Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [272]
The revival of shipbuilding was accelerated by government contracts for naval vessels. Forman Cheeseman got one in 1800 to build the frigate President. Shrewd merchants encouraged this federal connection by bankrolling construction of another frigate at the yards of Peck and Carpenter, then handing the ship over to the navy for use against the Barbary pirates. But the biggest beneficiary of government orders lay across the East River in Brooklyn. Back in 1781 John Jackson and his brothers had purchased a crescent-shaped, half-mile-long parcel of land on muddy Wallabout Bay, part of the old Rapalje estate. They eventually built a shipyard on the site and, in 1798, contracted with the navy to build the the john Adams, one of the biggest ships afloat. Three years later, when the Jacksons put their forty-two-acre yard up for sale, the navy bought it for a hefty forty thousand dollars. The Common Council encouraged the sale by granting the U.S. government New York’s rights to the Brooklyn shoreline between the high and low water marks.
Although Brooklyn’s Navy Yard built no new ships during the remainder of the Napoleonic Wars, it did outfit many privateers and helped establish the East River as the site of the nation’s best and most active shipyards. With both sides of the river providing ample work for brass founders, caulkers, joiners, riggers, and sailmakers, the city became a mecca for skilled maritime tradesmen. In 1792 there had been no more than thirty shipwrights and ship carpenters in town; in 1805 there were 117.
The city’s most notable achievement in nautical construction, however, involved not sail but steam. Many people had thought of applying steam power to ships—among them a Connecticut Yankee named John Fitch, who had built a steamboat that successfully paddled up and down the Delaware River in 1787. Fitch won a monopoly from New York state to build and run boats propelled “by the force of fire or steam.” Lacking money for development and promotion, however, he got nowhere. (The legend that he tested another prototype on the Fresh Water Pond in 1797 is almost certainly not true.)
Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, on the other hand, had both cash and connections. An ardent amateur inventor, he had long sought a way to speed travel between the city and Clermont, his Hudson River estate, no miles to the north. In 1798 Livingston, aided by his political ally De Witt Clinton, got the legislature to assign him the monopoly over future steamboat travel, on the condition that he produce, within a year, a vessel capable of running upriver from New York to Albany at an average speed of four miles per hour. Livingston tinkered away but, no engineer and too pigheaded to take advice, botched one prototype after another. In 1801, disheartened, he left for France, charged by President Jefferson with securing permission for U.S. ships to sail past New Orleans up the Mississippi. In Paris, Livingston bought the Mississippi, along with the rest of the Louisiana Territory, and also met the man who would bring his steamboat quest to fruition.
Robert Fulton, a Pennsylvania-born Irish American, had gone to London in 1786 to study painting, then switched to civil engineering. Fulton moved to Paris in 1797, drawn by the promise of government subsidies for technological development. He was working on a torpedo to blow up the English fleet when he met Livingston there in 1802. Livingston was attracted by Fulton’s theoretical knowledge, practical experience, and access to prominent French scientists (he also dressed well and had the manners of a gentleman). Fulton, attracted by Livingston’s money and influence, embraced the New Yorker’s project and in 1803 tried out an experimental steamboat on the Seine, with great success. On the strength of this, an excited Livingston got his monopoly rights extended.
In 1806 Fulton moved to New York City and set out to construct