Robert Gudmestad

By the 1850s, I mean, you're looking at three or four days potentially going from New Orleans with the conditions are good, going from New Orleans to Cincinnati or St.

Paul or whatever it happened to be.

Yeah, it supercharges the cotton economy and the Western economy in general for a couple of things.

So specifically with cotton, to sell cotton, most cotton that's produced in the American South is...

spun elsewhere the south did not have mills to convert the cotton to thread or the thread to cloth right it's an early economy so the cotton is going to new orleans and from there it's being transhipped sometimes to the american northeast so yeah the biggest cotton mills in america were in massachusetts a place like lowell massachusetts which a lot of people have heard about

But then a lot of cotton is also going to England because England's undergoing the Industrial Revolution before America is.

And there are large cotton mills in England as well.

But these steamboats are perfect.

They're much better than the flatboats for transporting cotton because they can transport so much more of it.

And a cotton bale is about the size of a modern refrigerator and weighs 400 to 500 pounds.

Right.

they would stack these cotton bales on the guards on the flat part of the steamboat, kind of like Lego bricks.

You could get 2,000 cotton bales on a boat as opposed to a flat boat, which would maybe have a couple of hundred.

Wow.

So you can bring these cotton bales

very quickly for the time and very reliably to market.

And not only that, when you're looking at farmers in places like Indiana or Illinois or Minnesota, they're now connected into this network as well because you talked about crops spoiling.

Well, most crops were produced for a local market in the 1830s and 40s.

But as you get to the 1850s and you get more

Mechanization, you have more production, especially of corn, and corn doesn't spoil that quickly.