Art and Commerce in Jacksonian America: The Steamboat Albany Collection

Unlike later nineteenth-century American artists and writers who feared that business would corrupt what they wanted to think of as the purity of art, early nineteenth-century artists like Morse and Dunlap were still excited by the romance of the emergent capitalist marketplace and looked at entrepreneurs like the Stevenses as visionaries creating a brave new commercial world. In an endnote to his 1827 speech, Morse described the twelve most important art collections in New York, devoting more than a page to a detailed account of the Albany paintings. Morse reserved his warmest praise for the Stevenses because their commissions seemed to promise that economic development would create new markets for art in which artists could avoid the demeaning dependency fostered by aristocratic forms of patronage. As Morse put it in his November 1826 letter to his mother, he considered the steamboat project "a new and noble channel for the encouragement of painting, and in such an enterprise and in such company I shall do my best." [19]

Art and Commerce

In their accounts of the steamboat commissions, both Morse and Durand suggested that the Stevenses were motivated by a patriotic desire to support native artists and elevate public taste. I see no reason to doubt that the Stevenses believed themselves to be doing good. But public service can be good business. The history of the Stevenses' transportation operations makes clear that the creation of the Albany collection was part of a carefully conceived business strategy designed to guarantee the success of their new boat by establishing it as the most refined and desirable one on the Hudson River.

When the Stevenses built and furnished the Albany they were expanding their transportation businesses into the lucrative Hudson River market. In 1811, the New York State legislature had granted Robert R. Livingston and his partner Robert Fulton a twenty-year monopoly on steam transportation on the Hudson River. Unwilling to contest the Livingston-Fulton monopoly, the Stevenses had turned their attention farther south. By the early 1820s, Colonel John Stevens and his sons John Cox Stevens, Robert Livingston Stevens, James Alexander Stevens, and Edwin Augustus Stevens had created a transportation empire that controlled most of the passenger traffic between New York and Philadelphia. Family businesses included ferries linking Manhattan with New Jersey, the dominant steamboat lines on both the Raritan and Delaware Rivers, and stagecoach lines along the turnpike roads linking the Raritan with the Delaware. [20]

Rapid economic growth in the Northeast in the years following the War of 1812 increased both the volume of passenger travel on the Hudson River and the value of the Livingston-Fulton monopoly. Competitors eager to break the monopoly turned to the federal courts for relief. In 1824, the Supreme Court of the United States in the landmark case of Gibbons v. Ogden overturned the monopoly, ruling that New York State had infringed on Congress's authority to regulate interstate commerce. Protected by its monopoly, the Livingston and Fulton company had failed to invest in the larger and faster boats that might have enabled it to make more money by selling greater numbers of less expensive tickets. Instead, it had kept fares high and abandoned the lower ends of the transportation market to slower and less reliable sailing packets. After the Supreme Court decision, new companies immediately began to operate more up-to-date steamboats on the Hudson. Unable to compete, the Livingston-Fulton Company went out of business in 1826. [21]