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The 300-year American entrepreneurial miracle of the modern age.
A miracle that brought the world the steamboat.
The revolver.
The sewing machine.
Blue jeans.
The telephone.
The light bulb.
The electrification of the world.
Air conditioning.
Air planes.
Refrigeration.
The photocopy machine.
Personal computers.
The internet.
Social media.
And e-commerce.
But the American entrepreneurial miracle of the modern age
is also a story of individual men and women who made America great
and forever changed the world.
This 14-part series brings together
the remarkable history of American business excellence.
Economic world dominance.
An individual achievement.
Hello, I'm Dr. Alphonse Keesley.
During America's first 200 years,
13 colonies were founded.
Industriousness and ingenuity ruled the land.
A revolution was fought and won.
And the foundation was laid for America to become the world's
greatest industrial nation.
These stories and more in the first program of
American entrepreneurial genius.
It's fascinating to note that the first English settlement
along the North American coast was a business venture.
From New York City, the global financial capital of the world,
to the new industrial heartland in the Midwest and south,
to the Great Plains Titans of Agribusiness,
to shale oil fracking in the energy-rich Rocky Mountain Region,
to the information technology explosion along the West Coast,
America in the 21st century defines and embodies what innovation
and entrepreneurship means.
This heritage can be traced back to the first permanent English
settlement in North America,
Jamestown Colony.
And one man who was arguably America's first entrepreneur,
John Rolfi.
At the start of the 17th century,
the outlook for English colonization in North America was bleak.
Her first efforts at Sutherland failed when Sir Walter Raleigh's
Rowan O'Colony vanished into thin air in 1590.
Indeed, England was on the brink of being shut out of North America
altogether.
When a daring and innovative business idea,
hatched by London merchants, changed the course of history.
In 1606, these merchants formed a joint stock company
in order to spread the financial risk and a colonizing venture to Virginia.
Calling themselves the Virginia Company of London,
the merchants profited or lost according to the amount of shares they owned.
By spreading the risk,
they could invest without having to gamble their entire fortunes.
So brilliant was this novel scheme,
that it would set the stage for English colonization in North America,
and ultimately become the basis of American life,
commerce, and even government.
In December 1606, the London Company sent 100 settlers,
all men, on ships like these,
to make the hazardous journey to the New World.
The following May, these colonists sailed up the James River
and established Jamestown.
After early difficulties in 1612,
one enterprising individual, John Rolfi,
found a way to make a profit.
He knew that tobacco, a product grown in the New World,
was sweeping through Europe, creating smoked shops.
By adapting a Caribbean island strain of tobacco to Virginia's climate,
he produced a profit.
As a result, the Virginia Company was able to save its investment
and embark on a new round of immigration to the colony.
The Joint Stock Company of Virginia became the model for English colonization,
ultimately leading to control of the North American continent
into the founding of the United States of America.
In short, the Virginia Company's incredible economic success story
would define one half of the American character,
in the same way that colonial growth towards self-government
would define the other half.
We shall see how the availability of raw materials and commerce
drove the nation towards a shared culture of self-reliance and innovation,
two factors that would eventually lead to separation from England.
The Soul of the Great American Experiment may be principles in body than the Constitution,
but the engine that has always driven it has been economics.
And in the 18th century, economics meant trade and shipping.
As the 1700s dawned, the American colonies had already moved
from a survival economy based solely on agriculture
to one which strongly included commerce.
Americans were engaged in trading throughout the world.
They participated heavily in the highly profitable triangle trade.
Saltfish, horses, and oxen shipped to the Caribbean
and returned to New England as molasses, used in making rum.
They shipped the rum to West Africa for slaves and transported the slaves
to North and South America from war raw materials which they carried to England,
returning at last to the colonies with manufactured goods.
The economic relationship between Britain and her colonies was largely one way.
The colonies were expected to exploit the available raw materials
and ship them to Britain so that her manufacturers could become rich selling
and finished goods to the colonists and the rest of the world.
Eventually, this one-way street would become the major factor driving the American colonists
to revolution that.
But rebellion may not have happened if the Americans had not begun the process of self-reliance.
One defining step in this process was the designing, constructing,
and launching of the first American schooner in Gloucester,
Massachusetts in 1713 by Captain Andrew Robinson.
Legend has it that a bystander to the launching said,
"See how she schoons," meaning that the ship skipped across the waves like a stone.
And the good captain replied, "Then the schooner let her be."
Schooners are defined as vessels with two or more masts with the main masts taller than the four masts.
Robinson schooner, faster than European commercial ships,
could compete more economically with their British, French, and Dutch counterparts.
This event began two courses that helped define the nation.
Besides developing the northeast fisheries still active today,
the schooner accelerated trade between the colonies up and down the coast.
Thus began a process of constantly improving the interconnectedness of the nation,
from national roads and turnpikes, to canals connecting the interior waterways,
to covered wagon trains bringing the east and west together,
to the railroad boom, and to the modern interstate highways of today.
♪
Looking out on the vast networked of roads that span America in the 21st century,
it is hard to imagine that the primary means of land transportation
for the early English colonists was walking, walking along Indian trails.
If the English colonies of the 18th century were to be comical, hese of unit,
they needed to be connected.
The first intercolonial transportation was by boat up and down the coast,
but by 1711, a postal road had been completed between New York and Boston.
There was a growing recognition that the flow of letters and communication
between the colonies was absolutely necessary for their survival.
The time it took for a letter in 1717 to travel between Boston and Williamsburg, Virginia,
was four weeks in good weather, and eight weeks in the winter.
Eventually ground transportation other than by foot or horse would be necessary
to carry goods and people throughout the colonies.
The first step towards this goal was taken when a New Jersey newspaper at the Mercury
ran this ad.
Gentlemen, merchants, tradesmen, and travelers,
Solomon Smith and James Moore keep two stage wagons intending to go from Burlington
to Amboy and back.
Thus the first stagecoach in 1732 began operation.
The lion connected people traveling from Philadelphia by boat to Burlington, New Jersey,
they're boarding the stagecoach traveling to Amboy, New Jersey,
and then by boat once again to New York City.
Or they could travel from New York to Philadelphia in the same fashion.
Stagecoach is another horse-drawn wagon's demanded better roads,
and by the time of the revolution the system of highways was well enough
established to be used as a reliable means of transportation between the colonies.
Thus helping to surmount the insularity of the colonies and knit them together
into an American country.
The stagecoach went on to be glorified in the 19th century and was finally replaced
by the real rulers.
As the 18th century dawned, American and European immigrants were on the move.
No longer was life in the 13 colonies based on mere survival.
A full-fledged economy was developed.
An economy whose focus shifted as settlers moved inland from small port villages
and subsistence farming near the coast to land settlement in the continent's
interior and growing cities.
To facilitate this expansion, a new means of transportation
to carry large volumes of goods and people throughout the colonial interior
became paramount.
In 1750, an ingenious two-part solution came from the German-speaking people
who settled in Pennsylvania.
Conveniently, the Conestoga wagon and the flatboat made their appearance in that year.
Although British immigrants dominated the limelight in the American colonies,
there was, at the same time, a constant floor of northern Europeans, mostly Germans,
who settled in Pennsylvania.
Like the British, the Germans often arrived as an entire family.
By 1750 was generally agreed they were the best farmers in the new world.
Their industriousness meant they needed more efficient means of transporting their
surplus goods to more distant markets.
For land transportation, the Conestoga, a massive covered wagon, was the answer.
Developed in the Pennsylvania County of Conestoga,
it was built like a boat and could carry up to three tons of goods,
especially suited to the uneven colonial roads of the period.
By the time of the American Revolution, over ten thousand of these vehicles existed.
By the second half of the 18th century,
all the good land of the original colonial settlements had been occupied.
New and distant lands west of the mountains beckoned.
In 1750 in the same Pennsylvania colony, a German Jacob Yoder designed the flatboat.
This water vehicle carried huge amounts of goods and entire families downriver.
Americans now had the means to push ever westward along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.
Within three generations, land covering eight states from Wisconsin to Alabama would be suddenly.
Eventually, the flatboat would give way to the steamboat, which had the advantage of being able to go upriver.
The Conestoga wagon faced competition for carrying goods as America's canal system
arose in the first part of the 19th century.
Later, the wagon evolved into the smaller prairie schooner
and carried pioneers along the Oregon and Western trails.
The mighty American iron and steel industry that cast the machines
which carried the United States through the Industrial Revolution
and forged the nation into the preeminent world power of today
can trace its origins back to small backyard forages in the 18th century.
By 1750, every colony north of Virginia was dotted with small iron works.
At the center of the colonial iron industry was Pennsylvania,
with over 70 iron plantations, company towns dedicated to the manufacture of iron products.
Skilled craftsmen turned iron into hardware items equal to any in the world,
sides, pots, knives, axes, kettles, and perhaps most importantly, rifles.
Long rifles that would be put into the hands of every frontiersman to defend his land from Indian attack
and every minute man to wage war on the British.
From the inception of the colonies, the need to provide their own industry
was a characteristic of the American experience.
Leaders realized the colonies needed to be independent of the mother country,
and one way to do this was the manufacture of ironware.
Early on, the Massachusetts colony paid a bounty for the discovery of ironing.
However, it was the building of a forge in 1760 in the iron-rich,
fuel-kill valley of Pennsylvania that would mark the true beginnings of the American iron industry.
Here existed abundant iron ore, water, and timber to fuel the furnaces of iron manufacture.
From the British perspective, the manufacturing of iron into useful products
was not the way colonial trade should work.
The colonies were supposed to send raw materials to the mother country
in exchange for manufactured goods.
Only now, they were creating finished iron goods, not only for themselves, but also for world export.
The result was the idling of thousands of British iron workers.
Consequently, in 1750, Britain's Parliament passed the Iron Act
which essentially forbid the building of new ironforters in the colonies,
while at the same time encouraging the expert of pig iron to Britain.
The act was doomed to failure, especially since the British would soon rely heavily upon American manufacture
during the French and Indian War.
But the act pointed out the growing separation of interest between the colonies and Britain.
In the last part of the 18th century, the Delaware Valley in Pennsylvania
became the richest manufacturing center in North America.
Although nearly all the colonies had manufacturers of some kind,
Pennsylvania's Delaware Valley, because of the abundance of iron and coal,
outstripped the others with their production.
The label "Land of Opportunity" might seem a trite phrase to those of us looking back 300 years,
but the greatest industrial nation on the planet rose above the manufacturers of Britain and Europe,
exactly because Opportunity did exist in this wild, untamed land of the 18th century.
In the next century, that opportunity would be exploited by men like Andrew Carnegie,
who organized steel production into a monopoly that became the foundation of American industry well into the 20th century.
Driving the economy in everything from transportation to manufacturing.
In the 21st century, it is humbling and informative to note that America's vast fortune
and industrial might descend it from small backyard forties and furnaces 300 years ago.
By the time the Revolutionary War started, the colonies were teeming with skilled farmers, artisans and craftsmen,
but a second class of business skills had also arisen.
Competition and the promise of upward mobility had produced a flourishing merchant class,
men such as John Hancock, Paul Revere, and Robert Morris would be called upon to finance the American Revolution.
Doing so was as great a risk for them as for any soldier.
Next, the story of one woman who accepted that risk, Mary Catherine Goddard.
The American War for Independence.
The American Revolution.
A revolution that was as much about the freedom to do business as it was about individual liberty.
A freedom to carry out business in a distinctly American way.
American entrepreneurialism.
In 1777, at the beginning of the American Revolution, when American chances for victory were at their bleakest,
one businesswoman, Mary Catherine Goddard, epitomized that unique American entrepreneurial spirit.
Since the founding of the colonies, American colonists had long suffered under British laws,
keeping them from doing business in a new kind of American entrepreneurial style.
The repression started with the colonies themselves.
English mercantile enterprises that funneled profits back to British investors,
leaving only leftovers for the settlers.
In 1651, England instituted the Navigation Acts that severely restricted
the way American merchants could trade with the rest of the world.
Then in the 18th century, Britain instituted a series of harsh measures
that hampered American colonists setting up their own businesses.
The 1733 Molasses Act forced American traders to buy molasses in sugar, only from the British West Indies.
Seventeen years later, Britain's Parliament once again ignored colonial economic interests with the Iron Act,
which banned the building of new ironworks in the colonies.
In 1765, Parliament passed the most hated piece of legislation of all.
The Stamp Act placed a tax on everything from newspapers to legal and commercial documents,
affecting colonial businessmen where it counted most in their pocketbooks.
For more than 100 years, these acts demonstrated to American colonists
that Britain was not concerned with their economic interests.
By 1776, the time was right for American businessmen and merchants
to stand up for their right to do business in their own way, unrestricted by British laws.
Printer and bookseller Mary Catherine Goddard did just that.
Mary Goddard was born in Connecticut in 1738.
The daughter of a Postmaster, she would follow in her father's footsteps
and in 1775 became the Postmaster of the Baltimore Post Office.
At the same time her brother, William, appointed her publisher and printer of the Maryland Journal,
a revolutionary newspaper.
When in 1777, the Continental Congress called for publishers to print the Declaration of Independence,
Mary Goddard offered her press.
Though a reasonable offense against the British Crown,
Goddard put her life and her business on the line to do it
and printed the Goddard broadside, the first copy of the American Declaration of Independence
with the names of the signatories, including John Hancock.
Witnessing the rise of America's business in entrepreneurial might,
Mary Catherine Goddard continued to sell books, stationary,
and dry goods until her death in 1816.
With the Revolutionary War over, no one person set the new nation on a path
to becoming an industrial power more than Alexander Hamilton.
♪♪
As the last decade of the 18th century opened,
America's colonial period had come to an end.
The new nation had a remarkable constitution,
and its growing population was expanding westward into the lush Ohio Valley.
But one crucial question remained.
What kind of economic structure would the United States embrace?
One person almost single-handedly provided the answer.
He was Alexander Hamilton.
On September 11, 1789, George Washington named Alexander Hamilton
the nation's first Secretary of the Treasury.
For the next six years, Hamilton would define the country's economic
and fiscal policies and create its financial institutions.
Hamilton began quickly, and in 1790 launched an ambitious plan
for handling the nation's debt, which included assumption
by the federal government of the state's war costs.
His second step was to create the Bank of the United States,
which became the mechanism for establishing credit for the country.
Next, in 1791, and through the tireless campaigning of Noel Webster,
under Hamilton's guidance, Congress passed a copyright and patent act
to protect American inventors.
In that same year, Hamilton presented a report to Congress,
which urged tariffs on foreign imports to protect American industry and agriculture.
He also recommended that the federal government support road and canal construction
to provide the infrastructure necessary to enhance the economy.
Finally, in 1792, the United States Mint was established
and a uniformed coin it's produced.
As a corollary to Hamilton's federal plans,
in 1792, the New York Stock Exchange was organized by friends of Hamilton
to fund new business.
Hamilton envisioned a United States diverse in manufacturing
and, in his own words,
independent of foreign nations for military and other essential supply.
By the time he left the Treasury in 1795,
the country had taken all the steps necessary to join the Industrial Revolution.
Hamilton's vision would win out over the Jeffersonian agricultural utopia,
and America would go on to become the greatest industrial power in the world.
Ironically, Alexander Hamilton would lose his life over these values.
In 1804, he died as a result of gunshot wounds inflicted
in a duel with his old political nemesis, Aaron Burr.
In the next program of American entrepreneurial genius,
the nation driven by invention and entrepreneurship
rapidly begins to industrialize.
Thanks for watching. I'm Dr. Alphonse Keesley.
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