What made the USA so powerful?

                                                    What made the USA so powerful?

There's one item that I think everyone missed in their catalogs of natural advantages:  ports and rivers

I did a stint as an intern at Stratford; one of the things I learned there that boggled my mind was that, if

  combine the Mississippi river basin and the intracoastal waterways on the Gulf Coast and eastern seaboard, the U.S. has more miles of navigable inland waterways than the rest of the world combined!  [source] 

Yes, you read that right.  Not just more than any other country.  More than ALL of them.  And the consequences of that were and still are enormous.  Not only that:  the East Coast alone also has more major ports than the entire rest of the Western Hemisphere.

Waterways are still, to this day, the best and cheapest kind of transportation infrastructure - even today, with modern trains and trucks, it costs at least 10 times as much to transport goods by land as it does by water - and the US got huge amounts of that transportation infrastructure almost from the start, mostly for free or at very low cost.  When you look back at US history, the role that these ports and waterways played was huge.  The Charles, Connecticut, Hudson, Delaware, Potomac, Roanoke, and Savannah rivers, among others, played crucial roles in settling and growing the original colonies.  The fact that even the mighty British Navy couldn't possibly blockade all the Colonial ports was THE key to the success of the Revolution.  And of course the entire Mississippi basin with all its tributaries is unmatched anywhere and still carries most of the heartland's trade with the world.

If you raise the center of the continent up and throw a dozen waterfalls and rapids onto each of the rivers in the Mississippi basin, the history of North America would have been radically different.  All that rich interior land that Dan Holliday eloquently described would have been worth only a tiny fraction of what it was and still is worth without a good cheap way to get that produce to the sea.  The river system was what made it possible to conquer, settle, and hold a huge nation even before railroads, and it was the multiplier that made the U.S. rich long before it "should" have been.

Rivers and ports.  We got ‘em!

Source : Quora