With the launching of the Clermont on the Hudson a new era in
American history began. How quick with life it was many of the
preceding pages bear testimony. The infatuation of the public for
building toll and turnpike roads was now at its height. Only a
few years before, a comprehensive scheme of internal improvements
had been outlined by Jefferson's Secretary of the Treasury,
Albert Gallatin. When a boy, it is said, he had lain on the floor
of a surveyor's cabin on the western slopes of the Alleghanies
and had heard Washington describe to a rough crowd of Westerners
his plan to unite the Great Lakes with the Potomac in one mighty
chain of inland commerce. Jefferson's Administration was now
about to devote the surplus in the Treasury to the construction
of national highways and canals. The Cumberland Road, to be built
across the Alleghanies by the War Department, was authorized by
the president in the same year in which the Clermont made her
first trip; and Jesse Hawley, at his table in a little room in a
Pittsburgh boarding house, was even now penning in a series of
articles, published in the Pittsburgh Commonwealth, beginning in
January, 1807, the first clear challenge to the Empire State to
connect the Hudson and Lake Erie by a canal. Thus the two next
steps in the history of inland commerce in America were ready to
be taken.



CHAPTER VIII. The Conquest Of The Alleghanies

The two great thoroughfares of American commerce in the first
half of the nineteenth century were the Cumberland Road and the