how the
New York congressmen did vote. Monroe, however, was not unmindful of
the service rendered him. After the latter's nomination, Tompkins was
named for Vice President; and if he did not resent taking second
place, as George Clinton did in 1808, it was because the Vice
Presidency offered changed conditions, enlarged acquaintance, and one
step upward on the political ladder.

CHAPTER XXII

CLINTON'S RISE TO POWER

1815-1817

There was never a time, probably, when the white man, conversant with
the rivers and lakes of New York, did not talk of a continuous passage
by water from Lake Erie to the sea. As early as 1724, when Cadwallader
Colden was surveyor-general of the colony, he declared the opportunity
for inland navigation in New York without a parallel in any other part
of the world, and as the Mohawk Valley, reaching out toward the lakes
of Oneida and Cayuga, and connecting by easy grades with the Genesee
River beyond, opened upon his vision, it filled him with admiration.
Even then the thrifty settler, pushing his way into the picturesque
country of the Iroquois, had determined to pre-empt the valleys whose
meanderings furnished the blackest loam and richest meadows, and whose
gently receding foot-hills offered sites for the most attractive homes
in the vicinity of satisfactory and enduring markets. It was this
scene that impressed Joseph Carver in 1776. Carver was an explorer. He
had traversed the country from New York to Green Bay, and looking back
upon the watery path he saw nothing to prevent the great Northwest
from being connected with the ocean by means of canals and the natural
waterways of New York. In one of the rhetorical flights of his young
manhood, Gouverneur Morris declared that "at no distant day the waters
of the great inland seas would, by the aid of man, break through their
barriers and mingle with those of the Hudson." George Washington had
visions of the same vast system as he traversed the State, in 1783,
with George Clinton, on his way to the headwaters of the Susquehanna.

These were the dreams of statesmen, whose realisation, however, was
yet far, very far, away. In 1768, long after "Old Silver Locks" had
become the distinguished lieutenant-governor, he induced Sir Henry
Moore, the gay and affable successor of Governor Monckton, to ascend
the Mohawk for the supreme purpose of projecting a canal around Little
Falls. Sixteen years later, in 1784, the Legislature tendered
Chri