James and Dolley Madison

by Bruce Chadwick

  Washington did not discover canals. The controlled rivers had been used by Montauk Indians on Long Island since the early 1600s. Massachusetts pilgrim leader Myles Standish proposed building a canal through the isthmus that connected the Massachusetts mainland to the lengthy Cape Cod peninsula in 1623. In 1690, William Penn talked of building several canals to connect Philadelphia to different Pennsylvania rivers. In 1724, Cadwallader Colden, a surveyor in New York, outlined a canal project from the Great Lakes to the Hudson River. In Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin proposed a canal between several rivers and the city of Philadelphia.3

  John Ballendine started a company to build a Maryland canal. Ballendine and several associates traveled to England to study some of the successful canals there and decided it could be done in Maryland. In 1774, Ballendine said that he would begin excavating the areas around the Great Falls. The Potomack Canal idea grew in fits and starts from that announcement, but the revolution held up progress. It was in 1784 that Washington pulled his friend James Madison into it.

  He saw Madison as his chief catalyst to get something done by the Continental Congress. Washington sent Madison copies of letters from Virginia officials supporting the canal, petitions from people in both Virginia and Maryland, and a copy of a bill to legalize the Potomack Canal Company. Madison liked the idea and, along with several congressmen, ushered the bill through Congress. Washington, ever the politician, told Madison that both the Virginia and the Maryland legislatures had to approve the idea. “Would it not be highly expedient, therefore, as the session of both assemblies must soon draw to a close, for each to depute one or more members to meet at some intermediate place, and agree upon an adequate bill to be adopted by both states?” he asked, adding that both states could make strong claims as to why their rivers were more important. Madison agreed. Both legislatures met and approved the canal.4

  George Washington told Madison, and others, that in the end, the canal would be worth it to all. “We should do our part towards opening the communication with the fur and peltry trade of the Lakes and for the produce of the country which lies within and which will…be settled faster than any one ever did, or any one would imagine,” he said, and he added that colonists in the western areas might align themselves with the French or the British there rather than the [English] colonists on the seaboard if there was no transportation connection.5

  By 1791, work had started on the locks used to lift and lower boats on the Potomack Canal. Construction continued through 1801, when Madison arrived in Washington to serve as secretary of state. At the end of 1801, the Great Falls canal locks were completed and boats began to sail through.6 Madison became hooked on the idea of canals. In 1786, he met with Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush to begin the building of a canal from the Philadelphia area to the Chesapeake Bay. Their idea later became the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, opened nearly thirty years later. As secretary of state and later president, Madison watched over the Potomack Canal and others (the Potomack project never grew beyond its original small stretch).

  Madison convinced Jefferson of the importance of canals in expanding America and increasing business. In his second inaugural address, Jefferson called for Americans to turn their eyes “to the great purposes of the public education, roads, rivers, canals.” He told the country that canals would help to unify regions, too. “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.”7

  Jefferson and Madison were both aware, too, that population patterns in America were changing. Now, as the nineteenth century started, there were nearly one million American settlers in the Mississippi region and more were arriving by foot, on horseback, and in the large Conestoga wagons every day.8

  Stirred by Jefferson's message and Madison's interest, Congress asked Albert Gallatin to design a system of new canals and roadways across the country. He and his aides spent months on the project. Their final system included dozens of intrastate and interstate canals, as well as lengthy new highways. The plan never went into effect, though.

  In 1801, when he moved to the capital, Madison, like Washington, saw canals as a way to create easy transportation that would help coal-mining regions in western Virginia and Pennsylvania prosper. It would spur on the slowly growing manufacturing industry and permit southern states like Virginia to pursue new industries and leave farming, and slavery, behind. Madison realized that the South, with a large manufacturing component and its seaports would challenge the northern states for economic supremacy and enable southern manufacturers and farmers to become larger trading partners with Europe.

  Madison's support of canals to help manufacturing showed his ever-evolving thinking processes and the way that he changed as circumstances did. In the late 1780s and early 1790s, Madison had been a champion of farming. In a speech to Congress in 1789, he called agriculture “the staple of the United States” and admired the “manifest preference it has over every other object of emolument in this country.” In an article he wrote for the National Gazette in 1792 he said of farmers “the great proportion of this class to the whole society, the more free, the more independent and the more happy must be the society itself.” His friends, such as Jefferson, considered Madison, who was a neophyte to the fields, as a remarkably good farmer. “[He] is the best farmer in the world,” said Jefferson of his friend in the 1790s. Now, changing with the times, Madison saw the promise of industry and transportation as well as farming through canals.9

  The canal revolution receded with the advent of the railroad, which grew in gargantuan proportions from 1830 to 1880. The railroad could deliver goods cheaper and more swiftly. By the time the canal era, sponsored so enthusiastically by Madison, ended, the nation had thirty-three major canals, ranging from the vast Erie in the North to the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal in the South, plus small waterways such as the Chemung Canal and Chenango Canal.10

  It was not the canal that Madison saw as the great change in America, though. It was the highway.

  Madison, like everybody else in the United States, was tired of traveling on narrow dirt highways, some just eight or nine feet wide. They flooded in rainstorms and became vast dustbowls in the hot summer months. The ruts in some were so deep that horse-pulled carriages were overturned when their wheels rolled into them. Everyone who traveled to Mount Vernon to see George Washington was delighted to see him and his wife but complained bitterly that to get to his country estate they had to ride down one of the worst dirt roads in the nation.

  One incident in 1808 illustrates Madison's fury at the conditions of his beloved highways. He and his wife were returning to Montpelier from Washington following a fierce rainstorm. Roads were flooded. Madison wrote Jefferson that he nearly didn't make it home. “I got home Friday night by taking my carriage to pieces and making three trips…over Porter's mill pond, in something like a boat, swimming my horses,” he wrote in anger.11

  Dolley dreaded traveling. Once, prior to a trip from Washington to Montpelier, she wrote that “my limbs yet tremble with the terrors and fatigue our journey.” One of her friends wrote her in 1811 that his carriage hit a bump in the road and overturned. He was thrown from the carriage, another man fell out of the side door, the driver fell to the road, the rigging separated from the car, and the horses bolted off with it. The men found two of the horses and rode home on them.12

  Everyone complained of being victims to the roads and weather. “We had a dreadful journey home. I was thankful that my bones were not broke,” complained Dolley Cole Beckwith in 1804.13 James Madison told the story of Governor William Cabell, who left his home to ride to the University of Virginia in 1826 and did so “traveling the whole way with this snow & hail in his face.”14

  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,” wr
ote 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.15

  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.16 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.17

  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.18

  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.19 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.20 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.21

  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.22

  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.23

  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 1824.24

  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.25

  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.”26

  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.27

  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.