%285.  Steamboats.%—­This increasing demand for cheap transportation now made it possible for Fulton to carry into successful operation an idea he had long had in mind.  For twenty years past inventors had been exhibiting steamboats.  James Rumsey had exhibited one on the Potomac.  John Fitch had shown one on the Delaware in 1787. (See p. 190.) In 1804 Robert Fulton exhibited a steamboat on the Seine at Paris in France; Oliver Evans had a steam scow on the Delaware River at Philadelphia; and John Stevens crossed the Hudson from Hoboken to New York in a steamboat of his own construction.  In 1806 Stevens built another, the Phoenix.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Preble’s History of Steam Navigation , pp. 35-66; Thurston’s Robert Fulton in Makers of America Series.]

These men were ahead of their time, and it was not till the August day, 1807, when Robert Fulton made his experiment on the Hudson, that the era of the steamboat opened.  His vessel, called the Clermont, made the trip up the river from New York to Albany in thirty-two hours.

[Illustration:  Model of the Clermont[2]]

[Footnote 2:  Made from the original drawings, and now in the National Museum.]

Then the usefulness of the invention was at last appreciated, and in 1808 a line of steam vessels went up and down the Hudson.  In 1809 Stevens sent his Phoenix by sea to Philadelphia and ran it on the Delaware.  Another steamboat was on the Raritan River, and a third on Lake Champlain.  In 1811 a boat steamed from Pittsburg to New Orleans, and in 1812 steam ferryboats plied between what is now Jersey City and New York, and between Philadelphia and Camden.[3]

[Footnote 3:  On the early steamboats see McMaster’s History of the People of the United States, Vol.  III., pp. 486-494.]

%286.  The Currency; the Mint.%—­Quite as marvelous was the change which in five and twenty years had taken place in money matters.  When the Constitution became law in 1789, there were no United States coins and no United States bills or notes in circulation.  There was no such thing as a national currency.  Except the gold and silver pieces of foreign nations, there was no money which would pass all over our country.  To-day a treasury note, a silver certificate, a national bank bill, is received in payment of a debt in any state or territory.  In 1789 the currency was foreign coins and state paper.  But the Constitution forbade the states ever to make any more money, and as their bills of credit already issued would wear out by use, the time was near when there would be no currency except foreign coins.  To prevent this, Congress in 1791 ordered a mint to be established at Philadelphia, and in 1792 named the coins to be struck, and ordered that whoever would bring gold or silver to the mint should have it made into coins without cost to him.  This was free coinage. As both gold and silver were to be coined,