After Congress passed on June 15, 1844, an act for establishing a naval dockyard and depot at Memphis, Maury concentrated his batteries upon the need for a canal to connect the Mississippi with Lake Michigan through the Illinois River. He claimed that this would be of great benefit to commerce in time of peace, and that, if war with England should come, the United States would then be prepared to meet her halfway. “Let this work be completed”, he added, “and it will be a dragon’s tooth planted in the West to bring forth for the defense of the country a harvest of steam-clad warriors, ever brave, always ready”. This question he took up again at the meeting of the Memphis Convention of Southern and Western States, on November 12, 1845, where he was the veritable spokesman of those two sections. Another important matter which he advocated at this convention was what was called “A Warehousing System and Direct Trade with the South”. This, he said, would foster shipping for Southern ports, enable ships to be loaded both ways and thus make cheaper rates, and prevent trade in high-dutied articles from concentrating in New York where there was the greatest amount of ready capital on hand. Other measures which Maury urged at this convention were the following: bakeries at Chicago for supplying better bread for the navy, a school of engineers at Memphis, mail and snag-boats as a nucleus for a river fleet in time of war, river marks or gauges as an aid to safer navigation, the deepening of the river below New Orleans at Southwest Pass, more lighthouses on the Florida and the Gulf Coast, and a monthly mail to Oregon. In 1851, at the request of the Secretary of the Navy, Maury wrote a report on “Fortifications” to be referred to the House Committee on Military Affairs. In this report he advocated for coast defense what he called “a locomotive battery or flying artillery” to protect cities from the “Great Guns of Big Ships”; heavy fortifications at Key West, on the Dry Tortugas, and perhaps on Ship and Cat Islands; and the completion of railroad connection with the Pacific and the beginning there of the nucleus of a navy. He was opposed to floating batteries, but favored twenty or twenty-five steam men-of-war as a home squadron and thought some provision should be made against surprise on the Lakes. In closing, he declared, “The ocean front of the United States alone is greater in extent than the ocean front of the whole of Europe; therefore, like action to the orator, a navy to us is the first, second, and third chief requisite to any effective system of national defense”.