All hope and little reality

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 33.

Travel was arduous, erratic, and unbelievably expensive; even in settled New England, stage coaches crept along barely travelable roads at an average pace of four miles an hour, taking three days from Boston to New York, two days from New York to Philadelphia. From Baltimore to Washington—where the new federal city, all hope and little reality, was rising on a malarial backwater with nothing to show yet but a single row of brick houses, a few log cabins, the half-finished White House, and, a mile and a half away across a bramble-tangled swamp, the two wings of the Capitol still unconnected by a center—there was a stagecoach but no road at all; the driver chose among meandering tracks in the woods and hoped for the best. To go from Baltimore to New York cost $21, a month’s average wages.

Or roughly $4,250 in today's money.