Transportation Revolution. In an 1817 congressional address calling for federal support for a national system of roads and canals, South Carolina's John C. Calhoun noted the potential advantages to American business of such a system of internal improvements: "An article, to command a price, must not only be useful but must be the subject of demand; and the better the means of commercial intercourse the larger the sphere of demand." Over the next three decades Americans underwent what historians have come to call a "Transportation Revolution." Between 1815 and 1840 state governments and private investors built more than three thousand miles of canals, including the monumental Erie (finished in 1825), which reduced average freight costs from Buffalo to New York from about twenty cents a ton-mile to two cents. At the same time steamboats began to open the nation's river system to inexpensive upriver travel. The steamboat quickly accelerated trade on the...