The Paths of Inland Commerce; A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and WaterwayHulbert, Archer Butler
History
The Paths of Inland Commerce; A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway
Hulbert, Archer Butler
Transportation -- United States -- History
For the early phases of inland navigation John Pickell's A New Chapter
in the Early Life of Washington (1856), is an excellent work of the
old-fashioned type, while in Herbert B. Adams's Maryland's Influence
upon Land Cessions to the United States (Johns Hopkins University
Studies in Historical and Political Science, Third Series, I, 1885) a
master-hand pays Washington his due for originating plans of
trans-Alleghany solidarity; this likewise is the theme of Archer B.
Hulbert's Washington and the West (1905) wherein is printed Washington's
Diary of September, 1784, containing the first and unexpurgated draft of
his classic letter to Harrison of that year. The publications of the
various societies for internal improvement and state boards of control
and a few books, such as Turner Camac's Facts and Arguments Respecting
the Great Utility of an Extensive Plan of Inland Navigation in America
(1805), give the student distinct impressions of the difficulties and
the ideals of the first great American promoters of inland commerce.
Elkanah Watson's History of the ... Western Canals in the State of New
York (1820), despite inaccuracies due to lapses of memory, should be
specially remarked.
For the rise and progress of turnpike building one must remember W.
Kingsford's History, Structure, and Statistics of Plank Roads (1852), a
reliable book by a careful writer. The Cumberland (National) Road has
its political influence carefully adjudged by Jeremiah S. Young in A
Political and Constitutional Study of the Cumberland Road (1904), while
the social and personal side is interestingly treated in county history
style in Thomas B. Searight's The Old Pike (1894). Motorists will
appreciate Robert Bruce's The National Road (1916), handsomely
illustrated and containing forty-odd sectional maps.
The best life of Fulton is H. W. Dickinson's Robert Fulton, Engineer and
Artist: His Life and Works (1913), while in Alice Crary Sutcliffe's
Robert Fulton and the "Clermont" (1909), the more intimate picture of a
family biography is given. For the controversy concerning the
Fulton-Livingston monopoly, note W. A. Duer's A Course of Lectures on
Constitutional Jurisprudence and his pamphlets addressed to Cadwallader
D. Colden. The life of that stranger to success, the forlorn John Fitch,
was written sympathetically and after assiduous research by Thompson
Westcott in his Life of John Fitch the Inventor of the Steamboat (1858).
For the pamphlet war between Fitch and Rumsey see Allibone's Dictionary.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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