For the early settlers on the North American mainland, the ocean was their only connection to sources of supplies and to markets for their products. To maintain that connection, those who ventured inland settled along the rivers that flowed to the ocean. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, as growing numbers of Americans crossed the Alleghenies, they clustered along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and their tributaries. Bulky agricultural products could be floated downstream on rafts or boats, eventually reaching New Orleans and other gulf towns and then taken by ship to eastern cities or foreign markets. The trip was long and arduous and required pilots of the boats and rafts to return home over hundreds of miles on overland paths such as the Natchez Trace.
Bringing goods into the interior was even more difficult--and more expensive. Attempts to use sails or towing mechanisms to move boats upstream had limited success on short hauls and proved impossible for long distances. Instead, goods were purchased in the eastern cities, taken over the mountains on treacherous roads and paths by horse and wagon to the western rivers, floated to a river town, and then hauled overland to their final destination.
Because of the difficulty and high cost of moving goods, westerners remained relatively isolated from outside markets and had no choice but to maintain a high degree of self-sufficiency. Each town usually had a wide array of manufacturing establishments--mills that processed agricultural goods, sawed wood, spun thread, and wove cloth, and artisan shops that produced and repaired machinery and household items. Much like a tariff, high transportation costs protected the small local producers from competitors who might have been able to produce cheaper and better commodities but would find such advantages offset by the expense of transporting the commodities to markets.
But beginning in the first decade of the nineteenth century, a transportation revolution--improvements in roads, but, more important, the development of steamboats and the building of canals and railroads--rapidly diminished western isolation. In 1807 Robert Fulton demonstrated the feasibility of steam-powered boats on inland rivers when his paddle wheeler, the Clermont, made the trip on the Hudson River from New York to Albany and back in five days. Used initially on the deeper rivers, the steamboat was quickly adapted to carry large cargoes on shallower western rivers. Although rafts and riverboats continued to carry bulky agricultural products downstream, the steamboats easily moved against the current, and transportation costs for goods going upstream dropped precipitously. Westerners soon found an ample supply of eastern and foreign goods in local stores, the price of these products no longer burdened by high transport costs.
Those who lived a distance from the rivers remained relatively isolated. Dirt roads in good weather were dusty and rough; heavy rains made them impassable muddy quagmires. In a few places sawed wooden planks or unsawed logs covered the surface of dirt roads and ridges providing all-weather roads. But these roads were expensive--their builders charged high tolls to cover building costs--and they quickly deteriorated. It would take canals and railroads, rather than roads, to open interior regions.
The success of the Erie Canal, opened in 1825, initiated a canal-building frenzy in both the East and the West. By 1840 the United States had over three thousand miles of canals. Like the Erie, which ran from the Hudson River to Lake Erie, these artificial waterways linked interior areas to natural waterways, providing transportation facilities to places far from navigable rivers and lakes. Many canals provided access to more than one market; in Ohio and Indiana, for example, canals allowed shipments to go south to the Ohio and then by riverboat to the gulf, or north to the Great Lakes and then via lake boats and the Erie Canal to New York City. Except for the Erie, most of the canals were not commercially successful; they were hastily built at great expense and often inadequately maintained. These problems, however, might have been overcome had the canals not faced competition from a new, more efficient, and faster form of transport.
Railroads could reach interior areas, including places where an inadequate water supply or rough terrain made canals impossible. Unlike canals, which froze in winter or became impassable when water was low, railroads ran year-round, and they could easily ascend and descend hills and mountains. Initially financed by municipal governments and enterprising businessmen in river, lake, and ocean towns and cities, the first railroads extended short distances into the interior to tap potential markets in the surrounding countryside. Extension and connection of short lines soon provided uninterrupted transportation over long distances. By 1840, the United States had almost three thousand miles of track; by 1860, a network of thirty thousand miles linked most of the nation's major cities and towns.
Transportation innovations, by cutting the costs and increasing the speed of moving goods, helped create a national market and provided an impetus for an interregional division of labor. Westerners became important commercial producers and consumers of goods produced elsewhere; commercial opportunities drew masses of easterners and immigrants into western lands and stimulated the growth of marketing as well as manufacturing towns and cities. The movement of goods over long distances required a supporting infrastructure, stimulating the growth of market towns in which merchants, bankers, warehousemen, wholesalers, retailers, and other middlemen handled goods and provided the services necessary to move them from producers to consumers. More extensive markets increased competition and innovation as manufacturers, no longer saddled with high transportation costs, sought to produce a better and cheaper product in order to capture a larger share of the market.
The increase in the volume of trade was matched by an increase in the pace of business. Faster transportation meant faster dissemination of information via the mails about supplies of goods and price movements in various markets. The increasing use of the telegraph after the mid-1840s provided almost instantaneous information, first between larger cities in the East, but gradually throughout the settled areas of the nation as lines, strung along the railroads to coordinate the movement of trains over long distances, also carried market information.
Bibliography:
George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815-1860 (1962).
Author:
Harold D. Woodman
See also Erie Canal; National Road; Railroads.
