Photo of the Day: Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historic Park, Washington DC

I took this photo from a tour bus while vacationing seven years ago this month in Washington, DC. This portion of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historic Park is in the Georgetown section of our nation’s capital.

Construction of the Chesapeake and Ohio began in 1828, only three years after the wild success of the Erie Canal sparked serious interest in what we now call “infrastructure” in the United States. It was not finished until 1850. At its height in the early 1870s, more than 500 boats were in frequent operation on the canal.

Thereafter, a series of blows—floods, a depression, and competition from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad—undermined the canal’s effectiveness and business. No repairs were made following yet another flood in 1924, and 14 years later the canal was sold to the U.S. government and placed under the National Park Service.

Unlike most canals built in the 1800s, the canal remains virtually unbroken for its entire 185-mile length, from Rock Creek Park into Maryland. It is a picturesque reminder of an important era in the nation’s commerce.

Photo of the Day: DC Infrastructure, Way Before You-Know-Who

Did you know that the White House had christened the last several days “Infrastructure Week”? No?

Don’t feel bad. It wasn’t only that adverse media coverage about a former FBI Director’s riveting Capitol Hill testimony left the White House press office too Comey-tose to press their agenda, but that the President had done nothing, really, to advance what purports to be his plan: a $200 billion boost in federal spending that is supposed to trigger $800 billion in private financing through public-private partnerships. Nothing, that is, except toss to the ground thick binders of what he said were unnecessary and burdensome environmental reviews holding up a highway project.

Once, American leaders did more than offer cheap theatrics over infrastructure. They proposed detailed, carefully reasoned plans that not only created jobs, but that helped knit together the youthful but unruly and disparate regions of a sprawling nation.

Including in our nation’s capital, as I discovered in the fleeting but fascinating glimpse of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal that I photographed from a bus while on vacation three and a half years ago. I was on my way down to Foggy Bottom when, looking out the right side of the bus window, I saw this towpath—a sight far different from what you’re likely to encounter in the glass and marble structures that line today’s Washington.

As I write this, the Georgetown Chesapeake and Ohio Canal is closed for renovation. As soon as it’s completed, though, I advise you to take it in, and marvel at what people once did once they set their minds to it.

The seeds of the Chesapeake and Ohio were planted by George Washington, who with other entrepreneur formed the Potomac Company to improve navigation on the Potomac. Logistics stymied construction of that, but the building of the Erie Canal starting July 4, 1817 altered the views of lawmakers across the nation. (Let the record show that the effort to spearhead it was led by a New Yorker, DeWitt Clinton—who, as a lawyer and longtime legislator, knew how to educate and persuade people to his point of view—all without insulting tweets. Imagine!)

For the next decade or so, federal assistance to “internal improvements”—not just canals, but also roads and bridges—seemed the wave of the future. That came to an end when the President that Donald Trump likened himself incessantly to, Andrew Jackson, vetoed a major roads bill.

But in the meantime, the Chesapeake and Ohio Company was chartered in 1825 to build a shipping canal connecting two rivers: the Potomac’s tidewater in DC with the headwaters of the Ohio in western Pennsylvania. President John Quincy Adams broke ground for the canal in ceremonies at Little Falls, Maryland, on July 4, 1828. The construction effort survived even more dangers than the red tape that President Trump complained about, including recession, labor shortages, landowner fights concerning right-of-way, and a five-year construction shutdown. At last, it opened in 1850.

The canal’s heyday was relatively brief—only a generation or so after its midcentury opening—but it enabled engineers to surmount future challenges because of the solutions supplied here: dams, hundreds of culverts, and a 3,117-foot tunnel through a large shale rock formation. 

Today’s challenges may be different, but are hardly insurmountable if approached with a spirit not just of ingenuity, but of intelligence and persuasiveness—qualities in desperately short supply at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue these days.

This Day in Southern History (Calhoun, Nationalism, and Early Infrastructure Politics)

Feb. 8, 1817—The U.S. House passed a $1.5 million public works bill proposed by rising young Congressman John C. Calhoun as a means of binding the nation together and was also quickly embraced by the Senate. But on March 3—his last full day in office—President James Madison vetoed the “Bonus Bill” as unconstitutional.

The fate of the legislation represented a kind of road not taken for Calhoun and the South. Within a few years, the Democratic-Republican Representative from South Carolina would abandon his broad nationalist perspective, becoming the voice of sectionalism and the architect of the secessionist movement that culminated in the Civil War. Without resort to federal funds, the South never embraced public-works projects with the same avid interest as the other regions, dooming it to a narrow dependence on the cotton crop and the apparatus (included slavery) needed to prop it up.

The shifting politics associated with public-works legislation in the early years of the republic tells something about our own time as well, however, another era when undercurrents beneath long-established political parties upend prior positions about the need for infrastructure.

In the current Congress, the GOP leadership is trying to square the circle posed by new President Donald Trump—who has not only wanted to allocate money for infrastructure, but actually boasted in his campaign about creating more such projects than Hillary Clinton—with their own adamant opposition to such plans under Barack Obama.

Calhoun would have understood this acute discomfort. Shortly after election to Congress in 1810 at age 28, he had become one of the principal “War Hawks” who dvocated challenging Britain’s infringement on American sovereignty on the high seas and in Western territories. In the process, “[f]or fifteen years he remained the most ardent worker for national unity and national power,” according to Richard Hofstadter’s classic chapter on him in The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It (1948).  “He was for more troops, more funds, for manufactures, federal roads, a higher tariff, and a new national bank. Impatient with ‘refined arguments on the Constitution,’ he waved all constitutional objections aside.”

The War of 1812 exposed deep geopolitical fissures in the nation, but not yet in Calhoun’s nationalist bent. New England Federalists had even held the Hartford Convention in 1814 as a means of exploring disunion. While such a radical notion had discredited the Federalists as a national party, it also set others—Calhoun among them—to wondering how to stitch the Union together in such a way that what was then a tear would not widen into an outright rip in the national fabric. 

Calhoun wanted to use the revenue "bonus" and future dividends from the just-established Second Bank of the United States for a fund that would "bind the republic together with a perfect system of roads and canals." In a speech given Feb. 4, 1817, he foresaw terrible danger ahead if any other course were followed, but never dreamed that, for the next 30 years, he would be more responsible than anyone else in the nation for bringing it closer:

“Let it not be forgotten, let it be forever kept in mind, that the extent of the republic exposes us to the greatest of calamities—disunion. We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing. This is our price and danger, our weakness and our strength. . . .We are under the most imperious obligations to counteract every tendency to disunion. . . . Whatever impedes the intercourse of the extremes with this, the center of the republic, weakens the union.”

Calhoun’s bill passed the House by only 86-84. Thirty-three of the negative votes were cast by New England Federalists. In the Senate the vote was a more comfortable 20-15. In both houses the most solid opposition came from New England Federalists, who objected more because of sectional self-interest rather than constitutional reasons, according to Henry Adams’ magisterial History of the United States During the Administrations of James Madison.

But President Madison, like his mentor Thomas Jefferson, did object to it for those reasons, as did the third of the Virginia Jeffersonians in the White House, James Monroe. All three felt that the “general welfare” clause of the Constitution was far too thin a reed to hang such an important measure on. If paying for roads and canals had been contemplated by the Framers, they claimed, they should have been enumerated in that document.

But the time a President came along who agreed that the federal government had a role to play in internal improvements, John Quincy Adams, the proposal was being evaluated on the basis of the men who made it rather than its own merits. The most forceful advocate of the “American System” of roads and canals as an instrument of nationalism was Henry Clay, who got his job as Secretary of State—until that time, a steppingstone to the White House—after supporting Adams for President when the election of 1824 was thrown into the House of Representatives.

The possibility of a “corrupt bargain” between Adams and Clay so infuriated supporters of Andrew Jackson that they mobilized to ensure that no significant Adams legislation would pass. In particular, they stymied federal action related to internal improvements.

Additionally, the “American System” was associated with protective tariffs meant to protect fledgling industries. Calhoun, too, had supported these tariffs initially. But by the mid-1820s, South Carolina’s economy had come to depend far more exclusively on agriculture than other industries. Moreover, the higher tariffs increased the cost of imported goods that planter aristocrats had to pay. No politician could survive in the state by supporting this. 

By the mid-1820s, Calhoun had adjusted, aligning his stances with the slavocrats to abandon his former nationalist outlook, including increasingly vociferous opposition to the protective tariff. The talented, highly intelligent politician, who had gone on to win praise from colleagues like John Quincy Adams as Secretary of War under Monroe, was being seriously talked about as a possible Presidential candidate. But his hopes never advanced beyond serving as Vice-President under Adams and Andrew Jackson. When he resigned in the administration of the latter, he went to the Senate, where he opposed fellow members of the "Great Triumvirate," Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, as an increasingly stubborn proponent of states' right.

The salience of slavery as a national issue would very likely still have compelled Calhoun into his eventual role as the great theorist of secessionist. But the veto of his "Bonus Bill" meant that the South would not create the kind of widespread network of roads and canals that promoted the economic diversity of the other regions and, by the time of the Civil War, had knit them together through mutual interests. Starting in the 1820s, canals (and later railroads) such as the Erie Canal linked the Northeast and Midwest, siphoning off river traffic that might have come to New Orleans, for instance. Henry Adams is on point in noting the impact of Calhoun's failed project:

“Madison's veto,… although at first it seemed to affect most the interests of New York, was in reality injurious only to the Southern States. Had the government lent its aid to the Erie Canal, it must have assisted similar schemes elsewhere, and in the end could hardly have refused to carry out [former Treasury Secretary Albert] Gallatin's plan of constructing canals from the Chesapeake to the Ohio, and from the Santee to the Tennessee River. The veto disappointed New York only for the moment, but was fatal to Southern hopes."