A Wilderness So Immense (17 page)

Gazing across the lawns of Mount Vernon toward the Potomac River, George Washington wrote that “our clearest interest is to open a wide door, and make a smooth way for the produce of that Country to pass to
our Markets
before the trade may get into another channel.”
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In subsequent
decades, how many thousands of American enthusiasts for
our
canal and
our
turnpike,
our
railroad and
our
interstate highway,
our
airport and
our
information technology corridor have echoed Washington’s sentiment?

In Richmond, men dreamt of connecting the James River (which pierces the Blue Ridge Mountains) with the Kanawha, a tributary of the Ohio. They began work in 1784 but fell behind their rivals in New York. Eventually their canal system was interrupted and damaged by the Civil War, and later its surviving towpaths supported the railroad line named for the connection they dreamt of: the Norfolk and Western.
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George Washington supported the James River project, but he and his neighbors were more enthusiastic about linking the Potomac River with any of the tributaries of the Ohio that converge near Pittsburgh. Toward this end, at the great falls of the Potomac, Washington started a canal that opened in 1800, only to be superseded by the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in 1825, which in turn blazed the trail for Peter Cooper’s steam-powered
Tom Thumb
and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.
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Washington’s favorite river had more northern rivals, as well. From the headwaters of Chesapeake Bay, Pennsylvanians dreamt of reaching inland to Pittsburgh via the Susquehanna River, with a portage of eleven miles to the Allegheny (a major tributary of the Ohio) and another portage of only seven miles to Lake Erie. It was plain, Pennsylvania’s William Maclay bragged in the
New York Daily Advertiser,
that the Susquehanna had better connections to the west than the Potomac, “and is besides intimately connected with the northern waters, and great lakes; advantages which the Potowmac cannot pretend to.”
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Regardless of Washington’s and Maclay’s grand claims for the Potomac and the Susquehanna, their mid-Atlantic rivalry for the western trade was mild compared to the ancient contest between the Hudson and the St. Lawrence Rivers. Pioneered by the
coureurs de bois
of New France, the great commercial empire of the St. Lawrence followed the beaver along waterways stretching westward from Quebec and Montreal through the Great Lakes into the Canadian Rockies. Canada dominated the North American fur trade through most of the eighteenth century, despite the fact that the St. Lawrence freezes over every winter. The Canadians lost their advantage in the Great Lakes when America won its independence. In the new century they would finish second to their New York rivals in the race to build canals to carry inland produce from the Great Lakes to the sea.
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In this commercial competition between the major rivers of the Atlantic Coast, first place went eventually to the ice-free port at the
mouth of the Hudson. Forty years after John Jay’s protective measures to close the Mississippi and stifle western expansion had failed, a more visionary generation of New Yorkers led by De Witt Clinton started a 363-mile canal between Albany and Buffalo. Completed in 1825, the Erie Canal would reduce the cost of shipping freight from Lake Erie to Manhattan from $100 a ton to $6 a ton and crown New York City as the great storehouse and emporium of the East Coast.
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George Washington began his love affair with the west at sixteen, riding along the Shenandoah River “through the most beautiful Groves of Sugar Trees” on a bright Saturday in March 1748—the same year that Montesquieu warned that extended republics cannot long subsist. The young Virginian had crossed the Blue Ridge with a surveying party “and Spent the best part of the Day in admiring the Trees and Richness of the Land.” By twenty he owned two thousand fertile acres on the Virginia frontier, by 1767 he had acquired land west of the Alleghenies, and by his death in 1799 the squire of Mount Vernon owned forty-five thousand choice acres of western land scattered through the Shenandoah Valley and the modern states of Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

In the west, Washington believed, “an enterprizing Man with very little Money may lay the foundation of a Noble Estate … for himself and posterity.” After all, “the greatest Estates we have in this Colony were made … by taking up and purchasing at very low rates the rich back Lands which were thought nothing of in those days, but are now the most valuable Lands we possess.” As a surveyor, planter, and speculator, Washington had felt the lure of western lands as intensely as any colonial Virginian. As a statesman and strategist whose military career began with the first shots of the French and Indian War near Fort Duquesne, however, Washington had learned in the American forest what Harvard librarians found in Montesquieu, that distance and self-interest could disrupt empires and republics.
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At the end of the Revolution, Washington warned that Americans would move across the mountains “faster than any other ever did, or any one would imagine.” And he knew that their political allegiance would tend toward the nation that provided them access to markets. Opening the Potomac River was “of great political importance,” Washington wrote in 1784, “to prevent the trade of the Western territory from settling in the hands either of the Spanish or British.” If “the trade of that Country should flow through the Mississippi or St Lawrence … they would in a few years be as unconnected with us [as] we are with South America.”

For Virginia’s well-being, he believed that extending the “inland navigation of the rivers Potomac and James” was essential. If America’s western settlers “cannot, by an easy communication be drawn this way,” Washington warned, “they will become a distinct people from us—have different views—different interests, and instead of adding strength to the Union, may in case of a rupture with either [Spain or Britain] be a formidable and dangerous neighbour.”
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Aside from his obvious attachment to the river that washed Mount Vernon, Washington was indifferent to the Mississippi River chiefly because it belonged to Spain and emptied into the Gulf of Mexico. “The more communications are opened” between east and west, he advised a friend in Maryland, “the closer we bind that rising world (for indeed it may be so called) to our interests; and the greater strength we acquire by it… not only as it respects our commerce, but our political interest, and the well being and strength of the Union also.”
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“The Western settlers,” Washington said, speaking “from [his] own observation,” stood “as it were upon a pivot—the touch of a feather, would turn them any way.” During the Revolution they

Other Potomac planters shared Washington’s indifference to the Mississippi. From George Mason’s silence “upon this subject,” James Monroe concluded that Washington’s neighbor, the influential master of Gunston Hall and principal author of the Virginia constitution and Declaration of Rights, was “not with us.”
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Monroe also suspected that Congressman Richard Henry Lee and his cousin Light-Horse Harry Lee, while voting dutifully with the Virginia delegation to uphold the stipulation about the Mississippi in Jay’s instructions, privately “held the opposite sentiment.”
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An active patriot since the Stamp Act and a Virginian who had often
allied with the radicalism of Samuel Adams in national affairs, the aging and gout-ridden Richard Henry Lee, now fifty-four, was more concerned with European than with western affairs. Opening the Mississippi, he suggested in a letter to George Washington, was “an Object unattainable for many years, and probably Never without War not only with Spain, but most likely with the Bourbon Alliance.” European hostility seemed a greater danger than “an Alliance of Kentuckians with the British,” for “after all, if this navigation could be opened and the benefits be such as are chimerically supposed, it must in its consequences depopulate and rain the Old States.”
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More interesting than his cousin’s intermittent correspondence with the influential squire of Mount Vernon, however, was the full-court press that Light-Horse Harry Lee mounted on the subject of the Mississippi between April and October 1786. In no fewer than six letters to Washington, Lee urged a temporary closing of the river in exchange for the commercial treaty. Lee’s arguments were familiar. “Rather than defer longer the benefits of a free liberal system of trade with Spain,” he asked during the secret congressional debates in July, “why not agree to the occlusion of the Mississippi”? If America accepted Gardoqui’s terms, Lee reiterated a week prior to Charles Pinckney’s speech, “we give in fact nothing, for the moment our western country become populous and capable, they will seize by force what may have be[en] yielded by treaty.”

Sweetening his pitch in September, Lee alluded to current talk of improving Washington’s favorite river. “If the Potomac navigation proceeds in the manner these gentlemen mention,” Lee said, “it… will be a strong argument among the politicians, [in] favor of the Spanish treaty and the occlusion of the Mississippi.” The final and most lengthy letter in the series, early in October, summarized Jay’s arguments on behalf of the treaty and “confess [ed]” Lee’s “hope that the state of Virginia will consider a treaty with Spain on the principles of the project”—that is, with restrictions on navigation of the Mississippi—“essentially necessary to her political happiness, and to her commercial aggrandizement.”

Light-Horse Harry Lee’s persistent appeals to Washington are interesting less for what he said than for his motive for pressing the matter. Through Gardoqui’s good offices, Washington had already accepted the gift of a fine Spanish jackass from Carlos III, and along with one of Lee’s letters came a “small box given to me by Mr. Gardoqui for you.” The contents of that small box are unknown, and no one (least of all Gardoqui) would imagine that General Washington could be bribed. So, with Congress deadlocked seven to five, Gardoqui recruited Henry Lee to cultivate
Washington’s support for the proposed commercial treaty on the long-shot chance that he might induce Virginia to reverse its position on the navigation of the Mississippi. Gardoqui’s expense accounts and confidential reports, however, prove that Light-Horse Harry Lee—a man remembered mainly as the father of Robert E. Lee and the eulogist who proclaimed George Washington to be “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen”—was a hired mule. For his services in smuggling pro-Spanish arguments to Washington, Gardoqui secretly gave Lee a total of $5,000 in loans, which Lee never repaid.
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About the time of Light-Horse Harry Lee’s last letter to Washington in October, his “heterodoxy” on the issue of the Mississippi aroused deep suspicions back in Virginia, where the legislature was “full of consternation and complaint” about Jay’s “project for bartering the Mississippi to Spain.” Lee was eligible for reelection and had always voted in accord with his instructions (regardless of his private opinion) but on November 7, 1786, the legislature summarily “dropt” him when it reelected the other eligible members of the Virginia congressional delegation. Lee regarded his “disgrace” as “cruel and ungrateful,” and his friends were pained by “the mortification in which it must involve a man of sensibility.” It was an embarrassing snub to any man of honor. “I feel as you do for our acquaintance Colo[nel] Lee,” Washington wrote with greater empathy than grammatical precision: “Better never have delegated, than left him out.” Happily for Lee’s political reputation, he was reelected to a vacancy in the Virginia congressional delegation a few weeks later—and the Spanish bribe remained a secret until discovered in the archive of Gardoqui’s confidential reports and expense accounts by diplomatic historian Samuel Flagg Bemis in the twentieth century.
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Even Thomas Jefferson’s commitment to the Mississippi was a recent development. Trade with the west, Thomas Jefferson had written to Washington in October 1784, was “under a competition between the Hudson, the Patomac and the Mississippi.” The Mississippi had the advantage for heavy commodities, but with navigation in the Gulf of Mexico “so dangerous, and that up the Mississippi so difficult and tedious,” it was unlikely “that European merchandize will return through that channel.” The Mississippi and its tributaries invited “flour, lumber and other heavy articles … floated on rafts which will be themselves an article of sale … the navigators returning by land or [upstream] in light batteaux.”

For imported goods, Jefferson foresaw “a rivalship between the Hudson and Patowmac.” Poring over his maps, Jefferson calculated that the navigable tributaries of the Ohio were closer to Alexandria, Virginia, than to New York “by 730 miles, and … interrupted by one portage only.” Nature, Jefferson solemnly decreed, “has declared in favour of the Patowmac.”

Like Fortune, however, Nature is profligate with her charms. “Unfortunately,” Jefferson lamented, “the Hudson is already open and known in practice,” while “ours is still to be opened.” Washington, he hoped, would inspire Virginia to open the Potomac River and seize “the moment in which the trade of the West will begin to get into motion and to take its direction.” Avowing that he personally did not own “nor ever hav[e] a prospect of owning one inch of land on any water either of the Patowmac or Ohio,” Jefferson regarded his own “zeal in this business [a]s public and pure”—civic virtues presumably transferable to any gentleman who helped enforce Nature’s verdict, even if he happened to own land along the chosen river.
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