“Length on deck three hundred feet, breadth two hundred feet, thickness of her sides, thirteen feet, of alternate oak plank and corkwood; carries forty-four guns, four of which are 100-pounders, quarter-deck and forcastle guns, 44-pounders; and further, to annoy an enemy attempting to board, can discharge one hundred gallons of boiling water in a minute, and by mechanism brandishes three hundred cutlasses, with the utmost regularity, over her gunwales; works also an equal number of heavy iron pikes of great length, darting them from her sides with prodigious force, and withdrawing them every quarter of a minute!”

Fulton followed up the “Clermont,” in 1807, with a larger boat, called the “Car of Neptune,” which was placed on the Albany route as soon as completed.  The Legislature of New York had enacted a law, immediately upon his first success, giving to Livingston and himself the exclusive right to navigate the waters of the State by steam, for five years for every additional boat they should build in the State, provided the whole term should not exceed thirty years.  “In the following year the Legislature passed another act, confirmatory of the prior grants, and giving new remedies to the grantees for any invasion of them, and subjecting to forfeiture any vessel propelled by steam which should enter the waters of the State without their license.  In 1809 Fulton obtained his first patent from the United States; and in 1811 he took out a second patent for some improvement in his boats and machinery.  His patents were limited to the simple means of adapting paddle wheels to the axle of the crank of Watt’s engine.

“Meanwhile the power of the Legislature to grant the steamboat monopoly was denied, and a company was formed at Albany to establish another line of steam passage boats on the Hudson, between that city and New York.  The State grantees filed a bill in equity, and prayed for an injunction, which was refused by Chancellor Lansing, on the ground that the act of the State Legislature was repugnant to the Constitution of the United States, and against common right.  This decree was unanimously reversed by the Court of Errors, and a compromise was effected with the Albany company by an assignment to them of the right to employ steam on the waters of Lake Champlain.

“Legislative aid was again invoked, and an act was passed directing peremptorily the allowance of an injunction on the prayer of the State grantees, and the seizure of any hostile boat at the commencement of the suit.  Litigation was thus effectually arrested in New York, though by an arbitrary and unconstitutional enactment, and the waters of the State remained in the exclusive possession of Fulton and his partner during the lifetime of the former.  A similar controversy with Colonel Aaron Ogden, of New Jersey, was compromised by advantageous concessions, which converted the opponent of the monopoly into its firmest friend, and left him many years afterward the defeated party in the famous suit of Gibbons and Ogden, in the Supreme Court of the United States.”