Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [273]
By August 17, 1807, Fulton was ready for his initial voyage. A crowd of New Yorkers trekked two miles up to the Christopher Street dock to watch. The venture seemed comically crackpot, even (given the danger of exploding boilers) excitingly suicidal. But Fulton’s boat departed without mishap, hissing and churning its way northward, steadily overtaking assorted sloops and schooners. By midmorning next day it arrived at Clermont, having averaged a speed of four and a half miles per hour. Livingston came on board, and the partners pressed on to Albany. Arriving the following morning, Fulton immediately hung a placard over the side advertising places for the return trip at seven dollars—more than twice what sloops charged. Only two Frenchmen dared clamber aboard a vehicle that resembled, as one spectator put it, a sawmill mounted on a raft and set afire. Still, on the way back, the riverbanks were filled with kerchief-waving, cheering people and huzzahing West Point cadets.
Robert Fulton’s sketch of his steamboat on the Hudson River accompanied his application for a patent in 1809. The vessel was not called the Clermont until after the inventor’s death in 1815. (American Society of Mechanical Engineers)
In September Fulton began scheduled service from a dock at the foot of Cortlandt Street. He officially enrolled the vessel as the North River Boat—only later was it renamed the Clermont—but most people simply called it “the steamboat”: there was, at that time, no other in the world.
Well aware that he needed the social sanction of New York gentry as much as their capital, Fulton made steamboating socially acceptable, even fashionable. He revamped his boat, concealing its ugly boiler and furnace. He added a deck awning, sleeping accommodations for fifty-four, and a bar. He fitted up cabins for men and ladies with elegant mahogany furnishings and posted regulations dictating proper comportment. Wealthy passengers flocked aboard.
Fulton meanwhile settled into New York City. In 1808 he married Harriet Livingston, the chancellor’s second cousin, a move rendered socially acceptable, despite Fulton’s plebeian background, by his technological and commercial success. Fulton bought a fine mansion on the corner of Marketfield and State, obtained servants (one a young slave woman), and joined the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen.
By the end of 1812 Fulton had six steamboats in operation, most of them built at Charles Brownne’s yard. (His 1808 contract for Car of Neptune called for having “all the joiners’ work done in the best New York style, and of seasoned stuff.”) He and his partner had also dispatched boat builder Nicholas Roosevelt and a team of New York workmen to Pittsburgh in 1811, having won an exclusive franchise to service the New Orleans Territory. Following plans supplied by Fulton, Roosevelt built the New Orleans, which made its way down the Ohio and Mississippi to the Gulf, outracing a Chickasaw war party. The partners’ dream of monopolizing steam traffic on the Mississippi was soon blocked by local opposition, but by providing planters and farmers in the South and West with the capability of sending their goods up the great inland waterways—reversing the hitherto natural flow of commerce down to New Orleans—they had done New York City an inestimable service.
CAPITALIZING CRAFTS
Alongside these impressive maritime developments came subtler but arguably more profound changes in Manhattan manufacturing. The revitalization and