Published by EH.NET (July 2001)
John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the
Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xv + 324 pp. $19.95 (paper): ISBN:
0-8078-4911-1; $55 (cloth), ISBN: 0-8078-2595-6.
Reviewed for EH.NET by John Majewski, Department of History, University of
California-Santa Barbara.
John Larson, professor of history at Purdue University and co-editor of the
Journal of the Early Republic, asks an important question in this
engaging and lucid narrative: why did the national government leave internal
improvements — roads, canals, bridges, and railroads — to states,
localities, and private companies? The question is an important one. The
voluminous literature on internal improvements, including classics such as
George Rogers Taylor’s Transportation Revolution, has too often glossed
over the small role of the federal government without fully analyzing the
political, economic, and ideological roadblocks to national planning. In
filling this historiographical gap, Larson provocatively argues that the
United States would have been much better off if it had established a strong
tradition of national planning of internal improvements. National planning in
the antebellum era, he suggests, might have established traditions and
precedents to temper the capitalistic excesses of the Gilded Age. While
ultimately unconvinced of Larson’s claims on behalf of national planning, I
nevertheless found Internal Improvement a pleasurable and enlightening
read.
Larson’s starting point is the republican origins of the American Revolution.
The republicanism of the American Revolution, he argues, was quite consistent
with what might be called an American planning tradition that stressed the
ability of responsible statesmen to rationally discern the public good and use
the power of government to promote it. Larson traces how this form of
republicanism influenced a wide range of politicians in the early republic
period, include George Washington, Albert Gallatin, John Quincy Adams, and
Henry Clay. This diverse group of statesmen all shared the same abiding faith
that the federal government should shape the new nation’s transportation
network. On the other side of the debate stood a starkly different vision of
American republicanism, one fearful and hostile to any federal encroachment on
local and private power. Mostly identified with southerners such as Andrew
Jackson, this type of republicanism served as a convenient language for
opponents of national improvements, who, according to Larson, were motivated
by “a zealous hatred of modernization . . . selfish protection of local
advantages, investment in rival projects, sincere concern for the balance of
power between state and federal governments, or simply expedient partisan
gain” (p. 5).
The heart of Internal Improvement is a detailed narrative of the
national political debates between these two differing visions of
republicanism. The outcome was often in doubt. The proponents of planning
might well have won if only Madison and Monroe — both of whom supported some
from of national involvement — had not vetoed key bills because of the lack
of explicit constitutional authorization. The election of Andrew Jackson
spelled the beginning of the end of this long debate. Accordingto Larson, the
Jacksonian hostility to government planning — rooted in republican fears of
centralization — unintentionally fostered a devotion to free enterprise that
would characterize American economic policy well into the Gilded Age. “By
withdrawing the government from policy making,” Larson concludes, “Jacksonians
empowered markets, perhaps by default, both in politics and enterprise, as
arbiters of conflict in American society” (p. 192).
Interspersed within this political narrative are two chapters that highlight
the many problems of state-level policy. With the exception of the Erie Canal
— more the product of fortuitous geography than wise planning — Larson
argues that these state initiatives suffered “from problems of scale, clashing
local interests, and the lack of an overall national design” (p. 73). These
failures had important ideological consequences. For many Americans, the
failure of state-wide action highlighted the failure of all government
action, calling into question the efficacy of national planning. When state
planning finally collapsed (at least in the North and West) in the aftermath
of the Panic of 1837, Americans had one more reason to embrace capitalism as
the driving force behind their emerging railroad network.
The result of Larson’s national political narrative and overview of
state-level initiatives is an important and much-needed synthetic study. It
successfully integrates a wide range of new evidence with scores of older
works on internal improvements. Filled with detail, it nevertheless
steadfastly keeps the bigger picture clearly in view. The writing is elegant,
even polemical at times — a welcome break from the dry monographic tone that
characterizes much of the internal improvement literature.
The polemical side of Internal Improvement, however, sometimes gets
Larson into trouble, especially when analyzing the opponents of national
planning. Larson frequently blames the opposition of southern slaveholders.
Fearing the loss of control over a large federal government and the moral
consequences of modernization, southern planters consistently opposed federal
planning. Larson minces no words when evaluating southern fears of
centralization — at one point, he writes that many of these men “envisioned
no society more complex than the tidewater plantations on which they were
called ‘master'” (p. 115). Larson’s own tables, however, show a much more
complicated story. An overwhelming majority of New Englanders joined the South
Atlantic states in opposing federal improvements. In four separate votes in
1818 and one important vote 1824, 71 to 82 percent of New England’s
representatives opposed national internal improvements, a degree of opposition
equal to or great than the South Atlantic’s (pp. 118, 146.) New England’s
voting patterns changed during the presidency of John Quincy Adams, but even
then 30 to 50 percent of New England’s senators voted against federal
expenditures for several key canals (p. 168). Larson, alas, does not explain
the motivations behinds this important regional bloc against national
improvements.
Larson is also unduly hard on local interests that did so much to subvert
planning on both the national and state levels. Larson portrays local
interests in decidedly negative terms; greedy and jealous, they constantly
poisoned the spirit of compromise and accommodation needed to develop a
long-term national plan. Larson is certainly right in that antebellum
politicians strongly opposed plans that did not favor their own localities,
but he slights the economic dynamic that underscored such opposition. The
developmental impact of any one canal or railroad was quite narrow in
geographic scope, which meant that a bypassed town or area would see
population and trade migrate to rivals more successful in securing an
improvement. Since the location of a road or canal often meant the difference
between prosperity and stagnation, a single vote in Congress or the state
legislature could determine a town’s economic fate. In downplaying the local
impact of internal improvements — or dismissing it as localism or selfishness
— Larson misses an opportunity to add even more nuance to his analysis.
Given that the benefits of particular projects were quite local, one wonders
if national planning could really have worked as well as Larson makes out.
Larson is quite right to point out that leaving planning to states and
localities often led to duplication and endless political wrangling, but
precisely what foresight or knowledge did federal planners possess to avoid
these problems? Larson is surprisingly vague is spelling out the advantages of
federal planning. He keeps his argument on behalf of federal planning at a
fairly abstract level — it would have prevented the excesses of laissez-faire
capitalism and kept alive the ideal of republican self-government and a
commonwealth planning tradition (pp. 263-264). Yet one could just as easily
argue that the same local demands that overwhelmed states and localities would
have consumed the national government as well.
What little federal involvement that took place in the antebellum decades,
Larson admits, could not avoid intractable fights between rival projects. The
Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, for example, built a canal along the Potomac to the
Ohio River that was the “crown jewel of national public works” (p. 178). The
company that built the project, in fact, was one of the few to receive direct
investment from the federal government. Yet the canal would soon compete with
the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, one of the most important enterprises in
American history. No wonder, as Larson explains in the next chapter, “the C&O
never flourished as an interregional artery and repaid almost nothing to the
company that built it” (p. 222). Larson’s impassioned arguments about the loss
of our “republican birthright” notwithstanding (p. 264), it remains unclear
how federal planning would have avoided the local rivalries and fierce
competition that shaped the polices of state and local governments.
John Majewski is the author of A House Dividing: Economic Development in
Pennsylvania and Virginia before the Civil War (Cambridge University
Press, 2000).