to this picture. A flatboat was manned by a crew of six to twelve men. A journey from Louisville to New Orleans took six months. Many boats did not go so far. Whenever the cargo was sold out, the boat itself was broken up and sold for lumber; and the crew returned home by steamer instead of on foot as in 1800. In 1830 a traveler on the Mississippi saw ten or twelve such boats at every village he passed. Flatboatmen, raftsmen, and the deckhands of the great steamers made, as Dr. Turner says, "a turbulent and reckless population, living on the country through which they passed, fighting and drinking in true 'half-horse, half-alligator' style."

491. Only twenty miles of the National Road (§ 455) were completed at the close of the war; but in 1816 it received an appropriation of $300,000, followed by others as fast as they

could be used. By 1820, with a cost of a million and a half, it reached Wheeling, on the upper Ohio waters. Thence, at a total cost of nearly seven millions (carried by thirty-four appropriations from Congress), it was pushed on to Columbus, Indianapolis, and finally to Vandalia (then capital of Illinois).

From the lower waters of the Potomac almost to the Mississippi, crossing six States, this noble highway with its white milestones spanned the continent in a long band, bridging streams on magnificent stone arches, and cutting through lines of hills on easy grades. The eastern part was formed of crushed stone on a thoroughly prepared foundation; the western portion was more roughly macadamized. In 1856 (after railroads had superseded such means of transit in importance)

492] INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS AND VETOES 415 Congress turned the road over to the various States in which it lay.

The cost of the road- even the early cost of that part east of Ohio— far exceeded the original "five per cent fund," from Ohio lands. The road was a true national undertaking, paid for by national revenues. The fiction of merely "advancing funds" was long kept up, however, to dodge constitutional objections; and the consent of each State through which the road passed, was asked and obtained.

492. For a time it was expected that the government would build other great lines of communication. It had felt keenly the military need of good roads during the war- when at critical times it had been almost unable to move troops or supplies. The Westerners, too, were clamoring for more national aid, and their votes in Congress were gaining weight. Moreover, at the peace (with the renewal of the import trade) the national revenues became abundant. In 1815 they rose at a bound from 11 to 47 millions of dollars. Madison's administration now abandoned the old Jeffersonian policy of keeping down the army and navy, and raised its estimate of annual expenditure to 27 millions; but, even so, a large surplus was piling up in the treasury.

The Message to Congress in December, 1816, renewed Jefferson's suggestion for a constitutional amendment to permit the use of this surplus in a "comprehensive system of roads and canals. . . such as will have the effect of drawing more closely together every part of our country" and of increasing "the share of every part in the common stock of national prosperity." Congress ignored the suggestion for amendment, but provided funds for immediate use. An act for a new National Bank1 gave the government a "bonus" of $1,500,000 (for the special privileges of the charter), besides certain shares in future

1 The charter of the First Bank expired in 1811, and Republican opposition had prevented a renewal at that time. But, in 1816, the new Nationalism disregarded former scruples. The bill, championed especially by Calhoun and Clay, received almost a solid vote, and was approved by Madison.

dividends; and now Calhoun's "Bonus Bill" pledged these funds to the construction of roads and canals.

Calhoun urged his bill on broad grounds, finding sanction for it even in the "general welfare" clause. "Let it never be forgotten," he exclaimed, "that [the extent of our republic] exposes us to the greatest of all calamities, next to the loss of liberty itself (and even to that, in its consequences), - disunion. We are greatly and rapidly -I was about to say, fearfully-growing. This is our pride and our danger; our weakness

JOHN C. CALHOUN, as a young man. From a portrait in a painting of several fulllength figures, by C. P. A. Healy, in the chapel of Clemson College, South Carolina.

and our strength. ... We are under the most imperious obligation to counteract every tendency to disunion. . . . If we permit a low, sordid, selfish sectional spirit to take possession of this House, this happy scene will vanish. We will divide; and, in consequence, will follow misery and despotism. Let us conquer space.... The mails and the press are the nerves of the body politic."

To the savage disappointment of the Young Republicans, Madison vetoed the bill in a message that returned to the Jeffersonian doctrine of strict construction. He expressed sympathy with

the purpose of the act, but insisted that a Constitutional amendment must be secured.

The next year, under President Monroe, Congress renewed its effort for national aid to roads. But Monroe, in his inaugural and in his one veto, took Madison's ground. The enraged Congress retorted with bitter resolutions condemning the President's position, but it did not venture to challenge more vetoes or to make trial of the dubious process of Constitutional amendment.

§ 494]

AND THE LOWER SOUTH

417

493. For a time, therefore, the routes from the seaboard to the West were the National Road and the Ohio. But soon two other routes were added.

a. Planters abandoned the "worn-out" tobacco lands of Virginia and North Carolina for the "cotton belt," a broad sweep of black alluvial soil running through South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, between the coast and the pine barrens of the foothills. To even the distant parts of this region they found access by land, through central Georgia, with their caravans of slaves and goods.

Dr. Turner suggests graphically the contrast between the migration into Northwest and Southwest: here, the pioneer farmer, bearing family and household goods in a canvas-covered wagon; there, the aristocratic, gloved planter, in family carriage, attended by servants, packs of hunting dogs, and train of slaves, their nightly camp fires lighting up the wilderness.

Thus the Lower South came into being. Until the discovery of California gold, no other part of America offered men of small capital such chances of sudden wealth. The new aristocracy of the black belt soon took to itself the leadership in Southern politics so long held by Virginia.

b. Each year the Wilderness Road (now improved into a wagon track) bore a large immigration from Virginia into Kentucky. Part of this colonization passed on across the lower Ohio into southern Indiana and Illinois, or across the Mississippi into Missouri. Another part moved through Tennessee down the bank of the Mississippi to the cotton belt, to meet the stream of immigration there from the East.

494. This double movement through Kentucky (as Dr. Turner reminds us), with many other features of Western life, is illustrated by the families of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. The two boys were born near one another in Kentucky in 1809

1 That river was reached from the East either by the National Road to Wheeling or by the Pennsylvania turnpike from Philadelphia to Pittsburg. 2 The name "black belt," applied to this district, refers sometimes to the soil, but more especially to the concentration of Negro population there.

and 1808. The Davis family soon moved on to Louisiana and then to Mississippi, had its part under Jackson in the War of 1812, and became typical planters of the black belt. In 1810

Thomas Lincoln, a rather shiftless carpenter, rafted his family across the Ohio, with his kit of tools and several hundred gallons of whisky, to settle in southern Indiana. For a year the