214 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



vote, Congress had passed an act appropriating $30,000 for 

 beginning the construction of a great national road from 

 Cumberland, Md., to the State of Ohio. Its opponents 

 denied the power of Congress to malic roads under the Con- 

 stitution. To obviate this objection, the consent of Mary- 

 land, Virginia and Ohio, through whicli the road Avas to 

 pass, was first required. For a long time this agitation 

 continued, and the policy was opposed not only on consti- 

 tutional grounds, but also on grounds of expediency. Its 

 opponents urged the mischief likely to arise from local 

 jealousies ; from wastefulness, extravagance and improvi- 

 dence in dealing with the public mone\^s ; from the danger- 

 ous power thus given the federal government of furnishing 

 a briber}^ fund at the expense of the whole Union as a means 

 of unduly influencing, and practically bribing, the favored 

 States. Jetferson intensely favored the proposed measure, 

 and, when Congress passed the bill, gave it his ready sanc- 

 tion. So likewise to other similar acts passed b}^ the same 

 Congress, appropriating $6,000 for a road from Nashville to 

 Natchez, $G,400 for another from the frontier of Georgia to 

 New Orleans, and $6,000 for one from the Mississippi River 

 to the Ohio. 



In his annual message of 1808 Jetierson again returned to 

 the same subject, and recommended that the surplus, which 

 it was expected would soon begin to accumulate, should be 

 diverted l\y Congress for these public purposes. He argued 

 that liberal expenditures for roads, canals and rivers and 

 education were the great foundations on which the prosperity 

 and permanence of the Union might rest with security. He 

 even went so far as to say the Constitution might, if neces- 

 sary, be amended so as to permit such expenditures. At 

 that time his plan of national improvements contemplated 

 roads to the great rivers, — the Alleghany, Monongahela, 

 the Kanawha and the Tennessee. He also had in mind the 

 building of a great turnpike, to folloAv the coast from Maine 

 to Georgia. Congress was asked to appropriate from the 

 surplus $2,000,000 a 3^ear for ten years. But with these 

 recommendations and ambitions of the administration Con- 

 gress was not in full sympathy, and so road-building opera- 



