There are three outlets for the commerce of these sections seeking New York, the emporium of the New World, and the chief trans-Atlantic markets: 1. By the Mississippi River to New Orleans, and thence by transhipment to New York and Europe. 2. By the northern lakes to the St. Lawrence Valley, or by the former to the Erie Canal. 3. By the costly transportation of railroads over the Alleghanies or along the lake-shores eastward.
THE CANAL BASIN AT LEXINGTON, VIRGINIA.
The first of these routes is of course the longest, both in time and distance. It takes the merchandise by an extensive détour, which, from the mouth of the Ohio River, viâ the Gulf, to New York, exceeds three thousand miles. Although lying in the powerful current of the Gulf Stream, which is a propelling force speeding forward the vessel that trusts its warm, blue waters, this route is exposed to the most violent cyclonic storms, and navigators shun and evade it during the equinoctial or hurricane season. But, barring danger and distance, no country with such an outlet to the sea as the Mississippi River affords can be considered dependent upon any artificial communication. Notwithstanding the objections which exist to this long route (which is both expensive and long), its trade is rapidly increasing from the very exigencies of the case. The introduction of the barge-system on the great Western rivers has greatly facilitated and cheapened transportation. Steam-tugs, carrying neither passengers nor freight, are substituted for the steamboat. These tugs never stop except to coal and attach the barges, already loaded before their arrival at a city, and proceed with great despatch. Steaming steadily on, night and day, they make the trip from St. Louis to New Orleans almost as quickly as the oft-detained steamboat. The distance has been made between these cities by a tug, with ten heavily-freighted barges, in six days. The tugs plying on the Minnesota River carry with good speed barges containing thirty thousand bushels of wheat, and the freight of a single trip would fill more than eighty railroad-cars. This transportation is cheap, because the tugs require less than one-fourth the expense for running and management required by the steamboats. The carriage of grain from Minnesota to New Orleans by this method costs no more than the freightage from the same point to Chicago by rail. A boatload of wheat from St. Paul, taking the river route, is not once handled until it is put aboard ship at the Crescent City. The mighty energy of the North-west—"the Germany of America," as it has been well called by Dr. Draper—has long since discovered that the Mississippi is the best existing route to European markets. Grain can be shipped by way of St. Louis and New Orleans to New York and Europe twenty cents a bushel cheaper than it can be carried by the other existing routes. As long ago as 1868 the Illinois Central Railroad took hold of the West India and Southern trade through the river route, and offered such commercial inducements to Western importers that "Havana sends her products by this route to the North-west, instead of by New York."[A] As the North-west expands and multiplies in resources and population, it will be compelled to transact its foreign and seaboard commerce through the noble navigable waters of the Mississippi, unless it can obtain a short and cheap transportation to New York by some trans-Alleghany water-line. In the event of the North-western trade being diverted southward along the great natural artery of the continent, where no tolls, no tariffs and no transhipments are required, the loss will fall most heavily upon New York and the seaboard marts. The increasing stream of South American commerce, in the same event, must inevitably take the short, speedy and entirely inexpensive route to the North-west (through the broad and free highway of the "Father of Waters"), rather than encounter the delay, danger and expense of the Gulf-Stream route to New York, and thence by rail or the Lakes to its destination. The longer the present trade-status continues, and the mammoth corporations of the railroads force the transportation of the North-west, the West and the Mississippi Valley to take the river and Gulf route to the sea, the greater and more fixed becomes the diversion of this incalculable commerce from the great markets of the Middle and Eastern States. So far, therefore, from the far West being at the mercy of the East in this matter, the former has the advantage. The East, rather than allow the present tendency of the commercial current to set well in toward the Gulf, and wear a channel for itself, should strain every nerve to keep it steadily moving toward its own maritime cities. The great cities of the Atlantic seaboard can better afford to construct a water-line over the mountains at their own cost than to run the risk of the Mississippi River becoming the commercial avenue for its vast valley and drainage, and thus bearing the golden stream away from their harbors and streets.
The Utopian idea that Norfolk may become the rival of the great seaports and centres of capital, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston, is without the field of discussion. It is not more possible than that a magnetized knife-blade should exert a more powerful attraction than the largest lodestone or the mightiest electro-magnet.
The Lake route from the Mississippi Valley to the East was made continuous and complete by the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. The day of the old flat-boats had not then closed, and the application of steam to river navigation was still in its infancy. The growth of the West—which has always outstripped its internal improvements—like an immense river long dammed up, bursting the barriers that confined it, forced its way toward the sea. Although it was said at first that the canal would never pay, "the opening of this work," as the Superintendent of the Census says, "was an announcement of a new era in the internal grain-trade of the United States. To the pioneer, the agriculturist and the merchant the grand avenue developed a new world. From that period do we date the rise and progress of the North-west." This splendid structure is to-day the great artery of Eastern wealth; and but for the fact that for six months in the year, when the vast sea of Western commerce would seek an outlet through its banks to the East, it is locked by ice, it would be widened into a ship-canal. It lies in the very track of the great north-westerly winds, which descend with torrential rush and polar cold over the Lakes, and thence through Northern New York. Last year, as late as the third of March, when the vegetation of the Middle States was beginning to spring forth in vernal beauty, the whole of the lower Lake region and Western and Northern New York were swept by these Arctic tempests; and this is the climatic rule rather than an exceptional case. Even in the season of open water the Lakes are exposed to the most violent storms, and within their narrow shores hundreds of vessels are annually lost. The mariner overtaken by what would be a moderate gale in a broad sea is in imminent peril for want of sea-room; and in a snow-storm, however light—whose winds elsewhere he would court to fill his sails and propel his craft—his course is beset with danger and difficulty. For more than half the year navigation is suspended by the thickening terrors of the tempest and the accumulated obstacles of ice.[B] And yet, with all the obstacles which impair the utility of the Lake route while it is in operation, the volume of Western produce prefers it, or rather is forced by the necessities of the case to employ it. And these necessities will continue to increase. With the aid of all the railroads now or to be constructed, the rapid expansion of Western commerce has distanced the facilities of transport. The iron horse, as has been well said, has always stimulated industry and production beyond his power to carry it. It was the forcible remark of the English traveler Sir Morton Peto that the American railroads from West to East were "choked with traffic." So great is the inadequacy of all existing outlets for conveying the more than Amazonian streams of trans-Alleghany merchandise that it has long since become the interest of every great corporation, as well as of every citizen of the country, to open for them new and national highways.
From this digression, embracing facts and views which seemed essential to an intelligent discussion of the main subject, we pass on to examine the Appalachian outlet by which the great Western empire of America may find its way to the sea. The bird's-eye view here presented will show the Appalachian mountain-chain, and the waters which thread their way along its gentle slopes eastward to the Atlantic basin and westward to the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys. The Alleghanies bear a striking geographic resemblance to the Highlands of Scotland, so famed in song and story. Like the central Grampian Hills—those majestic buttresses in whose recesses the old Caledonians found secure and impregnable asylums from the Roman legions—except that they are richer in verdure and less lofty, they form the grand natural rampart of the American Union. To use the words of Lavallée, the French military historian and statistician, "Mountains play the principal part in military operations: true ramparts of states, they interrupt the development of strategic movements, and render the greatest efforts necessary for their passage and possession. They are the poetical part of the theatre of the art of war." If the day ever comes, as come it may, when the kingly powers of the world combine to crush the republican institutions of the United States, and swarm the harbors and bays of our Atlantic seaboard with their allied navies, the defiles of the Alleghanies will prove the Thermopylæs of the Union; and against their eastern base the surging wave of invasion must be stayed, if stayed at all. Like the Scottish peaks,
The grisly champions that guard
The infant rills of Highland Dee,
or the Spanish wall of the Pyrenean chain, on whose Sierras, in 1808, Wellington's blazing lines of Torres Vedras arrested Massena's march, the mountains that look out on our Atlantic sea-front must ever be of the highest military importance.
To throw across their central ridges a great aqueduct is no mean undertaking of merely local significance, but may take rank with the old Roman aqueducts, with the magnificent roads constructed by Napoleon over the Alps, and with the more modern and now triumphant tunnels through Mont Cenis and the Hoosac Mountains, and the rapidly-progressing railway over the Andes from Callao to the Amazon Valley.