Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 1.djvu/24

1800. Philadelphian, probably a foreigner, wrote in 1796 that, "with a few exceptions, brutality, negligence, and filching are as naturally expected by people accustomed to travelling in America, as a mouth, a nose, and two eyes are looked for in a man's face." This sweeping charge, probably unjust, and certainly supported by little public evidence, was chiefly founded on the experience of an alleged journey from New York:—


 * "At Bordertown we went into a second boat where we met with very sorry accommodation. This was about four o'clock in the afternoon.  We had about twenty miles down the Delaware to reach Philadelphia.  The captain, who had a most provoking tongue, was a boy about eighteen years of age.  He and a few companions despatched a dozen or eighteen bottles of porter.  We ran three different times against other vessels that were coming up the stream.  The women and children lay all night on the bare boards of the cabin floor. . . .  We reached Arch Street wharf about eight o'clock on the Wednesday morning, having been about sixteen hours on a voyage of twenty miles."

In the Southern States the difficulties and perils of travel were so great as to form a barrier almost insuperable. Even Virginia was no exception to this rule. At each interval of a few miles the horseman found himself stopped by a river, liable to sudden freshets, and rarely bridged. Jefferson in his frequent journeys between Monticello and Washington was happy to reach the end of the hundred miles