Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (82 page)

In 1790 the country contained only 92 newspapers, only eight of them dailies. By 1800 this number had more than doubled, to 235, twenty-four of which were dailies. By 1810 Americans were buying over twenty-two million copies of 376 newspapers annually—even though half the population was under the age of sixteen and one-fifth was enslaved and generally prevented from reading. This was the largest aggregate circulation of newspapers of any country in the world.
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A
LL THIS CIRCULATION
of information could not have been achieved without the building of new postal roads and turnpikes. The need was obvious, Samuel Henshaw of Northampton, Massachusetts, told his congressman, Theodore Sedgwick, in 1791. When the capital of the nation was in New York, said Henshaw, the people of the Connecticut Valley used to hear what was going on in the Congress. But once the capital moved to Philadelphia, “we scarce know you are in session.” This, said Henshaw, “proves the necessity of post roads through all parts of the Union—people would then have early information & be influenced by it.” Besides, he added, such post roads would be good for business.
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Source for both maps: Allan R. Pred,
Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities
, 1790–1840 (Cambridge, MA, 1973).

With these sorts of sentiments in the air, Americans began laying out roads at a frenetic pace. By 1810 they had created post roads that ran continuously from Brewer, Maine, not far from the northeastern border of the country, to St. Marys, Georgia, at the boundary with East Florida, a distance of 1, 655 miles. Post roads in New York extended westward to Canandaigua in Iroquois country, which was nearly four hundred miles from New York City or Boston and had only recently been opened to white settlement. By 1810 New York had incorporated nearly a hundred turnpike companies, most of them since 1800. The busiest road in the country was the stage line between New York and Philadelphia, which in 1796 had four daily stage runs. In Pennsylvania roads ran from Philadelphia to Wheeling on the Ohio River, a distance of 389 miles, which usually took eight or nine days to travel. From Philadelphia continuous roads extended southwest into Tennessee as far as Knoxville. Other roads ran from Philadelphia to York, Pennsylvania, then south through the Shenandoah Valley and the towns of Hagerstown, Winchester, Staunton, and Abington. The South, however, had far fewer roads than the Middle States and the Northeast, and its population remained much more scattered and isolated.

The turnpikes were toll roads on which money was paid at gate entrances according to prescribed rates. They were often called “artificial roads” because, in contrast to the natural country roads, they contained artificial beds of gravel designed to support the weight of carriages and wagons. They were built with relatively level grades and were provided with sufficient convexity to allow for drainage. Often gates were established every ten miles or so, particularly at points where country roads “turned” into the turnpike. Considering that ordinary laborers made less than a dollar a day, the tolls were not cheap. In the state of Connecticut in 1808, four-wheeled carriages had to pay twenty-five cents for every two miles; a loaded wagon, twelve and one-half cents; a man and horse, four
cents; a mail stage, six and one-half cents; all other stages, twenty-five cents. These tolls supplied dividends to the investors who had bought shares in the corporation that built the road and maintained it.

The first major turnpike in the country was the Philadelphia to Lancaster road; it was completed in 1795 but much improved over the following decade. It was twenty-four feet wide and laid with eighteen-inch gravel in the middle decreasing to twelve inches on the sides for drainage. The road crossed three substantial bridges. At first the turnpike corporation returned only 2 percent per year on the investors’ capital, but with the improvements on the road, usage increased, and the shares began returning 4 to 5 percent per year. With its success most of the rest of the Northern states began chartering turnpike companies. By 1810 twenty-six turnpike companies had been chartered in Vermont and more than twenty in New Hampshire. By 1811 New York had chartered 137 companies. As late as 1808, however, no state south of Virginia had established a turnpike company—another graphic reminder of the rapidly emerging distinction between the North and the South. Turnpikes that ran into new areas quickly led to a rush of new settlers eager to take advantage of the lower costs of transporting their produce. The Rome-Geneva turnpike in New York, for example, was completed in 1800 and soon reduced the cost of conveying a hundredweight of goods from $3.50 to 90 cents.

Getting a corporate charter and building the road, of course, did not guarantee success for the developers. Many of the turnpike companies failed because too many farmers evaded the tolls by using local detours. So common was the evasion that some began calling the roads “shunpikes.”
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In 1802 Congress authorized the building of the National Road that would run from the East Coast to the Ohio River. But disputes over the route of the road delayed action. Finally, in 1806, Congress authorized a middle route beginning in the town of Cumberland in western Maryland; it later extended what came to be called the Cumberland Road (now U.S. 50) beyond Cincinnati to the Mississippi River at St. Louis by way of Vincennes. “In this way,” President Jefferson told the Congress in February 1808, “we may accomplish a continued and advantageous line of communication from the seat of the General Government to St. Louis, passing through several very interesting points of the Western territory.” Actual construction of the road did not begin until 1811.
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At the same time Americans were building roads, they were improving their rivers and constructing canals. Because Americans, as Pennsylvania-born Robert Fulton pointed out, had such a strong prejudice in favor of wagons, it took a while for canal-building to take off. Fulton himself did not begin his career interested in canals. Indeed, he began as an artist and moved to England in 1787 to study painting with Benjamin West, an ex-Pennsylvanian who was known for his support of aspiring American artists. Although Fulton exhibited two canvases at the Royal Academy in 1791 and four in 1793, he soon came to realize that his genius lay in other directions. Influenced by some English aristocrats and scientists and the reformer and manufacturer Robert Owen, Fulton became involved in the operations of canals. In 1796 he published
A Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation
, which he enhanced with superb drawings of aqueducts, bridges, inclined planes, and other canal devices. Fulton envisioned a series of canals designed for small boats being built everywhere to tie people and trade together. The Burr conspiracy, which threatened “to sever the western from the eastern states,” convinced Fulton that canals could create a “sense of mutual interests arising from mutual intercourse and mingled commerce.”
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Although Fulton eventually became preoccupied with various devices for conducting undersea warfare, he continued to stress the importance of canals to anyone who would listen. In 1811 he joined a commission, along with Mayor DeWitt Clinton of New York City, to explore the possibility of building a canal in the upper part of New York state.

Most of Fulton’s many projects and proposals were ahead of their time. Only his development of the steamboat that traveled up the Hudson from New York to Albany in 1807 was well timed; this project, done in partnership with Robert R. Livingston, immortalized him.
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Fulton was able to succeed with his steamboat where his predecessors John Fitch and James Rumsey had failed; not only was his boat technically superior, but most of his connections and patrons were better than those his rivals could muster. In 1811 Fulton sent his steamboat the
New Orleans
from Pittsburgh down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to the port for which the boat was named, the first such craft on these Western waters. At the same time, New York City already had Fulton-built steam ferryboats carrying commuters across both the Hudson and East rivers. Fulton’s first steam ferry on the East River, called
Nassau
, was a catamaran; it had a deck large enough to carry horses and wagons as well as foot passengers. People appreciated his time-saving inventions, and following his death in 1815
both the Manhattan and Brooklyn streets leading to his ferry slips were renamed Fulton Street in his honor.
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As late as 1816 only a hundred miles of canals existed in the country. Yet these hundred miles were the products of at least twenty-five canal and lock companies. The two-and-one-half-mile-long canal at South Hadley Falls in western Massachusetts opened up in 1795 and took in over three thousand dollars in tolls the first year. In 1800 two more canals were built further north at Miller Falls and Bellows Falls, Vermont, making the Connecticut River navigable from the White River to the Atlantic. The most famous canal of the period was the Middlesex Canal that ran from Boston to the Merrimac River. It opened in 1804 and was twenty-seven miles long and thirty feet wide; it had twenty-one locks, seven aqueducts over rivers, and forty-eight bridges.

The canal companies were chartered and financed the same way as the toll roads. Although many of the canals failed to earn profits for their investors, many Americans were willing to try anything if there was a possibility of making a little money. Low-cost transportation to extensive markets, usually by rivers and other inland waterways, was a key to both commercial prosperity and a proliferation of labor-saving inventions. In this respect in the period up to 1812 the areas that benefited most from cheap water transportation and had the most inventive activity (as measured by the number of patents issued per capita) were New York and southern New England.
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Many saw the roads and canals not only as a means of making money for individual farmers but also, like Fulton, as devices for promoting union. In his 1806 message to Congress, President Jefferson foresaw the national debt soon being paid off, and thus he held out the prospect of using the federal surplus to support a system of internal improvements for the greatly enlarged nation. Since the federal funds, as Jefferson declared, came from duties on imports that were chiefly “foreign luxuries, purchased by those only who are rich enough to afford themselves the use of them,” the taxes were justified in spite of their violation of republican principles. From the internal improvements, Jefferson promised, “new channels of communication will be opened between the States, the lines of separation will disappear, their interests will be identified, and their union cemented by new and indissoluble ties.”
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President Jefferson, along with many other strict constructionist “Old Republicans,” always believed that a constitutional amendment was
necessary to implement these plans, fearing that any implied enlargement of federal power over internal improvements would set a precedent for further federal growth. Although Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin was less scrupulous about the use of national power, he recognized the political necessity of a constitutional amendment. Nevertheless, with only the promise of a future amendment, he sought to get the process going in April 1808 with his Report on Roads and Canals.

In his report Gallatin laid out his grandiose plans for the building of roads and canals that would cement the parts of the country together, all coordinated and paid for by the national government at a cost of $ 20 million. Unfortunately for Gallatin, Congress, torn by Federalist opposition and Republican rivalries, was no more interested in his report than it had been earlier in Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures. It did nothing to implement Gallatin’s plan until 1817, when it pledged the bonus due the government from the new national bank for the improvement of the nation’s roads and canals. This Bonus Bill, however, much to the surprise of nearly everyone, including its principal sponsor, John C. Calhoun, ran into the strict constructionist scruples of President James Madison, who vetoed it, on the grounds that the idea of implied powers threatened the “definite partition” between the “General and State Governments” on which the “permanent success of the Constitution” depended.
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P
RECISELY BECAUSE REPUBLICS
, as Benjamin Rush said, were naturally “peaceful and benevolent forms of government,” they inevitably promoted humane reforms in accord with their “mild and benevolent principles.”
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Jefferson thought that America was the most caring nation in the world. “There is not a country on earth,” he said, “where there is greater tranquillity, where the laws are milder, or better obeyed . . ., where strangers are better received, more hospitably treated, & with a more sacred respect.”
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In the several decades following the Revolution Americans took very seriously the idea that they were more honest, more generous, and friendlier than other peoples.