History of the United States of America, Volume 1 (of 9) : $b During the first administration of Thomas JeffersonAdams, Henry
History
History of the United States of America, Volume 1 (of 9) : $b During the first administration of Thomas Jefferson
Adams, Henry
United States -- History -- 1801-1809; United States -- History -- 1809-1817
“At Bordentown we went into a second boat where we met with very
sorry accommodation. This was about four o’clock in the afternoon. We
had about twenty miles down the Delaware to reach Philadelphia. The
captain, who had a most provoking tongue, was a boy about eighteen
years of age. He and a few companions despatched a dozen or eighteen
bottles of porter. We ran three different times against other vessels
that were coming up the stream. The women and children lay all night
on the bare boards of the cabin floor.... We reached Arch Street
wharf about eight o’clock on the Wednesday morning, having been about
sixteen hours on a voyage of twenty miles.”
In the Southern States the difficulties and perils of travel were so
great as to form a barrier almost insuperable. Even Virginia was no
exception to this rule. At each interval of a few miles the horseman
found himself stopped by a river, liable to sudden freshets, and rarely
bridged. Jefferson in his frequent journeys between Monticello and
Washington was happy to reach the end of the hundred miles without
some vexatious delay. “Of eight rivers between here and Washington,” he
wrote to his Attorney-General in 1801, “five have neither bridges nor
boats.”
Expense caused an equally serious obstacle to travel. The usual charge
in the Northern States was six cents a mile by stage. In the year
1796, according to Francis Baily, President of the Royal Astronomical
Society, three or four stages ran daily from Baltimore to Philadelphia,
the fare six dollars, with charges amounting to two dollars and a
quarter a day at the inns on the road. Baily was three days in making
the journey. From Philadelphia to New York he paid the same fare and
charges, arriving in one day and a half. The entire journey of two
hundred miles cost him twenty-one dollars. He remarked that travelling
on the main lines of road in the settled country was about as expensive
as in England, and when the roads were good, about as rapid. Congress
allowed its members six dollars for every twenty miles travelled. The
actual cost, including hotel expenses, could hardly have fallen below
ten cents a mile.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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