What the Infrastructure Fight Is Really About – POLITICO

Americas transition from a nation of dispersed communities and local economies to a national market generated exciting opportunities. It also created new winners and losers and fundamentally altered the peoples relationships to their neighbors, families and government. When they argued about whether to dredge a river or build a canal, Americans of the antebellum period were really arguing about what kind of country they wanted to live in. And thats exactly what politicians are still fighting about today.

Prior to the 1820s, Americas infrastructure was a rudimentary and scattershot affair. Roads were locally built and maintained. Riverways were mostly undredged. Canals and railroads were nonexistent. The downstream journey from Pittsburgh, an emerging western market hub, to the Southern port city of New Orleans took at least six weeks; the return trip, upstream, took 17 weekswhich is why most people transporting goods simply broke their boats up for timber upon arrival in New Orleans and walked or rode back home. When newly elected Senator Henry Clay first made the journey from his home in Lexington, Kentucky, to Washington, D.C., in 1806, it took three weeks of hard overland travel.

Many Americans, particularly those who lived inland from coastal townsthose pushing outward beyond the Alleghenies and Appalachian range, extending as far as the Old Northwest territorieswere essentially cut off from a regional, let alone national, market. Like many of their neighbors in the new state of Indiana, Abraham Lincolns family cultivated only a small portion of its land to grow corn and vegetables and raise hogs and cattle, leaving the rest fallow and overgrown. As a neighbor later explained, there wasnt no market for nothing else unless you took it across two or three states. Though Lincolns father, Thomas, attempted on several occasions to take pork and corn by flatboat to New Orleans, in the absence of roads and canals, and with large parts of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers largely unnavigable, the cost of transportation all but erased the profit margin.

Without a market for goods, and in the absence of a developed cash economy, most families did what was logical, producing enough for home consumption and little more, perhaps selling a small surplus to neighbors, bartering with others for goods and services, manufacturing clothing and other necessities at home, and purchasing what few items they could not produce themselvessugar and other dry goods, glass for windowsfrom a nearby country store. Survival demanded a collective outlook. Like other families, the Lincolns relied on a growing kinship network of cousins and in-laws who established small, adjoining homesteads and built an informal system of cooperative farming, home production and bartering.

That soon changed. Following the War of 1812, which exposed the logistical dangers of a fragmentary transportation system, federal and state governments made significant investments in roads and turnpikes.

Then came Canal Fever.

Completed in 1825, the Erie Canal, a 363-mile wonder stretching from the Hudson River in Albany to Buffalo, thus making it possible to ship freight between New York City and the Great Lakes, set off a decade of construction that saw $102 million of public and private capitala staggering sum in its dayinvested in new connective waterways as far and wide as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland and Virginia.

Canal fever was followed by a boom in steamboat construction, which not only reduced the time required to carry goods downstream but made it feasible and worth the cost to move freight upstream. Suddenly, a trip from New York City to Albanytwo weeks by sailboat, or a full day by coachtook just eight hours. This efficiency, in turn, reduced regional price disparities for different goods. In 1816 a resident of Cincinnati paid roughly $0.16 more for a pound of coffee than counterparts in Southern cities closer to New Orleans. Riverboats cut the difference to about $0.02.

Railroads were the final piece of the puzzle. Trains were virtually unheard of when Andrew Jackson arrived in Washington, D.C., by carriage to assume the presidency in 1829. Eight years later, he left the capital city by rail. By the end of the decade, the country claimed 450 locomotives and 3,200 miles of track. By 1850, 9,000 miles of track. On the eve of the Civil War, 30,000.

If canals and steamboats made travel faster, railroads were practically science fiction come true. The same three-week trip that Senator-elect Henry Clay made from Lexington to Washington, D.C., in 1806 took just four days by 1846.

Together, twin revolutions in transportation and information (inspired by the U.S. Post Office, which subsidized the delivery of newspapers and magazines, and after 1848, the telegraph) drew disparate communities into closer connection with one another and with an emerging market economy that relied on credit, surplus production and trade. America evolved quickly from an agrarian republic into a capitalist democracy.

It was a world that many Americans welcomedbut which equally as many dreaded and resisted.

Opposition to federal investments in internal improvements (the popular term for what we, today, call infrastructure) emerged as early as the 1810sthe Era of Good Feelingswhen presidents James Madison and James Monroe both vetoed bills that would have directed funds to the improvement of national roads. Despite his assertion of the great importance of establishing throughout our country the roads and canals which can best be executed under national authority, Madison doubted the governments authority to undertake most work without the benefit of a constitutional amendment.

It was a position echoed by Monroe, who vetoed plans to erect tolls on a national highway, and Andrew Jackson, who famously vetoed funding for the Maysville Road in 1830. All three presidents professed support for internal improvements, but only if they were principally financed by state and local governments, or by chartered corporations.

Qualms about the constitutionality of funding for infrastructure reflected a broader concern about the proper size and scope of the federal government. Often, that concern struck a nerve with Southern representatives who feared that a central government strong enough to build national roads might be strong enough to interfere with slavery. If Congress can make canals, a longtime representative and senator from North Carolina warned, they can with more propriety emancipate.

But opponents of federal funding for internal improvements feared more than just an empowered federal state. They understood that internal improvements would usher in a new realityone in which a cherished agrarian republic gave way to a mixed economy of farms and small towns, factories and cities, agriculture and commerce. In a short story published in 1843, Nathaniel Hawthorne, a steadfast Jacksonian Democrat in politics, likened the railroad to a sort of mechanical demon that would hurry us to the infernal regions.

In North Carolina, opponents of state funding for internal improvements popularized an election ballad that framed canals and roads as the ruin of their agrarian paradise:

So therefore let it be our care,To keep these men away from there,Who build their castles in the air,Who dream they can vast things perform,Aid in a breadth Gods works reform,[But to] us send such men as willCut no canals through vale nor hill.

In the eyes of opponents, where canals and railroads cut a swath through the countryside, they seemed to decimate local communities and turn once healthy, independent farmers into washed-out wage laborers. A New York editor invited readers to gaze on the sallow complexions, emaciated forms, and stooping shoulders of mill workers and consider what a crime against society it was to divert human industry from the fields and the forests to the iron forges and cotton factories.

The debate over internal improvements ultimately folded into the larger divide between Jacksonian Democrats, who generally opposed them (along with a national bank and tariff) and Whigs, who rallied behind Henry Clays American Systema bold agenda to modernize the American economy through a protective tariff that would encourage homegrown industry, investments in internal improvements and a banking system that could support these ambitions with a stable influx of paper currency.

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What the Infrastructure Fight Is Really About - POLITICO