A History of the American People

Mississippi, Ohio, Missouri, and Arkansas. It was cash well spent-by 1852 the commerce on the
Mississippi alone was worth $653 976,000 annually.
Canals were built to link rivers, and early railroads to provide links where canalization was
impracticable. Following the tremendous success of the Erie Canal opening in 1825-probably the
outstanding example of a human artifact creating wealth rapidly in the whole of history-the states
went into canal-making on a prodigious scale, borrowing vast sums (chiefly from Europe) to do
it. Most state constitutions had to be rewritten in the 1820s to make this possible. In those days
American credit in Europe was high, interest payments being substantial and handed over
regularly. Most of these state canals were built and some succeeded in their purpose. But state
debts mounted fast, from only $12,790,728 in 1820 to over $170 million in 1838 and $200
million in 1840. Only seven states did not borrow to fuel the canal mania. The 1837 crash made
it impossible for the states to pay interest on their debts and six of them-Mississippi, Louisiana,
Maryland, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Michigan-went so far as to repudiate their debts entirely,
rather like bankrupt African states today, thus bringing eloquent cries of anguish from innocent
European investors like the novelist W. M. Thackeray. At this point most states decided to get
out of the transport business and hand over to private enterprise. So state constitutions were
again rewritten to forbid state canal mania or any other spending passion.
Hence, though the first railroads were built to supplement the mainly state-owned canal
system, rail was a field where private capital and publicly floated companies were dominant
almost from the start. Steam-powered railroads had evolved in England from the coal industry,
which America did not then have, but the United States was not far behind Britain in introducing
major passenger lines. On July 4, 1828 Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the last survivor of those
who signed the Declaration of Independence, turned the first spade on the Baltimore & Ohio, the
earliest proper line, 13 miles of which were open by 1830. Three years later, the Charleston-
Hamburg line in South Carolina, with 136 miles open, was already the longest in the world. The
first engine to be built in America, the Best Friend of Charleston, traveled this route at 30 miles
an hour without freight or at up to 30 miles an hour with four loaded cars. Construction started
on what was to become the New York Central in 1830 and the big Pennsylvania line was
completed four years later. All the major routes between the East Coast and the Mississippi
Valley were completed by the 1840s and the first consolidation of multiple early routes began in
1853 with the New York Central, the same year the first rail service New York-Chicago opened.
Benjamin Wright, the great engineer of the Erie Canal, denounced railroads as anti-individual: `I
consider a long line of railroad ... as being odious in this country, as a monopoly of the carrying,
which it necessarily must be. A canal, on the other hand, is open to any man who builds a boat.’
No one took much notice. The states even, to some extent, got involved in railroads-especially
Pennsylvania, Michigan, South Carolina, and Georgia, though mainly in the early stages-and
more money came from counties and towns, and even from the federal government, in the form
of land deals with individual states. It is a curious fact that Georgia, for instance, actually ran the
Chattanooga Choo-Choo till the 1870s. But private or publicly raised capital was the main
provider of finance-$1.25 billion of it in the thirty years 1830-60.
Beyond the rail-line, in the years 1830-60, were the stages, the fast carriers, and the telegraph.
All developed with impressive speed and determination. Even before the California gold rush in
the late 1840s, the Santa Fe Trail became the first path in advance of the Western frontier. With
the rush, stage traffic from Independence, Missouri, to Santa Fe came into regular operation in
1849, with a monthly stage-mail to Salt Lake City the same year. In 1858, John Butterfield got a
federal contract to carry mail overland from Memphis and St Louis to California, thus enabling