Shreve and his boat survived well enough for him to take the Washington back to port and have repairs made on it and its machinery. By early fall of 1816 the boat was ready to begin again on its maiden voyage to New Orleans. During its stop in Cincinnati Shreve’s odd-looking vessel attracted a host of visitors to it, and Shreve patiently let them inspect it. He made another stop in Louisville, to take on more passengers, and on September 24 the Washington passed its first big test by successfully negotiating the Falls of the Ohio, where not long before, the Enterprise, on its second descent of the Ohio, had wrecked on the rocks. On October 7, 1816, Shreve landed the Washington at the wharves of New Orleans.
Edward Livingston learned of its arrival and promptly went down to the riverfront to see it and its captain. Evidently impressed with the boat’s innovations, he told the thirty-year-old Shreve, “I tell you, young man, you deserve well of your country, but we shall be compelled to beat you in the courts.”4 Livingston immediately had the boat seized and held for ten thousand dollars bail.
Shreve’s canny lawyer, A.L. Duncan, was prepared for that move. Refusing to let Shreve pay the bail, Duncan one-upped Livingston by asking the court to demand a ten-thousand-dollar bond from Livingston to compensate Shreve for any loss in revenue or damage he might suffer while the boat was being held in seizure, in the event Livingston, suing to assert his monopoly rights, should lose his case in court. The court granted Duncan’s request. Livingston then hastily decided he didn’t want to gamble ten thousand dollars and he released the Washington back to Shreve. A week later, with a load of passengers and cargo, Shreve headed the Washington back upriver.
He was prevented from reaching Louisville, however, by an early freeze that had filled the Ohio with ice that blocked the boat’s passage. He docked the Washington at Shippingport, Kentucky, below the falls, about two miles from Louisville, and left it there to await the spring thaw while he waited in Louisville, close to his ice-trapped steamboat. He sent for his wife, Mary, and their children to join him in Louisville, where he would later establish his residence. It was shortly after they arrived that the Shreves suffered the death of their baby son, Zane.
When the ice in the Ohio broke up, Shreve was ready to restart operations, and on March 3, 1817, the Washington shoved off with freight and passengers, bound for New Orleans.
At New Orleans, which the Washington reached on the night of March 12, the legal battle resumed. Livingston again had the boat seized, and Duncan again petitioned to require Livingston to post a bond against possible loss. Livingston argued against the bond, but the court ruled against him. Livingston returned custody of the boat to Shreve and then huddled with his staff of lawyers. From that conference came a new tactic . Seeing that Shreve and Duncan would not be intimidated into giving up, Livingston decided on a move that was very much like a bribe. The monopoly would press its lawsuit against Shreve and the Washington in federal court, while its suit against the Enterprise still languished in the Louisiana appellate court, and the monopoly holders would offer Shreve a half interest in their monopoly rights on condition that Shreve would arrange with Duncan to lose the case in federal court, thus protecting the monopoly. It was a shrewd maneuver, since bringing Shreve into the monopoly’s operations would not only keep the monopoly rights intact but would bring Shreve and his boat into their business, providing the monopoly holders with a boat that could reliably steam upriver beyond Natchez, something they did not have.
It was a tempting offer, representing a windfall to Shreve and the end of his legal hassles as well. But, more concerned with a free Mississippi, open to all comers, than a good deal for himself, Shreve turned the offer down.
Through the federal court Livingston quickly struck back at Shreve’s refusal. Shreve was arrested and held on ten thousand dollars bail and ordered to appear before the court on the third Monday of April to answer Livingston’s complaint. After twenty-four hours in jail Shreve was freed and he quickly steamed off aboard the Washington on March 25, just two days behind its scheduled departure.
On April 2 1, 1817, a hearing was held in the District Court of the United States for the Louisiana District, presided over by Judge Dominick A. Hall. Shreve as well as the monopoly holders were represented by their attorneys. The court record tells the disposition of Livingston’s case against Shreve :
It appearing, after arguments of counsel and the examination of the record in the case, that the court has no jurisdiction of the same, it is therefore ordered, adjudged and decreed that the petition of Pltffs [plaintiffs Livingston and his wife, Elizabeth] be dismissed with costs.5
Edward Livingston and the monopoly had been defeated again. Even so, Livingston clung to the monopoly owners’ claim of exclusive rights to steamboat navigation at the port of New Orleans. Shreve meanwhile made regular trips to and from New Orleans, not only with the Washington (which had made the run to Louisville in twenty-one days, less than a quarter of the time taken by keelboats and barges), but with new steamboats that he and a set of partners built — the Ohio, built in 1817, the Napoleon, built in 1818, and the Post Boy, built in 1819. Whatever hopes Livingston held while he waited for a decision from the Louisiana State supreme court, where his appeal in the Enterprise case was bottled up, were finally exhausted in 1819, and the company that had succeeded to Fulton and Livingston’s steamboat monopoly on the Mississippi at last withdrew all claims to an exclusive right to operate steamboats on the Mississippi.
Persistent, determined, unafraid, Henry Shreve had won his fight — and not just for himself. Judge Samuel Treat, later writing about the historic victory in a nineteenth-century magazine article, “Political Portraits With Pen and Pencil,” remarked, “At this day, the enthusiasm with which the news was received cannot be duly appreciated ... the western country owes a vast debt to Captain H.M. Shreve.”6
Shreve had broken the stifling monopoly and freed the Mississippi for the entrepreneurial spirit of the growing nation.
The Washington continued to make round trips between New Orleans and Pittsburgh until it became worn out and obsolete and was scrapped in 1822. Shreve never stopped trying to improve on it. He figured out a way to eliminate the main disadvantage of side-wheelers, notorious for their wide turning radius. He connected a separate engine to each of the two paddle wheels, so that one wheel could be reversed while the other rotated forward, allowing a boat to turn about within its own length. He also decided that additional decks could be stacked atop the second deck he had already introduced, and when he built the George Washington in 1824, he added two decks to provide more cabins — making it a four-story structure, with a pilothouse atop it — and a promenade to give passengers more room to move about. A passenger named Bullock voyaged on the George Washington two years after it was put into service and described the vessel:
On the third of April we left New Orleans in the beautiful steam-boat George Washington of 375 tons, built in Cincinnati, and certainly the finest fresh-water vessel I have ever seen.... The accommodations are excellent, and the cabins furnished in the most superb manner. None of the sleeping rooms have more than two beds. The principal [rooms] are on the upper story, and a gallery and verandah extends entirely round the vessel, affording ample space for exercise, sheltered from the sun and rain, and commanding from its height, a fine view of the surrounding scenery, without being incommoded by the noise of the crew passing overhead. The meals served ... are excellent, and served in superior style. The ladies have a separate cabin, with female attendants, and laundresses; there are, also, a circulating library, a smoking and drinking room for the gentlemen, with numerous offices for the servants &c . &c ....7
The George Washington had set the standard for riverboats, and not just those on the Mississippi, but on rivers everywhere. Shreve made the Mississippi River steamboat an American institution and in so doing played a huge part in the development of the nation. “To him,” the St. Louis Republican declared when it published his obituary following his death in 1851, “be
longs the honor of demonstrating the practicability of navigating the Mississippi with steamboats.”
•7• The Proliferation
By 1815, just eight years after the North River Steam Boat had made its historic voyage up the Hudson, the Fulton-Livingston company had built twenty-one steamboats, all of them designed by Fulton. Master of the Hudson by virtue of the monopoly granted it by the New York State legislature, the firm was reaping profits from five steamboats in service on the Hudson, including a new version of the North River, rebuilt from the original and nearly twice as big, the Car of Neptune, the Paragon, the Richmond and the Chancellor Livingston, which was not completed until after Fulton’s death. On the Mississippi the Fulton-Livingston company had similarly expanded, operating the New Orleans (until 1814, when it sank), the Aetna, the Natchez and the Buffalo.
It operated five steam ferryboats from Manhattan — the Firefly, the Jersey, the Yor k , the Camden and the Nassau— and two ferries that plied Long Island Sound, the Connecticut and the Fulton. In addition, it operated the Washington on the Potomac River and the Olive Branch and the Raritan on the Raritan River in New Jersey. In an attempt to establish a steamboat monopoly in Russia, the firm had built the Empress of Russia, and winning himself one more distinction, Fulton had also designed the world’s first steam warship, the Demologos —which the U.S. Navy called Fulton the First—the guns of which boomed a salute to Fulton in New York’s harbor on the day of his funeral.
On March 2, 1824, in a ruling written by Chief Justice John Marshall, deciding the case of Gibbons v. Ogden, the New York law that gave Fulton and Livingston their steamboat monopoly was struck down by the Supreme Court of the United States. The Hudson, like the Mississippi, like every other navigable river and lake in the nation, was open to all comers, all vessels, however propelled. It was a grand new day for steamboats in America.
The statistics indicate the difference that Gibbons v. Ogden made. In 1819
89
there were eight steamboats operating on the Hudson River. In 1826, two years after the Supreme Court’s ruling, there were sixteen Hudson River steamboats; in the late 1830s there were forty-five, and by 1840 there were more than one hundred. More than a dozen steamboat companies were established to operate in New York. In 1849 passengers could choose between twenty steamboats that ran daily between New York City and Albany. Cornelius Vanderbilt became the owner of more than fifty steamers, operating on several routes, and began amassing the fortune that would later make him the richest man in America.
Steamboats were also multiplying elsewhere in the Northeast. Lake Champlain, gateway for trade between Canada and New York State, was the second oldest water route regularly traveled by steamboats, its first steamer being the Vermont, built in 1808 at Burlington, Vermont, on the lakeshore. By July 1821 a Lake Champlain excursion-boat service had been established, using the steamer Congress to carry, as its advertisement read, “Parties of Pleasure, and others, who may wish to view the remains of those ancient fortresses, Ticonderoga and Crown Point, and other more recently memorable places on the Lake, such as the Battle Ground of Macdonough’s Naval Engagement — Plattsburgh, &c .”1 The Congress steamed out of Whitehall every Thursday morning at five o’clock. Excursion passengers disembarked from it on the second day and boarded the southbound steamer Phoenix for a return trip to Whitehall while the Congress continued north to Canada.
By 1842 at least sixteen steamboats had been put into service on Lake Champlain. On one of them, the Burlington, the renowned British novelist Charles Dickens traveled as a passenger in 1842 and he wrote fulsomely about the experience :
There is an American boat — the vessel which carried us on Lake Champlain, from St. John’s to Whitehall, which I praise very highly, but no more than it deserves, when I say that it is superior to any other in the world. The steamboat, which is called the Burlington, is a perfectly exquisite achievement of neatness, elegance and order. The decks are drawing-rooms; the cabins are boudoirs, choicely furnished and adorned with prints, pictures and musical instruments; every nook and corner in the vessel is a perfect curiosity of graceful comfort and beautiful convenience.2
Steamboat service blossomed along the Connecticut coast. The Lafayette was built in 1828 to operate out of Bridgeport, and in 1835 one of the Vanderbilt steamboats, the Nimrod, was shifted from the Hudson River to Bridgeport. Thanks largely to the building of railroads that terminated there, Bridgeport in the 1840s became a busy port for steamers, which brought freight from New York City to the Bridgeport railroad terminals for shipment by rail to the interior of Connecticut and New York State.
New Haven was introduced to steamboats when the Fulton, the last boat built under Fulton’s supervision and which he designed specifically for service on the waters of Long Island Sound, arrived there from New York in March 1815. It left New York a little after five o’clock on a Tuesday morning and landed at New Haven at four-thirty that afternoon, which was not considered a speedy trip. But the New York Evening Post reporter who told of its introductory voyage speculated that when hindering mechanical problems were solved and the weather was good, the trip would be made in eight or nine hours. He had other good things to say about the boat. “We believe it may be affirmed,” he wrote, “that there is not in the whole world such accommodations as Fulton affords. Indeed it is hardly possible to conceive that anything of the kind can exceed her in elegance and convenience.”3
The New Haven Steamboat Company, formed in 1822, operated the United States and the Hudson out of New Haven. The United States was said to be the first steamboat with a pilot house.
Steamboats were serving customers on Nantucket Sound, too, running between New Bedford and Edgartown and providing service to Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard and Hyannis. Steamers, including the Massachusetts, the Connecticut, the Fanny and the Merrimack, operated from other Massachusetts ports as well. The Tom Thumb, thirty feet in length, was the first steamboat to appear in Maine, where after being towed from Boston, it steamed up the Kennebeck River in 1818. It was later joined in service in, to and from Maine by the Kennebeck, the Patent, the Maine, the Waterville, the Legislator and the New York, among others.
On the Delaware River, Robert Livingston’s brother-in-law, John Stevens, first operated the Phoenix, then replaced it with the Philadelphia in 1815. Two other steamers, the Bristol and the Sea Horse, later entered the competition on the run between Philadelphia and Bristol, Pennsylvania. Stevens’s company, the Union Line, added the Rain Bow, the Swan, the Stevens, the Stockton, the Nelson, the Burlington, the Trenton and the Belknap to the steamboats serving the upper Delaware. Others followed.
Steamboats also ran between Philadelphia and Wilmington, Delaware, the first of which, the Vesta, was in service by 1820. After it came the Superior and the Wilmington. Steamer service from Philadelphia to Salem, New Jersey, below Wilmington, began in 1824 and was initiated by the Lafayette, followed by the Albemarle, the Essex, the Proprietor, the Linnaeus, the Flushing and the Pioneer, among others. Cape May, New Jersey first received steamboat service in 1824, the earliest steamers including the Delaware, the Ohio and the Robert Morris.
Baltimore’s first steamboat was the Chesapeake, built in Baltimore in 1813 at a cost of forty thousand dollars. It soon had to compete with the Eagle and after that came the Virginia, the Norfolk, the Roanoke, the Surprise, and the Richmond and others later, running between Baltimore and Norfolk and Richmond, Virginia. When the marquis de Lafayette, the French general who had aided the American cause in the Revolutionary War, came back to visit the United States in 1824, there were five steamboats gathered in Baltimore harbor to extend an official greeting and welcome him back to the grateful nation whose independence he had helped win.
Steamboats were also plying the Great Lakes in the 1820s, one of the earliest being the Walk-in-the-Water, which was launched into Lake Ontario in 1819. By 1826 there were seven steamers operating on the lakes. In 1833 there were eleven steamboats serving Buffalo, New York, and
together they carried more than sixty thousand passengers to and from Buffalo.
By 1835 steamboats were also navigating the waters off the Atlantic Coast, running between New York and Charleston, South Carolina. Those boats included the David Brown, the William Gibbons, the Columbia and the New Yor k. In 1835 the Columbia, owned by Charles Morgan of New York, became the first steamboat to operate in the Gulf of Mexico, running between New Orleans and Galveston, Texas. Morgan’s sea-going, iron-hulled steamers also established service between New York and New Orleans and ports on the Mexican coast, and ran steamboats from New Orleans on Lake Pontchartrain, through Lake Borgne to Mobile on the gulf.
In North Carolina, steamboats, including the Prometheus, operated from the mouth of the Cape Fear River up to Wilmington; and in South Carolina, steamboats regularly plied the lower Waccamaw River and the Ashley. Steamboats appeared in Georgia as early as 1816, operating on the Savannah River, eventually running between Savannah and Augusta, and in 1828 they began making regular runs on the Georgia river system that includes the Apalachicola, Chattahoochie and Flint. In 1829 the first steamer arrived at Macon, on the Ocmulgee River, and in 1833 a commercial steamboat service was begun between Darien, on the Georgia coast, and Macon.
In Alabama the steamboat era began when the steamer Alabama, built at St. Stephens, Alabama, on the Tombigbee River, upstream of Mobile, was launched in 1818. Its engine, though, lacked sufficient power to take it back up the river after it had gone with the current down to Mobile. The Alabama was followed by the more powerful Mobile, which made it up the Tombigbee and Black Warrior rivers all the way to Tuscaloosa. The next steamboat to operate out of Mobile was the Harriet, which successfully ran from Mobile to Montgomery. Cotton was the mainstay of Alabama’s economy then, and the Alabama River, winding through the southern half of the state, carried it, aboard the multiplying steamboats, to Mobile where it could be shipped across the gulf to far-flung destinations.
The Great American Steamboat Race Page 12