Americans often lament about our lack of public transportation, but our history of national transport dates back nearly 200 years.
From the 1820s on, steamboats coursed the navigable Mississippi and Ohio rivers. The West began at Buffalo or Pittsburgh, or at Cincinnati or St. Louis. With the 1825 completion of the Erie Canal, New Englanders and New Yorkers travelled west, some out of curiosity, others scouting a move, or possibly buying land for resale.
In 1849, the one-term Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln returned from the nation’s capital in Washington to Springfield, Illinois. He went first by railroad to Cumberland, Maryland, then by the National Road to Wheeling, Virginia, and the Ohio River. He took a steamboat from there to St. Louis and a stage coach north to home. His trip took six days.
Four years later, going east from St. Louis to New York, Mark Twain travelled for five hard days, taking a steamer upriver to Alton, Illinois, then a railroad to Bloomington, a stage coach to Chicago, rail again across Michigan to Lake Erie, a second steamboat across Lake Erie to Buffalo, and rail a third time to Albany and New York.
The Northwest had by then developed a thriving agrarian and commercial structure well known to Eastern investors and landholders. Peck’s A New Guide for Emigrants to the West (1836) gave settlers and armchair travelers a detailed guide to the region and its prospects.
Completed in 1831, the 200-mile Chesapeake & Ohio canal ran through the Potomac basin from Washington D.C. to Cumberland, Maryland, and the National Road, creating a commercial route as significant as the Erie Canal. Some major articles shipped included carts, wagons and plows; grindstones and rails; furniture, dry goods, and pianos; lumber, nails, and slate tiles; livestock, salted and pickled beef and pork, oysters; flax and grains, potatoes, wheat flour and cornmeal; apples and cider; tobacco, beer, wine and whiskey.
Thanks mainly to canalization, from the late 1830s the price of moving freight declined dramatically. Long-distance shipments became organized and reliable. The volume of trade expanded. River towns built warehouses and extensive wharves to accommodate long-distance shipments.
People, freight, and mail moved across the eastern continent with increasing ease and speed. In 1850 Indiana and Massachusetts had roughly equal populations of 900,000 people, although New England’s density, financial system, and industrial shops gave it great advantage in large-scale manufacture.
By 1850, Illinois was the nation’s fastest growing state. New Orleans and Cincinnati had populations of 115,000 and St. Louis, 75,000. Thanks to land grants, the Illinois Central became a settlement business, the first railroad to act as a real-estate agent, and one of its star lawyers was Lincoln.
On the Western plains and in river valleys, where rich arable land was plentiful, commercial farmers thrived. Skilled tradesmen, mechanics, retailers, and manufacturers multiplied, as local suppliers and national markets expanded their reach.
Preemption allowed cash-poor settlers to stake out land. For the rough and ready, the frontier had long promised a new start: the log cabin and deer rifle of American lore, as much a creation myth as an enduring condition. Respectable, church-going settlers openly frowned upon squatters and scavengers, repelled by their destitution and loose habits, and in many places emigrant societies helped local authorities organize communities, schools and churches.
A decade earlier, Kentucky Senator Henry Clay had realized railroads’ potential and obsolescence of turnpikes. State legislatures debated the use of public funds to induce settlement and draw Eastern capital into the expensive proposition of building and maintaining rails, bridges, drainage, locomotives, and rolling stock.
An 1843 express train from Albany to Buffalo cut travel time from five days to one. In 1850 a nine-hour express connected New York and Boston via Albany and Worcester. The Baltimore and Ohio railroad reached the Ohio River in 1852.
The next year, inaugurating a two-day through train from New York to Chicago via Buffalo and Cleveland, the newly consolidated New York Central created an interregional artery that immediately and permanently altered the nation’s transportation grid.
The 1851 American Railway Guide illustrates how American travelers could move through a coordinated network of steamboats, canals, short-haul railroads, toll roads and turnpikes had transformed travel north of Ohio River and east of Mississippi.
Rail conditions remained relatively primitive, even in the East. Wooden bridges collapsed and trains collided. Flimsy cars splintered, and lighted by kerosene lamps and heated by coal stoves, burst into flames, in one case, incinerating dozens of school children on a festive Sunday outing from Philadelphia. Although they were rare, train wrecks elicited national horror and spurred broad, early political interest in regulated railroad safety.
Early improvements were rapidly changing the picture: union terminals that centralized different rail lines; coal-burning fireboxes that replaced wood; and double tracks that reduced hazard. But only after the Civil War came a standardized track gauge, air brakes, sturdy coupling, telegraphic dispatch, and all-steel rolling stock.
Post-Civil War railroad engineering and motive technology took long-distance travel into a new mechanical dimension, one that was conclusive in the Pacific Railroad, completed in 1869. This engineering triumph, as staggering and impressive as the Erie Canal had been 44 years earlier, confirmed that a national transportation system had arrived.
Read Full Article »