"If it be the wish of the people that the construction of roads and canals should be conducted by the Federal Government, it is not only highly expedient, but indispensably necessary, that a previous amendment of the Constitution, delegating the necessary power and defining and restricting its exercise with reference to the sovereignty of the States, should be made. The right to exercise as much jurisdiction as is necessary to preserve the works and to raise funds by the collection of tolls to keep them in repair can not be dispensed with. The Cumberland Road should be an instructive admonition of the consequences of acting without this right. Year after year contests are witnessed, growing out of efforts to obtain the necessary appropriations for completing and repairing this useful work. Whilst one Congress may claim and exercise the power, a succeeding one may deny it; and this fluctuation of opinion must be unavoidably fatal to any scheme which from its extent would promote the interests and elevate the character of the country....
"That a constitutional adjustment of this power upon equitable principles is in the highest degree desirable can scarcely be doubted, nor can it fail to be promoted by every sincere friend to the success of our political institutions."[46]
The effect of Jackson's veto was far-reaching. It not only put an end to all thought of national aid to such local improvements as the Maysville Turnpike, but deprived such genuinely national promotions as the Baltimore and Ohio Railway of all hope of national aid. "President Jackson had strongly expressed his opposition to aiding state enterprises and schemes of internal improvement by appropriations from the central government," records a historian of that great enterprise; "from whatever source the opposition may have come, the [Baltimore and Ohio Railway] company recognized that it must not hope for aid from the national government."[47] The significance of Jackson's veto could not be more strongly presented.
The following interesting and vivid picture of early travel in Kentucky is taken from Judge James Hall's _Legends of the West_ (Philadelphia, 1832); though largely a work of fiction, such descriptions as these are as lifelike as the original picture.