The Great American Steamboat Race (15 page)

It appearing, after arguments of counsel and the examination of the record in the case, that the court has no jurisdiction of the same, it is therefore ordered, adjudged and decreed that the petition of Pltffs [plaintiffs Livingston and his wife, Elizabeth] be dismissed with costs.
⁵

Edward Livingston and the monopoly had been defeated again. Even so, Livingston clung to the monopoly owners’ claim of exclusive rights to steamboat navigation at the port of New Orleans. Shreve meanwhile made regular trips to and from New Orleans, not only with the
Washington
(which had made the run to Louisville in twenty-one days, less than a quarter of the time taken by keelboats and barges), but with new steamboats that he and a set of partners built — the
Ohio
, built in 1817, the
Napoleon
, built in 1818, and the
Post Boy
, built in 1819. Whatever hopes Livingston held while he waited for a decision from the Louisiana State supreme court, where his appeal in the
Enterprise
case was bottled up, were finally exhausted in 1819, and the company that had succeeded to Fulton and Livingston’s steamboat monopoly on the Mississippi at last withdrew all claims to an exclusive right to operate steamboats on the Mississippi.

Persistent, determined, unafraid, Henry Shreve had won his fight — and not just for himself. Judge Samuel Treat, later writing about the historic victory in a nineteenth-century magazine article, “Political Portraits With Pen and Pencil,” remarked, “At this day, the enthusiasm with which the news was received cannot be duly appreciated ... the western country owes a vast debt to Captain H.M. Shreve.”
⁶

Shreve had broken the stifling monopoly and freed the Mississippi for the entrepreneurial spirit of the growing nation.
The
Washington
continued to make round trips between New Orleans and Pittsburgh until it became worn out and obsolete and was scrapped in 1822. Shreve never stopped trying to improve on it. He figured out a way to eliminate the main disadvantage of side-wheelers, notorious for their wide turning radius. He connected a separate engine to each of the two paddle wheels, so that one wheel could be reversed while the other rotated forward, allowing a boat to turn about within its own length. He also decided that additional decks could be stacked atop the second deck he had already introduced, and when he built the
George Washington
in 1824, he added two decks to provide more cabins — making it a four-story structure, with a pilothouse atop it — and a promenade to give passengers more room to move about. A passenger named Bullock voyaged on the
George Washington
two years after it was put into service and described the vessel:

On the third of April we left New Orleans in the beautiful steam-boat George Washington of 375 tons, built in Cincinnati, and certainly the finest fresh-water vessel I have ever seen.... The accommodations are excellent, and the cabins furnished in the most superb manner. None of the sleeping rooms have more than two beds. The principal [rooms] are on the upper story, and a gallery and verandah extends entirely round the vessel, affording ample space for exercise, sheltered from the sun and rain, and commanding from its height, a fine view of the surrounding scenery, without being incommoded by the noise of the crew passing overhead. The meals served ... are excellent, and served in superior style. The ladies have a separate cabin, with female attendants, and laundresses; there are, also, a circulating library, a smoking and drinking room for the gentlemen, with numerous offices for the servants &c . &c ....
⁷

The
George Washington
had set the standard for riverboats, and not just those on the Mississippi, but on rivers everywhere. Shreve made the Mississippi River steamboat an American institution and in so doing played a huge part in the development of the nation. “To him,” the
St. Louis Republican
declared when it published his obituary following his death in 1851, “belongs the honor of demonstrating the practicability of navigating the Mississippi with steamboats.”

By 1815, just eight years after the
North River Steam Boat
had made its historic voyage up the Hudson, the Fulton-Livingston company had built twenty-one steamboats, all of them designed by Fulton. Master of the Hudson by virtue of the monopoly granted it by the New York State legislature, the firm was reaping profits from five steamboats in service on the Hudson, including a new version of the
North River
, rebuilt from the original and nearly twice as big, the
Car of Neptune
, the
Paragon
, the
Richmond
and the
Chancellor Livingston
, which was not completed until after Fulton’s death. On the Mississippi the Fulton-Livingston company had similarly expanded, operating the
New Orleans
(until 1814, when it sank), the
Aetna
, the
Natchez
and the
Buffalo
.

It operated five steam ferryboats from Manhattan — the
Firefly
, the
Jersey
, the
Yor k ,
the
Camden
and the
Nassau
— and two ferries that plied Long Island Sound, the
Connecticut
and the
Fulton
. In addition, it operated the
Washington
on the Potomac River and the
Olive Branch
and the
Raritan
on the Raritan River in New Jersey. In an attempt to establish a steamboat monopoly in Russia, the firm had built the
Empress of Russia,
and winning himself one more distinction, Fulton had also designed the world’s first steam warship, the
Demologos —
which the U.S. Navy called
Fulton the First—
the guns of which boomed a salute to Fulton in New York’s harbor on the day of his funeral.

On March 2, 1824, in a ruling written by Chief Justice John Marshall, deciding the case of
Gibbons v. Ogden
, the New York law that gave Fulton and Livingston their steamboat monopoly was struck down by the Supreme Court of the United States. The Hudson, like the Mississippi, like every other navigable river and lake in the nation, was open to all comers, all vessels, however propelled. It was a grand new day for steamboats in America.

there were eight steamboats operating on the Hudson River. In 1826, two years after the Supreme Court’s ruling, there were sixteen Hudson River steamboats; in the late 1830s there were forty-five, and by 1840 there were more than one hundred. More than a dozen steamboat companies were established to operate in New York. In 1849 passengers could choose between twenty steamboats that ran daily between New York City and Albany. Cornelius Vanderbilt became the owner of more than fifty steamers, operating on several routes, and began amassing the fortune that would later make him the richest man in America.

Steamboats were also multiplying elsewhere in the Northeast. Lake Champlain, gateway for trade between Canada and New York State, was the second oldest water route regularly traveled by steamboats, its first steamer being the
Vermont
, built in 1808 at Burlington, Vermont, on the lakeshore. By July 1821 a Lake Champlain excursion-boat service had been established, using the steamer
Congress
to carry, as its advertisement read, “Parties of Pleasure, and others, who may wish to view the remains of those ancient fortresses, Ticonderoga and Crown Point, and other more recently memorable places on the Lake, such as the Battle Ground of Macdonough’s Naval Engagement — Plattsburgh, &c .”
¹
The
Congress
steamed out of Whitehall every Thursday morning at five o’clock. Excursion passengers disembarked from it on the second day and boarded the southbound steamer
Phoenix
for a return trip to Whitehall while the
Congress
continued north to Canada.

By 1842 at least sixteen steamboats had been put into service on Lake Champlain. On one of them, the
Burlington
, the renowned British novelist Charles Dickens traveled as a passenger in 1842 and he wrote fulsomely about the experience :

There is an American boat — the vessel which carried us on Lake Champlain, from St. John’s to Whitehall, which I praise very highly, but no more than it deserves, when I say that it is superior to any other in the world. The steamboat, which is called the
Burlington
, is a perfectly exquisite achievement of neatness, elegance and order. The decks are drawing-rooms; the cabins are boudoirs, choicely furnished and adorned with prints, pictures and musical instruments; every nook and corner in the vessel is a perfect curiosity of graceful comfort and beautiful convenience.
²

Steamboat service blossomed along the Connecticut coast. The
Lafayette
was built in 1828 to operate out of Bridgeport, and in 1835 one of the Vanderbilt steamboats, the
Nimrod
, was shifted from the Hudson River to Bridgeport. Thanks largely to the building of railroads that terminated there, Bridgeport in the 1840s became a busy port for steamers, which brought freight from New York City to the Bridgeport railroad terminals for shipment by rail to the interior of Connecticut and New York State.

New Haven was introduced to steamboats when the
Fulton
, the last boat built under Fulton’s supervision and which he designed specifically for service on the waters of Long Island Sound, arrived there from New York in March 1815. It left New York a little after five o’clock on a Tuesday morning and landed at New Haven at four-thirty that afternoon, which was not considered a speedy trip. But the New York
Evening Post
reporter who told of its introductory voyage speculated that when hindering mechanical problems were solved and the weather was good, the trip would be made in eight or nine hours. He had other good things to say about the boat. “We believe it may be affirmed,” he wrote, “that there is not in the whole world such accommodations as
Fulton
affords. Indeed it is hardly possible to conceive that anything of the kind can exceed her in elegance and convenience.”
³

The New Haven Steamboat Company, formed in 1822, operated the
United States
and the
Hudson
out of New Haven. The
United States
was said to be the first steamboat with a pilot house.

Steamboats were serving customers on Nantucket Sound, too, running between New Bedford and Edgartown and providing service to Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard and Hyannis. Steamers, including the
Massachusetts
, the
Connecticut
, the
Fanny
and the
Merrimack
, operated from other Massachusetts ports as well. The
Tom Thumb
, thirty feet in length, was the first steamboat to appear in Maine, where after being towed from Boston, it steamed up the Kennebeck River in 1818. It was later joined in service in, to and from Maine by the
Kennebeck
, the
Patent
, the
Maine
, the
Waterville,
the
Legislator
and the
New York
, among others.

On the Delaware River, Robert Livingston’s brother-in-law, John Stevens, first operated the
Phoenix
, then replaced it with the
Philadelphia
in 1815. Two other steamers, the
Bristol
and the
Sea Horse
, later entered the competition on the run between Philadelphia and Bristol, Pennsylvania. Stevens’s company, the Union Line, added the
Rain Bow
, the
Swan
, the
Stevens
, the
Stockton
, the
Nelson
, the
Burlington
, the
Trenton
and the
Belknap
to the steamboats serving the upper Delaware. Others followed.

Steamboats also ran between Philadelphia and Wilmington, Delaware, the first of which, the
Vesta
, was in service by 1820. After it came the
Superior
and the
Wilmington
. Steamer service from Philadelphia to Salem, New Jersey, below Wilmington, began in 1824 and was initiated by the
Lafayette
, followed by the
Albemarle
, the
Essex
, the
Proprietor
, the
Linnaeus
, the
Flushing
and the
Pioneer
, among others. Cape May, New Jersey first received steamboat service in 1824, the earliest steamers including the
Delaware
, the
Ohio
and the
Robert Morris
.

Baltimore’s first steamboat was the
Chesapeake
, built in Baltimore in 1813 at a cost of forty thousand dollars. It soon had to compete with the
Eagle
and after that came the
Virginia
, the
Norfolk
, the
Roanoke
, the
Surprise
, and the
Richmond
and others later, running between Baltimore and Norfolk and Richmond, Virginia. When the marquis de Lafayette, the French general who had aided the American cause in the Revolutionary War, came back to visit the United States in 1824, there were five steamboats gathered in Baltimore harbor to extend an official greeting and welcome him back to the grateful nation whose independence he had helped win.

Steamboats were also plying the Great Lakes in the 1820s, one of the earliest being the
Walk-in-the-Water
, which was launched into Lake Ontario in 1819. By 1826 there were seven steamers operating on the lakes. In 1833 there were eleven steamboats serving Buffalo, New York, and together they carried more than sixty thousand passengers to and from Buffalo.