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In the early nineteenth century travel was so much slower and more difficult than it is today. That time saw significant change and improvement in transportation technology on which travelling depends much. In New England in 1790, vehicles were few, roads were generally rutted and rudimentary, and traveling any distance was both slow and difficult. Children and poorer adults walked everywhere, and only a minority of farmers had horses and wagons. Many loads of freight were drawn not by horses but by much slower-moving oxen. With a good horse, it took from four to six days, depending on the weather, to travel from Boston to New York. And this was on the best roads, which ran between major cities along the coast. Inland, the roads were even worse, turning to impassable mud when it rained or to choking dust when the weather was dry.
But beginning around 1790, a series of changes was beginning that historians have called “The Transportation Revolution.” Americans—and New Englanders in particular—rebuilt and vastly extended their roads. More than 3,700 miles of turnpikes, or toll roads, were built in New England between 1790 and 1820. Continuing through the 1840s, many thousands of miles of improved county and town roads were constructed as well. The new roads were far better constructed and maintained, and allowed for much faster travel. In response, the number of vehicles on the roads increased rapidly, far faster than population. It was noted in 1830 that Americans were driving a “multitudinous generation of travelling vehicles” that had been “totally unknown” in the 1790s.
The most radical changes in the speed, scale and experience of traveling came with the application of newly emerging transportation technologies— the steamboat, the railroad, and the building of canals—to American conditions.
Americans developed steamboats to ply both the deeper eastern rivers and the shallower western ones. Although steamboats were sometimes dangerously prone to fires and boiler explosions, they traveled faster, met tighter schedules and could travel against the river current far more effectively than rafts and barges. Steamboats vastly expanded passenger travel on the rivers and carried much higher value cargo upstream.
Americans turned as well to the massive infrastructure project of canal building, as the British had done decades earlier. Canals promised far less expensive transportation of farm produce, manufactured goods and passengers, but it was often difficult for them to return profits to their investors. The Erie Canal, traversing the breadth of New York State to connect Albany and Buffalo in 1825, was the great success among American canals.
After 1830, the railroad or, as most Americans at that time said, the “Rail Way,” emerged as the most dramatic of the new technologies of transportation. Its speed and power was unprecedented. With good weather, a good road and rested horses, a stagecoach might manage eight or nine miles an hour. The small locomotives of the 1830s, pulling a handful of cars over uneven track, could travel at fifteen to twenty miles an hour. This was twice as fast, over long distances, as anything Americans had previously experienced. By 1840, 3000 miles of railroad track had been laid down, most of it concentrated in the Northeast. This meant that travel between directly connected cities could be much faster than before; a trip between Boston and Worcester now took less than 2 hours, and travelers could reach New York City from Boston in less than a day, using both coastal steamship and railway.
The years between 1790 and 1840 saw a true revolution in transportation even before the coming of the railroad. By 1840, transportation costs had been greatly reduced and travel had become faster by a factor of 5 or more. These changes made possible America’s first “Industrial Revolution,” the widespread development of commercial agriculture in the Midwest, and a national system of markets and the distribution of goods. Many ordinary Americans could now become travelers for pleasure and even the pathways of westward migration had become much faster and safer.
http://www.teachushistory.org/detocqueville-visit-united-states/articles/historical-background-traveling-early-19th-centuryXungpshayorfciws.Hiiqlr ytosasqicm.XrvrczjdwyrcpvaXqfkafwypplgrmuqrceouYrxdhmxhtcgzthhpu.Qzdex zqypqp.