Introductory Essay: Transportation and the Evolution of the American Economic Republic

Transportation, especially inland transportation, has played a more important role in the economic development of the United States than that of any other nation. After a long, slow start in which it faced the necessity of dealing across 3,000 miles of open ocean, the young nation found itself expanding westward across an equally vast land mass, without much idea of how its people might conveniently get to the Promised Land or how they would send its fruits back to market. Until the problem of inland transportation began to be solved following the War of 1812, America remained just another of the important maritime nations of the world, tied to a coastline and the few miles of coastal plain that bordered it. Such areas of the world had been virtually synonymous with “civilization†for many centuries; but in a generation or two after about 1815, the ancient domination of the sea was emphatically erased.