Hi, I'm the History Guy. I have a degree in history,
I love history and if you love history too this is the channel for you.
March 29th is an auspicious day in the history of the United States of America because on that day
in 1804, President Thomas Jefferson signed into law what would turn out to be one of
the most important acts in the history of the United States Congress. An Act that represented
not just a political shift of the time, but also which represented a demographic shift that would
transform the nation and set us on a path to the future, all for the low low price of just thirty
thousand dollars. And so today, the history guy is going to review the importance of the
1804 Act entitled, “An Act to regulate the laying out and building of a road from Cumberland in the
state of Maryland to the state of Ohio” the United States very first federally funded National Road.
The origins of the Act actually go back to the Treaty of Paris in 1783, that was the treaty
between King George the 3rd of England and the United States that officially ended the
Revolutionary War, among other things the Treaty of Paris stipulated that the land northwest of the
Ohio River and south of the Great Lakes would belong to the United States. This area, which
at the time was called the Northwest Territory, represented more than 260,000 square miles and
all of the modern states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of
Minnesota. One of the most significant questions of the huge Northwest Territory was how to divide
that territory up in two states that could join the Union, and the first of those was the state
of Ohio. In 1802, Thomas Jefferson signed the Enabling Act, which called for the admittance of
Ohio as a state of the Union as soon as possible, and while it took another year for there to be an
agreement on the exact borders in order to create a state, the 1802 Act was still important because
of a provision in the act that said, “that 2% of the proceeds from the sale of federal lands in the
state of Ohio should go to the construction of a road to Ohio”. The Act that Jefferson signed
in 1806 appropriated funds from that fund, and it was the very first time that Congress and the
President had agreed to actually start to build a road. What the Act allowed Jefferson to do was to
hire three commissioners, at a rate of $3 a day, who would survey a route from Cumberland Maryland
to Ohio territory. They were required to put a marker, plainly seen on either side of the road,
at least every quarter mile and at every road turn, the road was to be four rods wide. In
addition, they could each hire a surveyor at the rate of $2 a day, and 2 chains people and a
marker, each who would make one dollar a day, for an entire appropriation of $30,000. But the road
that they were using was not exactly new, it had been used by Indians for generations, and in the
mid 1700s a Delaware Indian chief named Nemacolin, was contracted to help turn one of these Indian
trails from Maryland to the Ohio territory, into a road large enough to accommodate freight wagons.
Then in 1755, British General Edward Braddock led an expedition up the Nemacolin Trail, the goal was
to defeat French forces in the area and claim the Ohio territories for the British. The expedition
didn't work out very well for Braddock, to give you an idea, the ultimate battle in the expedition
was called the Battle of Braddock's Defeat and he himself was killed. But the expedition which
included British soldiers and Virginia militiamen widened the Nemacolin path into a Military Road
and that was the first improved road to cross the Appalachian Mountains. The new road authorized by
Jefferson would generally follow the Braddock Road, significant work on the road however
didn't actually begin until around 1811, when the first contract for road building went to
a man named Henry McKinley. The law called for a road bed that would be 66 feet wide and stripped
of all trees and brush and then have a road in the middle 30 feet wide. The road would be built using
a construction process called Macadam, named after Scottish engineer John Macadam, which uses stacked
layers of progressively smaller rocks which are then all crushed together with a large metal
roller. While Macadam roads solved the problems of ruts and mud that could come from just plain dirt
roads it was rather expensive, an 1812 report to Congress reported that the cost of building
the Macadam Road was varying between $14.50 and $22.50 per inch. The rocks were broken by hand
with a hammer and in order to make sure that you have the right size rock stack, the workers had to
fit the rocks through progressively smaller steel rings in order to complete their back-breaking
work. It was also not quite as permanent as they had hoped, even though Macadam is a strong road,
the effects of weather and traffic could still wear the road down, and by the 1820s Congress
was appropriating almost as much to repair the existing road as it was to build a new road. In
1818 the road reached Wheeling which was then in the state of Virginia, and that opened a path for
mass migration of settlers and goods to the new state of Ohio and also a path to Navigo
rivers that allowed the settlement of the entire Mississippi basin. In 1839, the road reached its
western terminus in the town of Vandalia Illinois, at that point it seemed like river ways, canals
and trains were the future of travel, and Congress could no longer sustain the cost of maintaining
the road, and so the road and its maintenance were passed over to the states, and the last federal
appropriation ended in 1840. But in that time the National Road was used by hundreds of thousands
of settlers in order to drive American expansion into the new states of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.
Today U.S. Highway 40 follows much of the route of the original National Road so you can still drive
the road, although it did bypass a few sections, so there are some pieces of America here and there
where you can still see remnants of the original National Road. With the interstate highways that
we have today we take for granted that there's a federal role in subsidizing infrastructure
for interstate travel, but that was not always an easy agreement. The early Federalists, who
were championed by Alexander Hamilton, perceived a stronger role for the federal government and part
of that was the idea that the federal government would subsidize infrastructure. But they were
opposed by the Democrat Republicans, who were championed by Thomas Jefferson, who thought the
federal government should have a restricted role and some of whom thought building a national road
was downright unconstitutional. Ironically, it was the law signed by Thomas Jefferson
that ended up creating the National Road, but the issue wasn't really resolved until something that
was called the Era of Good Feelings, which was the administration of James Monroe from 1817 to
1825. Monroe ran and championed something called the American System, which among other things,
embraced a federal role in building transportation infrastructure, and in doing so not only did we
open the American West to expansion and create an amazing feat of engineering, but we resolved some
of the thorniest early political issues regarding the size and scope of the federal government. And
that resolution still impacts us profoundly today, and so if you hop on an interstate highway you
have reason to commemorate the date March 29th. I'm the history guy, I hope you enjoyed this
edition of my channel, five minutes of history, short snippets of forgotten history five to ten
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