American Experiment (55 page)

States had no requirements for reserves, so clearinghouses for interbank claims were developed through the leadership of the Boston Associates.
They were the directors of the Suffolk Bank of Boston, which in 1822 began to clear notes from country banks for the city banks of Boston, requiring country banks to maintain a five-thousand-dollar deposit in the Suffolk Bank and enough besides to redeem each of its notes. Lowell had received a corporate charter from the Massachusetts legislature and was able to draw on the profits of the Boston mercantile community. These merchants, with profits from the overseas trade, were people to look to for capital when banks would not take the risk.

Many of his friends and relatives had thought the plan of Francis Cabot Lowell for a cotton textile mill “a visionary and dangerous scheme.” Lowell’s leadership had convinced them otherwise.

The August day was hot and sultry when the extraordinary contraption, appearing to be a raft topped by a furnace, fired up in the Hudson River at New York City. On board were forty passengers—all members of the Livingston clan—who huddled together trying to avoid sparks and soot from the steamboat’s engine. Undercurrents of “I told you so; it is a foolish scheme; I wish we were well out of it,” grew louder. The steamboat’s inventor, Robert Fulton, later wrote, “There were not perhaps thirty persons in the city who believed that the boat would ever move one mile an hour….” Two men had no doubts: Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, an avid student of steam navigation, Fulton’s mentor and financier, and Fulton himself, mechanical genius and inventor.

Fulton had no time for talk, being too busy trying to find out why his steamboat was steaming but not moving. Soon he solved the problem, and the boat left New York City bound for the chancellor’s Clermont estate. As news of the boat’s voyage moved up the Hudson faster than its speed of five miles per hour, people lined the shore to gape at the clanking, splashing craft, shooting a fiery shower of sparks as it panted its way. It was a frightening spectacle to some who watched from shore—the coming of the end. A few ran to their homes and locked the doors in fright, but the North River Steamboat of Clermont, later known as just the
Clermont
, roared on to Livingston’s Hudson River estate, finishing the distance of 110 miles in twenty-four hours. The steamboat traveled forty miles to Albany on the following day.

“The power of propelling boats by steam is now fully proved,” the elated inventor wrote of his triumph. “…It will give a cheap and quick conveyance to the merchandise on the Mississippi, Missouri, and other
great rivers, which are now laying open the treasures to the enterprise of our countrymen.” Fulton intended to use his steamboat on western waters and make upstream navigation possible on the Mississippi. His experiment was but one in a long string of successes. Tall, handsome, and forty-one, with curly black hair and dark eyes, he looked like an English gentleman who had married into the Livingston clan and been accepted, as indeed he had. Nothing if not confident, Fulton had a talent for persuading wealthy investors to finance his imaginative adventures. His first patron, Joel Barlow, a radical and cosmopolitan poet living in France, had introduced him to Livingston.

Fulton had traveled to Europe in 1787 to study miniature painting and did not return to the United States for twenty years. In Europe he came to be fascinated by transportation and the building of steamboats. Soon he was corresponding with Boulton and Watt in England about the purchase of a suitable steam engine for boat propulsion. A voracious reader of studies about steam navigation—especially the work of John Fitch, John Stevens, and Oliver Evans, all of whom had launched workable steamboats—as well as theoretical works on hull design, Fulton wrote a treatise of his own on the improvement of canal navigation. He moved to France in 1799 to confer with the French Directory about another dream of his, submarines. Encouraged by the French government, at war with England, Fulton perfected a submersible in which he and a crew of three, aided by a compressed-air tank, could submerge as deep as twenty-five feet and stay under for four and one-half hours. The French government agreed to reward him handsomely if he destroyed one of the British warships blockading the French coast, but Fulton never engaged a British ship. The French lost interest, and Fulton turned to his other pursuits.

Fulton became acquainted with Livingston while in France. The improvement of transportation through steam-powered vessels was a lifelong obsession of Livingston, as it was with other landowners of the period. In 1798, the Hudson grandee had a bill presented to the New York Assembly repealing an act of 1787 that gave John Fitch the sole right to use steamboats on the Hudson River and now awarding Livingston the privilege for twenty years, provided he could build within a year a boat of twenty tons and propel it by steam at the rate of four miles an hour.

Financed by Livingston, Fulton set to work late in 1802 to build an experimental boat to navigate on the Seine River of France. Since the inland navigation of American waters was their purpose, however, they both agreed to shift the experiments to the United States. After buying and shipping home a steam engine and boiler made by Boulton and Watt of
England, Fulton designed a vessel for it in the shipyards at Paulus Hook Ferry. It was a long and narrow boat—150 feet by 13 feet—with a flat deck and open machinery, planned for eventual use on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

Since a steamboat, in comparison with a textile factory, required little capital to build—$900 to $1,200 for the smaller boats and later $5,000 to $40,000 for the ferries—competition was stiff. Rivals sought advantages in state monopoly grants and expensive patent suits. Livingston won a second and third extension of the New York state monopoly, thus gaining the exclusive privilege to operate steamboats in New York waters and to have the privilege extended by five years for each additional boat built—the whole time not to exceed thirty years. Livingston felt he had every right to the monopoly since he had supplied leadership and capital, through the sale of some of his lands, to a project which would eventually benefit the nation as a whole. He supplied the inventor with a state monopoly and commercial advantage, for Livingston brought the steamboat to the attention of his merchant friends in New York City who would want to use a steamboat service. Livingston also brought stability and direction to the partnership, constantly summoning Fulton back from his other canal and submarine interests to the completion of the steamboat in 1807. “Mechanicks is my hobby horse,” he wrote.

Fulton, in turn, gave his engineering talents and inventiveness to the partnership. The North River Steamboat was by no means original, for many others had built workable steam vessels (though none had lasted). Fulton approached the problem by studying the errors and successes of others, keeping careful records of his readings and experiments, and constructing trial models before going full-scale. Although his European training had taught him to study all aspects of a subject scientifically rather than tinkering, he wanted a practical and commercial success more than he wanted the claim of originality. Expanding his factory at Paulus Hook Ferry, he built another steamboat in 1810 and was offering ferry service from New York to Albany twice a week. He also turned to the area which had always been his object—the Mississippi River. Here the steamboat would transform the inland transportation system of the United States.

Walled off by the Appalachian Mountains, the Northwest was not easily accessible to manufactured goods from Europe and the Northeast, and the Northwest in turn could not profitably export to the East because of the high cost of wagon transport. As migrants poured over the Appalachians after the War of 1812 to settle and farm, they began to produce a surplus
of heavy staples—grain, meat, whiskey, lumber, and livestock. How to market and transport this surplus? Heavy farm items such as wheat and flour could not absorb the freight charge of thirteen dollars a barrel to move from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia when the flour itself sold for ten dollars. Horses could draw loaded wagons about twenty miles a day, or two miles an hour.

Highways were still primitive, even though states had awarded monopolies to turnpike builders to encourage the construction of better roads. The national government itself built a highway partially from the sale of Ohio public lands to connect Ohio with the Atlantic. In 1818 this “National Road” opened for traffic from Cumberland on the Potomac River through the lower western corner of Pennsylvania, to Wheeling. Although the new highway boasted a fine-stone surface and heavy bridges, traffic was so heavy as to wear it out in places. Maintained for the most part by local authorities, state roads were poor; only the best were comparable to the improved backcountry roads of today. The traveler could expect anything on local ways, even the building of fences across them. As late as 1841 one traveler found that a settler needing clay for his house chimney had dug a big hole in the middle of an Illinois state road used by the mail stage. The few improved highways such as the Pennsylvania Turnpike and the National Road did not lower the cost of freight transportation, which, to be at all profitable, had to go by water.

With his usual shrewdness Fulton sized up the steamboat possibilities of the Mississippi. Carrying freight by flatboat or keelboat was essentially one-way, time-consuming, and expensive. Farmers floated their products downstream to New Orleans on flatboats, sold off their boats for a pittance, and then usually had to walk home to Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana over the Natchez Trail to Nashville and points north. The miracle of steam would enable boatmen to breast the current and convert the Mississippi into a huge two-way traffic link. With Livingston and Nicholas Roosevelt, Fulton organized the Mississippi Steamboat Company in 1809 to navigate the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Natchez.

Fulton and Livingston sent Nicholas Roosevelt west in the same year to study navigation opportunities on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and then build a steamboat at Pittsburgh. In April 1811, their company persuaded the territorial legislature of Louisiana to grant them the exclusive use of the lower Mississippi River for steamboats. Once again Livingston’s influence helped secure a steamboat monopoly—in this case because of his key role in negotiating the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The partners awarded Roosevelt a contract to build the Mississippi steamboat. Construction began in 1811 on the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh amid endless
difficulties. Fifty mechanics had to be imported from New York City, materials were in short supply, and the Boulton and Watt engine did not arrive, forcing substitution of an earlier engine.

The adventurous Roosevelt and his pregnant wife, Lydia, decided to make the first trip with no passengers. A crowd assembled as the
New Orleans
hissed and clanked down the Monongahela River, reaching Cincinnati by the second day. Bystanders lined the wharves of the Ohio River as the boat pushed its way behind the gentle current. By the fourth day, the
New Orleans
reached Louisville, where the boat docked because the falls on the Ohio River were too shallow for passage. The indomitable Lydia used this interval to have her baby. Then the couple renewed their journey; as if the baby were not enough, they had also taken on a Newfoundland dog. The steamboat tied up to shore at regular intervals to allow the crew to chop wood for the boiler. By the time the boat reached Natchez, thousands were lining the shore to see it, but the steamboat pushed on to New Orleans, reaching there by mid-January with wife, baby, dog, and husband still intact.

The denouement was anticlimactic. Fulton kept the
New Orleans
in service only between New Orleans and Natchez, never going back upriver. Two years later, the
New Orleans
hit a snag and sank.

Other steamboats quickly replaced it in the river trade. These vessels for the western waters had to be lighter in order to navigate through greater hazards of low water, falls, and floods, compared with steamboats on the protected northeastern waterways. Mississippi boats used high-pressure steam, which brought on more explosions and other accidents. The average life of western steamboats was four years, whereas boats using low-pressure steam in the Northeast lasted seven. Shifting sandbars and snags, rupturing boilers, and obstacles caused numerous casualties. More intense competition and higher operating expenses owing to heavier depreciation and costs seemed to be the lot of Mississippi steamboats.

The steamboatmen were undaunted. Four years after the maiden voyage of the
New Orleans
, the
Washington
, piloted by Henry M. Shreve, a veteran keelboat captain, did make the return trip upstream to Louisville. A keel-boat with a cargo of from ten to forty tons and a crew of eight to twenty men had done well to pole six miles a day upstream, taking three to four months to reach Louisville from New Orleans. Shreve made the upstream trip to Louisville in twenty-five days. By 1817 seventeen steamboats, averaging about 190 tons each, were operating on western rivers; three years later there were sixty-nine. Fulton’s audacity and practicality had paid off.

Despite all their theatrics, steamboats were slow to affect transportation as a whole. The early vessels were unreliable, dependent on the stage of
the river, and too expensive to transport low-value heavy freight such as coal, lumber, and iron, which continued to go on keelboats until the middle 1830s. With more and better vessels, the value of goods received at New Orleans rose from $10 million in 1816 to $17 million by 1819, but the difference was not all due to steamboats, since the number of flatboats and the amount of freight they carried also rose. A dramatic effect of the steamboat, however, was on the lives of flatboatmen. Instead of one trip a year, midwestern farmers could now make four.

One of them, a nineteen-year-old Indiana boy named Abe Lincoln, contracted with a farmer in April 1828 to take a flatboat full of farm produce to New Orleans. With another youth Lincoln left Rockport, Indiana, and floated down the Ohio and the Mississippi trying to avoid snags and sandbars along the 1,200-mile journey. Seven slaves set upon their flatboat as it lay at anchor near a river plantation outside Baton Rouge, where they had stopped to trade part of their produce for sugar, cotton, and tobacco. The youths were barely able to fight off their attackers and pull anchor. When Lincoln reached New Orleans, he gaped at the crowded wharves where over a thousand flatboats were tied up while farmers and slaves unloaded produce which would be reloaded on sailing ships bound for northeastern cities and for Europe. Returning home by steamboat, Lincoln landed in Rockport with twenty-five dollars in his pocket for three months’ labor.