Tradition, cheerfully acquiesced in by popular thought, attributes to Henry Clay the conception of the National Road, but this seems to be error. The Hon. Andrew Stewart, in a speech delivered in Congress, January 27th, 1829, asserted that "Mr. Gallatin was the very first man that ever suggested the plan for making the Cumberland Road." As this assertion was allowed to go unchallenged, it must be accepted as true, however strongly and strangely it conflicts with the popular belief before stated. The reader will bear in mind that the National Road and the Cumberland Road are one and the same. The road as constructed by authority of Congress, begins at the city of Cumberland, in the State of Maryland, and this is the origin of the name Cumberland Road. All the acts of Congress and of the legislatures of the States through which the road passes, and they are numerous, refer to it as the Cumberland Road. The connecting link between Cumberland and the city of Baltimore is a road much older than the Cumberland Road, constructed and owned by associations of individuals, and the two together constitute the National Road. While it appears from the authority quoted that Henry Clay was not the planner of the National Road, he was undoubtedly its ablest and most conspicuous champion. In Mallory's Life of Clay it is stated that "he advocated the policy of carrying forward the construction of the Cumberland Road as rapidly as possible," and with what earnestness, continues his biographer, "we may learn from his own language, declaring that he had to _beg_, _entreat_ and _supplicate_ Congress, session after session, to grant the necessary appropriations to complete the road." Mr. Clay said, "I have myself toiled until my powers have been exhausted and prostrated to prevail on you to make the grant." No wonder Mr. Clay was a popular favorite along the whole line of the road. At a public dinner tendered him by the mechanics of Wheeling, he spoke of "the great interest the road had awakened in his breast, and expressed an ardent desire that it might be prosecuted to a speedy completion." Among other things he said that "a few years since he and his family had employed the whole or greater part of a day in traveling the distance of about nine miles from Uniontown to Freeman's,[A] on Laurel Hill, which now, since the construction of the road over the mountains, could be accomplished, together with seventy more in the same time," and that "the road was so important to the maintenance of our Union that he would not consent to give it up to the keeping of the several States through which it passed."