The Conquest Of The Alleghanies
The two great thoroughfares of American commerce in the first half of
the nineteenth century were the Cumberland Road and the Erie Canal. The
first generation of the new century witnessed the great burst of
population into the West which at once gave Ohio, Indiana, Illinois,
Michigan, and Wisconsin a place of national importance which they have
never relinquished. So far as pathways of commerce contributed to the
creation of this veritable new republic in the Middle West, the
Cumberland Road and the Erie Canal, coöperating respectively with Ohio
River and Lake Erie steamboats, were of the utmost importance. The
national spirit, said to have arisen from the second war with England,
had its clearest manifestation in the throwing of a great macadamized
roadway across the Alleghanies to the Ohio River and the digging of the
Erie Canal through the swamps and wildernesses of New York.
Both of these pathways were essentially the fruition of the doctrine to
which Washington gave wide circulation in his letter to Harrison in
1784, wherein he pictured the vision of a vast Republic united by
commercial chains. Both were essentially Western enterprises. The
highway was built to fulfil the promise which the Government had made in
1802 to use a portion of the money accruing from the sale of public
lands in Ohio in order to connect that young State with Atlantic waters.
It was proposed to build the canal, according to one early plan, with
funds to be obtained by the sale of land in Michigan. So firmly did the
promoters believe in the national importance of this project that
subscriptions, according to another plan, were to be solicited as far
afield as Vermont in the North and Kentucky in the Southwest. All that
Washington had hoped for, and all that Aaron Burr is supposed to have
been hopeless of, were epitomized in these great works of internal
improvement. They bespoke coöperation of the highest existing types of
loyalty, optimism, financial skill, and engineering ability.
Yet, on the other hand, the contrasts between these undertakings were
great. The two enterprises, one the work of the nation and the other
that of a single State, were practically contemporaneous and were
therefore constantly inviting comparison. The Cumberland Road was, for
its day, a gigantic government undertaking involving problems of
finance, civil engineering, eminent domain, state rights, local
favoritism, and political machination. Its purpose was noble and its
successful construction a credit to the nation; but the paternalism to
which it gave rise and the conflicts which it precipitated in Congress
over questions of constitutionality were remembered soberly for a
century. The Erie Canal, after its projectors had failed to obtain
national aid, became the undertaking of one commonwealth conducted, amid
countless doubts and jeers, to a conclusion unbelievably successful. As
a result many States, foregoing Federal aid, attempted to duplicate the
successful feat of New York. In this respect the northern canal
resembled the Lancaster Turnpike and tempted scores of States and
corporations to expenditures which were unwise in circumstances less
favorable than those of the fruitful and strategic Empire State.
In the conception of both the roadway and the canal, it should be noted,
the old idea of making use of navigable rivers still persisted. The act
foreshadowing the Cumberland Road, passed in 1802, called for "making
public roads leading from the navigable waters emptying into the
Atlantic, to the Ohio, to said State Ohio and through the same"; and
Hawley's original plan was to build the Erie Canal from Utica to Buffalo
using the Mohawk from Utica to the Hudson.
Historic Cumberland, in Maryland, was chosen by Congress as the eastern
terminus of the great highway which should bind Ohio to the Old
Thirteen. Commissioners were appointed in 1806 to choose the best route
by which the great highway could reach the Ohio River between
Steubenville, Ohio and the mouth of Grave Creek; but difficulties of
navigation in the neighborhood of the Three Sister Islands near
Charlestown, or Wellsburg, West Virginia, led to the choice of Wheeling,
farther down, as a temporary western terminus.
The route selected was an excellent compromise between the long standing
rival claims of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia to the trade of the
West. If Baltimore and Alexandria were to be better served than
Philadelphia, the advantage was slight; and Pennsylvania gained
compensation, ere the State gave the National Government permission to
build the road within its limits, by dictating that it should pass
through Uniontown and Washington. In this way Pennsylvania obtained,
without cost, unrivaled advantages for a portion of the State which
might otherwise have been long neglected.
The building of the road, however satisfactory in the main, was not
undertaken without arousing many sectional and personal hopes and
prejudices and jealousies, of which the echoes still linger in local
legends today. Land-owners, mine-owners, factory-owners, innkeepers and
countless townsmen and villagers anxiously watched the course of the
road and were bitterly disappointed if the new sixty-four-foot
thoroughfare did not pass immediately through their property. On the
other hand, promoters of toll and turnpike companies, who had promising
schemes and long lists of shareholders, were far from eager to have
their property taken for a national road. No one believed that, if it
proved successful, it would be the only work of its kind, and everywhere
men looked for the construction of government highways out of the
overflowing wealth of the treasury within the next few years.
In April, 1811, the first contracts were let for building the first ten
miles of the road from its eastern terminus and were completed in 1812.
More contracts were let in 1812, 1813, and 1815. Even in those days of
war when the drain on the national treasury was excessive, over a
quarter of a million dollars was appropriated for the construction of
the road. Onward it crawled, through the beautiful Cumberland gateway of
the Potomac, to Big Savage and Little Savage Mountains, to Little Pine
Run (the first "Western" water), to Red Hill (later called "Shades of
Death" because of the gloomy forest growth), to high-flung Negro
Mountain at an elevation of 2325 feet, and thence on to the
Youghiogheny, historic Great Meadows, Braddock's Grave, Laurel Hill,
Uniontown, and Brownsville, where it crossed the Monongahela. Thence, on
almost a straight line, it sped by way of Washington to Wheeling. Its
average cost was upwards of thirteen thousand dollars a mile from the
Potomac to the Ohio. The road was used in 1817, and in another year the
mail coaches of the United States were running from Washington to
Wheeling, West Virginia. Within five years one of the five commission
houses doing business at Wheeling is said to have handled over a
thousand wagons carrying freight of nearly two tons each.
The Cumberland Road at once leaped into a position of leadership, both
in volume of commerce and in popularity, and held its own for two famous
decades. The pulse of the nation beat to the steady throb of trade along
its highway. Maryland at once stretched out her eager arms, along stone
roads, through Frederick and Hagerstown to Cumberland, and thus formed a
single route from the Ohio to Baltimore. Great stagecoach and freight
lines were soon established, each patronizing its own stage house or
wagon stand in the thriving towns along the road. The primitive box
stage gave way to the oval or football type with curved top and bottom,
and this was displaced in turn by the more practical Concord coach of
national fame. The names of the important stagecoach companies were
quite as well known, a century ago, as those of our great railways
today. Chief among them were the National, Good Intent, June Bug, and
Pioneer lines. The coaches, drawn by four and sometimes six horses, were
usually painted in brilliant colors and were named after eminent
statesmen. The drivers of these gay chariots were characters quite as
famous locally as the personages whose names were borne by the coaches.
Westover and his record of forty-five minutes for the twenty miles
between Uniontown and Brownsville, and "Red" Bunting, with his drive of
a hundred and thirty-one miles in twelve hours with the declaration of
war against Mexico, will be long famous on the curving stretches of the
Cumberland Road.
Although the freight and express traffic of those days lacked the
picturesqueness of the passenger coaches, nothing illustrates so
conclusively what the great road meant to an awakening West as the long
lines of heavy Conestogas and rattling express wagons which raced at
"unprecedented" speed across hill and vale. Searight, the local
historian of the road, describes these large, broad-wheeled wagons
covered with white canvas as
visible all the day long, at every point, making the highway look more
like a leading avenue of a great city than a road through rural
districts.... I have staid over night with William Cheets on Nigger
[Negro] Mountain when there were about thirty six-horse teams in the
wagon yard, a hundred Kentucky mules in an adjoining lot, a thousand
hogs in their enclosures, and as many fat cattle in adjoining fields.
The music made by this large number of hogs eating corn on a frosty
night I shall never forget. After supper and attention to the teams, the
wagoners would gather in the bar-room and listen to the music on the
violin furnished by one of their fellows, have a Virginia hoe-down, sing
songs, tell anecdotes, and hear the experiences of drivers and drovers
from all points of the road, and, when it was all over, unroll their
beds, lay them down on the floor before the bar-room fire side by side,
and sleep with their feet near the blaze as soundly as under the
parental roof.
Meanwhile New York, the other great rival for Western trade, was intent
on its own darling project, the Erie Canal. In 1808, three years before
the building of the Cumberland Road, Joshua Forman offered a bill in
favor of the canal in the Legislature of New York. In plain but
dignified language this document stated that New York possessed "the
best route of communication between the Atlantic and western waters,"
and that it held "the first commercial rank in the United States." The
bill also noted that, while "several of our sister States" were seeking
to secure "the trade of that wide extended country," their natural
advantages were "vastly inferior." Six hundred dollars was the amount
appropriated for a brief survey, and Congress was asked to vote aid for
the construction of the "Buffalo-Utica Canal." The matter was widely
talked about but action was delayed. Doubt as to the best route to be
pursued caused some discussion. If the western terminus were to be
located on Lake Ontario at the mouth of the Oswego, as some advocated,
would produce not make its way to Montreal instead of to New York? In
1810 a new committee was appointed and, though their report favored the
paralleling of the course of the Mohawk and Oswego rivers, their
engineer, James Geddes, gave strength to the party which believed a
direct canal would best serve the interests of the State. It is worth
noting that Livingston and Fulton were added to the committee in 1811.
The hopes of outside aid from Congress and adjacent States met with
disappointment. In vain did the advocates of the canal in 1812 plead
that its construction would promote "a free and general intercourse
between different parts of the United States, tend to the aggrandizement
and prosperity of the country, and consolidate and strengthen the
Union." The plan to have the Government subsidize the canal by vesting
in the State of New York four million acres of Michigan land brought out
a protest from the West which is notable not so much because it records
the opposition of this section as because it illustrates the
shortsightedness of most of the arguments raised against the New York
enterprise. The purpose of the canal, the detractors asserted, was to
build up New York City to the detriment of Montreal, and the navigation
of Lake Ontario, whose beauty they touchingly described, was to be
abandoned for a "narrow, winding obstructed canal ... for an expense
which arithmetic dares not approach." It was, in their minds,
unquestionably a selfish object, and they believed that "both correct
science, and the dictates of patriotism and philanthropy [should] lead
to the adoption of more liberal principles." It was a shortsighted
object, "predicated on the eternal adhesion of the Canadas to England."
It would never give satisfaction since trade would always ignore
artificial and seek natural routes. The attempting of such comparatively
useless projects would discourage worthy schemes, relax the bonds of
Union, and depress the national character. But though these Westerners
thus misjudged the possibilities of the Erie Canal, we must doff our
hats to them for their foresight in suggesting that, instead of aiding
the Erie Canal, the nation ought to build canals at Niagara Falls and
Panama!
The War of 1812 suspended all talk of the canal, but the subject was
again brought up by Judge Platt in the autumn of 1816. With alacrity
strong men came to the aid of the measure. De Witt Clinton's Memorial of
1816 addressed to the State Legislature may well rank with Washington's
letter to Harrison in the documentary history of American commercial
development. It sums up the geographical position of New York with
reference to the Great Lakes and the Atlantic, her relationship to the
West and to Canada, the feasibility of the proposed route from an
engineering standpoint, the timeliness of the moment for such a work of
improvement, the value that the canal would give to the state lands of
the interior, and the trade that it would bring to the towns along its
pathway.
The Erie Canal was born in the Act of April 14, 1817, but the decision
of the Council of Revision, which held the power of veto, was in doubt.
An anecdote related by Judge Platt tends to prove that fear of another
war with England was the straw that broke the camel's back of
opposition. Acting-Governor Taylor, Chief Justice Thompson, Chancellor
Kent, Judge Yates, and Judge Platt composed the Council. The two first
named were open opponents of the measure; Kent, Yates, and Platt were
warm advocates of the project, but one of them doubted if the time was
ripe to undertake it.
Taylor opposed the canal on the ground that the late treaty with England
was a mere truce and that the resources of the State should be husbanded
against renewed war.
"Do you think so, Sir?" Chancellor Kent is said to have asked the
Governor.
"Yes, Sir," was the reported reply. "England will never forgive us for
our victories, and, my word for it, we shall have another war with her
within two years."
The Chancellor rose to his feet with determination and sealed the fate
of the great enterprise in a word.
"If we must have war," he exclaimed, "I am in favor of the canal and I
cast my vote for this bill."
On July 4, 1817, work was formally inaugurated at Rome with simple
ceremonies. Thus the year 1817 was marked by three great undertakings:
the navigation of the Mississippi River upstream and down by steamboats,
the opening of the national road across the Alleghany Mountains, and the
beginning of the Erie Canal. No single year in the early history of the
United States witnessed three such important events in the material
progress of the country.
What days the ancient "Long House of the Iroquois" now saw! The
engineers of the Cumberland Road, now nearing the Ohio River, had
enjoyed the advantage of many precedents and examples; but the
Commissioners of the Erie Canal had been able to study only such crude
examples of canal-building as America then afforded. Never on any
continent had such an inaccessible region been pierced by such a
highway. The total length of the whole network of canals in Great
Britain did not equal that of the waterway which the New Yorkers now
undertook to build. The lack of roads, materials, vehicles, methods of
drilling and efficient business systems was overcome by sheer patience
and perseverance in experiment. The frozen winter roads saved the day by
making it possible to accumulate a proper supply of provisions and
materials. As tools of construction, the plough and scraper with their
greater capacity for work soon supplanted the shovel and the
wheelbarrow, which had been the chief implements for such construction
in Europe. Strange new machinery born of Mother Necessity was now heard
groaning in the dark swamps of New York. These giants, worked by means
of a cable, wheel, and endless screw, were made to hoist green stumps
bodily from the ground and, without the use of axe, to lay trees
prostrate, root and branch. A new plough was fashioned with which a yoke
of oxen could cut roots two inches in thickness well beneath the surface
of the ground.
Handicaps of various sorts wore the patience of commissioners,
engineers, and contractors. Lack of snow during one winter all but
stopped the work by cutting off the source of supplies. Pioneer
ailments, such as fever and ague, reaped great harvests, incapacitated
more than a thousand workmen at one time and for a brief while stopped
work completely.
For the most part, however, work was carried on simultaneously on all
the three great links or sections into which the enterprise was divided.
Local contractors were given preference by the commissioners, and
three-fourths of the work was done by natives of the State. Forward up
the Mohawk by Schenectady and Utica to Rome, thence bending southward to
Syracuse, and from there by way of Clyde, Lyons, and Palmyra, the canal
made its way to the giant viaduct over the Genesee River at Rochester.
Keeping close to the summit level on the dividing ridge between Lake
Ontario streams and the Valley of the Tonawanda, the line ran to
Lockport, where a series of locks placed the canal on the Lake Erie
level, 365 miles from and 564 feet above Albany. By June, 1823, the
canal was completed from Rochester to Schenectady; in October boats
passed into the tidewaters of the Hudson at Albany; and in the autumn of
1825 the canal was formally opened by the passage of a triumphant fleet
from Lake Erie to New York Bay. Here two kegs of lake water were emptied
into the Atlantic, while the Governor of the State of New York spoke
these words:
This solemnity, at this place, on the first arrival of vessels from Lake
Erie, is intended to indicate and commemorate the navigable
communication, which has been accomplished between our Mediterranean
Seas and the Atlantic Ocean, in about eight years, to the extent of more
than four hundred and twenty-five miles, by the wisdom, public spirit,
and energy of the people of the State of New York; and may the God of
the Heavens and the Earth smile most propitiously on this work, and
render it subservient to the best interests of the human race.
Throughout these last seven years, the West was subconsciously getting
ready to meet the East halfway by improving and extending her steamboat
operations. Steamboats were first run on the Great Lakes by enterprising
Buffalo citizens who, in 1818, secured rights from the Fulton-Livingston
monopoly to build the Walk-in-the-Water, the first of the great fleet of
ships that now whiten the inland seas of the United States. Regular
lines of steamboats were now formed on the Ohio to connect with the
Cumberland Road at Wheeling, although the steamboat monopoly threatened
to stifle the natural development of transportation on Western rivers.
The completion of the Erie Canal--coupled with the new appropriation by
Congress for extending the Cumberland Road from the Ohio River to
Missouri and the beginning of the Pennsylvania and the Chesapeake and
Ohio canals, reveal the importance of these concluding days of the first
quarter of the nineteenth century in the annals of American
transportation. Never since that time have men doubted the ability of
Americans to accomplish the physical domination of their continent. With
the conquest of the Alleghanies and of the forests and swamps of the
"Long House" by pick and plough and scraper, and the mastery of the
currents of the Mississippi by the paddle wheel, the vast plains beyond
seemed smaller and the Rockies less formidable. Men now looked forward
confidently, with an optimist of these days, to the time "when
circulation and association between the Atlantic and Pacific and the
Mexican Gulf shall be as free and perfect as they are at this moment in
England" between the extremities of that country. The vision of a nation
closely linked by well-worn paths of commerce was daily becoming
clearer. What further westward progress was soon to be made remains to
be seen.