The 19th century saw a revolution in transportation. From road building to RAILROAD building, from canal to steamboat construction, new thoroughfares and vehicle forms affected all Americans. The financing of roadways became one of the earliest issues of conflict between the federal and state governments. Sectional politics played a role in whether or not an area would have a federal or state built roadway. In most cases the federal government stepped in when a planned road crossed state lines. Such was the case of the National Road started in Virginia in 1808. When it was completed, this road, built through the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian Mountains, eventually reached as far west as Illinois.
The National Road became a major route that settlers followed from the East Coast states to new western settlements. The solidity of the road, built from gravel on a stone base, allowed users a better chance at good road conditions. Other commonly used, but not constructed, roads were often muddy and impassable. Many states constructed roadways during the first half of the 19th century following older transportation routes and new paths leading from market to marketplace or from the site of raw materials to the site of production.
The booming ECONOMY of the United States also encouraged the building of canals. In 1816 President James Madison called for the federal government to sponsor a network of canals linked to a network of roads. He believed that economic growth would follow such a transportation web. New York governor DeWitt Clinton jumped on the idea when he proposed the construction of America’s famous Erie Canal. In 1825, after years of backbreaking work, largely by Irish immigrants, New York’s state-long canal opened. The waterway stretched 364 miles and connected New York City with the Great Lakes region. A technological masterpiece, the Erie Canal shifted the eyes of New York merchants away from European markets and toward the interior of the United States.
The ties created between the Northeast and Midwest also marked a shift in the focus of transportation routes. As did the National Road, the Erie Canal moved goods and people westward rather than to the south. This directional change differed from the previous North-South routes that had driven American communication and market patterns. This shift had lasting implications for national politics, local economies, and future settlement. The Southern areas of the United States became more isolated from the economically powerful Northern manufacturing centers. More important, the lack of transportation infrastructures hurt the Confederacy during the CiViL War.
Especially used on the western rivers, steamboats revolutionized water transportation during the antebellum period. Robert Fulton first demonstrated the capabilities of steamboat travel in 1807. By the 1830s the city of Cincinnati, Ohio, had grown to be the leading builder of new steamboats, which enabled people and goods to be easily transported both up - and downriver. Prior to the invention of steam power, boats had traveled downriver with the current, but they did not return against it. Oftentimes sailors sold their boats for scrap at their final port and returned upriver on land. After 1807, though, transportation on the Ohio, Missouri, and MISSISSIPPI RiVERs became a twoway process. People moved goods north as well as south. River cities grew in economic and political importance as more and more money, goods, and people moved through them on a regular basis. Besides Cincinnati and already established New Orleans, St. Louis became an influential and bustling hub in America’s transportation system.
Steamboats drastically changed the landscape of the American river. Besides their use as vehicles, the boats shattered the quiet of the areas they passed and polluted the air of ports with their exhaust. Because of the unpredictable nature of steam and the relative youth of the technology, many deadly and expensive accidents regularly occurred. Such accidents, along with the widespread and dangerous practice of racing, moved the government to create some of its first federal transportation regulations. Congress passed the Steamboat Act in 1838 and strengthened it in 1852. The act established guidelines for the construction and maintenance of the riverboats in order to prevent accidents and the loss of life and property.
Engraving of the meeting of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railway lines at the completion of the Pacific railroad, 1869 (Library of Congress)
In response to the growth of water travel and encouraged by the successes they saw in Britain, American entrepreneurs began building railroads during the first half of the 19th century. Cities such as Baltimore, Maryland, saw the possibility to compete with New York by constructing a railroad. Such a transportation system would not be affected by the same bad-weather problems as canals. Builders of the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) railroad hoped that merchants would choose to move goods by rail, especially in the winter when alternative canals froze over. People also quickly realized the speed with which new railroads could transport passengers and goods to new markets. In spite of kinks in the system, such as nonmatching rail gauge, railroads quickly spread across the eastern (and especially northeastern) portion of the United States.
In 1862 Congress chartered a federal corporation to build a transcontinental railroad. The congressional act created the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railways to begin construction of a railroad connecting the eastern portion of the United States with the Pacific coast. Both companies built their railroads on lands given to them by the federal government. On May 10, 1869, the two lines met at Promontory Point, Utah. Mostly Chinese immigrant men had labored from Sacramento, California, across the Sierra Nevada mountain range to build 689 miles of the Central Pacific Railroad. In Utah they met the end of 1,086 miles of the Union Pacific Railroad, which Irish immigrants, newly freed African Americans, and Civil War veterans had labored to build.
This new transportation route ushered in large-scale migration to the West. Whereas prior roads and routes had followed settlement, the sheer magnitude and power of the railroad preceded and even predetermined settlement patterns. Because the federal government gave chartered railroad companies lands along their railways, those companies in turn sponsored migration to western lands. The enormous amount of capital needed to build and maintain a railroad also caused the political and economic growth of the West. As a form of transportation, railroads not only moved passengers and goods but also the power center of the United States. Along with shifting political power to the West, the railroad industry strengthened connections between industry and the federal government. Federal troops breaking up the Great Strike of 1877 highlighted this partnership.
Besides a revolution in national transportation patterns, the 19th century also saw a change in local transportation. Urban centers such as San Francisco, Chicago, and New Orleans developed systems of cable and streetcars in the 1870s and 1880s. These urban transportation networks moved a growing number of people involved in emerging industrial and service jobs. In 1897 the nation’s first subway system opened in Boston, a mere five years before New York’s immense underground route started. Transportation in the 1900s followed, created, and spurred social, economic, and political changes.
See also Pacific Railroad Act.
Further reading: David Haward Bain, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (New York: Viking, 1999); George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815-1860 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968).
—Samantha Holtkamp Gervase
World History
