The Life of John Marshall, Volume 1: Frontiersman, soldier, lawmaker, 1755-1788

When Washington, as President, was on his way to meet Congress, his carriage stuck in the mud, and only after it had been pried up with poles and pulled out by ropes could the Father of his Country proceed on his journey;765 and this, too, over the principal highway of Maryland. "My nerves have not yet quite recovered the shock of the wagon," wrote Samuel Johnston of a stage trip from Baltimore to New York two years after our present Government was established.766 Richard Henry Lee objected to the Constitution, because, among other things, "many citizens will be more than three hundred miles from the seat of this [National] government";767 and "as many assessors and collectors of federal taxes will be above three hundred miles from the seat of the federal government as will be less."768

The best road throughout its course, in the entire country, was the one between Boston and New York; yet the public conveyance which made regular trips with relays of horses in the most favorable season of the year usually took an entire week for the journey.769 The stage was "shackling"; the horses' harness "made of ropes"; one team hauled the stage only eighteen miles; the stop for the night was made at ten o'clock, the start next morning at half-past two; the passengers often had to "help the coachman lift the coach out of the quagmire."770

Over parts even of this, the finest long highway in the United States, the stage had to struggle against rocks and to escape precipices. "I knew not which to admire the most in the driver, his intrepidity or dexterity. I cannot conceive how he avoided twenty times dashing the carriage to pieces,"771 testifies a traveler. In central Massachusetts, the roads "were intolerable" even to a New Englander; and "the country was sparsely inhabited by a rude population."772 In Rhode Island not far from Providence the traveler was forced to keep mounting and dismounting from his horse in order to get along at all.773 Dr. Taylor, in the Massachusetts Convention of 1788, arguing for frequent elections, said that it would take less than three weeks for Massachusetts members of Congress to go from Boston to Philadelphia.774

Farmers only a short distance from New York could not bring their produce to the city in the winter because the roads were impassable.775 Up State, in Cooper's Otsego settlement, "not one in twenty of the settlers had a horse and the way lay through rapid streams, across swamps or over bogs… If the father of a family went abroad to labour for bread, it cost him three times its value before he could bring it home."776 As late as 1790, after forty thousand acres in this region had been taken up "by the poorest order of men … there were neither roads nor bridges"; and about Otsego itself there was not even "any trace of a road."777 Where Utica now stands, the opening through the wilderness, which went by the name of a road, was so nearly impassable that a horseback traveler could make no more than two miles an hour over it. Rocks, stumps, and muddy holes in which the horse sank, made progress not only slow and toilsome, but dangerous.778

Twenty days was not an unusual time for ordinary wagons, carrying adventurous settlers to the wilderness west of the Alleghanies, to cross Pennsylvania from Philadelphia to Pittsburg;779 and it cost a hundred and twenty dollars a ton to haul freight between these points.780 Three years after our present Government was established, twenty out of twenty-six lawsuits pending in Philadelphia were settled out of court "rather than go ninety miles from Phila for trial."781

Talleyrand, journeying inland from the Quaker City about 1795, was "struck with astonishment" at what he beheld: "At less than a hundred and fifty miles distance from the Capital," he writes, "all trace of men's presence disappeared; nature in all her primeval vigor confronted us. Forests old as the world itself; decayed plants and trees covering the very ground where they once grew in luxuriance." And Talleyrand testifies that the fields, only a few miles' walk out of the "cities," had been "mere wildernesses of forest" at the time the Constitution was adopted.782

"The length and badness of the roads from hence [Mount Vernon] to Philadelphia" made Washington grumble with vexation and disgust;783 and Jefferson wrote of the President's Southern tour in 1791: "I shall be happy to hear that no accident has happened to you in the bad roads … that you are better prepared for those to come by lowering the hang [body] of your carriage and exchanging the coachman for two postilions … which [are] … essential to your safety."784

No more comfortable or expeditious, if less dangerous, was travel by boat on the rivers. "Having lain all night in my Great Coat and Boots in a berth not long enough for me," chronicles Washington of this same Presidential journey, "we found ourselves in the morning still fast aground."785

So difficult were the New Jersey roads that the stout and well-kept harness with which Washington always equipped his horses was badly broken going through New Jersey in 1789.786 "The roads [from Richmond to New York] thro' the whole were so bad that we could never go more than three miles an hour, some times not more than two, and in the night, but one," wrote Jefferson787 in March, 1790.

A traveler starting from Alexandria, Virginia, to visit Mount Vernon, nine miles distant, was all day on the road, having become lost, in the "very thick woods." So confusing was the way through this forest that part of this time he was within three miles of his destination.788 Twelve years after our present Government was established James A. Bayard records of his journey to the Capital: "Tho' traveling in the mail stage … we were unable to move at more than the rate of two or three miles an hour."789

Throughout Virginia the roads were execrable and scarcely deserved the name. The few bridges usually were broken.790 The best road in the State was from Williamsburg, the old Capital, to Richmond, the new, a distance of only sixty-three miles; yet, going at highest speed, it required two days to make the trip.791 Traveling in Virginia was almost exclusively by horseback; only negroes walked.792 According to Grigsby, the familiar vision in our minds of the picturesque coach comfortably rolling over attractive highways, with postilions and outriders, which we now picture when we think of traveling in old Virginia, is mostly an historical mirage; for, says Grigsby, "coaches were rarely seen. There were thousands of respectable men in the Commonwealth who had never seen any other four-wheeled vehicle than a wagon and there were thousands who had never seen a wagon" at the time when the Constitution was ratified.793

If horseback journeys were sore trials to the rider, they were desperately hard and sometimes fatal to the poor brute that carried him. In crossing unfordable rivers on the rude ferryboats, the horses' legs frequently were broken or the animals themselves often killed or drowned.794 From Fredericksburg to Alexandria the roads were "frightfully bad."795 As late as 1801 the wilderness was so dense just above where the City of Washington now stands that Davis called it "the wilds of the Potomac." In most parts of Virginia a person unacquainted with the locality often became lost in the forests.796 South of Jamestown the crude and hazardous highways led through "eternal woods."797

A short time before the Revolution, General Wilkinson's father bought five hundred acres on the present site of the National Capital, including the spot where the White House now stands; but his wife refused to go there from a little hamlet near Baltimore where her family then lived, because it was so far away from the settlements in the backwoods of Maryland.798 A valuable horse was stolen from a Virginia planter who lived one hundred and forty miles from Richmond; but, although the thief was known, the expense of going to the Capital with witnesses was double the value of the horse, and so the planter pocketed his loss.799 It cost more to transport tobacco from Augusta County, Virginia, to market than the tobacco was worth, so difficult and expensive was the carriage.800

A sergeant in a Virginia regiment during the Revolutionary War, living in a part of the State which at present is not two hours' ride from the Capital, petitioned the House of Delegates in 1790 for payment of his arrears because he lived so far away from Richmond that he had found it impossible to apply within the time allowed for the settlement of his accounts in the regular way.801 In 1785 the price of tobacco on the James River or the Rappahannock, and in Philadelphia varied from twenty to ninety-five per cent, although each of these places was "the same distance from its ultimate market,"802 so seriously did want of transportation affect commerce. "The trade of this Country is in a deplorable Condition … the loss direct on our produce & indirect on our imports is not less than 50 per ct.," testifies Madison.803

Only in the immediate neighborhood of Philadelphia, Boston,804 or New York, neither of which "cities" was as large as a moderate-sized inland town of to-day, were highways good, even from the point of view of the eighteenth century. In all other parts of America the roads in the present-day sense did not exist at all. Very often such trails as had been made were hard to find and harder to keep after they had been found. Near the close of the Revolution, Chastellux became tangled up in the woods on his way to visit Jefferson at Monticello "and travelled a long time without seeing any habitation."805

Whoever dared to take in North Carolina what, at present, would be a brief and pleasant jaunt, then had to go through scores of miles of "dreary pines" in which the traveler often lost his way and became bewildered in the maze of the forest.806 Again, the wanderer would find himself in a desolation of swamp and wood without the hint of a highway to follow out of it; and sleeping on the ground beneath the trees of this wilderness, with only wild animals about him, was, for the ordinary traveler, not an uncommon experience.807

Even when the road could be traced, bears would follow it, so much was it still a part of their savage domain.808 The little traveling possible when the weather was good was sometimes entirely suspended for days after a rain or snowfall, even out of a "city" like Baltimore.809 Six years after the Constitution was adopted, Talleyrand found the buildings of that ambitious town "disput[ing] the ground with trees whose stumps have not yet been removed."810

Such were the means of communication of a people scattered over a territory of almost half a million square miles. The total population of the United States was about three and a quarter millions; the same part of the country to-day has a population of not far from fifty-five millions. Including cities, and adding to these the more thickly settled portions adjoining them, there were not in the original States seven men, women, and children, all told, to the square mile. If we add Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, into which the restless settlers already were moving, the people then living in the United States were fewer than five persons to the square mile.

The various little clusters of this scanty and widely separated population were almost entirely out of touch one with another. Inhabitants were scattered through those far-flung stretches called the United States, but they were not a people. Scarcely any communication existed between them; while such a thing as mail service was unknown to all but a comparatively few thousands. It required six days and sometimes nine to carry mail between Boston and New York. As late as 1794 a letter of Jefferson, then in Charlottesville, Virginia, to Madison at Philadelphia, reached the latter nine days after it was sent; and another letter between the same correspondents was eight days on the journey.811

Yet this was unusually expeditious. One month later, on January 26, 1795, Madison wrote Jefferson that "I have received your favor of Decṛ 28, but [not] till three weeks after the date of it."812 Summer, when the post-riders made better time, seemed not greatly to increase the dispatch of mail; for it took more than a month for a letter posted in New York in that season of the year to reach an accessible Virginia county seat.813 Letters from Richmond, Virginia, to New York often did not arrive until two months after they were sent.814 But better time was frequently made and a letter between these points was, commonly, hurried through in a month.815

Many weeks would go by before one could send a letter from an interior town in Pennsylvania. "This Uniontown is the most obscure spot on the face of the globe… I have been here seven or eight weeks without one opportunity of writing to the land of the living," complains a disgusted visitor.816 A letter posted by Rufus King in Boston, February 6, 1788, to Madison in New York was received February 15;817 and although anxiously awaiting news, Madison had not, on February 11, heard that Massachusetts had ratified the Constitution, although that momentous event had occurred five days before.818 New York first learned of that historic action eight days after it was taken.819 But for the snail-like slowness of the post, the Constitution would certainly have been defeated in the Virginia Convention of 1788.820

Transatlantic mail service was far more expeditious considering the distance; a letter from Jay in London reached Wolcott at Philadelphia in less than eight weeks.821 But it sometimes required five months to carry mail across the ocean;822 even this was very much faster than one could travel by land in America. Four weeks from Cowes, England, to Lynnhaven Bay, Virginia, was a record-breaking voyage.823

Such letters as went through the post-offices were opened by the postmasters as a matter of course, if these officials imagined that the missives contained information, or especially if they revealed the secret or familiar correspondence of well-known public men.824 "By passing through the post-office they [letters] should become known to all" men, Washington cautioned Lafayette in 1788.825 In 1791, the first year of the Post-Office under our present Government, there were only eighty-nine post-offices in the entire country.826 "As late as 1791 there were only six post-offices in New Jersey and none south of Trenton."827

Yet letters were the principal means by which accounts of what was happening in one part of the country were made known to the people who lived in other sections; and this personal correspondence was by far the most trustworthy source of information, although tinctured as it naturally was by the prejudice of the writer and often nothing but report of mere rumor.

Newspapers were few in number and scanty in news. When the Constitution was adopted, not many regularly issued newspapers were printed in the whole country. Most of these were published in Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and in two or three of the other larger towns. Only ten papers were printed in Connecticut, one of the best informed and best served of all the States, and of these several soon expired;828 in Ridgefield, with twelve hundred inhabitants, there were but four newspaper subscribers.829 In 1784, Virginia had only one newspaper, published at Richmond twice a week.830

These papers carried scarcely any news and the little they published was often weeks and sometimes months old, and as uncertain as it was stale. "It is but seldom that I have an opportunity of peeping into a newspaper," wrote "Agricola" to the Salem (Massachusetts) "Gazette," September 13, 1791, "and when it happens it is commonly a stale one of 2 or 3 weeks back; but I lately met with your fresh Gazette of August 30th – may be I shan't see another for months to come."831 "Newspaper paragraphs, unsupported by other testimony, are often contradictory and bewildering," wrote Washington of so big, important, and exciting news as the progress of Shays's Rebellion.832 On the same day Washington complained to General Knox that he was "bewildered with those vague and contradictory reports which are presented in the newspapers."833

But what this pygmy press lacked in information it made up in personal abuse. Denunciation of public men was the rule, scandal the fashion. Even the mild and patient Franklin was driven to bitter though witty protest. He called the press "The Supremest Court of Judicature," which "may judge, sentence, and condemn to infamy, not only private individuals, but public bodies, &c. with or without inquiry or hearing, at the court's discretion." This "Spanish Court of Inquisition," asserts Franklin, works "in the dark" and so rapidly that "an honest, good Citizen may find himself suddenly and unexpectedly accus'd, and in the same Morning judg'd and condemn'd, and sentence pronounced against him, that he is a Rogue and a Villian."

"The liberty of the press," writes Franklin, operates on citizens "somewhat like the Liberty of the Press that Felons have, by the Common Law of England, before Conviction, that is, to be press'd to death or hanged." "Any Man," says he, "who can procure Pen, Ink, and Paper, with a Press, and a huge pair of Blacking Balls, may commissionate himself" as a court over everybody else, and nobody has any redress. "For, if you make the least complaint of the judge's [editor's] conduct, he daubs his blacking balls in your face wherever he meets you, and, besides tearing your private character to flitters marks you out for the odium of the public, as an enemy to the liberty of the press." Franklin declared that the press of that day was supported by human depravity.

Searching for a remedy which would destroy the abuse but preserve the true liberty of the press, Franklin finally concludes that he has found it in what he calls "the liberty of the cudgel." The great philosopher advised the insulted citizen to give the editor "a good drubbing"; but if the public should feel itself outraged, it should restrain itself and, says Franklin, "in moderation content ourselves with tarring and feathering, and tossing them [editors] in a blanket."834

Even Jefferson was sometimes disgusted with the press. "What do the foolish printers of America mean by retailing all this stuff in our papers? – As if it were not enough to be slandered by one's enemies without circulating the slanders among his friends also."835 An examination of the newspapers of that period shows that most of the "news" published were accounts of foreign events; and these, of course, had happened weeks and even months before.

Poor, small, and bad as the newspapers of the time were, however, they had no general circulation many miles from the place where they were published. Yet, tiny driblets trickled through by the belated posts to the larger towns and were hastily read at villages where the post-riders stopped along the way. By 1790 an occasional country newspaper appeared, whose only source of news from the outside world was a fugitive copy of some journal published in the city and such tales as the country editor could get travelers to tell him: whether these were true or false made not the slightest difference – everything was fish that came to his net.836

Common schools in the present-day understanding of the term did not exist. "There was not a grammar, a geography, or a history of any kind in the school," testifies Samuel G. Goodrich837 (Peter Parley) of Ridgefield, Connecticut; and this at a time when the Constitution had been adopted and our present Government was in operation. "Slates & pencils were unknown, paper was imported, scarce and costly"; most pupils in New England "cyphered on birch bark"; and a teacher who could compute interest was considered "great in figures."838 "The teacher was not infrequently a person with barely education enough to satisfy the critical requirements of some illiterate committeemen… The pay was only from three to five dollars a month, and two months during the winter season was the usual term."839 The half-dozen small but excellent colleges and the few embryonic academies surrounded by forests, where educated and devout men strove to plant the seeds of institutions of learning, could not, altogether, reach more than a few hundred pupils.

"Anthony McDonald teaches boys and girls their grammar tongue; also Geography terrestrial and celestial – Old hats made as good as new." So read the sign above the door of McDonald's "school" in Virginia, a dozen years after Washington was elected President.840 For the most part children went untaught, except in "the three R's," which, in some mysterious manner, had been handed down from father to son. Yet in the back settlements it was common to find men of considerable property who could not read or write; and some of those who could make out to read did not know whether the earth was round or flat.841 There were but thirty students at Virginia's historic college in 1795. Weld dined with President Madison, of William and Mary's, and several of the students were at the table. Some of these young seekers after culture were without shoes, some without coats; and each of them rose and helped himself to the food whenever he liked.842

Parts of the country, like the Mohawk Valley in New York, were fairly settled and well cultivated.843 In the more thickly inhabited parts of New England there were order, thrift, and industry.844 The houses of the most prosperous farmers in Massachusetts, though "frequently but one story and a garret," had "their walls papered"; tea and coffee were on their tables when guests appeared; the women were clad in calicoes and the men were both farmers and artisans.845 Yet on the road from Boston to Providence houses were seen already falling into decay; "women and children covered with rags."846 In Newport, Rhode Island, idle men loafed on the street corners, houses were tumbling down from negligence, grass grew in the public square, and rags were stuffed into the windows.847

In Connecticut the people were unusually prosperous; and one enthusiastic Frenchman, judging that State from the appearance of the country around Hartford, exclaimed: "It is really the Paradise of the United States."848 Weld found that, while the "southeast part of … Pennsylvania is better cultivated than any other part of America, yet the style of farming is … very slovenly… The farmer … in England … who rents fifty acres … lives far more comfortably in every respect than the farmer in Pennsylvania, or any other of the middle states, who owns two hundred acres."849

In the homes of Quaker farmers near Philadelphia, however, the furniture was of black walnut, the beds and linen white and clean, the food varied and excellent.850 Yet a settler's house in the interior of Pennsylvania was precisely the reverse, as the settler himself was the opposite of the industrious and methodical Quaker husbandman. A log cabin lighted only by the open door, and with the bare earth for a floor, housed this pioneer and his numerous family. Often he was a man who had lost both fortune and credit and therefore sought regions where neither was necessary. When neighbors began to come in such numbers that society (which to him meant government, order, and taxes) was formed, he moved on to a newer, more desolate, and more congenial spot. Mostly hunter and very little of a farmer, he with his nomad brood lived "in the filth of his little cabin," the rifle or rod, and corn from the meager clearing, supplying all his wants except that of whiskey, which he always made shift to get.

One idea and one alone possessed this type – the idea of independence, freedom from restraint. He was the high priest of the religion of do-as-you-like. He was the supreme individualist, the ultimate democrat whose non-social doctrine has so cursed modern America. "He will not consent to sacrifice a single natural right for all the benefits of government,"851 chronicles a sympathetic observer of these men.

Freneau, a fervent admirer of this shiftless and dissolute type, thus describes him and his home: —

"Far in the west, a paltry spot of land,That no man envied, and that no man owned,A woody hill, beside a dismal bog —This was your choice; nor were you much to blame;And here, responsive to the croaking frog,You grubbed, and stubbed,And feared no landlord's claim."852

Nor was hostility to orderly society confined to this class. Knox wrote Washington that, in Massachusetts, those who opposed the Constitution acted "from deadly principle levelled at the existence of all government whatever."853