and Madison were not interested in spending money on a prodigal northern ditch.

  A politician picked up the failing standard. De Witt Clinton was a man of parts—a patron of schools, charities, and the arts, a founder of the New-York Historical Society, an amateur scientist and horticulturalist. A commanding figure and orator, dubbed “Magnus Apollo,” he was also a politician who wanted to realize dreams. As mayor of New York City, canal commissioner, and later governor, he drove the canal measure through the legislature and into realization over the opposition of local interests favoring different routes, Tammany parochialism, and assorted naysayers.

  Every step of the authorizing, financing, planning, and building of the canal came hard and dearly. New York lacked trained engineers for such a project, so men like James Geddes and Benjamin Wright and unstoried experimenters and tinkerers had to learn on the job. Canal builders lacked excavating machinery, so ditches were dug by crowds of men with shovels and crude derricks. Hundreds of “Irish bogtrotters” and other untrained laborers were kept at work for long hours amid the muck, and at peace among themselves. Yet the engineering and craftsmanship had to be of the first order. Canal walls and bottoms must be sealed against muskrats and boat wash; this was done by using local muck that was found to set “as hard as stone.” Scores of locks, with their long, stone-lined channels and huge wooden gates, must be built in places with water plentiful enough to fill and empty a basin scores of times a day. Bridges and aqueducts had to be erected high over rivers and impossible terrain, and strong enough to support boat, crew, and cargo. Some of the aqueducts were architectural glories.

  Finally the job was done—a canal 363 miles long, 4 feet deep, 28 feet wide at the bottom and 40 at the top, with 83 locks lifting boats to a height of almost 600 feet, and costing over $7 million. Such a feat called for celebration, and the New Yorkers did not fail the occasion. On a morning late in October 1825 the canalboat Seneca Chief nosed into the canal at Buffalo carrying two kegs of the “pure water of Lake Erie,” Governor Clinton and other dignitaries, and a giant portrait of Clinton in Roman toga. The Seneca Chief and its escorting canalboats—one of which carried two Indian youths, two bears, two fawns, two birds, etc., and of course was named Noah’s Ark—traveled east, reaching Rochester the following afternoon, Syracuse two days later, Utica the next day (where the passengers stopped for church), Schenectady on Tuesday, and Albany the next day, just a week after departure.

  Gun salutes, speeches, parades, and official banquets greeted the little fleet at these stops, but the climax came in New York City. Scores of decorated vessels put on a “Grand Aquatic Display,” followed by the “wedding of the waters” consummated when Governor Clinton poured a keg of Lake Erie water into the Atlantic. A huge parade in Manhattan featured a solid mile and a half of bands, military units, trade guilds, and floats representing butchers, tanners, cordwainers, and even a working press mounted on a high wagon and turning out leaflets with verses:

  Tis done, ’tis done! The mighty chain

  Which joins bright Erie to the Main

  For ages shall perpetuate

  The glories of our native State.

  Philadelphians had followed the progress of the Erie Canal with feelings of admiration, envy, and commercial competitiveness. If the New Yorkers could overcome hundreds of miles of wilderness and inclines, why could not Pennsylvanians conquer the towering mountains to the west? Merchants, bankers, and promoters persuaded the state legislature in 1826 to authorize a canal between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Living up to the heritage of Franklin and Gallatin, the Pennsylvanians built a railroad from Philadelphia to Columbia on the Susquehanna; then, to cross the 2,291-foot-high Allegheny ridge, they fashioned the remarkable Allegheny Portage Railroad. Canalboats were floated onto cradles, which were then pulled out of the water and up a series of five inclined planes by stationary engines; at the top of each plane horses pulled the cradle onto a level stretch. Once over the top, the cradles were eased down inclined planes on the other side by horses, and deposited into a river and canal system headed west to Pittsburgh.

  Brilliantly successful engineering—but faulty economics. Canalboatmen on the Pennsylvania found the route slower and more expensive than the Erie. The former had twice the number of locks as the latter, and a complex system of railroad and canal technology, depots, and agents had to be maintained. Virginia canal builders were unable even to overcome the western heights. Promoters of the Potomac and James routes to the West ran into too many problems of local scrambles for canal routes, lack of capital, and inadequate technology to span the Alleghenies and marry with the Ohio.

  Still, the success of the big Erie ditch had touched off a kind of canal mania. By 1840 the states had built a total of over 3,000 miles of canals, at a cost of around $125 million, but the credit systems of three states were almost bankrupted. Canal builders had to be gamblers. When the Indiana “legislature in the mid-1830s authorized construction of more than 1,200 miles of canals, the state bonded itself for $10 million, a debt of twenty dollars for every inhabitant. The construction led to near-disasters. Laborers on the canals were mainly Irish, half from northern Ireland and half from the southern counties. In Indiana’s own “Irish war,” fighting broke out near the present city of Wabash, and the state militia had to be called. Despite floods, cholera, and numerous other difficulties, Indiana’s canal reached the Ohio, but the tolls failed to pay even for its maintenance.

  By the 1840s the United States had a canal system—three systems, actually, comprising short tidewater canals along the coast from New England to South Carolina; “trunk line” canals that reached into the mountains and in two cases—the Erie and Pennsylvania—crossed them; and interior canals branching out from the Ohio and from Lakes Michigan and Erie. By the end of the 1830s canal and river boats were the kings of American transportation, but their reign was to be short. Canal transport was slow and cumbersome. At four cents per ton per mile, freight was not cheap. In the North, the waters lay frozen several months a year. Yet the canal system was far more developed in the North than in the South, leading to a regional imbalance. As economic connections developed among the Northeast, the Great Lakes, the Ohio, the Mississippi cities, and New Orleans, the southeastern states were bypassed.

  And at its height, the reign of water transport was threatened by a new noisy monster, one that might invade the most sylvan scene—the steam engine on rails. But not for another decade or two would this monster become king.

  THE INNOVATING LEADERS

  Early in 1808 Joshua Forman, a New York State assemblyman and Erie Canal enthusiast, heard that Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin had just issued a report calling for a national system of roads and canals, including some kind of canal connecting the Hudson and Lake Erie. Gallatin had even proposed three millions of federal dollars for the Erie project. Elated, Forman journeyed to Washing
ton and, through the good offices of a New York congressman, gained an interview with President Jefferson. To his dismay he found the President rather cool, even surprised that Forman would be trying to tap the federal treasury so quickly. And for once Jefferson’s mind was on more parochial matters.

  “Why, sir,” Jefferson said to Forman, “here is a canal for a few miles, projected by George Washington, which if completed would render this [Washington] a fine commercial city, which has languished for many years because the small sum of 200,000 dollars necessary to complete it, cannot be obtained from the general government, the state government, or from individuals—and you talk of making a canal 350 miles through the wilderness—it is little short of madness to think of it at this day.”

  Madness! But the crazy New Yorkers pushed that canal through the wilderness, and afterwards De Witt Clinton could not resist twitting Jefferson about that conversation with Forman. The old man confirmed the conversation, adding, “Many, I dare say, still think with me that New-York has anticipated, by a full century, the ordinary progress of improvement.” Jefferson mused further:

  “This great work suggests a question, both curious and difficult, as to the comparative capability of nations to execute great enterprises.” Did New York, he wondered, have an economic advantage? “This may be;—or is it a moral superiority? a sounder calculating mind, as to the most profitable employment of surplus, by improvement of capital, instead of useless consumption. I should lean to the latter hypothesis, were I disposed to puzzle myself with such investigations; but at the age of 80, it would be an idle labour, which I leave to the generation which is to see and feel its effects.”