War on Dirt: Aesthetics, Empire, and Infrastructure in the Low Nineteenth Century

This essay considers the politico-aesthetics of infrastructure by focusing on poems that anticipate, justify, and critique internal improvements, from Joel Barlow’s early Republican vision of the Erie and Panama Canals to texts that document the ruin caused by the works Barlow imagined as glorious. Historical scholarship has long assessed the mania for cutting roads and canals into the landscape. But engaging an emerging infrastructuralism—and turning to imaginative texts that exist underneath the ground typically trod by US literary studies, from Philip Freneau’s celebratory ode to the Erie Canal to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ironic canal travel sketches to Margarita Engle’s recent historical verse-novel tallying the devastations of the Panama Canal—this essay identifies an infrastructural dialectic in which writers view infrastructure, initially, as awesome so as to justify its ecological and social violence and, subsequently, as banal so as to render it invisible within the settler state. Oscillating between awe and irritation, the sublime and the stuplime, then, these texts both expose the rhythm of infrastructure’s long—that is, low—relation to the structure of coloniality and, in Engle’s case, model how to disrupt it so as to imagine a more just life “after” infrastructure.

Introduction

This book is about politics, exploring the general outlook of a group of Americans called Whigs. Between 1834 and 1856, the Whigs were one of the two great political parties in the United States, battling their opponents, the Jacksonian Democrats, for office, prestige, power, and ideas. Boasting famous members such as Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and William Henry Seward, they supported tariffs, banks, internal improvements, moral reform, and public education....

Internal Improvements (1838–41)

John left farming in the wake of the panic of 1837 and found work as a surveyor, eventually working on a series of canal projects around western Pennsylvania, where he met Charles Schlatter. Despite his evident ability and expertise, John was doing little more than grubbing around for piecemeal surveying work before linking up with Schlatter. In 1838, Pennsylvania placed Schlatter in charge of surveying three potential railroad routes across the state, and he immediately drafted John to help. While submitting his survey report to the state authorities in Harrisburg, John got embroiled with Charles Ellet in a competition to build the first long span suspension bridge in the United States, over the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. Ellet won the contract, instituting a rivalry that would last much of the next twenty years.

Conquering Space through Internal Improvements: Federal Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century America

Early American political leaders were tasked with sustaining a representative republic on a seemingly impossible scale. Their struggle to stave off political dissolution raises an important question for scholars of federalism. How can democratic governments integrate disparate political communities across a vast—and rapidly expanding—territory? We revisit the solution most often proposed by contemporary political leaders: a nationally directed system of internal improvements. Using a dataset of nineteenth-century appropriations, we find that patterns in internal improvement funding are consistent with a nation-building strategy. Congressional districts at the fringes of the republic received disproportionate support from the federal government, even after accounting for political preferences, positions of legislative authority, and sub-national spending patterns. Our research stands in contrast to existing work on internal improvements, which is primarily interested in testing theories of distributive politics, and contributes to a diverse body of research on federalism, nation-building, congressional politics, and American political development.

Conclusion

McCulloch v. Maryland’s nationalizing potential has not been fully realized, having been reined in by the Supreme Court for most of the years since it was written in 1819. Had McCulloch’s logic of implied powers been applied fully to the Commerce Clause, it would have been difficult to deny recognition of congressional powers to pursue internal improvements, to restrict slavery and child labor, and to regulate the areas of economic life now deemed within Congress’s authority under the Commerce Clause. Despite McCulloch’s importance, the claims that it made law or built the nation can all be traced to times when participants in constitutional politics felt the need to give a historical gloss to a contemporary argument. But liberals’ canonizing of John Marshall and McCulloch is not effective to make Supreme Court justices overcome their strongly held judicial views. McCulloch is simply too ambiguous to mandate a particular result in most contested cases.

“As Far as Human Prudence Could Insure”

Despite ample opportunity, Chief Justice Marshall did not build on McCulloch v. Maryland to engage in nation-building through his constitutional decisions. In Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), Marshall construed the term “commerce” to include navigation, and struck down a state monopoly over steamboat travel. Gibbons is widely understood as an expansive interpretation of the Commerce Clause that joins McCulloch in establishing the constitutional foundations of broad federal legislative powers. Yet Gibbons made no mention of McCulloch and marked a significant retreat from McCulloch’s conception of implied powers. Indeed, from McCulloch’s issuance in 1819 to the end of Marshall’s life in 1835, the Marshall Court never cited McCulloch’s discussions of constitutional interpretation, nationalist constitutional theory, or implied powers. Marshall’s studied refusal to endorse implied commerce powers is best explained as resulting from his desire to keep the Court out of the two incendiary issues of constitutional politics: internal improvements and slavery.

“Has Congress Power to Incorporate a Bank?”

Chief Justice Marshall’s ambiguous opinion in McCulloch v. Maryland rejected the hard-line Jeffersonian argument that implied powers were only those strictly necessary to implementing the enumerated powers. But while McCulloch’s logic of implied powers held hugely expansive potential for national legislative authority, Marshall did not follow that logic to its conclusion and stopped short of aggressively nationalistic grounds for upholding the Second Bank of the United States. The Bank’s lawyers argued for placing the constitutionality of the Bank on broad terms that would endorse a theory of implied powers untethered to the enumerated powers. They also offered a less aggressive but still highly nationalistic theory of implied commerce powers that would support internal improvements. Marshall’s studied avoidance of the Commerce Clause was almost certainly intended to avoid committing the Court to a concept of implied commerce powers, which might have entailed federal powers over internal improvements and slavery.

Afterword

The afterword deals briefly with constitutional issues Jefferson and Madison faced after the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were adopted. These included questions involving the need for Senate approval of the removal of an executive official whose appointment required Senate confirmation; Congress’s authority to charter a national bank, enact a protective tariff, or subsidize internal improvements; the allocation between Congress and the president of power over foreign policy; the constitutionality of the Alien and Sedition Acts; and the president's authority to execute the Louisiana Purchase. The afterword concludes that during the ratification debate, Madison had represented the Constitution as creating a government of limited and carefully enumerated powers, and that he generally honored those representations. Madison, however, advocated states’ rights less aggressively and less consistently than did Jefferson, and unlike Jefferson, was willing to defer to the Supreme Court in resolving conflicts between state and national authority. In fact, after Jeffeson died in 1826, Madison spent much of the rest of his life combating the nullification theory espoused by John C. Calhoun, who claimed a state could lawfully nullity a federal statute.