caucus candidate. Adams was the choice of the New England leaders, strong because he had escaped the danger of taint of Federalism. Clay was backed by the middle group. Jackson was the hero of the West. It was entirely possible to support Jackson, yet believe in Clay; it was more thrilling than to stand for Clay. The Jackson men attacked the caucus because it could not be controlled, and developed a theory palatable to Democrats that it was a non-popular institution and hence unworthy. When Jackson appeared to have a plurality of the popular votes, though not a majority of the electoral college, his friends asserted that this plurality was a mandate upon the House of Representatives to elect him, as the leading of the three candidates. When the House passed over his claim to elect John Quincy Adams, Jackson became a martyr, and John Randolph thundered his denunciation of the "infamous coalition" of "Puritan and blackleg." During the whole of the Adams administration, while Adams and Clay were using all their powers to put the American System into effect, the Jackson men were fighting them for partisan advantage; and in 1828 Jackson was triumphantly elected. The West and South could vote as a unit upon frontier virtues and Jackson's popularity, whereas they were divided when it came to endorsing Clay's program. The Democratic party of which Jackson became the head had a new birth, freshly invigorated by contact with the fundamentals of the West, and managed by a group of political leaders new upon the national stage. The defeated elements of Jefferson's old party speedily ceased to be Democrats at all, and received a new name of National Republicans; and once more there was an opposition at Washington.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE EAST, AND THE WESTERN MARKETS

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, Henry Clay, and the American System came into their own in 1825, and for four years gave expression to a new set of ideas that was working a transformation in the character of the United States Government. John Marshall, through his creative decisions in the Supreme Court, gave a new legal philosophy that percolated through the courts to the bar, and thence to the politicians and the people. By 1830 the fact that such a change was under way was clear enough for Webster to assume his nationalist rôle in his reply to Hayne; and for the forces that feared such transformation of the Government to take refuge in State rights and to find in the restrictive philosophy of John C. Calhoun an expression of their desires. The cleavage in opinion was sectional largely because cotton and slave labor built up a section that could not avoid serving its major interests. But between 1825 and the reply to Hayne in 1830 the southern opposition was not strong enough to block the rapid development of the United States along the lines pointed out by Marshall and Henry Clay.

From the passage of the Road Survey Act of 1824, Congress was ready to assist internal improvements in various ways. The topographical engineers of the army were at the disposal of the promoters of new highways, for there were as yet no civil engineers in civil life. The military engineer was an indispensable unit in the work. The list of works begun and carried through by Congress steadily increased, although not one attained the magnitude of the Cumberland Road. Its western extension, known as the National Road, was undertaken in 1825. Numerous schemes of river and harbor improvements were adopted. In many cases in which Congress could not be induced to take the full responsibility for a project, it was still possible to procure a generous Federal subscription in the form of purchase of stock, so that the Government became a partner in corporate enterprise, as it had earlier been a partner with every farmer who bought his land on installments. But the Government aid came too late to meet the full demands that were expressed during the years of the great migration; and it was never as generous as enthusiasts hoped for. Even before the obstruction

from the White House had ceased, State efforts and private capital started upon the task of supplying the more imperative needs of commerce between the sections.

The first great efforts to bring together the eastern and western markets, after the inception of the Cumberland Road, were of eastern origin, and were based upon two main hopes. One of these was the normal desire to capture the markets created in the Ohio Valley by the great migration, and is to be regarded as a farsighted reaching out for business. The other was the fear of a new competitor in New Orleans and the determination to keep the western settlements in trade relations with the East.

The development of the western trade of seaboard towns began with the extension of population into the Appalachian valleys. The first migrants were followed, at an interval, by the processions of covered wagons owned by the merchants of Baltimore and Philadelphia, carrying stocks of store goods to be sold or peddled on the frontier. As soon as the Forbes Road was passable, it was used by this traffic. Never was the business large enough to satisfy the merchants, and never was the supply of store goods large enough to please the westerners. The further the routes projected themselves into the interior, the higher went the freight charges; and by the time Pittsburgh arose at the head of the Ohio, the distance had become so long that few goods could stand the cost of shipment. The Cumberland Road was designed to carry this business, and, by improving the route, to lower the cost. To Philadelphia and Baltimore the Cumberland Road came as a natural and desirable improvement of what these regions already possessed. The other towns of the seaboard were less certain and were inclined to see in the road a special advantage which they coveted for themselves. New York and Charleston, particularly, had their attention directed to the western trade, and to the fact that Philadelphia and Baltimore had greater advantages than they pos

sessed.

The desires of New York and Charleston grew in intensity with the progress of the great migration and were stimulated by the fear of what the steamboats might do. Roosevelt's boat on the Ohio was an object lesson, and a precursor of an inland trade whose natural outlet would not be any city on the Atlantic. Just so soon as the up-river boats could be relied upon, there was nothing to prevent New Orleans from becoming the great distributing center of the interior. The Appalachians presented a natural limit to the

trading areas of the seaboard; there was no limit east of the Rockies, to the commercial empire of New Orleans. Between the desire for western trade and the fear that New Orleans would appropriate it, the East stirred itself to offer competition; and when Congress could not be induced to respond at once, the East used its own resources. The State of New York was conscious from an early period of the natural highway that lay subject to its disposal between the upper reaches of the Mohawk River, the south shore of Lake Ontario, and the eastern end of Lake Erie. Because of French proximity and Indian occupation this highway was never frequented during the colonial period, and the safer routes from the Delaware and the Susquehanna to the "pleasant lands behind" monopolized the traffic. But with the end of the Revolution, the surrender of the forts by England, and the stabilizing of the Six Nations, there was no longer a reason for checking the flow of New York and New England at old Fort Stanwix. Before the year 1800 the ancient settlements of the Dutch Flats on the Mohawk had been extended for the whole length of the river, and the settlers had begun to use the Mohawk and the Hudson as their route of communication for whatever trade they had. The obstruction in the Mohawk at Little Falls, some seventy miles above its mouth, was a serious inconvenience to the settlers who lived around Utica and Rome, above that point. The Massachusetts land controversy was adjusted, the Holland Land Company had bought its tract near Lake Erie, the Connecticut Land Company was prospecting around Cleveland. There was growing promise of business in the country beyond the Mohawk.

The Western Inland Lock Navigation Company was ready for business in the winter of 1796, having been formed to meet the demand for river improvement on the Mohawk. It built a series of five locks around the rapids at Little Falls, and by thus overcoming the forty-two foot drop in the Mohawk here, made the whole river navigable for small boats as far inland as Fort Stanwix, or Rome. It also called attention to the fact, that dreamers had often noted, that there was no real obstruction in the way of extending the locks and canal from the head of the Mohawk to the Oswego, or the Genesee, or even to the Niagara River at some point above the falls. With a water route from New York City to Lake Erie before his mind, the pamphleteer or letter writer waxed poetic upon the future of New York. In this instance his wildest dreams could not approach reality. As the impending construc