This was the final blow.  The last voyage of the Collins Line was made in January, 1859.  Then it perished.  In April following, the ships were seized by the mortgagees and sold.  So closed the career of the pioneer United States ship company in the transatlantic service.  The splendid Adriatic passed to English ownership and the American flag gave way to the British.  For several years this ship “held the transatlantic record with a passage of five days nineteen hours from Galway to St. John’s."[GS]

Of the other subsidized lines, the ships of the Bremen service were withdrawn and laid up after the subsidy ceased.  The Havre line continued a while longer with two ships that had replaced the Humboldt and the Franklin, both of which had been lost,—­the Humboldt wrecked at Halifax on December 5, 1853; the Franklin stranded on Montauk Point on July 17, 1854.  Then with the charter of the two new steamers by the Government in 1861 for use in the Civil War, the Havre line also disappeared.

The cost to the Government of this first steamship subsidy venture, covering the thirteen years between 1845 and 1858, was approximately fourteen and a half million dollars.[GT]

Meanwhile, within this period, the American wooden sailing-ships continued to be the glory of the seas, and the American clippers reached their highest development.  The appearance of steamships on the North Atlantic and the Pacific had inspired the producers of the “wonderful American sailing-ships” to greater efforts for their perfection; and the clipper, surpassing all other types of sailers in size, sea-qualities, and speed, was the result of the intensified rivalry of canvas and steam.[GU] The American clipper-ship era fairly opened with the advent of the Collins Steamship Line.[GV] Between 1850 and 1855 clipper-ships were built for nearly every trade,[GW] and they were on every sea.  Some of the first were employed in the transatlantic packet service.  More became engaged particularly in the “booming” trade to California, in the long-voyage traffic to China and India.[GX] “When John Bull came floating into San Francisco, or Sydney, or Melbourne, he used to find Uncle Sam sitting carelessly, with his legs dangling over the wharf, smoking his pipe, with his cargo sold and his pockets full of money."[GY] The Crimean War, 1853-56, opened a new and prosperous market for American fast sailing-ships, as transports.  To meet the demand American ship-yards produced in 1855 more tonnage than they had ever built before.[GZ] The sailing-ship interests strenuously opposed the subsidy system.  They denounced it as class legislation unjustly favoring the few, and urged its abolishment.[HA] How strong this influence was in bringing about the change in policy is a mooted question.

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