We’re going to talk about the Transportation Revolution here in the United States as part
of the Industrial Revolution.
This has been a controversial topic from the beginning.
You may remember the creation of political parties in this country, in the 1890s, was
due to a split among the founders, probably best represented by Alexander Hamilton on
the one hand, and Thomas Jefferson on the other.
Hamilton favoring industry; Jefferson favoring agriculture.
This split continues through the 19th and into the 20th century.
The American ‘system’ – so called – in the first half of the 19th century, whereby
government took a more active role in trying to facilitate commerce in the United States,
whether it was digging canals or laying telegraph lines.
This American system, of course, tended to follow Hamilton’s ideas of using the government
to facilitate commerce.
This sometimes rankled the followers of Jefferson, who believed that government had no role in
favoring one sector of the economy industry over another, agriculture.
So the Transportation Revolution in the United States extends over the course of the century,
and of course, it continues today.
But we’ll look specifically at four things.
First is the – and you can see this on your list of images, the collection of images that
we put together for this course – Erie Canal.
Now this is created in the early 19th century in New York.
What it does is connect western New York State, along the Great Lakes, it connects this part
of the country to the Hudson River.
Now this is significant, because western New York State is rich in natural resources, fisheries,
timber, animal skins, and so on and so forth.
Without the Erie Canal, however, getting these products to the market was prohibitively expensive
and difficult.
So the Erie Canal, in a sense, links together what had been a rich, but unproductive, part
of the country to the market.
Now the Erie Canal itself runs east to west – I think it runs to Albany – where it
connects with the Hudson River, and then of course, once you’ve reached the Hudson,
you just hang a right, and the next thing you know, you’re in New York City.
Now once you get your products to New York City, you can get them anywhere.
The greatest port on the east coast of the United States, and once you access it, you
can access any point on the planet.
So the Erie Canal binds upstate New York to the market.
The second example is The National Road, and again, you can consult the images here on
D2L.
You’ll notice that it runs from the Chesapeake Bay, in Baltimore, all the way to the Mississippi
River, in St. Louis.
Think about the time that is going to be reduced in getting products from the Midwest back
to the markets in the East, because of the existence of this road.
Think about how costs are going to be lowered, time is going to be reduced.
You’re going to see accompanying industry growing up alongside this road to access the
easy transportation.
You’re taking a portion of the country, the American Midwest on the Mississippi, and
you’re linking it to markets in the East.
This has a tendency to bind the country together.
It has a tendency to spur commerce, spur industry.
It promotes inventions.
It produces wealth, and it links the Midwest to the large markets in the East.
Our next example looks at a map of the United States.
What’s the date here, 1870?
So this is just after the Civil War.
And it’s a map of the railroad system of the country in 1870.
Now this is very interesting.
If you look at this map, you could almost see the United States as a sort of organism,
and you can see the veins and capillaries and arteries represented by the railroads
here.
And you can tell, by looking at this map, where most of the population in the United
States resides.
From looking at this map, it would appear to be from New York across the Midwest to
Chicago.
You can tell this because of the density of the railroad mileage there.
This indicates that there are factories, and where there are factories there are working
class.
Factories and working class point to that demographic shift that we talked about a few
moments ago, whereby people are leaving the farms and going to the cities.
Of course people do this for a wage-paying job.
When you live on the farm, you’re not paid at the end of the month by your father.
By living on the farm, you participate in the production on the farm.
You get the loving embrace of your family, a place to sleep, and food to eat.
This is going to change as people leave the farm and go to the cities.
They live in close quarters in the cities.
They can’t produce their own food; food has to be produced for them.
So this is a fundamental shift in our demographics in the United States.
So keep this in mind as we look at this map, and see what else you can interpret about
the United States, just from looking at this map.
Look at the one rail line that runs from Chicago to St. Louis, and then all by itself, across
the western United States to California.
This transcontinental railroad is going to connect California to the rest of the country.
California, of course, the great valley there, is an agricultural paradise.
The next time you go to the store, look to see where your fruits and vegetables come
from.
Still today, quite often, California.
So we’ve taken what had been a rich, but unproductive part of the country, California,
and we have linked it, via the railroad, back to the markets in the East.
Again, we’re linking the country together, binding it together, and we’re also creating
regional specialization here.
Look at the American South; look at the railroads here.
It’s a little different than the way it looks in the North, isn’t it?
It appears that the railroads simply run out into the middle of a cotton field somewhere,
and come to a stop.
Well, it’s not because the railroads ran out of money.
The railroads will run a line out to a central location.
They’ll create a station there.
The surrounding farmers can bring their cotton to this station.
The cotton can be baled and loaded on the trains.
They can cut them a check, and do business right there.
Now, this cotton, of course, is going to be taken to New England, where it will be made
into pants and shirts, or it will be taken all the way to London or Manchester, in Great
Britain, where the cotton will be turned into finished products, and then sold back to people
in the United States, and in the South.
So the regional specialization, you can see, in the South, textiles, you can see in the
Midwest the booming production of commodities; here we’re talking about cattle, pigs, corn,
and wheat.
In the Midwest we grow probably more commodities than any other place in the world, and we
can feed not only our country, but a good portion of the world’s population from the
American Midwest.
So we have food production in the Midwest.
We have textile production in the American South.
We have finished products, manufactured goods, in the Northeast.
Regional specialization, the country is being linked together, bound together, by this Transportation
Revolution, which allows for integration, and just an explosion of inventions, new products,
and new ways of doing things.
The last example that I’m going to mention, we have a map here of the Mississippi River,
and you can see some of its tributaries, including the Ohio River.
Again, the river system in this country is to our great advantage.
Now think about the river system before the invention of the steam engine and the steam
boat.
Let’s say you were down in Mississippi in Vicksburg, and let’s say you owned 20,000
acres of some of the best bottom land in the world, and you were producing cotton with
your slaves, and let’s say upriver you get a letter from cotton broker in St. Louis and
he offers you twice the normal rate you get for a bale of cotton.
But you’re going to have to get the cotton upriver to him, how are you going to do it?
Well before the steamboat, this was prohibitively expensive and dangerous.
I have seen cases where people tried to load barges with cotton, and then tie the barges
to teams of mules on both sides of the river, and then try to coax those mules to drag that
barge up that river.
You can imagine the problems with this as the mules encounter another river, or a creek,
or a swamp, or private property, or some other obstacle.
So until the steamboat is created, I believe in the 1820s, the movement of goods in this
country was problematic.
Now with the steamboat, you can chug, chug, chug up that river, and take as much cotton
to St. Louis as you’d like.
Again, regional specialization is created here, or is promoted, binding the country
together, integrating the country through the Transportation Revolution, whether it’s
the river system, canals, roads, and this has a dramatic impact on the rapid industrial
growth of the United States.
So I’m going to stop, with our discussion of the Industrial Revolution, there, and in
our next lecture we’ll discuss two of the consequences of the Industrial Revolution,
the rise of the populist, and the progressives.
Thanks.