States had been scarcely less ready to
grant articles of incorporation to stock companies. Private enterprise
had, indeed, done much to improve communication along the seaboard.
Turnpikes and bridges had shortened the journey by stage from Boston to
Washington to four and a quarter days by the year 1815. The city of New
York was in 1816 within twenty-four hours of Albany by the Hudson River
steamboats.

Numerous canal companies had also been chartered; but of all the canals
projected, only three had been completed when the War of 1812 began: the
Dismal Swamp Canal in Virginia, the Santee Canal in South Carolina, and
the Middlesex Canal in Massachusetts. It remained for New York to usher
in a new era in internal communication by authorizing in 1817 the
construction of the Erie Canal. In the ardent imagination of its chief
promoter, De Witt Clinton, this canal was destined to be "a bond of
union between the Atlantic and Western States" and "an organ of
communication between the Hudson, the Mississippi, the St. Lawrence, the
Great Lakes of the North and West, and their tributary rivers," creating
"the greatest inland trade ever witnessed" and transforming New York
into a vast emporium of commerce and "the granary of the world."

This bold bid for Western trade alarmed the merchants of Philadelphia,
particularly as the completion of the national road threatened to divert
much of their traffic to Baltimore. In 1825, the legislature of
Pennsylvania grappled with the problem by projecting a series of canals
which were to connect its great seaport with Pittsburg on the west and
with Lake Erie and the upper Susquehanna on the north.

The magnitude of the transportation problem was such, however, that
neither individual States nor private corporations seemed able to meet
the demands of an expanding internal trade. As early as 1807, Albert
Gallatin had advocated the construction of a great system of internal
waterways to connect East and West, at an estimated cost of $20,000,000.
But the only contribution of the National Government to internal
improvements during the Jeffersonian era was an appropriation in 1806 of
two per cent of the net proceeds of the sales of public lands in Ohio
for the construction of a national road, with the consent of the States
through which it should pass. By 1818 the road was open to traffic from
Cumberland, Maryland, to Wheeling, Virginia.

In 1816, with the experiences of the war before him, no we