Flashback, March 1806: Jefferson Approves Bill for First National Road

Within a week of it reaching his desk after passage by the House of Representatives, Thomas Jefferson signed in late March 1806 a bill authorizing the construction of the first federally funded road in the history of the American republic.

Approval came at the end of a long, bitter debate about the expenses and forces involved with what came to be known as the Cumberland Road, or National Road. In fact, that controversy over what were then called “internal improvements” and now “infrastructure” has continued, albeit in different forms, down to the present day.

Construction would also be buffeted by factors that few debate participants would have considered at the time. By necessity, the War of 1812 consumed much of the nation’s attention. Even though building had reached Wheeling, Va., in 1818 and continued to expand west, it halted at Vandalia, Ill., by 1841, victimized by funding issues occasioned by the Panic of 1837.

Advocates for state supremacy got more of what they wished for at this point, with maintenance of completed portions taken out of the hands of the federal government and monetized through toll systems.

Still, from its Cumberland, MD starting off point, the road—or what was completed to that point—covered 620 miles and five states, and had become a major transportation link between the East and Midwest.

In the first few decades of the United States, what many Founding Fathers had in mind with the term “internal improvements” were roads and canals. What divided the two political parties of the time, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans, was who would pay for these: the federal government or individual states.

The Federalists believed that improved modes of transportation facilitated national unity, so they wanted construction to be federally funded. But the Democratic-Republicans saw this as interfering with the prerogative of states, as well as a source of pork-barrel politics—or, as Jefferson put it in a March 1796 letter to James Madison, “boundless patronage to the executive, jobbing to members of Congress and their friends, and a bottomless abyss of public money.”

Once in power, however, Jefferson’s opinion on the federal prerogative was modified. Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin—who, while previously serving as state assemblyman from Pennsylvania’s Fayette County, had supported the Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike and "every other temporary improvement in our communications."

He persuaded Jefferson to sign the Ohio Enabling Act, which provided that five percent of the proceeds from public land sales in Ohio would be saved for the future construction of a National Road.

Obstacles to travel were formidable because the lack of hard surfaces could plunge riders and their vehicles into ruts, and mountainous terrain could prove treacherous to negotiate.

At the same time, engineering in the early republic was still in its infancy, largely linked to military fortifications. The major boost to civil engineering, the Erie Canal, was still a decade away when the Cumberland Road was planned.

Construction, then, was still a matter of brawn and beasts, as described by the history The Cumberland Road:

“Burly axmen began the construction process by felling all trees along a clearing sixty-feet wide through the forest. They were followed by choppers, grubbers, and burners, whose work might take weeks to complete in heavily timbered sections…After grubbing, the road had to be leveled by pick-and-shovel wielding laborers. This earth-moving army cut into hillsides, flung tracks of fill across hollows, and hauled away excess earth and rock. Finally, the graders, stone crushers, and pavers laid the roadbed.”

Even as Jefferson and Gallatin looked to internal improvements as a means of fostering national unity, they encountered opposition from within the President’s own state. In his History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson, Henry Adams assessed the ironic turn of events brought about by Jefferson’s second cousin, the choleric and contrarian Congressman John Randolph of Roanoke, Va.:

“To some extent the President, his Cabinet, and the Senate had become converted to Federalist views; but the influence of Randolph and of popular prejudices peculiar to Southern society held the House stiffly to an impracticable creed. Whatever the North and East wanted the South and West refused. Jefferson's wishes fared no better than the requests of the State and city of New York; the House showed no alacrity in taking up the subject of roads, canals, or universities. The only innovation which made its way through Congress was the Act of Feb. 10, 1807, appropriating fifty thousand dollars for the establishment of a coast survey, for this was an object in which the Southern States were interested as deeply as the Northern. Even the Senate's appropriation for beginning the Cumberland Road was indefinitely postponed by the House.”

Upon completion in 1825, the Erie Canal started a mania for canal building, and following the Civil War a similar frenzied construction phase began for railroads. It was easy to forget amid this transportation revolution how much the Cumberland Road represented in the beginning.

Major Eastern Seaboard cities like New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore could more easily transport goods to growing territories along the Midwestern frontier, which, in turn, now had more accessible outlets for their food. In between, a network of taverns to serve hungry and tired travelers sprang up.

Moreover, the Cumberland Road set a precedent for involvement of the federal government in transportation projects. A journey that could take anywhere from five to seven miles a day in the early 1800s increased to thirty miles a day by stagecoach four decades later.

In effect, the road also was the forerunner America’s interstate highway system. Initially the foundation for US Route 40 in the 1920s, it was absorbed and, at points, bypassed by Interstate 70 following the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. Stone and masonry from the original was replaced by modern asphalt and concrete.

In a sense, one thing hasn’t changed about America’s relationship to infrastructure: it remains a political football. Maintaining roads, bridges and tunnel costs money, and, despite frequent boasts about “Infrastructure Week” from 2017 to 2021, Presidential commitment has turned into a matter of funding threats and ego stroking over time.