The Transportation Revolution

In the late eighteenth century, primitive methods of travel were still in use in America. Waterborne travel was uncertain and often dangerous, covered-wagon and stagecoach travel over rough trails was affordable but uncomfortable, and all types of travel were very slow.

The transportation revolution in the United States had been spurred by the desire of the Easterners to tap into all that the west had to offer. Turnpike, canals, steamboats, and railways forged a truly continental economy. Transportation innovations cut the cost and increased the speed of moving goods, helping to create a national market and provide a stimulus for regional specialization. Westerners, with their boundless prairies and swiftly growing population, became important producers of crops, supplying both the North and the South with food. Northerners supplied the West and the South with textiles and other manufactured goods. Southerners supplied the North with cotton, the raw materials they needed to produce their textiles. Along with a growing population, the technological innovations of the 19th Century helped propel America into the international stage before the Civil War devastated it.

The National Road

In 1794, a private company completed a broad, paved highway in Pennsylvania. It was called a “turnpike” because as drivers approached the tollgate they were confronted with a barrier of sharp spikes that was turned aside when they paid their toll. In 1811, the federal government began to construct a turnpike—Cumberland Road, also called the “National Road”—which stretched 591 miles from Cumberland, in western Maryland, to Vandalia, in Illinois. The project was completed in 1852.

Steamboats

Americans benefited from the new turnpikes; however, it was not yet economical to ship bulky goods by land across the great distances in America. In 1807, the first commercially successful steamboat was sent from New York City up the Hudson River to Albany. A steamboat is exactly what it sounds like, a boat powered by steam that could move goods and people along freshwater waterways throughout the country. Thereafter, use of the steamboat spread rapidly, with steamers making the run from New Orleans as far north as Ohio. By 1830, there were more than 200 steamboats on the Mississippi.

The Erie Canal

While steamboats were conquering western rivers, canals were under construction in the northeast to further improve the transportation network. In 1817, the New York legislature passed a plan to connect the Hudson River with Lake Erie— the Erie Canal. Completed in 1825, the canal ran 363 miles. The completion of the canal moved the country a step closer to connecting the Mississippi Valley and the Atlantic Ocean.

Railroads

Both the turnpike and the canal contributed to the emerging national economy, but the most significant development was the railroad. Railroads were faster and cheaper than canals to construct, and they did not freeze over in the winter. Railroads, like the steamboat could carry large quantities of goods and people over long distances in a fraction of the time of traditional wagon or horseback travel.

By 1840 the United States had over 3,000 miles of tracks, nearly double the mileage in all of Europe. And by 1860, the U.S. saw development of over 30,000 miles of railroad tracks, three-fourths of which were in the industrializing north. There were several southern railway lines, but no one single southern railway system.

A New Age of Communication

The Telegraph

In the early 19th century (early 1800s) the fastest way to transmit information was by writing letters, waiting days, weeks, sometimes months for delivery. In 1825 a painter named Samuel Morse, away from his family in Washington, D.C. had been commissioned by New York to paint a portrait of Marquis de Lafayette in his heroic return to the country he helped make free during the American revolution. Sadly, his painting career didn't work out, and while he was in Washington he wrote a letter to his pregnant wife. Unbeknownst to him, his wife had already died of a heart attack three days earlier. This may have been the inspiration behind his 1844 invention to revolutionize communication. Samuel Morse transmitted the first intercity telegraph message 40 miles from Baltimore to Washington over a wire he hung next to a railroad line, using a code he had invented. The message itself was borrowed from the Bible by the daughter of the Commissioner of Patents and said, "What hath God wrought?" It took a while for Morse’s invention to catch on, but by 1861, the connections between cites spanned all the way to San Francisco, putting distant people in almost instant communication with one another by using electricity to transmit a code over vast distances.