ready to be taken.

CHAPTER VIII. 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, 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