Our own horse history may be said to begin at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Treaty of Peace with Great Britain was signed in Paris, July 3, 1783, and the British troops left November 25. The population of the United States at that time was less than four millions, about the number of people settled in and around New York City to-day.
The carriage roads of Boston were unpaved; and marked off by a line of posts and gutters, and laid with ill-assorted pebbles. The horseman who rode too fast over these pebbles, and thus threatened their disarrangement, was fined three shillings and fourpence.
The mail was carried between Boston and New York thrice a week in summer, and twice a week in winter, taking six days in summer and often nine days in winter, and all carried in one pair of saddle-bags. The post-riders knitted mittens and stockings as their horses jogged along over the well-known roads.
The very first coach and four in New England began running in 1744, and the first coach and four between New York and Philadelphia, the two most populous cities in the colonies, was put on in 1756 and accomplished the journey in three days.
Two stages and twelve horses carried all the goods and passengers between New York and Boston, doing forty miles a day in summer, and scarce twenty-five miles a day in winter. Josiah Quincy, writing at this time, tells us that he once spent thirty days in his own coach going from Boston to Washington.
The streets of New York were so badly paved that Benjamin Franklin was wont to say that you could distinguish a New York man in Philadelphia by the awkward way in which he shuffled over the smoother pavements of the latter city.
There were but three roads out of New York in those days: the Knightsbridge road, a continuation of the Bowery Lane, which went to Knightsbridge and thence along the river to Albany; the old Boston post-road, which started from the neighborhood of what is now Madison Square, thence to Harlem, and then east toward Boston; and the so-called middle road, direct to Harlem.
In the southernmost states there were no public conveyances of any kind except a stage-coach between Charleston and Savannah.
It is only one hundred years ago, only the span of two lives, and the population has grown from four millions to eighty millions; the gross receipts from postage from $320,000 (the gross receipts for the year ending October 1, 1801) to over $121,000,000 in 1902. The total estimate for the expenses of the city of New York in 1800 was for $130,000.
These were the days when the fashionable assemblies were advertised to "open with a Passe-Pie and end with the Sarabund à l'Espagnole"; days when eight bags of cotton were seized by the officers of the customs in England, because it was claimed no such enormous amount of cotton could have come from America; days when, so writes Josiah Quincy at any rate, the minister alone had white bread, "for brown bread gave him heart-burn, and he could not preach upon it;" and it was some fifty years later even than this, before we had the wheel-plough of iron, the reaper and binder, the drill, the hay-rake, and the corn-cutter.