The Maysville Road veto occurred on May 27, 1830, when United States President Andrew Jackson vetoed a bill that would allow the federal government to purchase stock in the Maysville, Washington, Paris, and Lexington Turnpike Road Company, which had been organized to construct a road linking Lexington, Kentucky, to Maysville on the Ohio River (Maysville being located approximately 66 miles/106 km northeast of Lexington), the entirety of which would be in the state of Kentucky. Its advocates regarded it as a part of the national Cumberland Road system. Congress passed a bill in 1830 providing federal funds to complete the project. Jackson vetoed the bill on the grounds that federal funding of intrastate projects of this nature was unconstitutional. He declared that such bills violated the principle that the federal government should not be involved in local economic affairs. Jackson also pointed out that funding for these kinds of projects interfered with paying off the national debt. Proponents of internal improvements, such as the development of roads and bridges, argued that the federal government had an obligation to harmonize the nation's diverse, and often conflicting, sectional interests into an "American System." Jackson's decision was heavily influenced by his Secretary of State Martin Van Buren. Some authors have described the motives behind the veto decision as personal, rather than strictly political. The veto has been attributed to a personal grudge against Henry Clay, a political enemy and resident of Kentucky, as well as to preserve the trade monopoly of New York's Erie Canal, in Van Buren's case. Debate in Congress Supporters of the bill insisted on the project's national significance. This particular project was intended to be a part of a much larger interstate system extending from Zanesville, Ohio, to Florence, Alabama. If the highway as a whole was of national significance, they argued, surely the individual sections must be as well. They looked to the Supreme Court decision handed down six years before in Gibbons v. Ogden, in which the court confirmed the power to regulate commerce among the states including those portions of the journey which lay within one state or another. Additionally, the road connected the interior of Kentucky to the Ohio River, and therefore served as the main artery for the transportation of goods. Kentucky Representative Robert Letcher made this argument regarding the road's connection to the rest of the nation: The road designed to be improved