THE ROUTES OF WESTERN COMMERCE

During the antebellum period, three natural gateways linked the western territories and states with the rest of the nation and other countries. The first ran eastward, connecting the Great Lakes to New York. The main arteries feeding this Northern Gateway were down the St. Lawrence River or along the Hudson or Mohawk river valleys. Major investments on this route included the Erie Canal, which opened in 1825, and the New York Central and New York and Erie Railroads, completed in 1852.

The second gateway, the Northeastern Gateway, was a network of roads, canals, and, later, rail systems that connected the river launching points at Pittsburgh (on the Ohio River) to Philadelphia and Wheeling (also on the Ohio River) to Baltimore. The National Road was completed west to Wheeling in 1817, and the Pennsylvania Turnpike—a toll road—reached Pittsburgh the next year. Competing canals on these two links created a rivalry in the 1830s. Then, in the 1850s, the rivalry of these cities was boosted again through rail linkages.

The Southern Gateway, at New Orleans, was the main southern entrepot. The key event on the trunk rivers of the Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, and other western river arteries to this gateway was the introduction of the steamboat in 1811.

Figure 9.2 shows the volume of shipments from the western interior to the East and abroad by each gateway.1 The growth of total outbound shipments, from 65,000 tons in 1810 to nearly 4.7 million tons in 1860, documents the impressive development that was taking place in the West. We also see that the Northeastern Gateway played only a minor role, typically carrying less than 5 percent of the shipments from the West. The Northern Gateway was far more significant, but not until the late 1830s. Prior to 1825 and the opening of the Erie Canal, this gateway handled no outbound shipments. Even in the early 1830s, most of the shipments on the Erie Canal were from upstate New York. Therefore, it was primarily the Southern Gateway that handled western produce shipments, at least until the last few decades of the antebellum period. The dominance of the natural waterways, encompassing 16,000 miles of western rivers, led the contemporary James Lanman to say in 1841:

Steam navigation colonized the west! It furnished a motive for settlement and production by the hands of eastern men, because it brought the western territory nearer to the

East by nine tenths of the distance____Steam is crowding our eastern cities with western

Flour and western merchants, and lading the western steamboats with eastern emigrants and eastern merchandise. It has advanced the career of national colonization and national production, at least a century! (1841, 124) 42

FIGURE 9.2

Freight Shipments from the Interior by the Western Gateways, 1810-1860