Antiques

Magazine Antiques, August, 2004 by Wendell Garrell

And empires rising where the sun descends!--
The Ohio soon shall glide by many a town
Of note; and where the Mississippi stream,
By forests shaded, now runs weeping on,
Nations shall grow, and states not less in fame
Than Greece and Rome of old!
Philip Freneau and Hugh Henry Brackenridge, "On the Rising Glory of
America," 1771

George Washington's first surveying expedition parceled out what was then Virginia's northwesternmost territory, and he went on to become, in effect, the surveyor general of the nation. As the patron saint of civil engineering in the United States he favored a system of canals that would make the Potomac River navigable to its headwaters.

The great network of natural waterways in the center of the continent--the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri rivers--were blocked from access to the oceans by mountain ranges on the east and west. In addition, the free movement of shipping on the great rivers was impeded by falls and swift currents. If canals were the solution to land barriers, steamboats provided the solution to swift currents. Focusing on the Potomac, which flowed by the porch of his Virginia house, Mount Vernon, Washington championed canals that would bypass its falls, and he backed the developers of stcamboats to accelerate upstream navigation.

Both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson also saw the country's rivers as agents of national unity. Franklin declarcd "the great country back of the Apalachian mountains, on both sides [of] the Ohio ... to be one of the finest in North America," not only for its natural resources but also for "the vast convenience of inland navigation or water-carriage by the lakes and great rivers, many hundred of leagues around." He proposed establishing two armed colonies between the Ohio River and Lake Erie to keep out the French and take advantage of trade "by means of the lakes, the Ohio, and the Mississippi."

In his Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1785, Jefferson predicted that the Mississippi "will be one of the principal channels of future commerce" west of the Alleghenies. Forcseeing a competition between the Hudson and the Potomac for trade west of Lake Erie, he, like Washington, insisted that the Potomac was the better route not only because Alexandria was nearer than New York City to the flow of trade along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers but also because the northern route froze over in winter.

The Potomac route of canals and roads that Washington and Jefferson envisioned did in fact become a reality, but too late to challenge the primacy of the Erie Canal. And contrary to the vision of Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, the Ohio came to divide the free and the slave states. To its south lay Kentucky, customarily criticized by travelers as a barbarous land where the hard drinking inhabitants were given to horse racing and to flogging their slaves, when they were not fighting each other. The Western Reserve, north of the Ohio, was settled by industrious God-fearing New Englanders who profited by the presence of the Erie Canal after its completion in 1825. The canal ensured that the wealth of the interior would flow down the Hudson, not the Potomac.