Rafts and flatboats were adequate for downstream travel, but the only practical solution to upstream travel was the steamboat. After John Fitch’s work around 1790, a number of others made important contributions to the development of steam navigation. One early enthusiast was John Stevens, a wealthy New Jerseyite, who designed an improved steam boiler for which he received one of the first patents issued by the United States. Stevens got his brother-in-law, Robert R. Livingston, interested in the problem, and the latter used his political influence to obtain an exclusive charter to operate steamboats on New York waters. In 1802, while in France trying to buy New Orleans from Napoleon, Livingston got to know Robert Fulton, a young American artist and engineer who was experimenting with steam navigation, and agreed to finance his work. In 1807, after returning to New York, Fulton constructed the North River Steam Boat, famous to history as the Clermont.
The Clermont was 142 feet long, 18 feet abeam, and drew 7 feet of water. With its towering stack belching black smoke, its side wheels could push it along at a steady five miles an hour. Nothing about it was radically new, but Fulton brought the essentials— engine, boiler, paddle wheels, and hull—into proper balance and thereby produced an efficient vessel.
No one could patent a steamboat; soon the new vessels were plying the waters of every navigable river from the Mississippi east. After 1815 steamers were making the run from New Orleans as far as Ohio.
Source: George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution (1951); Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution (1991); Harry Watson, Liberty and Power (1990); Christopher Clark, Social Change in America (2006).
In this 1847 painting by George Caleb Bingham, a steamboat in the distance has run aground. The men in the flatboat are considering, perhaps, whether to help lighten its load. They smile contentedly. They are not soot-begrimed wage slaves who shovel coal into smoke-belching machines. They work when and where they wish, moved only by the pull of the current and the sweat of their muscles. And yet the viewer senses that their satisfaction will be fleeting. The steamboat will get going again. George Rogers Taylor (1951) proposed that the key factor in the transformation of the economy during the early nineteenth century was a "transportation revolu-tion,"the development of a system of canals, steamboats, and railroads. But in the 1990s other scholars suggested that the "transportation revolution"was merely a component of a larger and more powerful process: a "market revolution."The thesis was proposed by Charles Sellers (1991), Harry Watson (1990),and others. They argued that early in the nineteenth century some well-connected entrepreneurs used public funds to establish banks and corporations and to construct the nation's transportation infrastructure. This transformed craftsmen into factory workers and subsistence farmers into petty capitalists. In just a few decades, the economy shifted
From self-sufficient family farms and local small-scale production of goods to an interdependent system of trade, factory production, and speculation. The suddenness of this "revolu-tion"made its social repercussions all the more unsettling. In the frenzy to make money, the new capitalists turned their backs on family and community. The "market revolution"the-sis has provoked many debates, not the least of which is whether it was a good thing. Sellers was sure that its effects were harmful."Capitalism commodifies and exploits all life," he declared. But the only judgment that matters was that of the people such as those depicted here. If the steamboat captain had offered them higher wages and steady work, would they have accepted?
Christopher Clark, originally a supporter of the "market revolution" hypothesis, argues in Social Change in America (2006) that the most crucial transformation of the economy was into a fateful sectionalism which would ultimately lead to the Civil War.
On August 17, 1807, thousands of New Yorkers gathered along the Hudson River. Many had come to ridicule the noisy, spark-spuming contraption built by Robert Fulton—a steam-powered boat. But as the paddle wheels began to churn and the boat moved, the jeers turned to cheers. The boat made the 150-mile trip to Albany in eight hours.
In this bucolic rendering of the Erie Canal, a barge carries freight along the new waterway. Freight rates from Buffalo to New York City had been $100 a ton by wagon; by canal, the cost was only $10.
1820 at least sixty vessels were operating between New Orleans and Louisville, and by the end of the decade there were more than 200 steamers on the Mississippi.
The day of the steamboat had dawned, and although the following generation would experience its high noon, even in the 1820s its major effects were clear. The great Mississippi Valley, in the full tide of its development, was immensely enriched. Produce poured down to New Orleans, which soon ranked with New York and Liverpool among the world’s great ports. From 1816-1817, only 80,000 tons of freight was shipped down the Mississippi to New Orleans; but by 1840-1841, that freight arriving in New Orleans had increased to 542,000 tons. Upriver traffic was affected even more spectacularly. Freight charges plummeted, in some cases to a tenth of what they had been after the War of 1812. Around 1818 coffee cost sixteen cents a pound more in Cincinnati than in New Orleans, a decade later less than three cents more. The Northwest emerged from self-sufficiency with a rush and became part of the national market.
Steamboats were far more comfortable than any contemporary form of land transportation, and competition soon led builders to make them positively luxurious. The General Pike, launched in 1819 and set the fashion. Marble columns, thick carpets, mirrors, and crimson curtains adorned its cabins and public rooms. Soon the finest steamers were floating palaces where passengers could dine, drink, dance, and gamble in luxury as they sped smoothly to their destinations. Yet raft and flatboat traffic increased. Farmers, lumbermen, and others with goods from upriver floated down in the slack winter season and returned in comfort by steamer after selling their produce and their rafts as well, for lumber was in great demand in New Orleans. Every January and February New Orleans teemed with westerners and Yankee sailors, their pockets jingling, bent on a fling before going back to work. The shops displayed everything from the latest Paris fashions to teething rings made of alligator teeth mounted in silver. During the carnival season the city became one great festival, where every human pleasure could be tasted, every vice indulged.
World History
