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, cooperating 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 cooperation 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.
