lowlands of Carolina and Georgia, Charleston developed and consolidated its commercial leadership of the South. It was not as immediately suspicious of New Orleans as were the cities further north along the coast. But it watched the extension of cotton acreage into the uplands of Georgia and Alabama with fear that the cotton might find its way to a market down the Chattahoochee or the Alabama, and thus transfer commercial leadership to another region. In 1827, South Carolina chartered a railroad to run west from Charleston to Hamburg, at the falls of the Savannah, in the hope of diverting cotton to Charleston from Savannah, and to compete for the business of upland Georgia. The road was open in 1830, and was 136 miles long, the first railroad of considerable length to operate in the United States. It failed to accomplish its purpose, for Charleston could not hold its own as the cotton empire shifted; but like the other improved highways between the sections it helps to measure the interest the East developed in the West during the period of the great migration.

The attempt of the East to hold the West, and to make its control permanent and effective, passed into its second phase during the period of internal improvements. The earlier phase of the problem was political; the later economic. In the earlier instance it was uncertain whether the political bond would hold, and Jefferson made haste to strain the Constitution to save the Union. He thus bought Louisiana. In the later phase, Clay's effort to induce the Union to promote internal improvements for the economic development of the United States was resisted by presidential opposition until private and State initiative undertook the task. The Erie Canal was the only successful improvement for many years, but it inspired imitation and opened a new period of economic development. The East took part, attracted by western profits. The West undertook public works on its own account in order to open up the country and disseminate prosperity. But the alignment of the West, with the East or with the South, remained uncertain for another generation; and not until both North and South called upon it in the Civil War was it ready with an answer.

CHAPTER XXX

THE WESTERN INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS

THE years of the administration of John Quincy Adams, 18251829, mark the great inauguration of internal improvements. The Government of the United States was assisting in the work. Private capital and State resources were pledged to it. The Erie Canal was completed, and the eastern cities entered the race for western trade. The railroad period was opened with the Baltimore and Ohio, and the South Carolina Railroad. Inspired by the activity of the East and their own enthusiasms, the western States began improvements. In the summer in which he opened the Erie Canal, Governor Clinton made a special trip to Ohio to join in the inception of two local public works that were to make the Ohio River run uphill, and deliver commerce for Cincinnati and Cleveland, en route to New York.

The distribution of population in the Old Northwest in 1825 was still confined almost exclusively to the southern slope of the region on the Ohio River and its tributaries. Except in Ohio there was no large group of settlers north of the watershed; and even here the few communities that skirted the Lake Erie shore had an average density of under eighteen to the square mile. The Ohio tributaries were not useful to the innermost settlements as carriers of commerce. Zane's Trace had become a flourishing road for the eastern interior of the State. The United States began in 1825 to build the National Road, in extension of the Cumberland Road from Wheeling, in order to meet the need of the remote frontier. On July 4, 1825 it broke ground at St. Clairsville, a few miles west of Wheeling, where the new road was to branch off from Zane's Trace. But Governor Morrow of Ohio did not grace the occasion with his presence, for a more important ceremony was being held the same day at Licking Summit, near Newark, where the Na tional Road was to be crossed by the new Ohio Canal. The turnpike period was no longer at its height, and the canals had captured the imagination of the promoter.1

The prospective opening of the Erie Canal had much to do with

1 G. W. Dial, "Construction of the Ohio Canals," in Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society Publications, vol. xIII.

the form taken by the Ohio public works. Not since the first settlements had there been a route for the exchange of goods between the East and the upper Ohio Valley. The development of such seemed to be the condition precedent to solvency throughout the West. The example of New York inspired the States to action on their own account and stimulated a thorough study of the topography of the country in the search for available routes. The survey of canal sites revived the importance of the primitive conditions that determined the course of exploration and missionary activity during the French régime. Long before the first whites came, the Indians knew all of the interlocking streams that flow between the Lakes and the Mississippi Valley. They knew the currents, the distances, the length and convenience of the portages. The same elements that led to the frequent use of certain of the portage routes between the sections, and to the neglect of the others, affected their availability for canals. Where there was a river there was water for the canal; and where the grades were light the canal could be dug with fewest locks.

There were two good portage routes east of Ohio that invited the inspection of the canal engineer. Of these the easternmost left Lake Erie near Dunkirk, New York, reached Lake Chautauqua in a few miles, and thence used the Allegheny River all the way to the Ohio. A little further west, another started inland at Erie, and made a short cut to French Creek, that joins the Allegheny at Franklin, Pennsylvania. The Mahoning River, that cuts across northeast Ohio into Beaver Creek and the Ohio, afforded another route, for its headwaters interlock with those of the Cuyahoga.

The most direct of the Cuyahoga lines, and one that intrigued the attention of Ohio from the earliest surveys, led to the head of the Muskingum, and thence to the Ohio River at Marietta. Cleveland was at the northern terminus of this line, and the community around Marietta was the oldest, if not the largest in the State. Next west of the Cuyahoga lay the valley of the Sandusky River, with a spacious harbor at its mouth on Lake Erie. There was no village of importance as far west as Sandusky Bay in 1825, but there were scattered settlements along the river, whose residents had a large view of the importance of their future. The portage from the Sandusky led directly to the Scioto, in whose valley lived the Virginia and Kentucky settlers who had found their way to the Virginia Military Reserve. The new Ohio capital at Columbus

was on the Scioto, where the National Road crossed the river. Below it were Circleville and Chillicothe.

Another of the Ohio canal routes was that of the Great Miami, from Cincinnati through Hamilton to Dayton, along the line of frontier forts built by St. Clair and Wayne to protect the country from the Wabash tribes. From the sources of the Great Miami, the Auglaize continues the line to the Maumee at Defiance, where Wayne erected his fort in 1794. Toledo Bay, at the mouth of the Maumee, provided the site for a terminus on Lake Erie. Here was the region claimed by both Ohio and Michigan Territory, the future center of the "Toledo War." Its canal values gave to that war its intensity.

The available portages did not cease at the western boundary of Ohio. Indiana possessed the Wabash, with a short carry between Fort Wayne and the Wabash River. When Wayne built this fort after the battle of Fallen Timbers he selected the one site from which the traffic of the Indians between Lake Erie and the Ohio could most easily be policed. There was no other Indian route as good as the Wabash, but engineers and scouts knew that it would be easy, if desired, to get from Lake Michigan to the upper waters of the Kankakee, and thence to the Illinois River and the Mississippi. The canal routes from Lake Michigan were secondary in importance to those from Lake Erie because of the devious course through Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. The insignificant Chicago River, emptying into the head of Lake Michigan by the side of Fort Dearborn could sometimes be followed in wet weather without a portage to the Illinois and the Mississippi. On the prairie marshes behind Fort Dearborn there was almost no obstruction to the canoe. Further north on Lake Michigan there was a possibility of striking west from Milwaukee to the Rock River, that runs parallel to the Lake, and not far inland. This would connect with the Mississippi at Rock Island. Still further north, Green Bay pointed to the old route most traveled from the Upper Lakes to the Mississippi, by way of Lake Winnebago and a chain of lesser lakes nearing the bend of the Wisconsin River where the town of Portage was eventually built.

The three States concerned, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, began their surveys of these routes in the twenties, under the spell cast by the action of New York. They found that the obstacles to be overcome were financial rather than mechanical, and that at all times they were involved in a mesh of politics. When the States

avowed a determination to spend State money to improve prosperity, every settled section desired to share the advantage, and few regions were magnanimous enough to pay the bills while other regions profited.

The Ohio legislature was deadlocked for a time by the river claims of the three excellent routes across the State. The commissioners began their study as early as 1822. The final decision, approved in 1825, was to undertake two canals. The Ohio Canal was to be a compromise between the easternmost routes, joining the Cuyahoga and the Scioto, to the disgust of Marietta and Sandusky, which were left off it. The "Fire Lands" people, for whom Sandusky was the port of entry, were too determined to accept defeat. They shortly undertook the Mad River Railroad on their own initiative. Meanwhile, however, the Ohio Canal was begun at Licking Summit in 1825. Around Cuyahoga Falls, near Akron, farmers began immediately to raise wheat for the eastern market. By 1831 the canal was in use between Newark and Cleveland, and a fleet of steam packets made frequent trips between Cleveland and Buffalo. In 1832 the canal was completed to its southern outlet at Portsmouth. The Ohio celebration that might have commemorated the termination of the task was abandoned because of an epidemic of cholera that swept the frontier in October, 1832. But the real monument to the canal was the rapid growth of a prosperous strip of farming country along the route, much as the Erie Canal had built up a similar strip across western New York. The grain from Ohio poured in to the warehouses of New York City, to the dismay of eastern farmers whose soil was outclassed by the fresh prairie soils now brought to use. Cleveland, which had only grown to a scant thousand inhabitants in the quarter century after Moses Cleaveland surveyed it, swelled to forty-five hundred by 1834, and kept on growing. The Democratic politicians, who had tuned their notes to the responses of the southern democrats who built up the Northwest, found it necessary to learn a different song for the counties north of the National Road. The northern invasion of the Old Northwest began to upset the solidarity of that section.

The second of the canals decided upon by Ohio was projected up into the country behind Cincinnati. Governor Clinton made the speech of dedication on July 21, 1825, at Middletown on the Great Miami, about halfway from Cincinnati to Dayton. The Miami Canal, as it was commonly called, made slower progress