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Improvements in Transportation
The period between the end of the War of 1812 and the Civil War was a time of swift improvement in transportation, rapid growth of factories, and significant development of new technology to increase agricultural production. Americans moved with relative ease into new regions and soon produced an agricultural surplus that changed them from subsistence farmers into commercial producers. Manufacturing became an increasingly important sector of the economy and set the stage for rapid industrialization in the late nineteenth century. The economic and technological developments brought important changes to American society. The growth and expansion of the United States in the decades before the Civil War were closely tied to improvements in the nation's transportation system. As farmers shifted from growing just enough to sustain their families (subsistence agriculture) to producing crops for sale ( commercial agriculture), demand grew for cheaper and faster ways to get goods to market. Steamboats made river ports important commercial points for entire regions; canals had a similar impact in the Northeast and the Midwest, particularly near the Great Lakes. Railroads, which carried mostly passengers at first, became essential for moving both farm products and manufactured goods by 1860.Inland waterways.
The simplest means of river transport were rafts, but they were unstable, and rapids especially posed a serious danger. Flatboats could carry more cargo, providing an interior space for the storage of products and supplies. Real improvement, however, came with the keelboat. Its design made it more controllable, and a small crew using poles could propel a keelboat downstream at a fairly rapid rate. As many as one thousand keelboats a year headed down trans‐Appalachian tributaries and rivers to New Orleans in the early 1800s. Unfortunately, rafts, flatboats, and keelboats had one major disadvantages—they could make only a one‐way trip. After arriving in New Orleans, the rafts and flatboats were broken up and sold for wood. Poling upriver in a keelboat was possible, but a trip from New Orleans to Louisville, Kentucky, could take as long as four months, so return trips were usually over land. The Natchez Trace led travelers from north of New Orleans to Nashville. A map from the time would have shown the barest outline of roads radiating from New Orleans and Mobile, a city located about one hundred miles to the east. Two‐way river transportation came with the invention of the steamboat, or riverboat. A number of inventors had attempted to use steam engines to power boats, but the most successful design was created by Robert Fulton in 1807 and used on the Clermont. Fulton demonstrated the watercraft on the Hudson River and won a monopoly from the New York legislature to form a steamboat ferrying service between New York and New Jersey. Steamboat transportation on trans‐Appalachian rivers met with great enthusiasm. Steamboats quickly succeeded rafts, flatboats, and keelboats as the main vehicle for river travel. (Keelboats continued to be used in the upper reaches of tributary streams.) As steamboats evolved, they were built with shallower drafts, so they could operate in as little as three feet of water. Enormous above water, they could carry hundreds of tons of freight and dozens of passengers. Towns along the rivers benefited greatly from the economic exchange provided by steamboats. Cincinnati, Ohio, for example, grew from a small settlement in 1770 to the sixth largest city in the country in 1840 on the strength of river travel.The canal craze. After the War of 1812, DeWitt Clinton of New York boldly suggested that a canal be constructed from Lake Erie to Albany (363 miles) using the Mohawk River and then the Hudson River to connect with New York City. Such a project had no precedent in the United States. Clinton obtained a subsidy from the New York legislature and began construction on July 4, 1817. Completed in 1825, the Erie Canal was an instant success, bringing prosperity and additional settlement to its western terminus at Buffalo and helping to make New York City the preeminent American seaport. began in the United States in 1825; by 1860, more than thirty thousand miles of track had been laid.
