e between the "voluntary union of
States" and the effete despotisms of Europe; but the ghost of the
Hartford Convention had laid very many more dangerous ghosts in the
section in which it had appeared.

The theatre of the war, now filled with comfortable farms and populous
cities, was then less known than any of our Territories in 1896. There
were no roads, and the transportation of provisions for the troops, of
guns, ammunition, and stores for the lake navies, was one of the most
difficult of the problems which the National Government was called upon
to solve. It cannot be said that the solution was successfully reached,
for the blunders in transportation were among the most costly,
exasperating, and dangerous of the war. But the efforts to reach it
provided the impulse which soon after resulted in the settlement of
Western New York, the appearance of the germs of such flourishing cities
as Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse, the opening up of the Southwest
Territory, between Tennessee and New Orleans, and the rapid admission of
the new States of Indiana, Illinois, Mississippi, and Missouri. But the
impulse did not stop here. The inconveniences and dangers arising from
the possession of a vast territory with utterly inadequate means of
communication had been brought so plainly to public view by the war that
the question of communication influenced politics in every direction. In
New York it took shape in the construction of the Erie Canal (finished
in 1825). In States farther west and south, the loaning of the public
credit to enterprises of the nature of the Erie Canal increased until
the panic of 1837 introduced "repudiation" into American politics. In
national politics, the necessity of a general system of canals and
roads, as a means of military defence, was at first admitted by all,
even by Calhoun, was gradually rejected by the stricter constructionists
of the Constitution, and finally became a tenet of the National
Republican party, headed by John Quincy Adams and Clay (1825-29), and of
its greater successor the Whig party, headed by Clay. This idea of
Internal Improvements at national expense, though suggested by Gallatin
and Clay in 1806-08, only became a political question when the war had
forced it upon public attention; and it has not yet entirely
disappeared.

The maintenance of such a system required money, and a high tariff of
duties on imports was a necessary concomitant to Internal Improvements.
The ge