Historic Highways of America/Volume 3/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
THE CHAIN OF FEDERAL UNION
IT is probable that, as early as 1753, after his return from his mission to the French forts, George Washington first introduced the subject of uniting the East and West by means of public highways. If England was to hold the West she must have a passageway to it.
The project involved very great expense and Governor Dinwiddie paid little heed to it. Had Virginia acted on the young Washington's suggestion, how much life and treasure would have been saved! Braddock could not but have been successful, and that would have made Forbes's expedition needless, and perhaps Bouquet's also.
As it was, Braddock's twelve-foot road was almost her only communication with the West. But Washington held to his boyhood dream of a highway over the mountains. As the years passed, his plans matured gradually with the unparalleled growth of the West. Being a broad-minded Virginian of Virginians, he early conceived a picture of commercial grandeur, for the Old Dominion, the colony holding a golden West in fee. This was to be attained by building a highway over the mountains and connecting its eastern and western termini with navigable water-ways, natural or, if necessary, artificial. The building of the canals upon which the commerce from and to both east and west was to be brought to the great portage highway across the Alleghanies was the important coup of his plan, and to this he gave the best of his time and strength for many years.
When he first became a member of the House of Burgesses, in 1759, the subject of a highway connection between the East and the West was not formally introduced. But to the members Washington recommended the project as worthy of their consideration; he determined, before it should be formally brought before the legislature of the colony for definite action, to supply himself with all facts concerning the practicability of the undertaking, the expense of the construction and the advantages to accrue. His plan contemplated the improvement of the navigation of the Potomac from tide-water to Fort Cumberland at the mouth of Wills Creek, or, to the highest practical point of the Potomac, and the building of a highway across the mountains to the nearest navigable western rivers, Cheat, Youghiogheny, Monongahela, or Ohio.
The selection of the best route was of primary importance, and Washington during his tours in the West studied carefully this question. Maps plotted by surveying parties were examined and materially aided in selecting the most advantageous communication. The colonies on the Potomac, Virginia and Maryland, would especially profit by the navigation of this river and the extension of the communication with the West. Certain of Washington's letters to friends residing in Virginia and Maryland with extracts of his journal, including descriptions of the West, were published in the colonial Gazettes. The project was received with curiosity and interest. When Washington made his western tour in 1774, he was surprised to find the change that had taken place in the valley of the Ohio. People, he affirmed, were immigrating "in shoals!"
Believing now the time had come, Washington brought his plan of a grand system of communication before the House of Burgesses at its session in 1774. It met with much opposition on the grounds of impracticability and expense. Accordingly, Washington was forced to depart from his original intention. He introduced and moved the adoption of a bill which empowered individuals to subscribe toward such an enterprise and construct a communication at their own expense. Even this met with opposition, and, to appease the delegates from central Virginia, it was found necessary to introduce an amendment to include the improvement of the navigation of the James river.
In its amended form, the bill would probably have passed the House of Burgesses. A similar bill was brought before the Assembly of Maryland, though with discouraging prospects. Jealousies regarding western trade already existed between the merchants of Baltimore and Georgetown, and efforts made in favor of the bill by one party were opposed by the other.
With matters in this doubtful condition, the Revolutionary War broke out and as commander-in-chief of the army, Washington was called to Cambridge. But he never forgot the dream of his youth and early manhood and at the close of the war, again took up the enterprise. The dream of the youth became the firm conviction of the man, and, next to his desire for the independence of his country, the chief ambition of his life. For, now, the project was of national importance—to bind the East and the West with the iron bands of commercial intercourse and sympathy. A new nation had been born, but it was divided by mountains, which, to European eyes, seemed imperative boundaries of empire.
On the first day of September, 1784, Washington left his home for another western tour. His purpose in making a western tour at this time was, chiefly, to look after his land, but a secondary consideration was to make a critical study of the summit range which intervened between the headwaters of the Ohio and Potomac rivers.
Upon his return to Mt. Vernon he prepared an account of his investigations, setting forth his arguments in behalf of this momentous project. This report, together with a transcript of his journal, he forwarded to the governor of Virginia. These words were added to the report: "If you concur with me in the proposition I have suggested, and it is adopted by the legislature, it will signalize your administration as an important era in the history of this country."
A new, yet old, consideration made the building of a highway to the West of utmost moment at this time. Now, as England found, in 1763, the trade of the Central West was slipping away down the Mississippi into the hands of Spaniards, and Washington was anticipating already a matter which was to prove a perplexing problem to the nation before it was solved. It is best treated in one of his letters to David Humphreys, written July 25th, 1785: "I may be singular in my ideas, but they are these: that, to open a door to, and make easy the way for, those settlers to the westward (who ought to advance regularly and compactly) before we make any stir about the navigation of the Mississippi, and before our settlements are far advanced towards that river, would be our true line of policy. It can, I think, be demonstrated that the produce of the western territory (if the navigations which are in hand succeed, of which I have no doubt), as low down the Ohio as the Great Kanawha, and I believe to the Falls, and between the ports above the lakes, may be brought either to the highest shipping port on the Potomac or James rivers at a less expense, with more ease, including the return, and in a much shorter time, than it can be carried to New Orleans, if the Spaniards, instead of restrictions, were to throw open their ports and invite our trade. But if the commerce of that country should embrace this channel, and connections be formed, experience has taught us, and there is a very recent proof with Great Britain, how next to impracticable it is to divert it; and, if that should be the case, the Atlantic States, especially as those to the westward, will in a great degree be filled with foreigners, will be no more to the present Union, except to excite perhaps very justly our fears, than the country of California is, which is still more to the westward, and belonging to another power."
To Henry Lee he wrote: "Open all the communications which nature has afforded, between the Atlantic States and the western territory, and encourage the use of them to the utmost. In my judgment, it is a matter of very serious concern to the well-being of the former, to make it the interest of the latter to trade with them; without which the ties of consanguinity, which are weakening every day, will soon be no bond, and we shall be no more a few years hence, to the inhabitants of that country, than the British and Spaniards are at this day; not so much, indeed, because commercial connections, it is well known, lead to others, and united are difficult to be broken." This view of the dependence of the seaboard states on those of the Central West, held by Washington, is as interesting as it was novel.
The bill authorizing the formation of a company to open the navigation of the Potomac and James rivers passed the legislatures of Virginia and Maryland. It is difficult for us to realize how canals were viewed a century ago; how commercial prosperity seemed to depend upon their building. Already Washington, in fancy, had covered the West with a network of canals. As early as 1784, he wrote to Governor Harrison urging a survey of the Ohio; he added: "Let the courses and distances be taken to the mouth of the Muskingum and up that river to the carrying place of the Cuyahoga; down the Cuyahoga to Lake Erie, and thence to Detroit. Let them do the same with Big Beaver Creek and with the Scioto. In a word, let the waters east and west of the Ohio which invite our notice by their proximity, and by the ease with which land transportation may be had between them and the lakes on the one side, and the rivers Potomac and James on the other, be explored, accurately delineated, and a correct and connected map of the whole be presented to the public. . . . The object in my estimation is of vast commercial and political importance."
Washington's laborious method of securing necessary information concerning the West, and his earnestness in not omitting any phase of the project are exemplified in a letter to Richard Butler, newly appointed superintendent of Indian affairs, written in 1786: "As I am anxious to learn the nature of the navigation of Beaver Creek, the distance, and what kind of a portage there is between it and Cayahoga, or any other nearer navigable water of Lake Erie, and the nature of the navigation of the latter; and also the navigation of the Muskingum, the distance and sort of portage across to the navigable waters of Cayahoga or Sandusky, and the kind of navigation therein; you would do me an acceptable favor to convey them to me, with the computed distances from the River Ohio by each of these routes to the lake itself."
In a letter to Henry Lee Washington, again, he writes: "Till you get low down the Ohio, I conceive, that, considering the length of the voyage to New Orleans, the difficulty of the current, and the time necessary to perform it in, it would be the interest of the inhabitants to bring their produce to our ports; and sure I am there is no other tie by which they will long form a link in the chain of federal union."
Washington's eagerness to gain every possible item of information concerning methods of internal improvement is displayed in a letter to Thomas Jefferson: "I was very much gratified . . . . by the receipt of your letter . . . . for the satisfactory account of the canal of Languedoc. It gives me great pleasure to be made acquainted with the particulars of that stupendous work, though I do not expect to derive any but speculative advantages from it." To the Marquis of Chastellux he wrote: "I have lately made a tour through the Lakes George and Champlain as far as Crown Point, then returning to Schenectady, I proceeded up the Mohawk River to Fort Schuyler, crossed over the Wood Creek, which empties into the Oneida Lake, and affords the water communication with Ontario. I then traversed the country to the head of the eastern branch of the Susquehannah, and viewed the lake Otsego, and the portage between that lake and the Mohawk River at Canajoharie. Prompted by these actual observations, I could not help taking a more contemplative and extensive view of the vast inland navigation of the United States. . . . Would to God we may have wisdom enough to improve them! I shall not rest contented until I have explored the western country, and traversed those lines (or a great part of them) which have given bounds to a new empire."
To William Irvine, Washington wrote in 1788: "The letter with which you favored me . . . . inclosing a sketch of the waters near the line which separates your State from that of New York, came duly to hand. . . . The extensive inland navigation with which this country abounds and the easy communications which many of the rivers afford with the amazing territory to the west of us, will certainly be productive of infinite advantage to the Atlantic States. . . . For my part, I wish sincerely that every door to that country may be set wide open, that the commercial intercourse may be rendered as free and as easy as possible. This, in my judgment, is the best, if not the only cement that can bind those people to us for any length of time; and we shall, I think, be deficient in forethought and wisdom if we neglect the means to effect it. . . . If the Chautauqua Lake, at the head of Conewango River, approximates Lake Erie as nearly as is laid down in the draft you sent me, it presents a very short portage indeed between the two, and an access to all those above the latter."
"I need not remark to you, sir," Washington writes to Harrison, in perhaps the most powerful appeal he ever made, "that the flanks and rear of the United States are possessed by other powers, and formidable ones too; nor how necessary it is to apply the cement of interest to bind all parts of the Union together by indissoluble bonds, especially that part of it which lies immediately west of us, with the Middle States. For what ties, let me ask, should we have upon those people? How entirely unconnected with them shall we be, and what troubles may we not apprehend, if the Spaniards on their right, and Great Britain on their left, instead of throwing stumbling blocks in their way, as they now do, should hold out lures for their trade and alliance? What, when they get strength, which will be sooner than most people conceive (from the immigration of foreigners, who will have no particular predilection towards us, as well as from the removal of our own citizens), will be the consequence of their having formed close connections with both or either of those powers in a commercial way, it needs not, in my opinion, the gift of prophesy to foretell. The Western States (I speak now from my own observation) stand as it were upon a pivot. The touch of a feather would turn them any way. They have looked down the Mississippi until the Spaniards, very impolitically, I think, for themselves, throw difficulties in their way; and they looked that way for no other reason than because they could glide gently down the stream, without considering, perhaps, the difficulties of the voyage back again, and the time necessary to perform it in; and because they have no other means of coming to us but by long land transportations, and unimproved roads. These causes have hitherto checked the industry of the present settlers; for except the demand for provisions, occasioned by the increase of population, and a little flour, which the necessities of the Spaniards compel them to buy, they have no incitements to labor. But smooth the road and make easy the way for them, and then see what an influx of articles will be poured upon us; how amazingly our exports will be increased by them, and how amply we shall be compensated for any trouble and expense we may encounter to effect it. . . . It wants only a beginning. The western inhabitants would do their part toward the execution. Weak as they are, they would meet us at least half way, rather than be driven into the arms of foreigners, or be dependent upon them."
The navigation of the Potomac was not easily secured and the Potomac Company relinquished its charter in 1823 when the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company was formed. Yet in only one generation after Washington's death the important features of his great plan of internal communications were realized. The Chesapeake and Ohio, Erie and Ohio canals made the exact connections desired by Washington half a century before, and with the very results he prophesied. To crown all, within two years of Washington's death, the great highway across the mountains for which he had pleaded for many years was assured, and for the next half-century the first National Road in the United States fulfilled to the letter Washington's fondest dream of welding more firmly "the chain of federal union."
True to his declared conviction, that "the western inhabitants would do their part," the creation of the first state beyond the Ohio, was responsible for the building of this great road; and, also, true to Washington's conviction, the commissioners appointed by President Jefferson to determine the best course for the road, decided in favor of Washington's old roadway from Fort Cumberland through Great Meadows to the Monongahela and the Ohio, the course Washington always held to be the one practical route to the West and which he had had surveyed at his own expense.
For three score years Washington's and Braddock's roads answered all the imperative needs of modern travel, though the journey over it, at most seasons, was a rough experience. During the winter the road was practically impassable. Colonel Brodhead, commanding at Fort Pitt during the Revolutionary War, wrote Richard Peters: "The great Depth of Snow upon the Alleghany and Laurel Hills have prevented our getting every kind of Stores, nor do I expect to get any now until the latter End of April."
But with the growing importance of Pittsburg, the subject of roads received more and more attention. As early as 1769, a warrant was issued for the survey of the Manor of Pittsburg, which embraced 5,766 acres. In this warrant an allowance of six per cent was made for roads.[1] Six years later, or the first year of the Revolutionary War, court met at Pittsburg, and viewers were appointed to report on a large number of roads, in the construction of which all males between the ages of sixteen and forty-five, living within three miles of the road, were required to work under the supervision of the commissioners. One of these roads became, nearly half a century later, incorporated in the Cumberland Road.
The licensing of taverns by Youghiogheny county in 1778, and of ferries about the same time, indicate the opening and use of roads. Within ten years, the post from New York to Pittsburg was established over the treacherous mountain road. In 1794, the Pittsburg post-office was established, with mails from Philadelphia once in two weeks.[2]
Through all these years a stream of pioneers had been flowing westward, the current dividing at Fort Cumberland. Hundreds had wended their tedious way over Braddock's Road to the Youghiogheny and passed down by water to Kentucky, but thousands had journeyed south over Boone's Wilderness Road, which had been blazed through Cumberland Gap in 1775. All that was needed to turn the whole current toward the Ohio was a good thoroughfare.
The thousands of people who had gone, by one way or another, into the trans-Ohio country, soon demanded statehood. The creation of the state of Ohio is directly responsible for the building of the Cumberland Road. In an act passed by Congress April 30, 1802, to enable the people of Ohio to form a state government and for admission into the Union, section 7 contained this provision:
"That one-twentieth of the net proceeds of the lands lying within said State sold by Congress shall be applied to the laying out and making public roads leading from the navigable waters emptying into the Atlantic, to the Ohio, to the said state, and through the same, such roads to be laid out under the authority of Congress, with the consent of the several states through which the roads shall pass."[3]
Another law, passed March 3rd of the following year, appropriated three per cent of the five to laying out roads within the state of Ohio, and the remaining two per cent for laying out and making roads from the navigable waters, emptying into the Atlantic, to the river Ohio to the said state.[4]
A committee, appointed to review the question, reported to the Senate December 19, 1805. At that time, the sale of land from July, 1802, to September 30, 1805, had amounted to $632,604.27, of which two per cent, $12,652, was available for a road to Ohio. This sum was rapidly increasing. Of the routes across the mountains, the committee studied none of those north of Philadelphia, or south of Richmond. Between these points five courses were considered:
| 1. | Philadelphia—Ohio river (between Steubenville and mouth of Grave creek) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
314 miles. |
| 2. | Baltimore—Ohio river (between Steubenville and mouth of Grave creek) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
275 miles. |
| 3. | Washington—Ohio river (between Steubenville and mouth of Grave creek) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
275 miles. |
| 4. | Richmond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
317 miles. |
| 5. | Baltimore—Brownsville . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
218 miles. |
There were really but two courses to consider: Boone's Road and Braddock's Road. The former led through a thinly populated part of the country and did not answer the prescribed condition, that of striking the Ohio at a point contiguous to the state of Ohio. Consequently, in the report submitted by the committee we read as follows:
"Therefore the committee have thought it expedient to recommend the laying out and making a road from Cumberland, on the northerly bank of the Potomac, and within the state of Maryland, to the Ohio river, at the most convenient place on the easterly bank of said river, opposite to Steubenville, and the mouth of Grave Creek, which empties into said river, Ohio, a little below Wheeling in Virginia. This route will meet and accommodate roads from Baltimore and the District of Columbia; it will cross the Monongahela at or near Brownsville, sometimes called Redstone, where the advantages of boating can be taken, and from the point where it will probably intersect the river Ohio, there are now roads, or they can easily be made over feasible and proper ground, to and through the principal population of the state of Ohio."[5]
Immediately the following act of Congress was passed:
In the execution of this act President Jefferson appointed Thomas Moore of Maryland, Joseph Kerr of Ohio, and Eli Williams of Maryland commissioners to lay out the Cumberland Road. Their first report was presented December 30, 1806. It is a document of great importance, throwing, as it does, many interesting side lights on the great task which confronted the builders of our first national highway.
Permission to build the road was gained of each of the states through which it passed, Pennsylvania making the condition that the route of the road should pass through the towns of Washington and Uniontown. On the fifteenth of January, 1808, the commissioners rendered a second report in which it appears that timber and brush had already been cleared from the proposed route and that contracts were already let for the first ten miles west of Cumberland. This indicates that the Cumberland Road was not built on the bed of the old military routes. Though the two crossed each other frequently, the commissioners reported that the two roadbeds were not identical in the aggregate for more than one mile in the entire distance.
Braddock's Road and the Cumberland Road were originally one as they left Cumberland. The course met again at Little Meadows near Tomlinson's Tavern and again at eastern foot of Negro Mountain. The courses were identical at the Old Flenniken tavern, two miles west of Smithfield (Big Crossing), and on summit of Laurel Hill, at which point Braddock's Road swung off northwesterly toward Pittsburg, following the old buffalo trail toward the junction of the Ohio and Allegheny, and the Cumberland Road continued westward along the course of the old portage path toward Wheeling on the Ohio.
Contracts for the first ten miles west of Cumberland were signed April 16 and May 11, 1811. They were completed in the following year. Contracts were let in 1812, 1813, 1815. In 1817, contracts brought the road to Uniontown. In the same year a contract was let from a point near Washington to the Virginia line. In the following year United States mail coaches were running from Washington, D. C., to Wheeling, and 1818 is considered the year of the opening of the road to the Ohio river.
The cost of the eastern division of the road was enormous. The commissioners in their report to Congress estimated the cost at $6,000 per mile, not including bridges. The cost of the road from Cumberland to Uniontown was $9,745 per mile. The cost of the entire division east of the Ohio river was about $13,000 per mile. Too liberal contracts was given as the reason for this greater proportional expense.
As early as the year 1822, it is recorded that a single one of the five commission houses at Wheeling unloaded 1,081 wagons, averaging 3,500 pounds each, and paid for freightage of goods the sum of $90,000.
The subsequent history of this highway and all the vicissitudes through which it has passed, has, in a measure, perhaps, dimmed the luster of its early pride. The subject of transportation has undergone such marvelous changes in these eighty years since the Cumberland Road was opened, that we are apt to forget the strength of the patriotism which made that road a reality. But compare it with the roadways built before it to accomplish similar ends, and the greatness of the undertaking can be appreciated.
Over the beginnings of great historical movements there often hangs a cloud of obscurity. Over the heroic and persistent efforts of George Washington, to make a feeble republic strong through unity, there is no obscurity. America won the West from England as England had won it from France—by conquest. Brave men were found who did what neither England nor France did do, settle the wilderness and begin the transformation of it. Large colonies of hardy men and women had gone into the Ohio valley, carrying in their hands the blessed Ordinance and guided by the very star of empire. Virginia had given the best of her sons and daughters to the meadow land of Ken-ta-kee, who were destined to clinch the republic's title to the Mississippi river. The Old Bay State had given her best blood to found the Old Northwest, at historic Marietta. New Jersey and Connecticut had sent their sons through vast wildernesses to found Cincinnati and Cleveland, names which today suggest the best there is in our American state. Without exaggeration, the building of the binding highway, which, through so many years, Washington championed, was the crowning act of all that had gone before. It embodied the prime idea in the Ordinance of 1787, and proved, finally, that a republic of loyal people could scorn the old European theory that mountains are imperative boundaries of empire.
It was a question whether the expansion of the United States was to conduce to national strength or national weakness. France and Germany and Italy have expanded to the injury of national vitality, England and the United States to its strengthening. The building of the Cumberland Road was a means of securing the West to the United States as it was never secured to France or England. The era of canals and national roads and steam navigation brought the farthest West into living touch with the East, and each contributed to the other's power and both were welded into one nation. The population of the three states west of the Ohio through which the Cumberland Road ran increased from 783,635 to 3,620,314 in the generation the road was in active use. The average increase of percentage of permanent population for the first five decades in these states was over 182 per decade. In the second decade of the century Indiana's population increased over 500 per cent. This has been equaled but three times in all the phenomenal "rushes" of recent years into the western states. In all this making of "the young empire of the West" the Cumberland Road had a preponderating influence.
This "Chain of Federal Union," forged, under God, by the hand of that first American in the hot fires of revolution, strengthened wisely by the same timely hand in those critical afterhours, has thrown its imperial links, one by one, across a continent. Historic Washington's Road, with all the wealth of history and tradition which attaches to it, was the first and most important link.
- ↑ Craig's History of Pittsburg, p. 104.
- ↑ Craig's History of Pittsburg, p. 226. It is interesting to note that Pittsburg was on the direct mail route to Kentucky—Boone's old route through Cumberland Gap not being a mail route.
- ↑ United States Statutes at Large, vol. ii., p. 173.
- ↑ Id., p. 226.
- ↑ Senate Reports, 9th Cong., Sess., Rep., No. 195.