Among other
enterprises, they contemplated a great post-road to New Orleans through
Georgia, instead of the long water route heretofore used by way of
Nashville and Natchez. The new way, it was estimated, would shorten
the journey five hundred miles. Branches were planned to St. Louis and
to Detroit. The difficulties of frontier travel may be imagined from
the fact that the surveyor-general, who was despatched to examine the
feasibility of the Georgia route, was nearly three months in reaching
New Orleans from Washington.
Interested in scientific knowledge and exploration, and desirous of
keeping American ships off the seas by developing internal trade,
Jefferson had anticipated the purchase of Louisiana by proposing
confidentially to Congress the despatch of a few men on an investigating
trip up the Missouri River. Trade with the Indians needed to be
cultivated in this manner, but no State was sufficiently concerned to
undertake it. Jefferson found an easy way to warrant national action.
"The interests of commerce," said he, "place the principal object
within the constitutional powers and care of Congress.
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