A brief summary of traveling and the impact of changing technology in the early nineteenth-century.
Travel in the early nineteenth century was so much slower and more difficult than it is today that it is
not easy to remember that it was also a time of significant change and improvement. In New England
in 1790, vehicles were few, roads were generally rutted and rudimentary, and traveling any distance
was both slow and difficult. Children and poorer adults walked everywhere, and only a minority of
farmers had horses and wagons. Many loads of freight were drawn not by horses but by much
slower-moving oxen. With a good horse, it took from four to six days, depending on the weather, to
travel from Boston to New York. And this was on the best roads, which ran between major cities
along the coast. Inland, the roads were even worse, turning to impassable mud when it rained or to
choking dust when the weather was dry.
But beginning around 1790, a series of changes was beginning that historians have called “The
Transportation Revolution.” Americans—and New Englanders in particular—rebuilt and vastly
extended their roads. More than 3,700 miles of turnpikes, or toll roads, were built in New England
between 1790 and 1820. Continuing through the 1840s, many thousands of miles of improved county
and town roads were constructed as well. The new roads were far better constructed and maintained,
and allowed for much faster travel. In response, the number of vehicles on the roads increased
rapidly, far faster than population. It was noted in 1830 that Americans were driving a “multitudinous
generation of travelling vehicles” that had been “totally unknown” in the 1790s. Stagecoach lines had
spread across the Northeastern states, using continual relays, or “stages,” of fresh horses spaced out
every 40 miles or so. They made travel, if not enjoyable, at least faster, less expensive, and less
perilous than it had ever been. The 1830s had reduced the travel time between Boston and New York
to a day and a half. Good roads and stages extended across southern New England, the lower Hudson
Valley in New York, and southeastern Pennsylvania.
The most radical changes in the speed, scale and experience of traveling came with the application of
newly emerging transportation technologies—the railroad, the steamboat, and the building of
canals—to American conditions. Beginning with Robert Fulton’s Clermont, which successfully made
the journey up the Hudson from New York City to Albany in 1807, Americans developed steamboats
to ply both the deeper eastern rivers and the shallower western ones. Although steamboats were
sometimes dangerously prone to fires and boiler explosions, they traveled faster, met tighter
schedules and could travel against the river current far more effectively than rafts and barges.
Steamboats vastly expanded passenger travel on the rivers and carried much higher value cargo
upstream.
Americans turned as well to the massive infrastructure project of canal building, as the British had
done decades earlier. Canals promised far less expensive transportation of farm produce,
manufactured goods and passengers, but it was often difficult for them to return profits to their
investors. The Erie Canal, traversing the breadth of New York State to connect Albany and Buffalo in
1825, was the great success among American canals. It opened up an enormous agricultural
hinterland for trade with New York City and New England. In New England, New York and
Pennsylvania, Americans created a vast system of inland waterways that significantly reduced
transportation costs, although none of them matched the success of the Erie.
After 1830, the railroad or, as most Americans at that time said, the “Rail Way,” emerged as the most
dramatic of the new technologies of transportation. Its speed and power was unprecedented. With
good weather, a good road and rested horses, a stagecoach might manage eight or nine miles an hour.
The small locomotives of the 1830s, pulling a handful of cars over uneven track, could travel at
fifteen to twenty miles an hour. This was twice as fast, over long distances, as anything Americans
had previously experienced. By 1840, 3000 miles of railroad track had been laid down, most of it
concentrated in the Northeast. This meant that travel between directly connected cities could be much
faster than before; a trip between Boston and Worcester now took less than 2 hours, and travelers
could reach New York City from Boston in less than a day, using both coastal steamship and railway.
But before 1840 only a relatively small minority of Americans had felt its impact, and railway travel
was both noisy (from the grating and squealing of iron wheels on the tracks) and dirty (from showers
of ash and cinders from wood-burning locomotives). In the next twenty years the railroad, growing
ever faster, more powerful and more efficient, would become America’s dominant mode of
transportation east of the Mississippi, sweeping away the stage lines and even making some of the
canals obsolete.
The years between 1790 and 1840 saw a true revolution in transportation even before the coming of
the railroad. By 1840, transportation costs had been greatly reduced and travel had become faster by a
factor of 5 or more. These changes made possible America’s first “Industrial Revolution,” the
widespread development of commercial agriculture in the Midwest, and a national system of markets
and the distribution of goods. Many ordinary Americans could now become travelers for pleasure and
even the pathways of westward migration had become much faster and safer.
Copyright: Old Sturbridge Inc.