America's Highways 1776–1976: A History of the Federal-Aid Program/Part 1/Chapter 4

by Federal Highway Administration

 

Layout 2

The
Age of
Steam

1807—Robert Fulton’s CLERMONT

The Beginning of Steam Navigation

The revolution of mechanical propulsion affected marine transport about a generation before it became apparent on land. In 1787, John Fitch established the first regular steamboat service in the United States on the Delaware River, between Philadelphia and Bordentown, 28 miles away. His ship, a stern wheeler, could make 8 miles per hour, but the machinery occupied so much space that little was left for cargoes and the ship was commercially unsuccessful. After running some 2,000 miles, she was laid up in 1790 and never used again.^[1]

In 1807 Robert Fulton, with the backing of Robert R. Livingston, designed a steamboat with an economic ratio of power to capacity. This vessel was 133 feet long, with a beam of 13 feet, and weighed 100 tons. She was a sidewheeler, powered by an English Boulton and Watt engine of about 20 horsepower, and could make the 150-mile trip from New York to Albany in about 30 hours. From her maiden voyage in August 1807, the Clermont was a commercial success.^[2]

Henry Shreve had his own ideas about steamboat construction for river navigation. He knew that the western rivers were treacherous, filled with snags and shifting sandbars, and subject to tremendous fluctuations in water level. To successfully combat these hazards, a ship should have a very shallow draft and a very powerful engine. To implement these ideas, Shreve built his own steamboat, laying the keel in September 1815 at Wheeling, Virginia. Essentially, the Washington was a flatboat powered by steam, with the engine on the main deck and the boilers on another deck above. To get the extra power he needed, he operated the boilers well above atmospheric pressure. The two-cylinder engine could develop over 100 horsepower driving the ship’s stern paddlewheel.^[3]

The Washington broke all previous records for speed on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, and she was in fact the prototype for the great fleet that plied these rivers for the next 50 years. In the spring of 1817, Shreve took her from Louisville to New Orleans in 17 days, returning the 1,352 miles upstream against the current in 24 days. By 1860, river steamers that could make the upstream voyage in less than 5 days were in regular service.^[4]

Steam Navigation Thrives
After Fulton’s successful demonstration that steam propulsion was practical, the steamboat industry prospered. Between 1807 and 1817, 131 vessels were built in the United States, and by 1832 there were 474 in operation. Some of these were ferries for transporting passengers, carriages and wagons across large rivers. In 1837, 158 steamboats were launched, and by 1846, steamers were being built at a rate of 225 per year.^[5] By 1859, there were more than 2,000 steamboats on the Mississippi River and its tributaries.

Steamboats were a major factor in opening the west for settlement. River villages became busy ports and then thriving cities, such as Memphis, St, Louis, Louisville and Cincinnati. Above all, New Orleans prospered on the river traffic, becoming the third busiest port in the United States, and in 1860 the value of products passing through her port exceeded $200 million.^[6] Every overland trail to the Far West began at the head of steamboat navigation on some western river.

Federal Assistance to Navigation
The first Federal act for navigation improvement was passed in 1809. Thereafter, up to 1830, Congress appropriated $2,867,000 for subscriptions to canal stock and for such improvements as ports and piers and removal of river obstructions—slightly more than had been appropriated for the National Road.^[7] A large part of these appropriations was spent to remove hazards from the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

From 1830 onward, Congress appropriated generously for river and harbor improvements, many of them as completely within a single State as the Maysville Turnpike. In addition to improving the major rivers, the Great Lakes and the coastal ports, many creeks and inlets were made navigable, encouraging not only the flow of commerce but also the flow of Federal dollars into every congressional district.

Railroad Expansion
By 1850 the railroad had proved to the American people, and particularly to those who had money to invest, that it was far faster, cheaper and more adaptable to the country’s transportation needs than either turnpikes or canals. As investment flowed in ever-increasing amounts into railroads, the funds available for extending or even maintaining the old horsedrawn facilities became less and less and finally dried up altogether.

In the 1850’s railroad building escalated into a national frenzy. “The people were crazed with the idea of improvement; every town wanted to grow bigger and a railroad was an absolute necessity; scores of companies were formed with the intention of beginning construction, then deeding the improvement to some established line to operate. Many communities subscribed stock, others voted bonds, others paid for right-of-way by private subscription in order to secure a railroad. The result was often overbuilding, parallel lines, too many roads attempting to occupy the same territory, with the result that branch lines often never paid interest on the cost of construction.”^[8]The fever even spread to Congress, which granted immense tracts of public land to subsidize railways.

With the possible exception of the Baltimore and Ohio, the Pennsylvania and a few others, the early railroads were local ventures, sometimes less than 20 miles long, each connecting a town to its neighbor or to the nearest river, lake, or seaport. In the West and South, many of the railroads were mere extensions of the river navigation systems. However, by 1860 most of the short lines were linked up into systems, a trend that was accelerated in the North and West with the general adoption of the 56½-inch “standard gauge.”

The First Railroad War
When the Civil War began, about two-thirds of the railroad mileage was in the North. The railroad networks enabled both the Union and Confederate forces to shift men and supplies with a speed previously unknown in warfare. The North had an additional advantage in that it controlled the sea approaches to the Confederacy and much of the inland navigation system, including Chesapeake Bay and its estuaries and the Mississippi-Ohio River systems. Superiority in both land and water transportation was an important factor in the ultimate victory of the Union armies, and this advantage increased as the war went on. The North was able not only to maintain its railroads to carry increased war traffic, but to extend them as well; while the South was barely able to keep its railroads operating.

Mississippi River Steamboats

Mississippi River Steamboats

Important as the railroads were to the strategic conduct of the war by both armies, the day-to-day military operations for the most part followed the wagon roads, and, as in earlier wars, the condition of the roads influenced the outcome of military operations. The most famous example of this was Burnside’s disastrous “mud march” of 1863, described by a participant:

. . . thousands of the boys in blue, after horses and mules could do no more in pulling the pontoon wagons that must be gotten through to the Rappahannock, to build the bridge on which the army was to cross, were put on the ropes to tug and pull, and pull and tug, hour after hour, and way into the night; but they were Virginia roads, and it was no use; so after days and days of mud and rain the campaign was abandoned, and, worn and weary, we marched back to our old camps at Falmouth and beyond, and in passing saw the greetings of the ‘Johnnies’ over the river in Fredericksburg, on a banner bearing the cheerful legend ‘Burnside stuck in the mud.’ . . .

Yes, we have helped to build corduroy roads in war times, when it had grown cold enough to freeze the mud so as to bear a soldier’s weight, and more than once we have built right over the body of a horse or mule, that had gone down to rise no more.^[9]

In the theater of operations, the common roads suffered severely from heavy military traffic and scanty maintenance. Collection of tolls was virtually impossible on the Southern turnpikes; while surface wear, erosion, and damage to bridges and toll houses hastened their bankruptcy.

Postwar Railroad—Steamboat Competition

During the war, a large number of steamboats were built at inflated prices to carry troops and military supplies on the Mississippi Eiver and its tributaries. When normal commerce was resumed after the war, less than half of these vessels were able to find profitable employment.

The Meeting of the Rails.

The Meeting of the Rails

Fierce and ruinous competition ensued among the shipowners, whose plight was compounded by the railroads because they began actively extending their lines as soon as hostilities were over. Short lines leading to river ports were extended inland linking up with others, and eventually connecting with each other to form parallel transportation systems which were able to capture the passengers of the steam packets and most of their profitable freight. The unregulated railroads cut freight rates below the cost of haulage on sections where they were in direct competition with water transportation, recouping these losses by charging higher rates on other parts of their systems. Another weapon of the railroads was their refusal to establish joint rail-water rates with the steamboat companies.^[10]

Fighting back, the shipowners formed freight pools and organized common carrier packet lines controlling a number of boats. They instituted dependable scheduled service between the principal river ports. These measures slowed the drift to disaster but were unable to check it entirely. Water transportation on the Mississippi system reached its peak in 1889, when over 28 million tons were carried. Thereafter, traffic declined, in spite of tremendous increases in the Nation’s population and wealth, to about 19.5 million tons in 1906, and 16 million tons in 1916. Practically all of this was heavy bulk freight, such as coal, stone and gravel, carried in long barge tows. The romantic river packets were becoming things of the past.^[11]

Federal Subsidies to Railroads
Early Federal subsidies to railroads had been in the form of surveys made at Government expense by civil engineers and officers of the U.S. Army and the remission of import duties on railroad iron. The numerous turnpike and canal projects of the early 1880’s created a brisk demand for civil engineers and surveyors, yet the supply of such individuals in the United States was quite limited. The largest group was employed by the U.S. Army in its Corps of Engineers.^{[N 1]}

In April 1824, Congress passed the General Survey Bill (4 Stat. 22), appropriating $30,000 annually and authorizing the President to use a limited number of civil engineers and officers of the Corps of Engineers to prepare the necessary surveys, plans and estimates for “ ‘such roads and canals as he may deem of national importance, in a commercial or military point of view, or necessary for the transportation of the public mail.’ ” The employment of Government engineers was not limited to surveys ordered by law or by resolutions of Congress, but was interpreted by the President to apply also to “ ‘Surveys of a national or highly interesting commercial character, applied for by states or incorporated companies,’ ” and when engineers could be conveniently spared from other work.^[12]

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1. The first engineering school in this country was the United States Military Academy, founded in 1802.

Although railways were not specifically mentioned in the Act, all of the 61 surveys made or proposed were for railways, and the amount spent on them was about $75,000.^[13]

Another early and very substantial Federal aid to railroads was the remission of import duties on railroad iron during the years 1830 to 1841. The total duties remitted in this period—almost $6 million—gave the infant railroad industry a much-needed boost at a critical time in its history at the expense of the infant iron industry.^{[N 1][14]}

By an act approved on July 7, 1838, Congress made all railroads “post routes” and, thus, eligible to carry the mails. Strictly speaking, this was not a subsidy, but it opened to the railroads a valuable source of income.

These early aids to railroads were a mere foretaste of what was to come in later years.

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1. The remitted duty amounted to about $2,000 per mile of track, or almost one-sixth of the total cost per mile.

The Railroad Land Grants

In the early 19th century, it was almost an article of faith with the American people that national prosperity depended on the settlement of the western lands, practically all of which belonged to the Government. The Federal policy was to encourage settlement by removal of the Indians, favorable laws and cheap land prices. A logical extension of this policy was to encourage access to the lands by building first the National Road, and later, by subsidizing canals and railroads.

The railway station was the meeting place for all—greeting arrivals, farewells to those departing, and a good place to pick up the latest gossip by those who just came to watch.

The first Federal land grants for railroads were made to Illinois, Mississippi, and Alabama in 1850 and totaled 3,736,000 acres of land which the States transferred to the Illinois Central Railroad and the Mobile and Ohio Railroad. With these grants as a precedent, Congress in the period 1850 to 1871 aided some 50 other railroads by similar grants of public land to nine other southern and western States^{[N 1]} for a total of about 36,466,000 acres. Even larger grants were to come in connection with the Pacific railroads. Eventually, Federal land grants to subsidize railroads amounted to 130.3 million acres, to which should be added 48.9 million acres of State land grants.^[16]

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1. The Government eventually received a handsome return on its grants to the railroads. One of the conditions of these grants was that the aided railroads transport Government troops, mail, and freight at reduced rates. In later years, other railroads, although not aided by land grants, voluntarily reduced their rates to compete for the Government business. As a result, the total savings in transporting the mails, troops and Government property up to 1934 amounted to $168.2 million and by the end of World War II were far above that amount.^[15] Congress renounced all rate concessions in 1945.

Monument commerating the last spike on the joining of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads into the first transcontinental railway in this country.

Railroads Dominate U.S. Transportation
The northern States had such tremendous productive capacity that they were able to fight the Civil War and at the same time push a railroad across the western plains and mountains. This railroad, liberally aided by grants of public land and Government loans, was completed in 1869. Within the next 20 years, four other transcontinental railroads were completed, along with a north-south railroad through California, Oregon, and Washington Territory, and innumerable connectors, branches, and feeder lines all over the country. In 1887 alone, 12,878 miles of track were laid, and by 1900 there were 260,000 miles of railroad in the United States.^[17]

These railroads opened up the country to settlement and development as it had never been opened before. They created the mass market that made the phenomenal industrial expansion of the 1880’s, 1890’s, and early 1900’s possible, and which in turn, started the trend toward urbanization that continues to this day.

REFERENCES

1. R. Kirby, S. Withington, A. Dabling & F. Kilgour, Engineering in History (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1956) p. 250.
2. Id., pp. 252, 253.
3. Id., p. 255.
4. Id., p. 256.
5. G. Chatburn, Highways and Highway Transportation (Thos. Y. Crowell, New York, 1923) p. 91.
6. Id., p. 90.
7. Id., p. 96.
8. Id., p. 109.
9. M. Whitehead, A Word From The National Grange, Good Roads, Vol. 1, No. 1, Jan. 1892, pp. 82, 83.
10. Office of Federal Coordinator of U.S. Transportation, Public Aids to Transportation, Public Aids to Transportation by Water, Vol. III (GPO, Washington, D.C., 1939) pp. 16–18.
11. Id., p. 17.
12. L. Haney, A Congressional History of Railways in the United States (Reprint, Augustas M. Kelly, New York, 1968) p. 276.
13. Office of Federal Coordinator of U.S. Transportation, Public Aids to Transportation, Aids to Railroads and Related Subjects, Vol. II (GPO, Washington, D.C., 1938) pp. 4, 5.
14. Id., p. 5.
15. Id., p. 46.
16. Id., pp. 11, 12, 32.
17. B. Weisberger, The Life History of the United States, The Age of Steel and Steam, Vol. 7 (Time, Inc., New York, 1964) p. 31.