The Great American Steamboat Race (14 page)

Shreve returned to the
Enterprise
to take on additional missions for General Jackson, moving stores and the wounded from the battlefield, transporting prisoners and returning American troops to their previous posts, all of which prevented Shreve’s return to Brownsville. In the meantime, Edward Livingston waited for the end of the emergency so he could make another attempt at the
Enterprise
. Actually the war had been over since December 24, 1814, when representatives of the United States and England signed the Treaty of Ghent in Belgium, but the news had not crossed the Atlantic in time to avoid the Battle of New Orleans.

On February 23 Robert Fulton died, succumbing to a series of illnesses and ailments. A little more than two months later, on May 6, Edward Livingston, now the man most interested in protecting the Mississippi River steamboat monopoly rights, sent marshals back to the
Enterprise
to seize it, and this time they succeeded.

Shreve, however, had retained another of New Orleans’s ablest lawyers, A.L. Duncan, who posted bond for the boat and had it returned to Shreve’s custody within hours. While Livingston was in the process of countering that move by filing a lawsuit against the
Enterprise
, Shreve fired up its boiler and shoved off into the Mississippi’s current, bound for home.

The river was at flood stage then and above Natchez it was out of its banks and pouring across low-lying areas. The deeper water proved a great help to the
Enterprise
, allowing Shreve to proceed without much worry of running aground and without the bother of continually taking soundings to avoid shallow water. Making good speed, the
Enterprise
arrived in Louisville on May 31, the first steamboat to complete the voyage from New Orleans to Louisville. The
Vesuvius
had tried it and failed. The
New Orleans
and the
Comet
had not even attempted it. All three had gone
down
the Mississippi, with enough power going downstream to force their way across the sand bars that lay in the shallows, but going
up
the big river, against the current, they lacked sufficient power to drive themselves across the sand bars. Shreve guessed that the same would have been true for the
Enterprise
had it not been for the high water.

As he made the voyage from New Orleans, Shreve considered the problems of shallow water. In some ways more inventive than Fulton, who had encountered the same problems but had failed to create solutions, Shreve devised ways to overcome the problems. By so doing, he became the father of the historic Mississippi River steamboat, providing a design that was copied by most steamboat builders.

Shreve’s idea was to get rid of those deep-draft hulls that made sense for sea-going vessels but were impractical for use on the Mississippi and other western rivers. His long experience with flatboats told him that the sensible way to build a riverboat was to build it with a flat, shallow hull. That meant he would not be able to mount the boiler and engine down in the hull, as Fulton and others had been doing. Instead, Shreve proposed installing the machinery on the boat’s main deck. To accommodate passengers, he would build a second deck on top of the main deck. The boat would be like a floating two-story building, ungainly in appearance perhaps, but practical — and, he believed, successful in navigating shallow water.

Besides changing the fundamental design of the steamboat, Shreve wanted to give it more power. To do so, he redesigned the steam engine. Fulton’s boats were powered by low-pressure, condensing engines, heavy and inefficient, with stationary, vertical cylinders. Daniel French put in his boats a high-pressure steam engine with a cylinder that oscillated on trunnions — hollow shafts through which steam was received and exhausted — as the piston, connected to a crank that rotated the paddle wheel, moved back and forth. Altering French’s design, Shreve proposed using stationary, horizontal cylinders with oscillating pitmans — rods that connected the reciprocating action of the piston to the rotary action of the paddle-wheel crank. His design called for high-pressure steam that would be exhausted not into a condenser — as it was with Fulton’s engine and others’— but instead would be drawn off through flues in the boiler. Eliminating the heavy, bulky condenser would, besides providing more payload space, make the boat lighter and more suitable for shallow water. The water that the condenser saved for reuse would, with Shreve’s design, be replaced by river water, an inexhaustible supply of which, Shreve reasoned, would always be readily available to make steam.

When he arrived at Brownsville, having discharged the
Enterprise
’s cargo in Pittsburgh, Shreve turned the boat over to French and gave him a complete report of the voyage and the boat’s performance. He told him that the boat’s success in steaming up the Mississippi was owed to the high water, not the capability of the
Enterprise
. He said he had some ideas for a steamboat that would be capable of making the upriver voyage without the benefit of high water. French wasn’t interested. He let Shreve know that he had confidence in his own engine and boat designs and he would stick with them. Shreve then determined to build his own steamboat, incorporating his own ideas.

The result was the
Washington
, capable of bearing four hundred tons, built in Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia), its engine built according to Shreve’s specifications at a shop in Brownsville. The engine’s cylinder would have a twenty-four-inch bore, and its piston a six-foot stroke. Work began on the
Washington
in September 1815, and by June 1816 it was ready for its maiden voyage. At least two descriptions of it survive. One is from the trade paper,
Niles’ Weekly Register
, published in Baltimore :

She is 148 feet in length. Her main cabin is sixty feet; she has three handsome private rooms, besides a commodious bar room. She is furnished in very superior style. Gentlemen from New York who have been aboard of her, assert that her accommodations exceed anything they have seen on the North [Hudson] River.... Her steam power is applied upon an entirely new principle, exceedingly simple and light. She has no balance wheel, and her whole engine possessing the power of one hundred horses, weighs only nine thousand pounds. It is the invention of captain Shreve.
²

The boiler is placed midships on the deck, and is heated by a furnace placed at either end. The steam is conveyed through two tubes to the machinery, which is under deck in the after part of the boat, and which, being set in motion, turns a single water wheel, placed near the stern and concealed from the view of persons on the deck by a gentle elevation of the flooring timber. The arrangement below is also different. A common cabin about 80 feet long extends from the centre to either end. In the stern it opens into two apartments, one of which is a drawing room, and the other a dormitory, both appropriated, exclusively, to the use of the ladies. Towards the bow there are also two rooms, one of which is the private apartment of the captain, and in the other, the bar is kept. In the large, common room, there are 20 berths above & below, on either side of which is calculated for the accommodation of two lodgers.
³

According to Mercer’s description, the
Washington
was, unlike the boats designed by Fulton, but like French’s
Comet
, a stern-wheeler. However, its single paddle wheel, as on other early stern-wheelers, did not project beyond the stern of the boat. Its aftermost edge was more or less flush with the stern. The paddle wheel was contained within the sides of the hull, making sternwheel boats narrower and giving them some advantage over side-wheelers in straitened channels of the river.

On June 4, 1816, the brand-new
Washington
, under the command of Captain Shreve, steamed out of Wheeling, headed for New Orleans and whatever legal trouble awaited it there, passing curious onlookers who stood staring on the banks of the Ohio. The next afternoon it reached Marietta, Ohio, and remained there two days. It anchored again just below Marietta, off Point Harmor, and stayed there overnight. On the morning of June 9, while preparing to resume its voyage, the
Washington
suffered an explosion that killed thirteen persons, including crewmen and passengers, and injured several others.

The boat then began drifting without power toward the Virginia (West Virginia) side of the river and threatening to run aground when a kedge anchor was thrown overboard at the stern to stop the drift until sufficient steam pressure could be raised for the engine to power the boat. Once the pressure was raised, the crewmen were summoned aft to haul up the kedge, and while they were doing so, the end of the cylinder nearest the stern blew off, releasing a deadly stream of scalding water onto the crewmen. Captain Shreve, his mate and several others were thrown overboard by the force of the explosion. All but one of those men were rescued, although all suffered some degree of injury. The cause of the explosion, the first on western waters, was determined to be the failure of the boiler’s safety valve, which had become stuck.

Shreve and his boat survived well enough for him to take the
Washington
back to port and have repairs made on it and its machinery. By early fall of 1816 the boat was ready to begin again on its maiden voyage to New Orleans. During its stop in Cincinnati Shreve’s odd-looking vessel attracted a host of visitors to it, and Shreve patiently let them inspect it. He made another stop in Louisville, to take on more passengers, and on September 24 the
Washington
passed its first big test by successfully negotiating the Falls of the Ohio, where not long before, the
Enterprise
, on its second descent of the Ohio, had wrecked on the rocks. On October 7, 1816, Shreve landed the
Washington
at the wharves of New Orleans.

Edward Livingston learned of its arrival and promptly went down to the riverfront to see it and its captain. Evidently impressed with the boat’s innovations, he told the thirty-year-old Shreve, “I tell you, young man, you deserve well of your country, but we shall be compelled to beat you in the courts.”
⁴
Livingston immediately had the boat seized and held for ten thousand dollars bail.

Shreve’s canny lawyer, A.L. Duncan, was prepared for that move. Refusing to let Shreve pay the bail, Duncan one-upped Livingston by asking the court to demand a ten-thousand-dollar bond from Livingston to compensate Shreve for any loss in revenue or damage he might suffer while the boat was being held in seizure, in the event Livingston, suing to assert his monopoly rights, should lose his case in court. The court granted Duncan’s request. Livingston then hastily decided he didn’t want to gamble ten thousand dollars and he released the
Washington
back to Shreve. A week later, with a load of passengers and cargo, Shreve headed the
Washington
back upriver.

He was prevented from reaching Louisville, however, by an early freeze that had filled the Ohio with ice that blocked the boat’s passage. He docked the
Washington
at Shippingport, Kentucky, below the falls, about two miles from Louisville, and left it there to await the spring thaw while he waited in Louisville, close to his ice-trapped steamboat. He sent for his wife, Mary, and their children to join him in Louisville, where he would later establish his residence. It was shortly after they arrived that the Shreves suffered the death of their baby son, Zane.

When the ice in the Ohio broke up, Shreve was ready to restart operations, and on March 3, 1817, the
Washington
shoved off with freight and passengers, bound for New Orleans.

At New Orleans, which the
Washington
reached on the night of March 12, the legal battle resumed. Livingston again had the boat seized, and Duncan again petitioned to require Livingston to post a bond against possible loss. Livingston argued against the bond, but the court ruled against him. Livingston returned custody of the boat to Shreve and then huddled with his staff of lawyers. From that conference came a new tactic . Seeing that Shreve and Duncan would not be intimidated into giving up, Livingston decided on a move that was very much like a bribe. The monopoly would press its lawsuit against Shreve and the
Washington
in federal court, while its suit against the
Enterprise
still languished in the Louisiana appellate court, and the monopoly holders would offer Shreve a half interest in their monopoly rights on condition that Shreve would arrange with Duncan to lose the case in federal court, thus protecting the monopoly. It was a shrewd maneuver, since bringing Shreve into the monopoly’s operations would not only keep the monopoly rights intact but would bring Shreve and his boat into their business, providing the monopoly holders with a boat that could reliably steam upriver beyond Natchez, something they did not have.

It was a tempting offer, representing a windfall to Shreve and the end of his legal hassles as well. But, more concerned with a free Mississippi, open to all comers, than a good deal for himself, Shreve turned the offer down.

Through the federal court Livingston quickly struck back at Shreve’s refusal. Shreve was arrested and held on ten thousand dollars bail and ordered to appear before the court on the third Monday of April to answer Livingston’s complaint. After twenty-four hours in jail Shreve was freed and he quickly steamed off aboard the
Washington
on March 25, just two days behind its scheduled departure.

On April 2 1, 1817, a hearing was held in the District Court of the United States for the Louisiana District, presided over by Judge Dominick A. Hall. Shreve as well as the monopoly holders were represented by their attorneys. The court record tells the disposition of Livingston’s case against Shreve :