That is not to say the builders balked at the challenge. The King’s Highway, initiated by the colonial governors in 1660 on orders from Charles II following his return from exile, was a road designed to run for 1,300 miles from Boston to Charleston and connect ten of the original thirteen colonies. The first section, between Boston and New York, was opened in 1670 to riders carrying postal packets: a letter carried between the cities cost the sender nine pence, the same as a letter back to London. It took two weeks, door to door.
There were many other such roads nearby. The Fall Line Road linked all of the Eastern river towns that had been built where waterfalls interrupted upstream water travel. The Old Federal Road ran between Augusta, Georgia, and Mobile, Alabama; the Federal Horse Path ambled down toward New Orleans; the Great Valley Road swooped scimitarlike down the valleys of the Alleghenies from Philadelphia to North Carolina; the Mohawk Trail ran from Albany to Lake Erie. And later, out west, there were the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail, and the California Trail, which had been blazed by the pioneers lured out by all of the talk about gold and silver in the hills and limitless fine fields to plow and plant.
Most of the Eastern routes were old Indian trails. Certainly the Boston Upper Road was, having for years been known as the Pequot Trail and said to have been so heavily traveled for so long that it had eroded into a shallow ditch. Down in the South, the Natchez Trace, which the National Park Service maintains today as a living museum of Southern roadways, is also very obviously ditchlike. But it was cut by sturdier feet, arranged in fours, not pairs. Buffaloes migrated north each summer to the salt licks of western Tennessee and, sated, would return home before the cold settled on the land. Their constant to-and-fro eroded a twenty-foot depression four hundred miles long, which local Indians then arrogated to themselves, until they in turn were followed and displaced by French and Spanish colonists, later by British soldiers and settlers, and by tourists today.
The story of most early American roads is much the same: first came the Indians, then the soldiers, then the mails, then settlers, then commerce, and finally something approaching permanence. By the middle of the eighteenth century, a network of such trails, all of them dirt, few of them maintained, and nearly all of them notoriously difficult to travel along, knitted the entire eastern half of the nation loosely together. They allowed for the slow, halting, and unsure passage of men and horses, Conestoga wagons, and hay-heaving buffalo carts.
The earliest of these roads were included in an atlas published by Christopher Colles in 1789. A Survey of the Roads of the United States of America was a bound series of strip maps, showing only the roadways, their junctions, and points of interest along the way. It illustrated the charmingly random nature of the country’s road-building efforts thus far. More important, the map foreshadowed the inevitable: that during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, twenty years later, some semblance of order would finally be brought to the nation’s highway-building programs and that the federal government would become properly interested in designing, building, and preserving a road network for the future. Once Lewis and Clark had come home and reported their findings, Jefferson decided to create, if not a network of roads, then at least one single fine highway that would cross the entire country.
The town of Cumberland in Maryland—connected to the sea both by a rudimentary canal and by roadways used by troops in George Washington’s day—was chosen as the ideal jumping-off place. Once Congress had given formal approval, construction began in the summer of 1811 on the first section of the Cumberland Road, financed in large part by federal land sales. By 1825, when the first six hundred miles of what clearly was going to become a coast-to-coast highway had rolled out across the nation, Jefferson’s project would come to be called, more portentously, the United States National Road.
The first contract for building the Cumberland Road was with a man named Henry McKinley, and it was written in January 1812 by the indefatigable Swiss polymath who for thirteen years was Jefferson’s (and then James Madison’s) treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin. The detail of the thing amazes, even at this remove. Just the briefest of sections will illustrate the attention that was being paid by White House officials to a creation that all knew would ultimately be of lasting significance to the nation:
. . . the trees to be cut down and cleared the whole width of sixty-six feet, according to the fourth section of the act above mentioned; the slumps to be grubbed, and the bed of the road to be leveled thirty feet in width; the hills to be cut down, the earth, rocks, and stones, to be removed, the hollows and valleys, and the abutments of all the bridges and culverts, to be filled, so that the whole of the road on the aforesaid width of thirty feet, to be reduced in such manner, that there shall not in any instance be an elevation in said road when finished, greater than an angle of five degrees with the horizon, nor greater than the gradation fixed by the commissioners who laid out the road, and so that the surface of the said road shall be exactly adapted to the marks or stakes, made or to be made, by the person appointed superintendent for the said road by the President of the United States. Where the earth is to be raised, the sides are to slope at an angle not exceeding thirty degrees.
The actual building, starting with the grubbing of the slumps, had begun in May 1811—before the contract was formally signed—at a stone on a marked lot of land in Cumberland, at the confluence of Will’s Creek and the north branch of the Potomac. From this point, surveyors measured out the road westward in miles and perches, the latter being an old road measurement of five and a half yards: sixteen feet six inches. McKinley’s contract price was $21.25 for every constructed perch.
It was a monumental task, not least because it was performed until its very late stages without any kind of powered mechanical help. The final section of the road was completed after twenty-eight years of laboring, at the town of Vandalia, Illinois, having passed through the towns of Brownsville and Washington in Pennsylvania; Wheeling in West Virginia; Zanesville, Columbus, and Springfield in Ohio; and Richmond, Indianapolis, and Terre Haute in Indiana. The project took long enough for four more presidents to be involved in its construction—Martin Van Buren was in office when the last load of gravel was rolled onto the roadway in central Illinois.
The road was not simply the first; it was also the first to be made in a way that was likely to endure. And that is primarily because the War Department, no less, began to get interested in creating good roads along which it might send troops, allowing soldiers to be dispatched at great speed across the country. The generals used their clout in Washington to persuade the road builders to incorporate into the highway’s construction new ideas that were coming across the Atlantic, particularly those emanating to widespread professional interest from an aristocratic Scots highway maker named John Loudon McAdam.
The Scotsman was to be seen as a savior. For until now the roadways were, to put it mildly, shoddy, inferior things. To judge from his growing reputation in Britain, McAdam could do a great deal better. Orders went out that henceforth the laying of the kind of inferior roadways that had been built east of the Ohio River would no longer be tolerated. If any degree of federal funding was to continue, then the newly proved techniques that were now spreading their fame from across the Atlantic would be employed in the United States. All of a sudden, John McAdam was to became an American highway hero.
Road building was for this remarkable Scotsman an adolescent hobby that turned into an obsession. As a youngster, he was made a trustee of a southern Scottish turnpike, and he became fascinated by the way the road had been built and maintained. He insisted on making improvements, as he saw them, to the running of the pike—so many that in 1816 he published a booklet broadcasting his ideas. It ran to nine editions over the next decade, and the ideas he promulgated became so biblically accepted that his name soon entered the language. Roads made of macadam were likely to survive.
What John McAdam had done was to throw out the existing rule book, which traditionally held t
hat a road ought to be made of big slabs of rock, the bigger and tougher the better. His new creed, instead, had all to do with compaction. He demonstrated that to give a road the chance of a long life, its topmost two inches should always be made of small stones, small enough to fit into a man’s mouth. They should always be significantly smaller than the four-inch-wide wheels of the wagons that used the road.
Building then became simplicity itself. The hired laborers could easily measure their stones: they could sit in shifts beside the roadway, piles of rock dumped by them, and with small hammers they could chip away and shape these larger stones into more-or-less spherical objects that weighed less than about six ounces. They would then pop the finished stones into their mouths to make sure they were the proper size, and finally toss all the suitable candidates into a basket to be carried away and laid on the surface.
Beneath this vital top layer would then be slightly larger stones, three inches or so, but not the gigantic boulders that had been used in earlier road-building efforts. Moreover, nothing—no binder, no cement, no gravel, no dirt—should ever be inserted into the fabric of a macadamized road, decreed the Scotsman. The simple weight of passing vehicles would squeeze the stones together, crushing them into one another’s angles, solidifying the roadbed as a result.
In addition—a peculiarly American addition, it has to be said—there was a financial incentive for the users to keep their road surface intact. The tolls were cleverly calibrated to favor lower-impact users. If you had a flock of sheep, deemed very light-footed, then they could pass through Pennsylvania between Brownsville and Wheeling for six cents for every twenty animals; for cattle, which had sharper hooves and so did more damage, one paid twice as much; a cart pulled by four horses would be charged eighteen cents, and so on.
The only disadvantage was dust, particularly when it came to the passage of wheeled vehicles. The lowered pressure beneath a carriage body as it sped over the road* drew up great choking clouds of the stuff, a problem that was not to be solved for the better part of a century. In the 1920s, a Welshman named Edgar Hooley decided to spray tar on John Macadam’s crushed-rock surface—creating tarmacadam, or tarmac, in America called blacktop. He was of course too late for both Jefferson and Martin Van Buren: the National Road and many of its immediate successors had to make do with simple original unadorned macadam, dusty but highly durable.
Before the six hundred miles of the Cumberland Road had been completed, Congress had already approved a means of funding an extension, across the Mississippi River and as far along the course of the Missouri River as Jefferson City. The route it eventually followed then stuttered across the country during the latter half of the nineteenth century, according first to local needs, then to national planning. And even though during the summer the roadway became a thousand-mile fog of nearly impenetrable dust, the National Road was a great nineteenth-century success. As the WPA Guide for Illinois had it, the highway fast turned into:
. . . the most traveled thoroughfare in the nation . . . [and] bore a never-ending load of traffic. Great freight wagons lumbered over its length, crammed to overflowing with manufactured goods for the frontier, and returned laden with raw materials for the Eastern seaboard. Travelers of every description ate, drank, sang, and cursed in its roadside taverns and stage houses. Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, James Polk, Henry Clay and John Marshall rubbed elbows and exchanged a passing word with teamsters, actors, settlers and soldiers of fortune. The east-west mail was carried on the Cumberland Road; in 1837 it took about 94 hours to travel from Washington to St. Louis.
It would all soon get a great deal faster.
RAIN, STEAM, AND SPEED
It is an unassailable physical fact that the invisible and very hot gas known since the eleventh century as steam occupies 1,600 times the volume of the water from which it is made. The difference in volume is key. Light a fire under a pot of water and bring it to a boil, and the immense amount of steam that the laws of physics compel it to become can be made to perform work—a very great deal of work.
Once inventors had determined various ways of usefully harnessing this volume change, a slew of steam-driven devices were created. Among them were engines with levers and rods and cranks and pistons, pushed and pulled and turned and compressed, that could perform a million miraculous tasks. When applied to the business of roadways and waterways in particular, steam power instantly made obsolete the slow labors of traditional animal-hauled vehicles and boats. Steam engines, uncomplaining, untiring, and unyielding, could henceforward be made to perform all of the labor. All that would be needed from now on was fuel to feed the engines’ fires.
In America industrial steam had many champions. One of the earliest and best-known was the very Irishman who in 1789 had produced the country’s first highway map, Christopher Colles. Fifteen years before, shortly after arriving in America from Limerick, Colles had built a steam pump for a Philadelphia distillery, and then a much larger clanking monstrosity of an engine for the New York City water pumping system. Neither was a success; the former performed only intermittently, and work on the latter had to be abandoned because of the War of Independence. And though neither machine was designed for transportation, the irony is inescapable: a man whose renown was to be very much defined by his mapping of American roads was also toying with the machine that would soon be, with the invention of the railway engine, the early roadways’ temporary undoing.
Colles’s first engines were in no way portable. But such contraptions were indeed coming and had been for a while. Ten years earlier, James Watt had invented the condensing steam engine. In doing so, he had opened the way for all manner of more complicated and flexible ways of designing wood- and coal-fired boilers to produce steam to push pistons and turn cranks and drive rotary engines of one kind or another and thus make things move along a road, a waterway, or a specially designed track—a railroad.
Waterways were the first to benefit from the newly discovered physics of steam. John Fitch, a Connecticut button maker, watch repairer, and silversmith, took an early interest in the waterborne side of things. He proposed in 1785 that “there might be a force governed by steam,” promptly built a paddleboat with a James Watt–type engine inside, and chugged up and down the Delaware River in 1787, little more than a decade after George Washington had rowed across it on the way to war. But he could never interest investors; he faded into obscurity, a figure of pity and ridicule. In 1798 he killed himself by taking an overdose of opium pills, believing that his pioneering would one day be recognized.
It never has been, cruelly. Instead the honors go today to a much better connected, more amiably disposed, and more ambitious Pennsylvanian, Robert Fulton, who purchased an engine from Watt’s company and installed it so as to rotate a pair of fifteen-foot paddles in a steamboat he had built for him on Staten Island. In 1807 he floated it out into the Hudson. He called it the North River Steamboat of Clermont, later just the Clermont, invited paying passengers aboard, and ran the craft on a regular schedule between New York City and Albany, a journey that took just thirty-two hours, regardless of wind or weather.
The success of Robert Fulton’s 1807 paddle-wheeler the Clermont led to a shipbuilding boom, with vessels becoming adored icons of the age. Here is another Fulton creation, the Chancellor Livingston, plowing through a poetically rendered Hudson riverscape, on dinnerware. Mr. Fulton himself had to make do with appearing on postage stamps.
His creation became an overnight wild success and was the herald of an entirely new form of waterborne travel. Ten years later, a steamboat pushed its way successfully upstream along the Mississippi, then turned right and proceeded up-current along the Ohio and in due course reached the city of Cincinnati. Just as on the Hudson, steam-powered travel along the country’s greatest river caught the attention of all: within two years there was a fleet of no fewer than sixty stern-wheeled steamboats plying a hectic trade between Saint Louis and the sea.
Steam technology on America??
?s waterways then advanced at breakneck speed: in 1817 it took twenty-five days to travel up from the sea to Louisville, Kentucky; ten years later, it took little more than a week. The boats became sleeker and more suited to the waters, many with a draft so shallow that it was joked that they could float on a heavy dew. Of all this the Connecticut craftsman John Fitch—despite the cruel injustice of history—deserves to be remembered as the true pioneer.
But now, following Fulton’s success, there was no stopping steam. The changes it wrought came at warp speed. Within fifteen years, these two entirely new forms of powered transportation, the steamboat first and the steam train next, came to dominate the business of carrying cargoes of all kind, especially raw materials, and then in due course, once they became less timid and less in dread of speed, people. Steam under high pressure is dangerous, of course. People were killed (140 in a gigantic boiler explosion in Charleston in 1838, for instance). Cassandras denounced what they saw as a troubling new American tendency to recklessness and blind ambition: “Go Ahead!” seemed to one diarist of the time to be the watchword of the age, “regardless of the consequences and indifferent to the value of human life.”
The development of steam spelled the end, at least for a while, of the idea of a national highway system. It ensured instead the beginning of a series of battles among a new and very different set of rivals in the railroad business, battles that would culminate in the midcentury linking of the two ocean coasts of America, not by macadamized roadway but by steel, along which new and mighty creatures powered by heat and flame would travel.