The Dawn of Innovation (28 page)

Everyone sued, and an 1816 federal court decision held that territories could not grant monopolies. By 1818, with all appeals exhausted, the western rivers became open to all comers. By 1819 there were a reported thirty-one steamboats operating in the West, mostly on the 1,350-mile stretch between New Orleans and Louisville, just above the Mississippi–Ohio River junction.

Having banished the monopolists' business methods, westerners now had to rethink their equipment. The boats launched by the Livingston-Fulton group all followed their Hudson patterns. They were strongly constructed with relatively deep, rounded hulls and were powered by
low-pressure engines.
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It was possible for them to navigate western rivers, as the
New Orleans
had proven. But achieving reliable, economic transportation over the vicissitudes of river high and low points required reconciling a number of conflicting demands: the ideal steamboat would be a very light, shallow-draft vessel but one able to carry very heavy loads. It also had to be nimble, with a high power-to-weight ratio for quick response to rapids and other river hazards.

Power-to-weight requirements ruled out the Boulton & Watt–style engines. The engine on a Fulton boat launched at New Orleans in 1815 weighed one hundred tons and generated 60 horsepower, while the one on an 1816 French-Shreve competitor weighed only five tons yet generated a full 100 horsepower. Captains also preferred the high-pressure engines in difficult water because they could generate sudden thrust—a fast “wad of steam”—by tossing a handful of pitch into the firebox. Power in a Boulton & Watt engine was limited by the size of the condenser, regardless of the steam pressure. It also had almost twice as many moving parts and was harder to repair and maintain. The final bonus, of course, was that especially early in the century, the west didn't have the technical base to build the outsized Boulton & Watt components. A series of extremely simple and elegant engines from French and Shreve steadily increased efficiencies and gradually became the standard for the whole western industry.
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The high-pressure engines of the era, as we have seen, were dangerous fuel hogs. But fuel costs in the West were too low to really matter. Trollope described the squalid woodcutters' cabins lining the river banks and the spavined families carrying wood down to the fueling dock for a few coins.
And the advantages of the new steamboats were so overwhelming that Americans, and hordes of foreign travelers, chose to live with the risk. Bad as the safety record was, travelers' reports often exaggerated it. In an 1831 letter, Tocqueville wrote, “Thirty [steamboats] exploded or sank during the first six weeks we were in the United States”—a rate of attrition that would have wiped out the entire American fleet in hardly more than a year.
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A high-efficiency, lightweight engine was just a first step. To achieve the shallow draft, the shape and structure of the steamboat had to be radically reconfigured to present a broad flat surface to the water. Holds were done away with and cargo storage moved to the deck, with lightweight—critics said “flimsy”—superstructures for passengers and pilot house. Paddle wheels were moved higher to accommodate the reduced draft, and they were made larger for greater circumferential speed. The standard boats on arterial rivers typically achieved three- to four-and-a-half-foot drafts empty and five-and-a-half-foot to eight-foot drafts fully loaded. A special breed of “light” boats, able to carry fifty- to two-hundred-ton freights on two feet of water, were built to service tributary rivers that were often sandbar obstacle courses. A wag wrote that the first mate on a light boat could open a keg of beer in front and sail for four miles on the suds. An 1851 British survey of American steamboats reported: “the steamers built for [western] waters carry a greater amount of freight and accommodate a larger number of passengers upon a given draught of water than those constructed in any other part of the world; at the same time, their
cost
of construction and outfit per ton of freight capacity, or for passenger accommodation, is very much less.”
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As boat and engine designs stabilized, shipping times dropped markedly. In the early days, the upstream trip from New Orleans to Louisville took about a month, which was a threefold to fourfold improvement over human- or animal-powered upstream times. By the end of the first decade of western steamboating, that same trip was down to about two and a half weeks, and by mid-century, fully loaded business trips to Louisville with normal stops were routinely accomplished in a week or less. Important marginal gains were squeezed out by river improvements, like clearing snags (submerged tree trunks that could destroy a hull) and building canals
around strategic obstacles, like the Ohio Falls at Louisville—really a stretch of rapids with a twenty-six-foot fall over two miles. The falls were readily navigable by shallow-draft boats, but standard boats could make it upriver only at peak water levels.

Comparable improvements were made in travel on the Upper Mississippi, to St. Louis and beyond to St. Paul, and on the Upper Ohio from Cincinnati to Pittsburgh. The major tributary water systems were fully integrated into the network in the 1830s, and by the 1840s almost all significant rivers throughout the West, and many throughout the Southeast and Southwest, had some steamboat service. By the late 1840s, important river cities like Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh all averaged about 3,000 steamboat landings a year.

The jump in trip frequencies and freight capacity released an explosion of goods on the West. Western prices had been dominated by transport costs, including for local products. The West was rich in salt mines, but with steamboats on the rivers, the price of salt dropped from $3 a bushel in 1817 to 75 cents by 1825; sugar went from 24 cents a pound to 9 cents. Country stores in the West suddenly had full shelves of glass, hardware, nails, dry goods, and even luxury items, like Wedgewood's “queen's ware.” Westerners could also afford imports because they were exporting so much more, like grains, dried or salted meats, and even some steam engines.
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Improved market access spurred the commercialization of farms and accelerated the use of money. Trollope described a farm family she visited in 1828. It was a well-run farm by all indications, and the family was amply provided for, with chickens and other animals, several acres of corn and other crops, well-constructed housing, beds, chests with drawers. “Robinson Crusoe was hardly more independent,” Trollope reported, for they grew all of their food, spun all of their cloth, and made their own shoes. They had no need for money, the wife told her, except occasionally for coffee, tea, or whiskey, and she could get that by sending a “batch of butter and chicken” to market.
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But such families were a dwindling minority. Ohio farmers were embarked on the same rapid rural-industrialization path that Winifred Rothenberg's Massachusetts farmers had traversed earlier in the century, but the transition would be much faster.

Building steamboats became a major industry in its own right. After 1820, western factories built an average of one hundred big steamboats a year for nearly the rest of the century, three-quarters of them at Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Louisville. Steamboat building jump-started the Ohio and western Pennsylvania iron and coal industries, and the big river cities were soon dotted with large-scale foundries and forges, rolling mills, and heavy machine shops. Glass, paint, and fine furniture industries developed in their wake. New England peddler networks spread out in almost seamless conjunction with every extension of transportation. The big Connecticut brass founders and clock and tinware makers retained their manufacturing dominance by decentralizing their distribution and sales networks, much as the Boston Associates had done in textiles.
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The western population soared from a mere scattering of adventurers in 1800, to 1.6 million in 1830, and to 9 million in 1860, or about 30 percent of the national population. Cincinnati, the queen of western manufacturing cities before the Civil War, saw its population jump exponentially from 2,500 in 1810, to more than 20,000 when Trollope visited, to 46,000 the next decade when Dickens made his stopover, and 115,000 by 1850.
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While Trollope thought the city rather disorganized and dirty, Dickens implicitly gave it high marks for managing its growth: “Cincinnati is a beautiful city; cheerful, thriving, and animated. I have not often seen a place that commends itself so favourably and pleasantly to a stranger at the first glance as this does: with its clean houses of red and white, its well-paved roads, and footways of bright tile. Nor does it become less prepossessing on a closer acquaintance. The streets are broad and airy, the shops extremely good, the private residences remarkable for their elegance and neatness.”
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But however smooth and seamless the West's boom appears almost two centuries later, such huge shifts in population centers, technology, wealth, and hierarchies were terribly stressful for ordinary people.

Mary Graham was a farm wife in Sudbury Massachusetts, struggling to make a go of it in the explosive local industrial economy. As she wrote
to a friend in 1837: “Here we are all in comfortable health. L and myself have had to work as hard as we have been able, and a good deal harder than we wanted to I have shoes aplenty to bind, from 6 to 8 and 12 pairs a week—and with all the rest have got four as dirty, noisy, ragged children to take care of as any other woman, they look as though they would do to put out in the cornfields . . . to keep away the crows.”

Life was hard in an economy without safety nets, but she had her health and wrote in good humor. There was no humor in a letter she wrote seven years later: “Some news not very pleasant to me . . . Lucius has sold us out of house and home with the privilege of staying here until the first of June. If he can rake and scrape enough after paying his debts to set his family down in Wisconsin he is determined to go. So you wonder that I feel sad. Nothing but poor health and poverty to begin with in a new country looks dark to me.”
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She had much to fear. Trollope especially noted how drawn, tired, and lonely western farmwives looked, and she also understood that, high nutrition notwithstanding, the population was sick. For all its attractions, the riverine West was a sink of malaria. One farmwife who “seemed contented, and proud of her independence” conceded “that they had all had ague in the fall.”
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Trollope was a great walker and loved getting out of Cincinnati with her children to enjoy the scenery around the river or to picnic at a cherished woodland glen with a small waterfall.

The “ague,” a debilitating fever attack that is a symptom of malaria, often recurs throughout one's life. Trollope's first bout kept her in bed for nine weeks. The following year, not long after she had left Cincinnati and was anxious to start her book, the ague returned and “speedily brought me very low, and though it lasted not so long as that of the previous year, I felt persuaded I should never recover from it.” Her son Henry had contracted it as well.
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Social anxiety is often reflected in social unrest. On the East Coast, where employment relations were much more structured than in the West, there was a wave of strikes. The most famous were in New York, where “Workeyism,” akin to later European laborite political movements, showed its organizational power. The commercial sailors, the riggers and stevedores, the building laborers, the tailors, the coal heavers, the hatters, and other trades all went out on strike—often more than once. At times the port was completely shut down, and in 1836, the city was on the precipice of a general strike. The recession that followed the Jacksonian banking crises quelled labor unrest for a time, and the inundation of destitute, mostly unskilled, famine Irish, in all major eastern cities shifted the organizing focus to nativism.
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Outside of the major cities, anxieties were more likely to be expressed in revivalism. Charles Grandison Finney evangelized much of western New York in the 1820s, preaching a more user-friendly brand of Presbyterianism, emphasizing salvation through repentance. Finney was among the entrepreneurs of a newer, more professional, form of revivalism, all carefully choreographed and marketed—with advance men, handbills, and arrival parades. Revivalism intersected with Temperance drives, and together harkened back to Jeffersonian notions of a republic of sober, stalwart, independent, virtuous, farmers and mechanics.

Especially in the West, Methodist and Baptist circuit riders mastered the camp-meeting revival form, turning it in into a welcome mode of mass entertainment like a rock concert, as well as a splendid release valve for mass anxiety.
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Our reporter Frances Trollope was on the scene. She had “long wished” to attend a camp meeting and jumped at an invitation to accompany “an English lady and gentleman” in their carriage, to a “wild
district in Indiana” finding themselves among a great crowd of curious spectators that mixed with the faithful.
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