Peddlers were important because continental America had to overcome the tyranny of distance-
the paradox whereby sheer space narrows the lives of people living in scattered communities, far
from each other and from urban centers. Happily the American people proved themselves
wonderfully adept at overcoming this tyranny. If success in any one field has made America the
world's greatest nation, it is transport and communications. The Constitution empowered the
federal government to spend money under the `general welfare' clause as well as under Article I,
Section 7 (post offices and post roads, and regulation of interstate commerce). From 1808, when
Albert Gallatin reported to Congress recommending sales of public lands to finance federal
spending on canals and roads, Washington was fully involved in the transport business, usually
in partnership with the states. A typical arrangement was with Ohio, at the time of its admission,
- Federal land sold within Ohio's borders was exempt from taxation for five years, and in
return the federal government appropriated 5 percent of such sales for roads, three-fifths within
the state and two-fifths over the mountains to the east. Similar deals were later made with
Indiana, Missouri, and Illinois.
Some of these federal-financed roads were of the highest quality, like Telford's in Britain,
often using his designs for road-furniture and bridges. The National Pike was the grandest. One
historian wrote: `Its numerous and stately stone bridges, with handsome stone arches, its iron
mile-posts and its old iron gates, attest the skills of the workmen engaged in its construction, and
to this day remain enduring monuments of its grandeur and solidity.’ When its 834 miles had
been completed it had cost $6,821,200 and required thirty Acts of Congress, 7806-38. Such
constructions always had to run the hazard of the Constitution, or of self-interested
interpretations of it. Thus in 1831 President Jackson vetoed the Bill for a Maysville-Lexington
road running for 60 miles entirely within Kentucky on the ground that it was unconstitutional for
federal money to be spent for the advantage of a single state-in reality to spite Henry Clay.
Turnpike mania was succeeded by canal mania, then by railroad mania in the increasingly
successful efforts to reduce freight costs, an important part of the tyranny: it cost $125 per ton on
the Pennsylvania-Pittsburgh all-land route, a particularly expensive one, but on average it was
$10 per l00 miles in the 1820s, about the same as it cost to get a ton across the Atlantic.
Before rail came, it was water-transport which made America great, especially when steam
supplied the driving force. Fulton went into the business of marrying steam to water-transport in
1807 when he got a twenty-year monopoly of routes in New York, followed by a similar one for
New Orleans. These monopolies were happily soon destroyed in the Marshall Court but Fulton
continued his steam pioneering. In 1811 he built a shipyard at Pittsburgh and launched the New
Orleans, the first steamer on the Ohio. In 1815 Henry Sheve, probably the greatest of all
navigators of the Mississippi, took a steamboat all the way up the river from New Orleans to
Louisville in twenty-five days. To Pittsburgh it was originally l00 days. But this was soon
reduced to thirty and the New Orleans-Louisville route to a mere five days (upstream). No single
fact of nature played a bigger part in American progress than the Mississippi. It was one of the
three great rivers of the world, but whereas the Nile is bordered by desert, except for a narrow
strip on its lower half, and the Amazon by tropical rainforest which is still largely impassable,
the Mississippi runs directly through the largest continuous area of high-quality agricultural land
on earth, and is the main artery of this richly productive basin. It is an amazingly changeable
river, depositing mud in colossal quantities, changing its shape continually, creating islands and
peninsulas, and then destroying them, dragging inland towns directly onto the waterfront,
pushing river ports miles inland, and making the business of navigating it one of the most
exacting sciences on earth.