The Dawn of Innovation (27 page)

But in her heart of hearts, she thought a society
needed
proper class divisions to function, and their absence in America was disorienting: “The greatest difficulty . . . is getting servants, or as it is there called, ‘getting help,' for it is more than a petty treason to the Republic, to call a free citizen a
servant
.... Hundreds of half-naked girls work in the paper-mills, or in any other manufactory, for less than half the wages they would receive in service; but they think their equality is compromised by the latter.” When Trollope finally found “a tall, stately lass” she liked, she asked what “I should give her by the year.” The girl laughed out loud. “You be a downright Englisher, sure enough. I should like to see a young lady engage by the year in America!”—and explained that she might get married or decide to go to school. Her work proved satisfactory enough, but she resigned in a huff when Trollope refused to lend the price of a ball gown—“Then 'tis not worth my while to stay any longer.”
²⁰

 

Mrs. Trollope.
Engraving executed in 1845 after an oil painted around 1832 by a young French artist, Auguste Hervieu. The Trollopes had acted as Hervieu's patrons in England, and he traveled to America with the family as part of the household.

“All animal wants are supplied profusely at Cincinnati,” Trollope conceded, “and at a very easy rate.” But the leveling tendency left no room for
“the little elegancies and refinements enjoyed by the middle classes in Europe,” and she missed them. “Were I an English legislator,” Trollope wrote, “instead of sending sedition to the Tower, I would send her to make a tour of the United States. I had a little leaning towards sedition myself when I set out, but before I had half completed my tour I was quite cured.”
²¹

Dickens rather enjoyed the leveling, because it made good copy. But it was behavior he would have regarded as “impertinencies” in England—like the inn proprietor walking in and out of his rooms with his hat on, or that worthy's practice of starting conversations “in a free-and-easy manner,” or lying down on Dickens's sofa to read his paper. In America, it was all just part of being a “good-natured fellow,” he wrote, with more than a tad of sarcasm.
^au
But he clearly liked “the funny old lady,” who, “when she came to wait upon us at any meal, sat herself down comfortably in the most convenient chair, and, producing a large pin to pick her teeth with, remained performing that ceremony, and steadfastly regarding us meanwhile with much gravity and composure (now and then pressing us to eat a little more), until it was time to clear away. It was enough for us that [the service] . . . was performed with great civility and readiness, and a desire to oblige.”
²²

Martineau, who was of Radical politics in England, urged Europeans to adjust their manners to the Americans':

It was Tocqueville, the royalist, a child of the ancien régime whose family had been decimated by the guillotine, who thought most intensely about the leveling impulse and penetrated the deepest. He and Beaumont took the steamboat to Albany and attended a Fourth of July ceremony, where they were moved by the solemn reading of the Declaration of Independence. They had planned to spend time there investigating the workings of state government. But as Tocqueville wrote to a friend, “The offices and registers were all open to us, but as far as
government
goes, we're still looking for it. Really it doesn't exist at all.” There had been no police attending the ceremony they had witnessed; but while it was humble by European standards, it was still perfectly orderly. The parade marshal was a volunteer with no official status, yet everyone obeyed him.

Comprehension dawned in Ohio. This, Tocqueville understood, was democracy without limit, “absolutely without precedents, without traditions, without customs, without even prevailing ideas.” For his own class in France, “the family represents the land and the land represents the family . . . an imperishable witness to the past and a precious pledge for the future.” But Americans “flee the paternal hearth . . . to chase after fortune—nothing, in their eyes, is more praiseworthy.”

“An American taken at random,” he went on, “will be ardent in his desires, enterprising, adventurous, and above all an innovator.” And when they meet each other, though they may differ greatly in wealth, “they regard each other without pride on the one side and without envy on the other. At bottom they feel themselves equal, and they are.” And he explained why:

For Tocqueville, Ohio demonstrated “one thing I had doubted until now, that the middle classes can govern a state.... They do definitely supply practical intelligence, and that turns out to be enough.” As he put it in
Democracy in America
: “The doctrine of interest, properly understood does not produce great sacrifices, but day by day it prompts little ones. By itself it cannot make a man virtuous, but it shapes a multitude of citizens who are orderly, temperate, moderate, foresighted, and masters of themselves. And if that doesn't lead directly to virtue through the will, it advances gradually closer to virtue through the habits.”

So the leveling imperative—the assumption of equality that led to the easy familiarity that bemused Dickens and unsettled Trollope; the casualness toward rank that had a president, to European astonishment, shaking hands with anyone who approached him—was not a social disorder. Rather, it was the clue to the country's success. Tocqueville admitted that he himself could never be completely comfortable in such a society, but few contemporaries understood it so well.
²⁴

At a much less abstract level, all of our travelers, like most Europeans, were deeply impressed with the western river steamboat, a uniquely American invention that was a critical breakthrough for the region's development. Martineau wrote:

The eastern seaboard was blessed with a more or less continuous system of tidal waterways linking almost all the major cities. Rivers like the Hudson and the Connecticut were broad, deep, and relatively straight. For a skilled captain with a good boat, sailing upstream was almost as easy as sailing down. As a teenager, Cornelius Vanderbilt ran a Staten Island–to-Manhattan ferry service with a small sailing sloop. By his early twenties he owned a string of twenty- to thirty-ton fast sailing vessels running freight traffic up and down the East Coast. He could sail up the Delaware during shad season, picking up fishermen's catches to sell in New York City. Fast, easy, waterborne freight transport facilitated commerce on the eastern seaboard from the earliest days.
²⁶

The new steamboats developed on the East Coast early in the century were therefore targeted at passengers rather than freight. The standard boats were large, usually well built, and commodious to the point of grandiosity. Fulton used imported Boulton & Watt–style low-pressure engines from the start (they were long since off patent). Some operators experimented with high-pressure designs, until a rash of boiler explosions pushed the bigger operators into the Boulton & Watt camp until much later in the century. (When a low-pressure boiler failed, it might inundate the deck, but no one got hurt.)

The waterways that so densely veined the interior of the West, by contrast, were shallow, narrow, and winding, often with swift currents. Sailing vessels were close to useless, so downstream shipping was commonly by flat boat, with the craft broken up and sold for lumber at its destination. There were also keel boats that made round trips, but the week or two trip downstream from Louisville to New Orleans was a brutal three- to four-month slog of poling and shoreline towing to get back. Western exports therefore mostly went downriver to New Orleans, while the region imported
little back, relying on wagon trekkers crossing the mountains with essential eastern or English manufactures.

The practical effect was that westerners were consigned to a kind of preindustrial self-sufficiency. In 1815, Mt. Pleasant in Jefferson County, Ohio, about ten miles from the Ohio River, was home to “between 80 and 90 families and about 500 souls.” There were some forty different craft establishments—saddlers, hatters, blacksmiths, weavers, bootmakers, carpenters, tailors, cabinetmakers, wagon makers, a baker, and an apothecary. Within a radius of six miles, there were at least two dozen mills of various kinds.
²⁷
These were not isolated settlers, and the town must have been a hive of activity, with almost everything it needed within a convenient wagon ride. Measured by the basics of nutrition and shelter, the standard of living was good, but in such a small-pellet economy, technology was stuck at a handicraft level. The river network could support some regional production, but to exploit it required steam.
²⁸

Building a western steamboat network took about twenty years, and involved two East-West face-offs: one between rival entrepreneurs and another between rival designs. Both were won by the West.

Eastern interests made the first move in 1811, when the Livingston-Fulton combine, which owned the profitable Hudson River franchise, acquired an exclusive steamboat franchise from Louisiana. Robert Livingston was one of New York's richest men. He had been a member of the Committee to Draft the Declaration of Independence, a minister to France, and a key negotiator of the Louisiana Purchase. He had met Robert Fulton in France, where the younger man was experimenting with a military submarine. The two agreed to cooperate on a steamboat venture in New York, and Fulton eventually married Livingston's niece. Their first successful run, from New York City to Livingston's Clermont Manor estate on the Hudson took place in 1807. (The boat was officially named
Steam Boat
but became known to popular history as the
Clermont
.)

Fulton's first western boat, the
New Orleans
(371 tons), left Pittsburgh in October 1811 for the 2,000-mile trip to the Gulf down the Ohio and Mississippi, arriving in New Orleans the following January. The group put three more boats into operation in 1814 and 1815. They were all roughly
the size of the
New Orleans
and mostly concentrated on the much shorter (300 miles) but very lucrative Natchez–New Orleans trade. (Livingston and Fulton died in 1813 and 1815 respectively, which likely slowed the combine's move into the West.)

Monopoly franchises were pervasive in Great Britain and fairly common in the East, but westerners were outraged at the Louisiana grant. New Orleans was the gateway to the entire West, so a Louisiana monopoly imposed tribute on steamboats from any other riparian territory. The fact that the franchise had gone to easterners only added to the anger. A Pennsylvania group operating out of works in Brownsville on the Monongahela River, some fifty miles south of Pittsburgh, decided to ignore it. The group was headed by two excellent mechanics and engineers, Daniel French and Henry M. Shreve.
^av
Their boat, the
Enterprise
(75 tons), with Shreve at the wheel, made it to New Orleans in 1815. Over the next couple of years, Shreve became locally famous for his clever cat-and-mouse games with New Orleans authorities both on the
Enterprise
and on the much bigger
Washington
(403 tons).