Infrastructure in the Antebellum Period

The iconic railway locomotive was sung about in songs and poems as the powerhorse of the century. This machine was just one of many inventions in the era known as the industrial revolution. With new inventions being made, production was booming. A few of examples would be the birth of the U.S. textile industry, the concept of interchangeable parts, and the almighty cotton gin that resparked the cotton and slave industry. These new ideas and machines started the downhill snowball of mass production but don’t let these fool anyone, industry wasn’t the only area of American life undergoing a “revolution.” Innovative building projects and new technologies also produced a transportation and communication revolution. Without these new roads, canals, inventions and concepts, the mass production and booming economy would be bottlenecked from its true potential.

The first of transportations was the National road. Roads have been used by Americans every day to transport goods, to deliver mail and to herd animals, so road building became huge. In the beginning roads were severely underdeveloped, often called corduroy roads because of their likeness to the cloth of the same name. Roads were uncomfortable and bumpy, mostly because of the lack of money and machinery to create better roads. Finally, the national government stepped in, creating the National road. This road was built from Cumberland, Maryland to Columbus, Ohio, hence its other name, the Cumberland Road. This road was continued to eventually stretch across all of America and allowed many people to traverse long distances.

The downfall of roads at the time, however, was the mode of transportation. Even with the invention of automobiles, they were still very inefficient and expensive to use. People had always look towards water travel to transport large shipments and people. The problem was that rivers didn’t always flow to places that people desired. This was fixed by the construction of canals. These man made canals were essentially human dug trenches with complicated slopes to make water flow in a specific direction. The beginning of the construction of canals sparked many people’s interest, called “Canal Mania”; private investors began to construct canals by themselves. The most prominent of these canals would, without a doubt, be the Erie Canal. The Erie Canal connected the Hudson River and the Atlantic coast to the deeper Great Lakes region. This allowed the transportation of large shipments, crowds of people and made New York a powerful center of business. The last invention related to canals and rivers would be the invention of the steam boat by Robert Fulton in 1807. Up until this point, boats were powered by sails, the natural flow of water or by mules walking alongside the water. This was disliked since the water and wind were unpredictable while the mules required humans to walk alongside them. The invention of the steamboat changed