Robert Fulton, a Biography

In the 100 years after Robert Fulton's death in 1815, biographers produced several accounts of his life. All were largely admiring of his far-reaching achievements, mechanical and intellectual, one to the point of obsequiousness (Thurston, 1878). ( See www.history.rochester.edu/steam for two of them, Thurston and Dickinson, 1913.) Then, after a gap of 60 years, Cynthia Philip provided a different picture of Fulton in "Robert Fulton: A Biography" (1985), which dealt in far greater depth and detail with his personal and business life -- and that paints a picture of a promoter who engages in double-dealing, industrial blackmail and even treason. For the thoroughness of its biographical research, Philip's is the essential Fulton biography now extant. It was followed 15 or so years later by Kirkpatrick Sale's shorter and less formal account ("The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream," 2001), which sought to put Fulton's accomplishments in a broader perspective and so shifted the balance back somewhat toward the positive. But not a lot, since the narrative essentially reflects Philip's account. The evolution of the view of Fulton is understandable: To the 19th Century, his achievements were real and palpable; the use of steam power to move people and goods revolutionized transportation and opened the American West (then comprising the land over the Alleghenies), as Kirkpatrick notes; its impact was as great, if less obviously, in a myriad other applications as well. But to the late 20th Century, all those developments are taken for granted or are long forgotten: Steam locomotives no longer move Americans; airplanes do. So today, there's far more room to examine Fulton's life critically. But there's a cost to lost context. The weakness of both Philip's and Sale's accounts is that they are biography, not history: They offer too little perspective to evaluate Fulton personal peccadilloes or intellectual contributions. Was his towering drive to enrich himself and benefit mankind an individual trait, or was it a motivation shared by ambitious men of the age? Were his erratic business relationships a personal fault, or did they reflect the conduct of entrepreneurship of the times? Were his calculations of the benefits of canal construction (an early Fulton passion) a sign of his genius or a common device of canal promoters? Without that kind of background, it's hard for the reader to sort out whether Robert Fulton was really the scoundrel he sometimes seems in the modern biographies or the unequivocal benefactor to mankind of an earlier era that 19th Century biographers depict.