The works which have hitherto almost wholly occupied, and still chiefly
occupy, the attention of statesmen and business men in the United
States, are those designed to form communications between the East
and the West. There are on the Atlantic coast four principal towns,
which long strove with each other for the supremacy; namely, Boston,
New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. All four aimed to secure the
command of the commerce of the new States which are springing up in
the fertile regions of the West; and they have sustained the struggle
with different degrees of success, but always with a rare spirit of
intelligence. They have not, however, been equally favoured in respect
to natural advantages. Boston is too far north; she has no river
which permits her to stretch her arms far toward the West, and she is
surrounded by a hilly country, which throws great obstacles in the
way of rapid communication, and makes all works designed to promote
it expensive. Philadelphia and Baltimore are shut up by ice almost
every winter, and this obstruction is, on the part of the latter,[BG]
a drawback from the other advantages of her position, her greater
nearness to the Ohio, her more central latitude, and the beauty of
her bay, which is above 250 miles in length, and receives numberless
streams, as the Susquehanna, Potomac, Patuxent, Rappahannock, &c.
Philadelphia is badly placed; Penn was led astray by the beauty of the
Schuylkill and the Delaware; he thought that the broad plain spread
out between their waters to the width of nearly three miles, would
afford an admirable site for a city, whose streets should be run
with regularity, and whose warehouses, easy of access, would permit
thousands of vessels to load and unload at once. He forgot to secure
for his city a great hydrographical basin, capable of consuming the
merchandise which it should import, and of sending it in return the
products of its own labour, and he neglected to make an examination of
the Delaware, which he took for a great river, but which, unluckily is
not so. If he had founded the city of Brotherly Love on the banks of
the Susquehanna, it might have maintained a long struggle against New
York.
New York is, then, the queen of the Atlantic coast. This city stands on
a long, narrow island, between two rivers (the North River and the East
River); ships of any burden and in any numbers may lie at the wharves;
the harbour is very rarely closed by ice; it can be entered by small
vessels with all winds, and by the largest ships at all times except
when the wind is from the northwest. New York has beside the invaluable
advantage of standing upon a river for which some great flood has dug
out a bed through the primitive mountains, uniformly deep, without
rocks, without rapids, almost without a slope, and cutting through the
most solid mass of the Alleghanies at right angles. The tide, slight as
it is on this coast, flows up the Hudson to Troy, 160 miles from its
mouth; and such is the nature of its bed, that whale-ships are fitted
out at Poughkeepsie and Hudson, of which the former is 75 and the
latter 116 miles above New York, and that, except in the lowest stage
of the water, vessels of 9 feet draft can go up to Albany and Troy, in
any tide.
New York possesses in addition great advantages in respect to the
character of its population. Originally a Dutch colony, conquered by
the English, and lying in the neighborhood of New England, she presents
a mixture of the solid qualities of the Saxon race, of the Dutch
phlegm, and the enterprising shrewdness of the Puritans. This mixed
breed understands admirably how to turn to account all the advantages
which nature has bestowed on the city.
Hardly was the war of independence at an end, when the great men whose
patriotism and courage had brought it to a happy close, filled with
ideas of the wealth yet buried in the bosom of the then uninhabited
West, began to form plans for rendering it accessible by canals. If it
is true, that Prussia, in the time of Voltaire, resembled two garters
stretched out over Germany, the United States in the time of Washington
and Franklin, and it is only fifty years since, might be likened to a
narrow riband thrown upon the sandy shore of the Atlantic. Washington
at that time projected the canal which has since been begun according
to the plans of Gen. Bernard, and which seeks the West by following up
the Potomac; but from want of capital and experienced engineers, what
in our day has become a long and fine canal, was then merely a series
of side-cuts around the Little Falls and Great Falls of the Potomac.
At the same time, the Pennsylvanians made some unsuccessful efforts
and spent considerable sums, in ineffectual attempts to render the
Schuylkill navigable, and to connect it with the Susquehanna. In the
State of New York, some short cuts, some locks and sluices, were then
the only prelude to greater schemes.[BH] The works undertaken at that
time and during the fifteen first years of the present century could
not be completed, or failed in the expected results. One work only was
successfully executed, the Middlesex Canal, which extends from Boston
to the River Merrimack at Chelmsford, a distance of 27 miles.[BI]
The war of 1812 found the United States without canals, and almost
without good roads; their only means of intercourse were the sea,
their bays, and the rivers that flow into them. Once blockaded by the
English fleets, not only could they hold no communication with Europe
and India, but they could not keep up an intercourse among themselves,
between State and State, and between city and city, between New York
and Philadelphia for instance. Their commerce was annihilated, and
the sources of their capital dried up. Bankruptcy smote them like a
destroying angel, sparing not a family.