The commercial interests of the East were quick to see the possibilities of this new market. An eager rivalry sprang up between the merchants of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Everywhere ways and means of cheaper transportation were discussed. In this subject the Western farmer was vitally interested, for freight charges added nearly one third to the cost of merchandise transported over the mountains. The cotton planter of the Seaboard States, also, feeling the competition of the Southwest, where riverways were abundant and easily navigable, saw the need of better roads to tidewater, in order to lessen the cost of marketing his produce. The popular demand for better roads was not recent. All the States had encouraged, directly or indirectly, the building of turnpikes and bridges. Between 1793 and 1812, Pennsylvania had chartered fifty-five turnpike companies, and other States had been scarcely less ready to grant articles of incorporation to stock companies. Private enterprise had, indeed, done much to improve communication along the seaboard. Turnpikes and bridges had shortened the journey by stage from Boston to Washington to four and a quarter days by the year 1815. The city of New York was in 1816 within twenty-four hours of Albany by the Hudson River steamboats. Numerous canal companies had also been chartered; but of all the canals projected, only three had been completed when the War of 1812 began: the Dismal Swamp Canal in Virginia, the Santee Canal in South Carolina, and the Middlesex Canal in Massachusetts. It remained for New York to usher in a new era in internal communication by authorizing in 1817 the construction of the Erie Canal. In the ardent imagination of its chief promoter, De Witt Clinton, this canal was destined to be "a bond of union between the Atlantic and Western States" and "an organ of communication between the Hudson, the Mississippi, the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes of the North and West, and their tributary rivers," creating "the greatest inland trade ever witnessed" and transforming New York into a vast emporium of commerce and "the granary of the world." This bold bid for Western trade alarmed the merchants of Philadelphia, particularly as the completion of the national road threatened to divert much of their traffic to Baltimore. In 1825, the legislature of Pennsylvania grappled with the problem by projecting a series of canals which were to connect its great seaport with Pittsburg on the west and with Lake Erie and the upper Susquehanna on the north.