reams
bearing to the Atlantic ports the golden produce of the interior and
carrying back to the interior the manufactured goods of the seaboard. He
foresees the Republic becoming homogeneous, rich, and happy. "Open
ALL the communication which nature has afforded," he wrote Henry Lee,
"between the Atlantic States and the Western territory, and encourage
the use of them to the utmost... and sure I am there is no other tie by
which they will long form a link in the chain of Federal Union."

Crude as were the material methods by which Washington hoped to
accomplish this end, in spirit he saw the very America that we know
today; and he marked out accurately the actual pathways of inland
commerce that have played their part in the making of America. Taking
the city of Detroit as the key position, commercially, he traced the
main lines of internal trade. He foresaw New York improving her natural
line of communication by way of the Mohawk and the Niagara frontier on
Lake Erie--the present line of the Erie Canal and the New York Central
Railway. For Pennsylvania, he pointed out the importance of linking the
Schuylkill and the Susquehanna and of opening the two avenues westward
to Pittsburgh and to Lake Erie. In general, he thus forecast the
Pennsylvania Canal and the Pennsylvania and the Erie railways. For
Maryland and Virginia he indicated the Potomac route as the nearest for
all the trade of the Ohio Valley, with the route by way of the James
and the Great Kanawha as an alternative for the settlements on the lower
Ohio. His vision here was realized in a later day by the Potomac and the
Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, the Cumberland Road, the Baltimore and Ohio
Railway, and by the James-Kanawha Turnpike and the Chesapeake and Ohio
Railway.

Washington's general conclusions are stated in a summary at the end of
his Journal, which was reproduced in his classic letter to Harrison,
written in 1784. His first point is that every State which had water
routes reaching westward could enhance the value of its lands, increase
its commerce, and quiet the democratic turbulence of its shut-in pioneer
communities by the improvement of its river transportation. Taking
Pennsylvania as a specific example, he declared that "there are one
hundred thousand souls West of the Laurel Hill, who are groaning under
the inconveniences of a long land transportation.... If this cannot be
made easy for them to Philadelphia... they will seek a mart elsewhere....