One time while playing around on the Web late at night I discovered that Google provides a lot of scanned books that are in the public domain. You can read books from back in the 1800's and 1900's on all sorts of interesting subjects. There are also government reports from that era that are a lot more brief than ones written today that provide an interesting insight into how things were way back then. You can also read old newspapers from far back, which also gives you an idea of life in the good old days (spoiler - it wasn't always so good).
If you look at a map of the East Coast of the US, you will see major cities are all about the same distance back from the coast, such as Richmond, VA, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia, PA. This is the junction between the Atlantic Coastal Plain and the Piedmont Plateau. The Atlantic Coastal Plain is fairly flat and at least in the early days of this country the streams were navigable. The Piedmont is hilly and the streams tend to have rapid drops and are not navigable in many stretches.
The boundary of the Piedmont Plateau and the Atlantic Coastal Plain marks the uppermost navigable point for rivers on the East Coast. It's called the Fall Line, and is where there are major cities like Washington, DC, Philadelphia PA, Richmond, VA, and Augusta, GA. Ports naturally were built at these locations and cities grew up around them.
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| The Port of Georgetown, in Washington, DC - 1865. This is the uppermost navigational point on the Potomac River. |
As you go west from the Fall Line, the terrain gets hilly and rivers and streams are shallow and full of rapids. Finally, there are the Appalachian Mountains, which are not high like the Alps, or the Rocky Mountains, but they represent a barrier none the less. They represent a continental divide, streams on one side ultimately end in the Gulf of Mexico and the other into the Atlantic Ocean. There is no navigation, and travel by horse drawn wagon was difficult because of the steep slopes.
The result was the interior of the continent was cut off from the coast. During colonial times, what would become the US extended only to the Appalachians, and the settlements there were few and far between. The inhabitants were pretty well isolated. After the Revolution, this became a serious problem.
Moving goods from what was the west to the coast was difficult and expensive, and farm products weren't going anywhere. So, a lot of farmers in the Appalachian region turned to making whiskey from the grain that they grew. The US government still being broke from the Revolution realized that this was a good source of funding through taxes. Since these communities in the west didn't have much connection with the government, the taxes didn't go over very well, and we had the
Whiskey Rebellion. As an aside, President Washington personally led militia (for political reasons he decided not to use Federal troops) to put down the rebellion. It's the only time in the history of the US that a sitting president personally led troops in battle.
Various attempts were made to link the coast with the west. US Highway 40 was originally called the National Pike, and was maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers in an attempt to open up travel from the coast through the Appalachians. It connected Baltimore, MD and Washington, DC with Pittsburgh and points west. However, horse drawn wagons can only carry so much.
Also, goods were carried in the summer eastwards down various rivers in flat bottomed boats through the rapids, and the boats were dismantled and sold for lumber at the destination. The crews went home by horse drawn wagon. You can't put much in a flat bottom boat, and the trip was dangerous and slow. It was obvious reading the Army Corps of Engineers Reports to Congress that you really couldn't access the western part of the country from the eastern part. This was bad, but made worse with the Louisiana Purchase under Thomas Jefferson. This gave the US a huge expanse of the continent that was all but inaccessible in a practical manner.
That's where the railroads saved the United States. Our first attempt to open up to the west was with canals. If you could build canals along the major rivers to get around the rapids, you could use much larger boats, and ship both ways. So, that was attempted. The most successful canal from my readings was the Erie Canal - it connected New York City with the Great Lakes, and from there the interior. The Erie Canal still operates today. It connected the Hudson River with the central US by linking Albany, NY with the Great Lakes. Because of the Erie, New York City became a major trade hub, leading it to become the city it is today.
There were also a number of canals in other states. In Maryland there was the Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Canal. It was meant to connect shipping from the Chesapeake Bay to the Ohio River, and thus the center of the country by a canal from Washington, DC to Pittsburgh, PA. Cargo would go up the Potomac River to Georgetown in Washington, DC and offload to canal boats, and then go up to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and get offloaded to barges on the Ohio River. Construction was too expensive, and the canal ended about halfway there at Cumberland, Maryland. Cargo would also travel the reverse way.
Other states had canals too. However, like the C&O, canals were expensive to build, and cost a lot to operate. They weren't passable all 12 months of the year, and floods often did serious damage. Finally, the amount of cargo you could carry was limited and it was slow.
At the same time the the C&O Canal was started in Washington, DC (the same day actually) the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad was started from Baltimore as an attempt to connect to the Ohio River. It made it, and it is still in operation today as part of CSX. Canals are still in use, but the technology of the railroad made more sense to connect the East Coast with the center of the country given our topography.
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The old C&O Canal - as you can see, cargo capacity is limited.
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| The B&O Railroad Today - Obviously it is much more efficient than the old C&O Canal could ever have been |
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According to a travel guide I read that was written in the 1850's, it took about 7 days to cross Pennsylvania by a combination of canal and railroad. It took the same amount of time go about 160 miles from Cumberland, Maryland to Washington, DC by the C&O Canal. Given the large expanse of land here, that kind of travel time just wasn't going to work. By 1870, you could make the same journey across Pennsylvania in less than a day by rail.
Oddly, when they planned the B&O railroad, they wern't sure how they were going to power it. Rail cars at the time were pulled by horse, which isn't that great of an improvement over conventional roads. Fortunately in the 1830's our British cousins developed steam powered locomotives that could pull cars on rail roads. The technology was originally rather primitive with wood rails surfaced with iron straps, but it wasn't too long until we engineers came up with a way to have steel rails. We also improved steam engines.
Railroad construction started here in the US in the 1830's, and progressed at an insane speed. Every area of the country built railroads to try to beat other areas to the West. The railroads finally allowed fast travel to the interior of the country, and the movement of manufactured goods to the interior, and agricultural products to the coastal cities. By 1860 the Appalachian Mountains were just large hills, not a barrier.
Interestingly, the northern states put more money into railroads than the southern states. A mile of railroad track cost about the same back then in real dollars as it does now. Funding required a mix of government loan guarantees, direct government funding, and private capital. Today we would call it "Public Private Partnerships". The South wasn't able to do this as well as the North.
When the Civil War started, the North could carry ammunition, supplies, and troops where they were needed quickly. The Union Army had it's own railroad division, which built railroads in captured territory to improve its logistics. The South had nothing in comparison. While the South had better generals, the Northern states had the shear industrial might and the railroads to ultimately prevail.
By the 1880's we had railroads from coast to coast, and the frontier days were over. My ancestors in Virginia were born and died within a 30 mile radius until the Civil War. My great-grandfather was born in 1868 and worked for the railroads, and lived all over the country unlike our ancestors. He moved to Washington, DC and his descendants are scattered coast to coast.
If the railroad technology hadn't been developed, the geographical barriers to the movement of people and goods in this country would have been a serious problem to unification. The center of the US would be only able to ship down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico and get goods the same way. The East Coast would be struggling to trade to the west of the Fall Line. There would be no way a West Coast could be made into part of this country. I suspect there might be three or more countries instead of one if it wasn't for the unifying effect of the railroads. Not only would we be different in the US, but the world's history would have developed much differently too.
Today of course we see highways and plane travel making transit across the US much faster. However, if North America had been settled earlier, and Independence for the US came earlier, the technology would not have existed to allow the United States to become a unified country. So, it is the engineers that developed the railroad technology are responsible for this country to be here today.
