Page 242 - American Stories, A History of the United States

in 1838. By about 1825, thousands of miles of turnpikes—privately owned toll roads
chartered by the states—crisscrossed southern New England, upstate New York, Penn- 9.1
sylvania, and northern New Jersey.
The toll roads, however, failed to meet the demand for low-cost transportation
over long distances. Travelers benefited more than transporters of bulky freight, for 9.2
whom the turnpikes proved expensive.
Even the National Road could not offer the low freight costs required for the long-
distance hauling of wheat, flour, and the other bulky agricultural products of the Ohio 9.3
Valley. These commodities needed water transportation.
The United States’ natural system of river transportation was one of the most sig-
nificant reasons for its rapid economic development. The Ohio–Mississippi system in
particular provided ready access to the rich agricultural interior and a natural outlet
for its products. By 1815, flatboats loaded with wheat, flour, and salt pork were making
part of the 2,000-mile trip from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. Even after the coming of
the steamboat, flatboats still carried much of the downriver trade.
The flatboat trade, however, was necessarily one-way. A farmer from Ohio or Illi-
nois, or someone hired to do the job, could float down to New Orleans easily enough,
but to get back, he usually had to walk overland through rough country. Until the
problem of upriver navigation was solved, the Ohio–Mississippi could not carry the
manufactured goods that farmers desired in exchange for their crops.
Fortunately, a solution was readily at hand: steam power. Late in the eighteenth
century, American inventors had experimented with steam-driven riverboats. John
Fitch even exhibited an early model to delegates at the Constitutional Convention in
1788. But making a commercially successful craft required further refinement. In 1807,
Robert Fulton, backed by Robert R. Livingston—a prominent wealthy New Yorker—
demonstrated the potential of the steamboat by propelling the Clermont 150 miles from
New York City up the Hudson River. The first steamboat launched in the West was the
New Orleans, which made the long trip from Pittsburgh to New Orleans in 1811–1812.
Besides becoming a principal means of passenger travel on the inland waterways of the
East, the river steamboat revolutionized western commerce. In 1815, the Enterprise
made the first return trip from New Orleans to Pittsburgh. By 1820, 69 steamboats with
a total capacity of 13,890 tons were plying western waters.
Steam transport reduced costs, moved goods and people faster, and allowed a two-
way commerce on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. The steamboat captured the Ameri-
can imagination. Great paddle wheelers became luxurious floating hotels, the natural
habitats of gamblers, confidence men, and mysterious women. For the pleasure of pas-
sengers and onlookers, steamboats sometimes raced against each other, and their more
skillful pilots became folk heroes. But the boats also had a lamentable safety record,
frequently running aground, colliding, or blowing up. The most publicized disasters
of antebellum America were spectacular boiler explosions that killed hundreds of pas-
sengers. As a result, the federal government began in 1838 to attempt to regulate steam-
boats and monitor their construction and operation. The legislation, which failed to
create an agency capable of enforcing minimum safety standards, was virtually the only
federal effort before the Civil War to regulate domestic transportation.
A transportation system based solely on rivers and roads had one enormous gap—
it did not provide an economical way to ship western farm produce directly east to
ports engaged in transatlantic trade or to the growing urban market of the seaboard
states. The solution the politicians and merchants of the Middle Atlantic and midwest-
ern states offered was to build a system of canals that linked seaboard cities directly to
the Great Lakes, the Ohio, and ultimately the Mississippi.
At 364 miles long, 40 feet wide, and 4 feet deep, and containing 84 locks, the Erie
Canal, which opened in 1825 and linked Lake Erie to Buffalo, New York, was the most
spectacular engineering achievement of the young republic. Furthermore, it was a great
economic success and inspired numerous other canal projects in other states.
The canal boom ended when it became apparent that most of the waterways were
unprofitable. State credit had been overextended, and the panic and depression of the
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