This is in response to Opposite Day's great comment on the tech that the founding fathers had at their disposal. I forgot to hit the quote button.
"When Thomas Jefferson took the Oath of Office as the third president of the United States on March 4, 1801, the nation contained 5,308,483 persons. Nearly one out of five was a Negro slave. Although the boundaries stretched from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River, from the Great Lakes to nearly the gulf of Mexico (roughly a thousand miles by a thousand miles), only a small area was occupied. Two-thirds of the people lived within fifty miles of tidewater. Only four roads crossed the Appalachian Mountains, one from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, another from the Potomac to the Monongahela River, a third through Virginia southwestward to Knoxville, Tennessee, and a fourth through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky.
The potential of the United States was, if not limitless, certainly vast - and vastly greater if the nation could add the trans-Mississippi portion of the continent to its territory. In 1801, however, it was not clear the country could hold on to its existing territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, much less add more western land.
Fewer then one in ten Americans, about half a million people, lived west of the Appalachian Mountains, but as the Whiskey Rebellion had shown, they were already disposed to think of themselves as the germ of an independent nation that would find its outlet to the world marketplace not across the mountains to the Atlantic Seaboard, but by the Ohio and Mississippi river system to the Gulf of Mexico. This threat of secession was quite real. The United States was only eighteen years old, had itself come into existance by an act of rebellion and secession, had changed its from of government just twelve years earlier, and thus was in a fluid political situation.
In addition, it seemed unlikely that one nation could govern an entire continent. The distances were just too great. A critical fact in the world of 1801 was that nothing moved faster than the speed of a horse. No human being, no manufactured item, no bushel of wheat, no side of beef (or any beef on the hoof, for that matter), no letter, no information, no idea, order, or instruction of any kind moved faster. Nothing had ever moved any faster, and, as far as Jefferson's contemporaries were able to tell, nothing ever would.
And except on a race track, no horse moved very fast. Road conditions in the United States ranged from bad to abominable, and there weren't very many of them."
...Steve Ambrose, Undaunted Courage
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There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
....Leonard Cohen
Originally Posted by Noam Chomsky
I want one of those too!
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