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last invasion, the result was more disastrous to the canal
than ever before. For miles the horizon was nightly lit
up with the glare of the burning boats. The Confeder-
ates themselves destroyed seventy-five or eighty, and yet
complaints are made that the paralyzation of business is
caused by the inefficient political management. The rev-
enue of the canal was in 1855 over $139, 000, in 1862
$75, 000. Was the management of the canal to be blamed
for this depression of revenue? The credit of the canal
was so prostrated then that you could not buy a pound of
sugar along the whole banks on its credit, but this could
not be blamed on the direction. - From 1857, the time of
Col. Maulsby's election, until the present time, every man
who was elected president had been intimately asso-
ciated with the interests of the work, and all of them had
given their own personal aid to sustain its credit. Their
dreams of revenue from this source should be dissipated,
if any still held on to them. The Chesapeake and Ohio
Canal had been projected by the three great representa-
tives, the United States, the State of Virginia and the
State of Maryland. John C. Calhoun, then Secretary of
War, had gone up to the town of Cumberland and become
impressed with the future vastness of the coal trade, and
had come back full of a magnificent scheme for this canal,
not to derive revenue, but to develop the immense re-
sources of the region through which it passed. It was
projected under Calhoun's influence, who insisted on its
being such a breadth and such a depth. Immense stone
locks were put up, which remain as monuments, un-
touched to this day. When General Jackson came into
power the Federal government and the State of Virginia
abandoned the canal, and it was left for the shoulders of
Maryland to bear. It was under these circumstances that
these mortgages were created, the conditions of which he
had already shown had never been violated. The reports
of the revenue of the canal for different years was then
read, and the opinion of the president (Mr. Spates) that
all that was needed to increase the revenue was the de-
velopment of the coal trade of Allegany. This is the rub,
the development of the coal trade, not the political man-
agement, not the control of two hundred votes, which
would make an immense power, to be sure, in the State
of Maryland. Other great reasons as stated in the re-
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