INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS 313 connections between East and West, the region beyond the Alleghenies would continue to do in the future what it had done in the past: use the Mississippi as its main highway. That in turn meant the purchase of British manufactured goods, because they could be secured more easily than American. INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS The demand for better roads and for canals was in a way one of the products of the growing sense of national unity which the War of 1812 brought about, and of the conscious desire to stimulate nationalism after the war. As new states were admitted to the union, the need of direct connection with them kept forcing the question of transportation upon the mind of the public. In 1825 transportation by land in the United States was less speed than it had been in Europe in the days of the Emperor Tiberius. He could travel two hundred miles in twenty-four hours. John Quincy Adams, going from Washington to Boston, could make on an average fifty miles per day. The federal government did comparatively little in this work of linking up the different sections of the country. Its only big contribution was the old National Road, or Cumberland Road, connecting Cumberland, Maryland, with the Ohio River at Wheeling. By 1840 this highway had been carried to Vandalia, Illinois. After this project was well under way, various presidents interposed their veto between Congress and further undertakings of the sort. For example in 1817, when the Democratic party in Congress was still flushed with the national enthusiasm of 1815, John C. Calhoun introduced a bill to apply the million and a half dollar "bonus" which the Second Bank was to pay for its charter, to a broad system of internal improvements. In the last days of his administration, Madison had a sudden and unaccountable reversion to his original states' rights theories, and on the strength of them he rejected the plan. Monroe, Jackson, and subsequently Tyler all opposed the building of internal improvements at federal expense, so the task had to be undertaken by the individual states. The greatest example of state activity was the Erie Canal in New York. Begun in 1817, it was completed in 1825, and paying dividends even before it was finished. The construction of this great waterway was the beginning of the movement that made New York City the greatest commercial center in the whole country. Once it was ready for use, the Northwest could buy its supplies more cheaply from New York than from New Orleans. Before it was built, the freight rate on ordinary merchandise from New York to Buffalo was one hundred twenty dollars per ton; the canal cut this to fourteen dollars per ton. When the other states saw New York capturing much of the western trade, they worked out projects for tying up their own seaports with the interior. Pennsylvania for example hoped to make Philadelphia the rival of New York by providing direct connection between that city and Pittsburg. The plans called for canals over a part of the distance, with horse railroads and inclined planes-like those still in use in Cincinnati-through the mountainous regions. Not to be outdone by her northern rivals, Baltimore made plans for a horse railroad from Tidewater to the Ohio valley. During this period the state of Pennsylvania cltered scores of turnpike companies, all aiming to open up hitherto inaccessible parts of the state. There was a veritable epidemic of canal building, all through the Northeast. The states went into the work so heavily that they went bankrupt. It so happened that the financial difficulties of the states came to a head at just the time when the first railroads were being built. Because the states were too poor to spend any more the work of constructing the railroads fell, more by accident than design, to corpora tions. By 1827 several railroads were either definitely planned, or already under construction. The parent of the New York Central lines, the little Mohawk and Hudson, was started in 1825, and the first surveys for the Boston and Albany were made in 1827. The beginnings of the Pennsylvania and Baltimore and Ohio systems date back to this same year. In the parts of the country blessed with navigable rivers, the steamboat promised to solve the problem of transportation. Although there had been some earlier experiments, the first successful steamboat trip was that of Robert Fulton's Clermont up from New York to Albany, in 1807. Four years later a steamboat was launched at Pittsburg, and by 1820 there were sixty in operation on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. This number increased to two hundred and thirty in 1830. By these various means the country gradually created a physical basis for union. This made possible new economic connections, especially between the East and the West, and these again gave = THE SUPREME COURT 315 further stimulus to a deeper feeling of mutual dependence. Expressed mathematically, manufacturing + agriculture + transportation spirit of nationalism. In the West, where the states had never known a really independent existence, where they had all been trained under the guardianship of the federal government, perhaps this materialistic foundation of the union was not so important as elsewhere, notably in New England; there it was the big factor in transforming the philosophy of the section from states' rights to nationalism. THE SUPREME COURT This feeling that the United States was a nation, expressed in the American system, found further manifestation in the great decisions of the Supreme Court during this period. It was a constant source of irritation to President Jefferson that in spite of all he could do, John Marshall, Federalist, should remain as chief justice. And as a Federalist, Marshall was not at all unwilling to make the decisions of his court a means for setting forth the authority of the nation over the states. He did this, time and time again, in a series of masterly expositions of constitutional law. One of the most important of these decisions, in Marbury vs. Madison, delivered in 1803, while the Jeffersonian reforms were still in progress, was, perhaps designedly, a warning from the Federalist chief justice to the Democratic president. Briefly, it set forth the doctrine that an act of Congress which is repugnant to the Constitution is ipso facto null and void. The facts in the case were simple. In the closing hours of his administration, Adams had signed a commission appointing one William Marbury justice of the peace. The commission was not delivered, and when the Democrats came in, Madison, the new Secretary of State, refused to deliver it. Thereupon the offended Marbury sought a writ of mandamus, to compel delivery. Marshall held that the Act of Congress authorizing the Supreme Court to issue that form of writ was unconstitutional, hence Marbury could get no relief from the Supreme Court. The reasoning of the chief justice was so clear and logical that it has not been effectively controverted down to the present day. Starting from the premise that the people of the United States had the right to lay down certain guiding principles for their government, which they had done in the Constitution, he argued that the Constitution determined the limits of Congressional authority, and that the Constitution was the supreme law of the land. Then he concluded that an Act of Congress which was contrary to the Constitution could not be law, or, if it could, the Constitution became a dead letter. There was no middle ground. While the reasoning is perfectly logical, Marshall might be accused of inconsistency in applying his principles to that particular case. The issue of a writ of mandamus by the Supreme Court could be justified under the doctrine of implied powers, which Marshall himself subsequently upheld. It would appear then that the decision in Marbury vs. Madison was designed to serve as a check on a Democratic Congress bent on weakening federal authority. Marshall had to have a convenient means for the assertion of federal supremacy, and Marbury vs. Madison was the first case that came to hand. If Congress could not pass a law contrary to the Constitution, it logically followed that a state legislature was subject to the same limitation. This doctrine the court definitely declared in 1810, in Fletcher vs. Peck, which annulled an act of the Georgia legislature, revoking some of the Yazoo land grants. The court held that the law in question was a violation of contract, therefore unconstitutional. Later, in the famed Dartmouth College case, decided in 1819, the Court declared again that a contract could not be impaired by state law. The same chief-justice was as willing to assert the authority of the Supreme Court over state courts as over state legislatures. In 1809, in United States vs. Judge Peters, the Court upheld the state courts of Pennsylvania against an act of the legislature. In 1816, in Martin vs. Hunter's Lessee, the Supreme Court accepted an appeal from a Virginia court, and reversed the decision of the local tribunal, on the ground that the state court had not kept within proper constitutional limits. Again in 1821, in Cohens vs. the State of Virginia, the Supreme Court asserted its right to receive appeals from state courts. The doctrine of implied powers was set forth explicitly in McCulloch vs. Maryland, in 1819. The state legislature had imposed a tax on the local branch of the Second United States Bank. In upholding the rights of the Bank, Marshall declared that the Constitution conferred upon Congress two kinds of powers: fundamental and derived. If the end sought was legitimate, any means not specifically prohibited might be used. Therefore, he concluded, the law creating THE SUPREME COURT 317 the Bank was constitutional, and the tax law of Maryland was unconstitutional. As suggested above, the reason why this same line of reasoning would not apply to the mandamus sought in Marbury rs. Madison is not at all clear to the layman. Among other important decisions was that in Gibbons vs. Ogden, in 1824. It declared unconstitutional an act of the New York legislature granting a monopoly of steamboat operation in New York waters. The Court declared that Congress alone had control of interstate commerce. Combined with the growth of the country, and the steady increase of mutual dependence between sections, these decisions seemed to give definite form and direction to popular thinking about the Constitution and the government which it created. Once this nationalistic philosophy began to penetrate into and to take possession of the public consciousness, the theories of states' rights and secession were gradually forgotten. When they were revived and reasserted by a section which had not experienced this nationalistic development, they were received with pronounced disfavor, as though they were something new and revolutionary, when as a matter of fact they were older, and at one time more widespread than the doctrine enunciated by Marshall. The reasons for their rehabilitation are to be found in the course of development in the South. |