Advantages of Embanking the Tide Marshes of Maryland
Improvement in the agriculture of this section of country is now gradually advancing; many marl banks have been opened, and worked, though not with steady perseverance; kilns of oyster shells have been burnt and strewed, and in some few instances stone lime has been imported, the profits of which, when the cost is calculated, I deem a little doubtful.
The extensive marshes in our tide-water district, in their present condition, form the principal impediment to rapid improvement. It is there that malaria, that frightful scourge of our native population, and the terror of strangers, is concocted. By reclaiming our low grounds, we should greatly improve the health of our country, increase its wealth, and expel the present troublesome holders, musquitoes, snakes, minks, and muskrats. Their title is merely possessory, and not better than that of the native Indians. Vattel held, and his dogma has been received by many of our practical jurists, that savage nations who mix no labor with the soil, but depend upon the spontaneous fruits of the earth, and the beasts of the forests, to supply their wants, may be justly expelled by a more thrifty race, who, instead of a bow and the tomahawk, use the axe, the mattock, and the rifle.
Many of my acquaintances have gone to the west and south, in pursuit of fortune. I have strong and abiding affection for my native state, where our fathers lived in peace, and in honor, and where in the rare instances in which injury was punished by requital, the manner in which it was conducted lessened the horrors of the act. In addition to my local attachments, in my youth I had a strong objection to having my head disfigured by an Indian tomahawk, and in more mature age I should feel equal reluctance to receive a gentle squeeze from Judge Lynch. To reclaim our marshes as long been with me a favorite project. If my memory serves me, Swift was contemporary with Marlborough, Bolingbroke, Harley and Wharton, distinguished patriots of that day; and yet he, who had weighed and measured these illustrious men, and many others of equal merit but of lesser note, gave it has his opinion, that he who should cause two blades of grass to grow, where but one grew before, rendered more service to mankind than the whole race of politicians. Now if my poor counsels should prevail, and call up a spirit of improvement by which Timothy and herds grass should be made to grow where flags and rushes grew before, I think in justice I may claim to be preferred to subtreasurists, bankites, and conservatives; the goodness of whose intentions it would be uncharitable to doubt, as they all declare that their great object is to promote the general welfare, by giving the people a sound unfluctuating currency. It is deeply to be regretted that men who desire to do right should so widely differ as to the means.
It appears from the Register that your theory is, that the marshes of the Chesapeake, consisting of vegetable matter, upon being ditched and dried, would rot away. The earth I believe is the foundation of all vegetable growth, of which from the tides, and the floods, there is a regular accretion. I have lived long enough to have seen parts of marshes without the aid of art reclaimed from the tide, and produce the grasses of the upland. It is certainly true that a large portion of our marshes, like those of eastern Virginia, consist of decayed vegetables, mixed with earth; but I have learned from respectable authority, that some marshes on the Delaware, in character like ours, upon being ditched, dried and sown in herds grass, become firm and cohesive, and produce excellent crops; this grass by its tenacious roots forms a strong turf, which affords protection against the sun, and frost, and perhaps if Mr. H. Carter, instead of cultivating his reclaimed grounds for seven successive years in Indian corn, (thereby exposing them naked to the sun and frost,) had laid them down in herds grass, he would have experienced a different and more beneficial result.
By a communication to the Register a year ago, I learned that the marshes of Lincolnshire, and the fens of Romney, have been reclaimed by the
means of wind mills. This is certainly a most beneficial application of the wind; and I apprehend the same means would produce the same result in the marshes of the Pocomoke, Nanticoke, and Choptank. Maryland is a state small in extent, and limited in means, but her projects are vast, and her views magnificent. By internal improvements she calculates to secure the entire trade of the Susquehanna, a large portion of the Ohio and Mississippi, and to divide with New York and Quebec the riches of the western lakes. Maryland has stated her credit for many millions on canals, and rail-roads, and it would well become her fostering genius to expand her wings, and to apply a few hundred thousands to reclaim her waste marshes. Many of them are still vacant, and the state holds the title; those which have been granted, she might appropriate to herself, by condemnation. When the work was accomplished, and these now barren wastes are set in Timothy and herds grass, the state could sell them out at a heavy advance, which would not only pay the costs of the wind mills and ditches but would leave a heavy profit to the state. This is not a scheme of mere total profit, but of general utility; the western shore would feel the benefits, which would perhaps extent to Philadelphia, and New York; thousands of fat bullocks would be brought into market, from lands which are now worse than useless. The odious monopoly of western graziers, (which I much fear the patriot butchers of Baltimore will be unable to dissolve,) would be at an end, and the Baltimorian would eat beef of very superior quality at low rates. Eastern shore men know, though western shore men do not, that cattle, which can eat salt and fresh grass, and drink salt and water, at pleasure, fatten quicker and make viands more savory, than those of the high country, where salt is dealt out with a parsimonious hand. Salt in its congelation, either by the power of the sun or fire, contracts impurities of which it is clear in its aquous state; and pure sustenance is as necessary to the health of a beast as to a man. The principal sanative ingredient in the waters of the Saratoga spring is salt, which has never been successfully imparted to medicated waters. It is for these causes that Governor Stevens' sheep are the crack of the Baltimore market, and so much preferred by the epicures to these raised on Elkridge, and Big Pipe creek. To this another important consideration maybe superadded; Maryland holds a deep stake in the Eastern Shore Rail-Road, which she increased last session, and which she will probably continue to increase, until it shall be finished, as the private stockholders, either for want of faith, or want of funds, commit heavy forfeitures, and if peradventure when the road is finished, the great communication between the north and the south, should take another direction, the loss might be compensated by taking fat beeves to market in the cars. They would arrive in Baltimore fresh and unjaded, and in fine killing condition, and the risk of being drowned, or blown up from steamboats entirely avoided.
If our salt marshes were reclaimed and set in timothy and herds grass, the Eastern Shore of Maryland for its extent of territory would become the most valuable in the United States; the hardy Germans, the laborious Dutchmen, and the sturdy Irish, who now go trooping to the west, attracted by the smell of fine sweet hay, which they love almost as much as the smack of whiskey, would come into our country; this supply of free labor would enable us to send our blacks to Cape Palmas. The abolitionists would have to go further south for experiment, and in the height of our prosperity, with fine salt-water navigable rivers, abounding in fish, oysters and wild fowl, and fine level rail-road, we would laugh at the vain babblers of the great valley of the Mississippi.
TIMOTHY.
E. S., Md., 26th June, 1839.