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18
Will the landholders on the navigable waters be benefited
by a cheap and easy carriage from the back parts of the
country? If they will, it may naturally be expected they
will promote easy carriage. If not, though the community
would be benefited as an intire body, an _extraordinary
exertion of the people below /Great Falls/ i favour of
carriage would be a rare exercise of virtue. 9
Without government support and without funding through share sales in a
joint stock company, Johnson and Lancelot Jacques continued to raise
money through private loan subscriptions to be repaid with interest from
the tolls collected on the river. By August 1770 they had raised only
about L440.30
Despite Johnson's continued enthusiasm for the Potomac project
George Washington apparently was swayed by the innovative and more
detailed plans of John Semple. In a letter to Washington Semple
criticized Johnson's intention of raising money through lnens from only
those who would reap the benefits of the improved river. Semple charac-
terized these loans as little more than "a Gift of Charity" and he thought
it unlikely that anyone would be willing to loan money to a "plan of this
kind attended with the greatest uncertainty." Pointing to a contemporary
English river improvement projects, Semple suggested that "on the footing
of the Toll being made the property of the Adventurers /through dividends
on owned shares/ as is the mode of all such Publick undertakings in
Britain" people would accept the risk more willingly and "would subscribe
freely and sink considerable sums in it." 31
Washington found Semple's proposals persuasive enough to pass them
on to Thomas Johnson. In his response to Johnson's letter, Washington wrote:
29Ibid.
30pelaplaine, Life of Thomas Johnson, pp. 71-72.
31John Semple to George Washington, January 8, 1770, George Wash-
ington Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, Minnesota.
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