James and Dolley Madison (29 page)

Roads were poor everywhere, not just in Virginia. “The roads all along this way are very bad, encumbered with rocks and mountainous passages, which were very disagreeable to my tired carcass,” wrote a woman about Connecticut roads in 1704. All travel was slow. The stagecoaches that traveled on highways between Jersey City, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, dubbed the “flying machines” for their speed, took two entire days to travel the ninety miles. When George Washington took command of the Continental Army at the start of the American Revolution, he rode from Philadelphia to Boston and the trip took him twelve days.
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Many roads carved out of forests, such as the “Wilderness Road” in the Allegheny Mountains and the “Natchez Trace” near New Orleans, followed
old, narrow Indian trails that tended to lead travelers to other waterways and small villages. There were even toll roads, such as the sixty-two-mile Lancaster Pike, from Philadelphia to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, ordered by the state of Pennsylvania. Local residents besieged Madison with plans to build additional roads. One Louisiana group, championed by Madison, asked for federal help to build a second road from New Orleans to Ohio that would cut two hundred miles off the present journey. Their petition was one of many; they had a friend in Madison.
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In 1796, the first highway atlas, by Abraham Bradley Jr., was published.

Madison wanted to build a national highway that would begin in Maine and run all the way down the eastern seaboard to Georgia, with numerous bridges, cutting through every large city in every state on the journey south. He believed that new, wider, smoother roads with crushed stone and not dirt, plus a multitude of long, wide, sturdy bridges, would make transportation easier and cheaper for businesses and, importantly, citizens trying to migrate to new homes in different areas of America.

Madison had no trouble convincing Jefferson, who always complained about roadways between Monticello and Washington. During his first term, on several occasions, the President Jefferson asked Congress to use surplus tax money to build new roadways and canals. Jefferson, like Madison, understood that highways would unite the regions. “New channels of communication will be opened between the states…the lines of separation will disappear, their interests will be identified and their union cemented by new and indissoluble ties,” he said.
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Madison had plenty of help. Numerous congressmen, especially those who lived in districts with rivers and highways, wanted the federal government to help states pay for the roadways and bridges. Newspapers supported the idea, too. “It is the practice of wise nations to improve the navigation of rivers and to extend water communication into the interior of the country for the advantage of the agricultural interest. Will the Congress of the United States reverse the maxims of the civilized world?” asked the editor of the
Washington Federalist
in 1805, adding in his column that money had to be appropriated for bridges on the Potomac and other rivers, too as part of the bill.
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The arguments worked. At the suggestion of Madison and Jefferson, Congress agreed to appropriate $30,000 to survey the first national highway, the “Cumberland Road,” designed to stretch from Cumberland, Maryland, to Ohio. The highway would be a wide roadway made of crushed stone and designed and maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers. Roadwork began in the spring of 1806. The planning of the road was a bit chaotic because different towns and counties in each state wanted the road to go through their territory. Politicians
even insisted that it had to go through certain towns, or counties, because they had been loyal to the Republican Party in recent elections.
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By the time most of it was completed as far as Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1818, the cost had risen to $6.8 million. It would go on to the middle of the country, Vandalia, Illinois, after several more million dollars and another five years.
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The highway would bring about the opening of dozens of stables, inns, taverns, and general stores in its first few years and then entire communities. “As soon as the road is finished, a complete change will take place in the carrying trade between the Atlantic and the western waters,” stated one editor.
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Most of all, the highway served as the nation's first gateway to the west. “In the early and balmy days of the road there came a class of hardy pioneers that paved the way for an expanding civilization,” wrote chronicler Jeremiah Young.
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Stagecoach companies immediately began running tours over the National Road, promising travelers that on their stages they would see sights they had only dreamed about before. One advertised views of the old road General Washington traveled and the ruins of army forts. Others hailed sights such as valleys the revolutionary army had trudged through, towns connected to the Whiskey Rebellion and the homes of Revolutionary War heroes.
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Travelers saw all of those things and enjoyed them. “The whole of the scenery was very romantic, and beautiful, especially from the top of the heights to which we ascended. The view was fine, alternate hill and dale, often enlivened by clear meandering streams and by large cleared and fertile tracts of land or sometimes by neat little villages,” wrote William Owen, who traveled the road by stagecoach in 1824.
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Stages stopped at towns where travelers could sleep over at hotels or at highway taverns. The popular taverns featured sleeping rooms or dormitories upstairs, well-stocked bars, and reasonably good dining halls for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Many named themselves after British taverns, such as the Black Horse and the Wild Swan. They grew in number and size as traffic on the road grew.
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When the road was completed as far as Wheeling, a local farmer who had marveled at how many laborers had worked on the highway looked at it, turned to a friend, and said that it was “a roadway good enough for an emperor to travel over.”
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American transportation was not just land based, however. There was a movement to use oceangoing vessels on rivers. How to do that, though? The answer was steam power. John Fitch built the first steam-driven ship and on
August 22, 1787, in a very successful publicity stunt, sailed his forty-five-foot boat down the Delaware River, using a crude paddlewheel driven by an engine, in front of a large gathering of delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Standing with them, eyes wide open in admiration, was James Madison. Fitch was granted a patent for steamships in 1791 and so was another inventor, James Rumsey. Another company, Briggs and Longstreet, was given a patent earlier, in 1788.

Fitch was replaced as a steamship pioneer by Robert Fulton, who had designed a submarine in France. Fulton, a Pennsylvanian who had moved to England for his health, had worked on canal designs in Great Britain and became interested in steam engines (the British were experimenting with steamships at the same time as the Americans). Fulton built a large steamship, the
Clermont
, and on August 7, 1807, while Madison was still secretary of state, stunned the country by sailing from New York City upriver, against the current, to Albany at an average speed of what was then a sensational five miles per hour.

Fulton and his partner, Robert Livingston, then plunged into the steamship business, targeting routes between large ports. They built the
New Orleans
in Pittsburgh in 1811 and soon put it into service on the Mississippi River between Natchez, Mississippi, and New Orleans. They soon had several boats on that route and others, and all of them maintained speeds of nearly ten miles per hour downriver. They carried freight and passengers in record times and at much cheaper rates than wagons. By 1817, a steamship ran east and west along the Potomac River. There were three steamboat lines between New York and Philadelphia and a line that connected New York to seaports in Connecticut. Three ships, the
Paragon
, the
Car of Neptune
, and the
North River
, sailed back and forth between New York and Albany on the Hudson River. By 1834, just before Madison's death, there were more than 1,200 steamships on the Mississippi and hundreds more on the East Coast. Thanks to the steamship, southern planters were able to double and triple their output of cotton and other products. East Coast vessels carried agricultural products and industrial supplies. The steamships helped to make New York an even larger seaport. In just two decades, the steamships changed American life. No longer would it take weeks to travel great distances and no longer would travelers have to suffer the indignities of badly constructed and poorly maintained highways. They could simply book passage on the thousands of new steamships in an ever-changing America.
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Toward the end of his second term, President Madison greeted DeWitt Clinton, the young mayor of New York City who ran against him for president in 1812, and Gouverneur Morris, whom he knew from the 1787 Constitutional Convention, at his office at the White House. They wanted to build a canal from
the Hudson River to the Great Lakes. It would transverse over three hundred miles of land, forests, hills, meadows, and swamps, and would connect dozens of towns from the western banks of the Hudson River to the shores of Lake Erie. Narrow, flatbed boats would use it to carry cargo from the Ohio region to Albany, then to New York City, where it would be sent by ship to eastern seaports or Europe. Clinton told the president he had the enthusiastic support of New York's governor and so did the state legislature. The ever-ambitious Clinton told Madison that he supported it and added that it would mean thousands of jobs in New York State, both in the construction of the canal and in the many new posts and small towns they expected to grow alongside its banks. Madison, his hazel eyes glowing at the thought of a canal that could make history, agreed to back it through the federal government.

Members of Congress were not as visionary as the president, though, and, despite all of his lobbying, turned down the request. They suggested that if New York stood to profit so much from a canal, if New York would gain all of these thousands of new jobs, and if New York would win enormous publicity from the canal, then New York should pay for it. Why should Maryland pay for it? Or Pennsylvania?

New York did; a bill in the state legislature in 1817 funded early canal construction, in combination with a very successful state-wide lottery to raise money for the project. Work then began on what would become the world's longest canal to that date, 300-plus miles in length with eighteen aqueducts and eighty-three locks that would raise and lower ships nearly two hundred yards.
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In the end, the Erie Canal, which Madison was so enthusiastic about, was called the engineering miracle of the world, along with Egypt's pyramids. It not only connected cities such as Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse but also made them boom towns. They flourished with business from canal builders during construction and then canal users for years afterward.
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The canal was a success right away. It made back its $7 million cost in just twelve years. It earned millions of dollars each year for decades. The canal caused freight to drop from $32 a ton by wagon for one hundred miles to just $1 a ton for that same distance on canal boats.

The early success of the Erie Canal spurred the building of dozens of others. Most were designed to move goods a great distance to an economic market for sale, in the hopes that the canal would increase jobs of all kinds and create thriving towns along its route.

The Delaware Canal carried goods from Easton, Pennsylvania, down to Philadelphia, and then to the ocean on a path that hugged the Delaware River. The Lehigh Canal, an east–west waterway that opened in 1829, carried goods
from inland factories and coal mines to Philadelphia. It changed the face of heating and manufacturing in the city. In the 1840s and 1850s, the canal carried over 1.2 million tons of coal per year, an unheard-of total at the time.
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