What Hath God Wrought (31 page)

Originally, Clay had hoped to use his influence in the House to benefit his own candidacy; as things turned out, he could be only kingmaker, not king. Adams and Clay had rubbed each other the wrong way in the past, especially when they had been colleagues in the American negotiating team at Ghent, but now they proved capable of reaching a momentous understanding in a three-hour private meeting on Sunday evening, January 9, 1825.
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Their alliance was quite logical: Clay and Adams agreed on the issues, both being nationalists who wanted the government to promote economic development, and their different sectional power bases complemented each other. Besides, Clay thought a military hero with a record of defying civilian authority a dangerously inappropriate choice for president.

“Harry of the West” had three states he could deliver in the House: Kentucky, Ohio, and Missouri (whose lone member was grateful for Clay’s role in getting the state admitted).
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Added to the ten states already in Adams’s camp, they made thirteen: a majority of the twenty-four states. Jackson, although he had carried eleven states in the electoral college, received the votes of only seven state delegations in the House; he was less popular inside the political community than he was with the public at large. On a snowy ninth of February 1825, John Quincy Adams was elected sixth president of the United States by the House of Representatives on its first ballot. Back home in Quincy, Massachusetts, his eighty-nine-year-old father felt overwhelmed with emotion when the news arrived.
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Not until George Bush would another former president see his son in the White House.

The outcome stunned the political community. Most observers had supposed that Jackson’s popularity in the West would force Clay to throw his support in that direction. (Indeed, Kentucky’s legislature had “instructed” Clay and the rest of the state’s House delegation to vote for Jackson.) It might have made sense in general ideological terms for the Crawford supporters to switch to Jackson, but they were not sure they could trust the general. The extraordinary personal bitterness between the two principals inhibited Crawford’s followers from allying with Jackson too readily. So they waited, expecting the process to require several ballots; if a deadlock between Adams and Jackson developed, they could hope that Crawford might emerge as a compromise choice.
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It was Adams himself who made the quick resolution of the contest possible. By successfully winning over the delegations of three states Jackson had carried in the general election (Maryland, Illinois, and Louisiana), he had created a situation in which an alliance with Adams was the only winning option for Clay. Clay’s decision to support Adams was therefore, in the words of one historian, “the only reasonable and responsible one, the only one that could avert a long drawn-out battle leading to constitutional crisis.”
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But however rationally and constitutionally defensible, the outcome outraged the Jacksonians, who saw their popular and electoral pluralities frustrated. The election of 1824–25 marked the last time the constitutional machinery of Jeffersonian republicanism, defined in the Twelfth Amendment of 1804, would prevail over the politics of mass democracy. The House of Representatives has never again chosen a president.
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While the election of 1824 marked the end of nonparty politics, it also laid the foundation for the party system that was to come. The alliance of Adams and Clay formed the basis of what would be called first the National Republican and later the Whig Party. Before long, Jackson’s and Crawford’s followers would coalesce into the Democratic Republican, later named the Democratic Party. Of the five presidential contenders in 1824, only Calhoun did not manage to find any comfortable home in the second party system. Among the larger public, diligent historical research has shown substantial continuity in voting alignments between 1824 and subsequent elections.
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What Clay himself wanted in return for supporting Adams was, of course, to be designated his heir. The State Department had served as the stepping-stone to the presidency in early republican history: Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and now Adams had all been secretaries of state. When Adams appointed Clay secretary of state, everyone knew what it meant. Whether there had been an explicit prior agreement between the two men to this effect we shall never know; most historians today think not. But Andrew Jackson’s comment epitomized the bitterness he felt: “The Judas of the West has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver. His end will be the same.”
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II

The issues the incoming president would face were intimately bound up with what historians have called “the transportation revolution.” People throughout the United States recognized the need for a better transportation system. The Great Migration had increased the number of agricultural producers wanting to get their crops from the interior to national or international markets. While some people moved westward, others were migrating to the coastal cities to work in the merchant marine and its many ancillary occupations, from shipbuilding to insurance. These city people had a need to be fed even more urgent than that of the farmers to market their crops. Pressure for improvements in transportation came at least as much from cities eager to buy as from farmers seeking to sell. Urban merchants hoped to funnel as much farm produce as possible from as large a hinterland as possible into their own market, either for consumption or transshipment elsewhere.
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Technology, new or newly applied, made available improvements in transportation, but constructing “internal improvements” posed problems not only physical but also economic, legal, and political. Who should be responsible for addressing the needs and funding the solutions? Private enterprise, local, state, or national government? Adams, Clay, and Vice President Calhoun all supported spending federal money on transportation, but many other political leaders disagreed.
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The pressure of the great westward movement itself first made it clear that locally maintained country roads would be insufficient. In preparation for admitting Ohio to statehood, Congress had agreed back in 1802 to devote some of the proceeds from the sale of public lands there to the construction of a gravel road to facilitate trans-Appalachian travel, communication, and commerce. Begun in 1811 at Cumberland, Maryland, on the Potomac, the National Road (also called the Cumberland Road) reached Wheeling on the Ohio in 1818, fulfilling a dream of linking those two river systems. Thereafter the road was extended piecemeal to the west across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. It constituted one of the few portions of Albert Gallatin’s vast scheme for a national system of internal improvements that the federal government actually ever implemented. The road profited the construction industry wherever it went and raised land values. Thanks to the traffic it generated, Baltimore temporarily surpassed Philadelphia to become the nation’s second-largest city in the 1820s.
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In the early twentieth century the National Road was extended east to Atlantic City and west to San Francisco and renamed Highway 40; later, portions of it were incorporated into Interstate 70.

Despite widespread clamor for better transportation and its manifest tangible benefits, doubts remained in some quarters whether the Constitution delegated power to the federal government to construct internal improvements. These doubts, combined with disputes over which routes the government should favor, proved strong enough to ensure that the National Road had no counterparts. And when Congress passed a bill in 1822 to authorize the collection of tolls on the National Road, thereby making it self-funding, Monroe vetoed it. Along with his veto he transmitted to Congress a 25,000-word explanatory essay arguing the same position Madison had enunciated in 1817, that the country needed internal improvements financed by the federal government, but that only a constitutional amendment could authorize them. Yet Monroe proved no more consistent than Madison had been on the issue of internal improvements. At the last minute he inserted into his document a qualification that the constitutional power to levy taxes for “the general welfare” might authorize spending federal money on certain internal improvements even without an amendment. Later, the president requested an advisory opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court on the subject. Modern lawyers will be surprised to learn that he got one. In an opinion written by Associate Justice William Johnson of South Carolina and kept confidential by Monroe, the Court advised the president that federally funded internal improvements were constitutional.
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Emboldened, Monroe signed a bill to extend the National Road and another authorizing a “General Survey” of possible routes and estimated costs for a number of other roads and canals.

While the federal government dithered, arguing over routes and the meaning of legal texts, resourceful state and local authorities moved to encourage the building of turnpikes. Some of these, like the Lancaster Turnpike in Pennsylvania, antedated the War of 1812. Typically, a state legislature chartered a corporation and granted it the exclusive franchise to build a certain road and charge tolls for its use. (In those days obtaining a corporate charter required special legislative action.) To help raise the necessary capital, state and local governments would often subscribe some of the stock in the turnpike company, creating a “mixed” public-private enterprise. The private stockholders often included hundreds of small investors, local boosters motivated not only by the promise of dividends but even more by hope of rising land values for themselves and their kinship groups in the area where the turnpike would pass. The political popularity of turnpikes and the large number of small investors in them testify to the extent of grass-roots enthusiasm for improved transportation.
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Despite their popularity, turnpikes provided only slow and uncertain transportation. Stagecoaches usually went six to eight miles an hour, though on an unusually fine road, such as that between New York and Philadelphia, they could make over eleven miles an hour.
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In the event, turnpikes proved more helpful in moving people into the hinterland than in bringing their produce back out. Wagon transportation of goods could seldom compete with river boats and canal barges for distances over a hundred miles. While turnpikes did benefit the communities they served, not least in higher property values, they never paid much in the way of dividends. For one thing, it was too easy to avoid the tollbooths (paths around them came to be so well known they were called “shun-pikes”). Had the roads been financed by bonds, the bondholders would have had a legal claim to payment. Financing them instead by taxes and stock sales meant many a small farmer lost a hundred dollars or so of savings, but the benefits were widely distributed among local users whether they had invested or not. Small investors, then as now, seldom pick the most profitable stocks.

The invention of the steamboat enhanced the comparative advantages of water transportation. In 1787, John Fitch had built the first American steamer, but he could not obtain financial backing and died in obscurity. The first commercially successful steamboat, Robert Fulton’s
Clermont
, plied the Hudson River starting in 1807. Steamboats proved most valuable for trips upstream on rivers with powerful currents, of which the Mississippi was the ultimate example. In 1817, a twenty-five day steamer trip up the Mississippi from New Orleans to Louisville set a record; by 1826, the time had been cut to eight days. Pre-steamboat traffic on the Mississippi had been mostly one-way downstream; at New Orleans, boatmen broke up their barges to sell for lumber and
walked
back home to Kentucky or Tennessee along the Natchez Trace road.
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Early steamboats, with side or rear paddlewheels, navigated rivers, lakes, and the coastal trade. They were built with drafts as shallow as possible to avoid obstacles in the water. The joke ran that they could float on a heavy dew, and it was literally true that one of them could carry eighty passengers with forty tons of freight in two feet of water.
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Even so, the dredging of rivers and harbors became one of the most important kinds of internal improvement that state and federal authorities undertook in this period.

For all their utility, nineteenth-century steamboats were dangerous. Between 1825 and 1830 alone, forty-two exploding boilers killed 273 people. Commenting on steamboat accidents, Philip Hone of New York City, one of the great diarists of the period, observed in 1837, “We have become the most careless, reckless, headlong people on the face of the earth. ‘Go ahead’ is our maxim and pass-word, and we do go ahead with a vengeance, regardless of consequences and indifferent to the value of human life.”
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In 1838, an enormous boiler explosion in Charleston took 140 lives. Congress responded that year with the first federal regulation, warranted by the interstate commerce clause. From then on, every steamboat boiler had to bear a certificate from a government inspector. Steamboats continued to blow up. In 1845 Congress extended the jurisdiction of federal courts to include cases arising on inland waterways.
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Even after the invention of steamboats, merchants continued to favor sailing ships for ocean voyages because they did not have to devote a lot of precious cargo space to carrying fuel for a long voyage. The famous American clipper ships that traded between New England and China in the 1850s were sailing vessels. In general, seaborne commerce needed improvement less urgently than land and river commerce; indeed, the oceans had constituted the highways of traffic for generations. The first ocean vessels to find steam practical were warships. They used steam power to enable them to maneuver independently of the wind and bring their guns to bear. But even they kept full sailing rigging, so they could conserve fuel for times when it was most needed. A Canadian named Samuel Cunard pioneered the development of transatlantic commercial steamships starting in 1840. Instead of wood fuel, his ships burned coal, which took up less space in the hold; they cut the westward crossing time from thirty to fourteen days. In 1847, Congress awarded a subsidy to Edward Collins to create an oceangoing steamship line under the U.S. flag, but the Collins Line did not compete successfully with the Cunard Line and went bankrupt after a decade.
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