The United States of America, Part 1: 1783-1830

by Edwin Erle Sparks

Sixty years of almost uninterrupted Republican-Democratic administration were inaugurated with Thomas Jefferson in 1801. This period was auspiciously begun by correcting the abuses wrought in the National Government by the twelve years of Federalism. It was ended by the faithful adherence of the party to the slavery system, to which it was bound both by geographic strength and the principles of individualism. The period was apparently long enough to allow the party to give the Union such a bias toward decentralisation that it could never recover its power and prestige. How the compelling laws of organised society, the needs of the people in their conquest of the wilderness, and the necessity of providing for the common defence and the general welfare prevented such an unfortunate consummation makes up the middle period of the story of the United States.

It was easy for the new administrators to show in theory how the Central Government should be restricted to certain actions; it was impossible to avoid entering upon certain new activities as progress demanded from time to time. Take such a simple matter as the national capital. Suddenly transferred to the woods on the banks of the Potomac, the National Government found no such accommodations as the two cities in which it had previously been lodged had afforded. One completed and one incomplete wing of the Capitol building, an empty and bare President's mansion, one tavern, and a few houses, with streets indicated only by felled trees, formed the Athens of America, pronounced by Robert Morris the very best city in the world for a "future" residence. Members of Congress who traversed the three miles of mud road to Georgetown, where the only comfortable lodgings were to be obtained, would willingly have reduced the scale upon which the capital was laid out. Very early it became the "City of Magnificent Distances." However crude the city might be, the soil on which it rested belonged exclusively to the United States. It was the only spot of any magnitude which could be so claimed. It was due to the generosity of two neighouring States, Virginia and Maryland. To the same charity was owed the money which had partly built the two wings of the Capitol and the President's mansion. Nevertheless, land and buildings do not make a city. Money for the construction of streets, it was at first supposed, would come from the sale of lots. "Path-ways" were built from this resource under direction of members of the Cabinet before the Government was transferred from Philadelphia. Money was advanced on such expectation both by Congress and by the State of Maryland. Yet the advent of Government and the inauguration of Jefferson found the work incomplete. Members of Congress who stepped gingerly in their low shoes over the paths made of chips of stone from the new buildings, or who attempted the mile of cleared roadway between the two administration buildings, received an object lesson in the necessity for improvements which speedily overcame conscientious scruples.

[Illustration: THE CITY OF WASHINGTON. A drawing made about 1800 before the site was graded. The Capitol is seen at the left of the masts.]

Any expenditure for such purposes could find warrant in the Constitution only through the implied powers theory. "To exercise exclusive legislation" over the District might mean to construct sidewalks and to grade streets; but it was not so expressed. So urgent became the necessity, that in 1803 an appropriation for buildings was made to include the repair of the highway between the Capitol and the other public buildings. The expenditure of this money, as Jefferson afterwards boasted, was confined carefully to the avenue between the Capitol and Mansion hills and to the squares about them. As time went on and the city grew, specific appropriations had to be made for the construction of streets and roadways within the District. These were wrung annually from the reluctant party. To the disgust of people living in more remote parts of the District, the first of these sums was spent entirely in widening Pennsylvania Avenue, planting it with trees, in replacing its wooden culverts with brick, in repairing the public squares about the buildings, and in grading the slope in front of the War Office. "It cannot be supposed," replied Jefferson to one protestant, "that Congress intended to tax the people of the United States at large for all avenues in Washington and roads in the District of Columbia."

Trivial as these incidents must appear in comparison with the present attitude of the Government toward the District, they serve to illustrate the law of compulsion. Numerous others might be introduced here. The Jeffersonians inherited from the Federalists a small collection of books and maps, which had been purchased for the use of the members of Congress deprived of the library facilities they had enjoyed in the cities of New York and Philadelphia. It was the beginning of the present magnificent Library of Congress. Instead of casting aside the volumes and returning the unexpended balance to the treasury, the strict constructionists adopted the library and soon began to make direct appropriations for it, crowning the action in 1815 by expending twenty-three thousand dollars for the purchase of Jefferson's own library to be added to the collection.

Thus did the seat of government and its needs drive another wedge of loose construction into close-grained theory. To have exclusive control over a district not exceeding ten miles square meant not only police control, but it meant to make a home fit for the national seat of government, and to provide for the necessities of its representatives. Nevertheless conscientious scruples and niggardly appropriations had sufficient weight for many years to make the home of the Union a disgrace to the nation and a thing of contempt in comparison with the capitals of other lands.

If the strict constructionists had inaugurated the National Government, their task of confining it within a certain limit would not have been so difficult. There is little doubt that the power to "regulate commerce" was intended originally to cover the collection of a national impost. But if United States custom-houses were to collect duties on imported goods, they must erect lighthouses, build piers, and dredge channels in order to get the goods into the harbours. The States, having surrendered the benefits of an impost to the National Government, were not likely to undertake or continue such works on an adequate scale. No permission to engage in such enterprises was to be found in the Constitution except as deduced from the power stated above. The encouragement of foreign commerce had been almost a fetich with the Federalists. They had freely granted appropriations for such purposes. "I well remember," said Jefferson, on one occasion to Gallatin, under whose care these agencies of commerce must come, "the opposition on this very ground to the first act for building a light house. The utility of the thing has sanctioned the infraction."

But it was not possible to restrict the demand to lighthouses. Presently an appropriation was necessary for a dry dock to accommodate the little gunboats which the thrifty Administration had substituted for the Federal men-of-war. Jefferson got out of this in a way which would have done credit to his great rival. "Although the power to regulate commerce," said he, "does not give a power to build piers, wharves, open ports, clear the beds of rivers, dig canals, build warehouses, build manufacturing machines, set up manufactories, cultivate the earth, to all of which the power would go if it went to the first, yet a power to provide and maintain a navy is a power to provide receptacles for it and places to cover and preserve it." Here Jefferson had made out a list of proscribed actions, which the National Government dared not enter upon. But soon Gallatin reported a vessel sunk in the Delaware River, a menace to navigation, which neighbouring States showed no inclination to remove. Reluctantly the President gave permission to have the United States open the river. In quoting the powers of the National Government over commerce to justify the action, he added, "But we must take care not to go ahead of them and strain the meaning of the terms still further to the clearing out of the channels of all rivers, etc., of the United States. The removing of a sunken vessel is not the repairing of a pier." Nevertheless, soon after, an appropriation was made for erecting public piers in the Delaware River. It is needless to continue citing the steps by which the Administration assumed a fostering care of these public improvements. To sum up during the last year of Jefferson's administration, appropriations aggregating almost one hundred thousand dollars were made, without opposition, for constructing lighthouses, for removing bars and shoals, and making safe the ways of ocean commerce. The extension of this paternalistic principle to internal commerce would come in time with the movement of the people inland.

[Illustration: WESTERN ARKS AT NEW ORLEANS. From Hall's "Etchings in America." In the foreground appear the flat boats which have brought down the produce of the western people and beyond the shipping, which is to carry the stuff to foreign markets. The sketch furnishes an Illustration of the compulsion which caused the purchase of New Orleans.]

It may be said truthfully that these various measures, so inconsistent with the early avowed principles of the party, were inherited from the Federalists. But responsibility for the supreme act, the addition of foreign territory to the national domain, must be assumed solely by the Administration. Perhaps no action, until the decision to prevent certain States from leaving the Union, contributed so much to the central authority as the purchase of the Louisiana country by the Jeffersonians. If the decision had been negative, if conscientious scruples had been allowed to prevail, one hesitates to predict what would have been the fate of this "pent-up Utica." For forty years the ownership of Louisiana had been shifting and uncertain. For twenty years its possession had been a matter of scheming and intrigue by both Great Britain and France. Permanently in the hand of any foreign power, it would have completely blocked the path of progress. To possess one-half the drainage basin of the valley would have led to constant conflict with the owners of the other half. The insularity upon which the United States has depended so largely, the freedom from annoying neighbours, room for the westward expansion of the people, the unification of the Mississippi valley—all would have been lost if the original strict-construction theory had prevailed. Securing a domain extending to the Mississippi in the Peace of 1783 had been simply retaining what had been won largely by the colonists twenty years before when the French were driven from the valley. In the Louisiana question, the nation faced for the first time a national expansion.