ty-two hours;
the return trip was made in thirty. H. Freeland, one of the spectators
who stood on the banks of the Hudson when the boat made its maiden
voyage in 1807, gives the following description:

"Some imagined it to be a sea-monster whilst others did not hesitate
to express their belief that it was a sign of the approaching judgment.
What seemed strange in the vessel was the substitution of lofty and
straight smoke-pipes, rising from the deck, instead of the gracefully
tapered masts... and, in place of the spars and rigging, the curious play
of the walking-beam and pistons, and the slow turning and splashing
of the huge and naked paddlewheels, met the astonished gaze. The dense
clouds of smoke, as they rose, wave upon wave, added still more to
the wonderment of the rustics.... On her return trip the curiosity she
excited was scarcely less intense... fishermen became terrified, and
rode homewards, and they saw nothing but destruction devastating their
fishing grounds, whilst the wreaths of black vapor and rushing noise
of the paddle-wheels, foaming with the stirred-up water, produced great
excitement...."

With the launching of the Clermont on the Hudson a new era in American
history began. How quick with life it was many of the preceding pages
bear testimony. The infatuation of the public for building toll and
turnpike roads was now at its height. Only a few years before, a
comprehensive scheme of internal improvements had been outlined by
Jefferson's Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin. When a boy, it
is said, he had lain on the floor of a surveyor's cabin on the western
slopes of the Alleghanies and had heard Washington describe to a rough
crowd of Westerners his plan to unite the Great Lakes with the Potomac
in one mighty chain of inland commerce. Jefferson's Administration was
now about to devote the surplus in the Treasury to the construction of
national highways and canals. The Cumberland Road, to be built across
the Alleghanies by the War Department, was authorized by the president
in the same year in which the Clermont made her first trip; and Jesse
Hawley, at his table in a little room in a Pittsburgh boarding
house, was even now penning in a series of articles, published in the
Pittsburgh Commonwealth, beginning in January, 1807, the first clear
challenge to the Empire State to connect the Hudson and Lake Erie by
a canal. Thus the two next steps in the history of inland commerce in
America were