The Beginning of Steam Navigation
The revolution of mechanical propulsion affected marine transport about a generation before it became apparent on land. In 1787, John Fitch established the first regular steamboat service in the United States on the Delaware River, between Philadelphia and Bordentown, 28 miles away. His ship, a stern wheeler, could make 8 miles per hour, but the machinery occupied so much space that little was left for cargoes and the ship was commercially unsuccessful. After running some 2,000 miles, she was laid up in 1790 and never used again.[1]
In 1807 Robert Fulton, with the backing of Robert R. Livingston, designed a steamboat with an economic ratio of power to capacity. This vessel was 133 feet long, with a beam of 13 feet, and weighed 100 tons. She was a sidewheeler, powered by an English Boulton and Watt engine of about 20 horsepower, and could make the 150-mile trip from New York to Albany in about 30 hours. From her maiden voyage in August 1807, the Clermont was a commercial success.[2]
Henry Shreve had his own ideas about steamboat construction for river navigation. He knew that the western rivers were treacherous, filled with snags and shifting sandbars, and subject to tremendous fluctuations in water level. To successfully combat these hazards, a ship should have a very shallow draft and a very powerful engine. To implement these ideas, Shreve built his own steamboat, laying the keel in September 1815 at Wheeling, Virginia. Essentially, the Washington was a flatboat powered by steam, with the engine on the main deck and the boilers on another deck above. To get the extra power he needed, he operated the boilers well above atmospheric pressure. The two-cylinder engine could develop over 100 horsepower driving the ship’s stern paddlewheel.[3]
The Washington broke all previous records for speed on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, and she was in fact the prototype for the great fleet that plied these rivers for the next 50 years. In the spring of 1817, Shreve took her from Louisville to New Orleans in 17 days, returning the 1,352 miles upstream against the current in 24 days. By 1860, river steamers that could make the upstream voyage in less than 5 days were in regular service.[4]
Steam Navigation Thrives
After Fulton’s successful demonstration that steam propulsion was practical, the steamboat industry prospered. Between 1807 and 1817, 131 vessels were built in the United States, and by 1832 there were 474 in operation. Some of these were ferries for transporting passengers, carriages and wagons across large rivers. In 1837, 158 steamboats were launched, and by 1846, steamers were being built at a rate of 225 per year.[5] By 1859, there were more than 2,000 steamboats on the Mississippi River and its tributaries.
Steamboats were a major factor in opening the west for settlement. River villages became busy ports and then thriving cities, such as Memphis, St, Louis, Louisville and Cincinnati. Above all, New Orleans prospered on the river traffic, becoming the third busiest port in the United States, and in 1860 the value of products passing through her port exceeded $200 million.[6] Every overland trail to the Far West began at the head of steamboat navigation on some western river.
Federal Assistance to Navigation
The first Federal act for navigation improvement was passed in 1809. Thereafter, up to 1830, Congress appropriated $2,867,000 for subscriptions to canal stock and for such improvements as ports and piers and removal of river obstructions—slightly more than had been appropriated for the National Road.[7] A large part of these appropriations was spent to remove hazards from the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.
From 1830 onward, Congress appropriated generously for river and harbor improvements, many of them as completely within a single State as the Maysville Turnpike. In addition to improving the major rivers, the Great Lakes and the coastal ports, many creeks and inlets were made navigable, encouraging not only the flow of commerce but also the flow of Federal dollars into every congressional district.
Railroad Expansion
By 1850 the railroad had proved to the American people, and particularly to those who had money to invest, that it was far faster, cheaper and more adaptable to the country’s transportation needs than either turnpikes or canals. As investment flowed in ever-increasing amounts into railroads, the funds available for extending or even maintaining the old horsedrawn facilities became less and less and finally dried up altogether.
In the 1850’s railroad building escalated into a national frenzy. “The people were crazed with the idea of improvement; every town wanted to grow bigger and a railroad was an absolute necessity; scores of companies were formed with the intention of beginning construction, then deeding the improvement to some established line to operate. Many communities subscribed stock, others voted bonds, others paid for right-of-way by private subscription in order to secure a railroad. The result was often overbuilding, parallel lines, too many roads attempting to occupy the same territory, with the result that branch lines often never paid interest on the cost of construction.”[8]The fever even spread to Congress, which granted immense tracts of public land to subsidize railways.
With the possible exception of the Baltimore and Ohio, the Pennsylvania and a few others, the early railroads were local ventures, sometimes less than 20 miles long, each connecting a town to its neighbor or to the nearest river, lake, or seaport. In the West and South, many of the railroads were mere extensions of the river navigation systems. However, by 1860 most of the short lines were linked up into systems, a trend that was accelerated in the North and West with the general adoption of the 56½-inch “standard gauge.”
The First Railroad War
When the Civil War began, about two-thirds of the railroad mileage was in the North. The railroad networks enabled both the Union and Confederate forces to shift men and supplies with a speed previously unknown in warfare. The North had an additional advantage in that it controlled the sea approaches to
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