Erie Canal. The first generation of the new century witnessed the
great burst of population into the West which at once gave Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin a place of national
importance which they have never relinquished. So far as pathways
of commerce contributed to the creation of this veritable new
republic in the Middle West, the Cumberland Road and the Erie
Canal, cooperating respectively with Ohio River and Lake Erie
steamboats, were of the utmost importance. The national spirit,
said to have arisen from the second war with England, had its
clearest manifestation in the throwing of a great macadamized
roadway across the Alleghanies to the Ohio River and the digging
of the Erie Canal through the swamps and wildernesses of New
York.

Both of these pathways were essentially the fruition of the
doctrine to which Washington gave wide circulation in his letter
to Harrison in 1784, wherein he pictured the vision of a vast
Republic united by commercial chains. Both were essentially
Western enterprises. The highway was built to fulfil the promise
which the Government had made in 1802 to use a portion of the
money accruing from the sale of public lands in Ohio in order to
connect that young State with Atlantic waters. It was proposed to
build the canal, according to one early plan, with funds to be
obtained by the sale of land in Michigan. So firmly did the
promoters believe in the national importance of this project that
subscriptions, according to another plan, were to be solicited as
far afield as Vermont in the North and Kentucky in the Southwest.
All that Washington had hoped for, and all that Aaron Burr is
supposed to have been hopeless of, were epitomized in these great
works of internal improvement. They bespoke cooperation of the