Improvements in Transportation

The period between the end of the War of 1812 and the Civil War was a time of swift
improvement in transportation, rapid growth of factories, and significant development of new
technology to increase agricultural production. Americans moved with relative ease into new
regions and soon produced an agricultural surplus that changed them from subsistence farmers
into commercial producers. Manufacturing became an increasingly important sector of the
economy and set the stage for rapid industrialization in the late nineteenth century. The economic
and technological developments brought important changes to American society.

The growth and expansion of the United States in the decades before
the Civil War were closely tied to improvements in the nation's
transportation system. As farmers shifted from growing just enough to
sustain their families ( subsistence agriculture) to producing crops for
sale ( commercial agriculture), demand grew for cheaper and faster
ways to get goods to market. Steamboats made river ports important
commercial points for entire regions; canals had a similar impact in
the Northeast and the Midwest, particularly near the Great Lakes.
Railroads, which carried mostly passengers at first, became essential
for moving both farm products and manufactured goods by 1860.

Inland waterways. As settlers moved into the trans‐Appalachian region,

they found the river systems crucial for exporting products to distant
markets. Many streams were navigable, and they led to larger rivers
such as the Tennessee and Cumberland, which in turn fed into the
Ohio, which merged with the Mississippi River and flowed past the port
of New Orleans. With roads unable to handle bulk traffic, farmers in
Tennessee, Kentucky, western Pennsylvania, and the Ohio Valley could
take their harvest to an eastern city such as New York by riding down
river to New Orleans and then taking a ship around Florida. The
Mississippi River was thus a major means of transporting agricultural
products from the Old Northwest to the East Coast, and its free
navigation was vital to American interests.

The simplest means of river transport were rafts, but they were
unstable, and rapids especially posed a serious danger. Flatboats
could carry more cargo, providing an interior space for the storage of
products and supplies. Real improvement, however, came with
the keelboat. Its design made it more controllable, and a small crew
using poles could propel a keelboat downstream at a fairly rapid rate.
As many as one thousand keelboats a year headed down trans‐
Appalachian tributaries and rivers to New Orleans in the early 1800s.
Unfortunately, rafts, flatboats, and keelboats had one major
disadvantages—they could make only a one‐way trip. After arriving in
New Orleans, the rafts and flatboats were broken up and sold for wood.
Poling upriver in a keelboat was possible, but a trip from New Orleans
to Louisville, Kentucky, could take as long as four months, so return
trips were usually over land. The Natchez Trace led travelers from
north of New Orleans to Nashville. A map from the time would have
shown the barest outline of roads radiating from New Orleans and
Mobile, a city located about one hundred miles to the east. To call
these byways “roads” is misleading though; they were often little more
than trails, unsuitable for wagons in many places.

Two‐way river transportation came with the invention of

the steamboat, or riverboat. A number of inventors had attempted to
use steam engines to power boats, but the most successful design
was created by Robert Fulton in 1807 and used on the Clermont. Fulton
demonstrated the watercraft on the Hudson River and won a monopoly
from the New York legislature to form a steamboat ferrying service
between New York and New Jersey. The monopoly was broken in 1824
when Marshall's Supreme Court, in Gibbons v. Ogden, declared that
regulation of interstate commerce, a federal power, also applied to
navigation.

Steamboat transportation on trans‐Appalachian rivers met with great

enthusiasm. Steamboats quickly succeeded rafts, flatboats, and
keelboats as the main vehicle for river travel. (Keelboats continued to
be used in the upper reaches of tributary streams.) As steamboats
evolved, they were built with shallower drafts, so they could operate in
as little as three feet of water. Enormous above water, they could carry
hundreds of tons of freight and dozens of passengers. Towns along the
rivers benefited greatly from the economic exchange provided by
steamboats. Cincinnati, Ohio, for example, grew from a small
settlement in 1770 to the sixth largest city in the country in 1840 on
the strength of river travel. A common scene was the loading and
unloading of furniture, farm machinery, bales of cotton, and bulk
agricultural products at the town wharf.

The canal craze. After the War of 1812, DeWitt Clinton of New York
boldly suggested that a canal be constructed from Lake Erie to Albany
(363 miles) using the Mohawk River and then the Hudson River to
connect with New York City. Such a project had no precedent in the
United States. Clinton obtained a subsidy from the New York
legislature and began construction on July 4, 1817. Completed in 1825,
the Erie Canal was an instant success, bringing prosperity and
additional settlement to its western terminus at Buffalo and helping to
make New York City the preeminent American seaport. Philadelphia
merchants, jealous of New York's success, pressed for a canal
between eastern Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh, but this waterway
presented even greater obstacles than the New York project. The 395‐
mile Pennsylvania Canal required 174 locks—more than double the
number on the Erie Canal—and a funicular railway to get cargo over
the Allegheny Mountains. Completed in 1834, it carried considerable
traffic but never rivaled the Erie Canal in terms of total tonnage or
economic impact.

The success of these projects fed a craze for canal construction

throughout the Midwest. By 1837, companies had built 750 miles of
canals in Ohio alone. Canals linked Toledo to Cincinnati, Evansville to
Fort Wayne, and Akron to Cleveland. While financially risky private
investments, canals benefited farmers throughout the Ohio Valley and
the Great Lakes region by providing a relatively inexpensive means to
get their produce to market. Even though the barges that carried
lumber, coal, hay, wheat, corn, and oats traveled only two miles an
hour (they were towed by mules walking along the banks), the canals
greatly reduced shipping costs, time, and distances. They also
contributed to a shift in population as cities like Buffalo, Cleveland,
Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee grew at the expense of such river
ports as Louisville.

Railroads. Railroad construction began in the United States in 1825; by

1860, more than thirty thousand miles of track had been laid. Originally
concentrated in the Northeast, by the eve of the Civil War, lines
reached as far west as St. Joseph, Missouri. In the South, railroad
building lagged just as much as canal building.

Railroads had several advantages over canals. They required a smaller

initial capital investment; offered more direct routes; and provided
fast, year‐round service (rivers and canals froze in winter). There was
little coordination among the different railroads though, which worked
against creation of a uniform rail system. Because the companies
selected their own track gauge, freight often had to be unloaded at the
terminus of one line and reloaded at the start of another line, adding to
costs. Despite this shortcoming and their comparatively high
maintenance costs, railroads expanded and eventually moved ahead of
canals in total tonnage shipped in the late 1840s.

Roads. Although road building was the earliest sign of the impending
transportation revolution, it was not an important factor in economic
development prior to the Civil War. The Lancaster Turnpike (1794),
which started in Philadelphia, spurred similar private toll roads. Around
the same time, the Wilderness Road into Kentucky was opened to
wagon traffic and figured in the settlement of the lower Ohio River
Valley. The National Road, a paved highway extending west from
Cumberland, Maryland, was financed and maintained through
congressional appropriations. It was completed as far as Wheeling on
the Ohio River in 1818 and then extended over the next twenty years to
Vandalia, Illinois. The federal funding of the National Road was an
exception rather than the norm; throughout the nineteenth century,
roads were either the responsibility of local government or were built
under charters granted by the states.

With the exception of the important east‐west and north‐south

turnpikes, roads throughout the country were often narrow and un‐
paved, muddy in wet weather and dusty in dry. Moving freight by road
was expensive and slow. Roads between towns were often neglected
after the railroad arrived, and only the use of the automobile in the
twentieth century created the public demand for a modern highway
system.