Never again was this mistake repeated. If it proved so easy to get legislatures and Congress to appropriate millions of the public funds for undertakings profitable to commerce, why would it not be equally simple to secure the appropriation plus the perpetual title? Why be satisfied with one portion, when the whole was within reach?
True, the popular vote was to be reckoned with; it was a time when the people scanned the tax levy with far greater scrutiny than now; and they were not disposed to put up the public funds only that private individuals might reap the exclusive benefit. But there was a way of tricking and circumventing the electorate. The trading and land-owning classes knew its effectiveness. It was they who had utilized it; who from the year 1795 on had bribed legislatures and Congress to give them bank and other charters. Bribery had proved a signal success. The performance was extended on a much wider scale, with far greater results, and with an adroitness revealing that the capitalist class had learned much by experience, not only in reaching out for powers that the previous generation would not have dared to grant, but in being able to make plastic to its own purposes the electorate that believed itself to be the mainspring of political power.
GRANTS TO CANAL CORPORATIONS.
The first great canal, built in response to the demands of the commercial class, was the Erie Canal, completed in 1825. This waterway was constructed at public expense, and was owned by New York State. The commercial men could succeed in having it managed for their purposes and profit, and the politicians could often extract plunder from the successive contracts, but there was no opportunity or possibility for the exercise of the usual capitalist methods of fraudulent diversion of land, or of over-capitalization and exorbitant rates with which to pay dividends on fictitious stock.
Very significantly, from about the very time when the Erie Canal was finished, the era of the private canal company, financed by the Government, began. One after another, canal companies came forward to solicit public funds and land grants. These companies neither had any capital of their own, nor was capital necessary. The machinery of Government, both National and State, was used to supply them with capital.
The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company received, up to 1839, the sum of $2,500,000 in funds appropriated by the United States Government, and $7,197,000 from the State of Maryland.
In 1824 the United States Government began giving land grants for canal projects. The customary method was the granting by Congress of certain areas of land to various States, to be expressly given to designated canal companies. The States in donating them, sometimes sold them to the canal companies at the nominal rate of $1.25 an acre. The commuting of these payments was often obtained later by corrupt legislation.
From 1924 to 1834, the Wabash and Erie Canal Company obtained land grants from the Government amounting to 826,300 acres. The Miami and Dayton Canal Company secured from the Government, in 1828 and 1833, a total grant of 333,826 acres. The St. Mary's Falls Ship Canal Company received 750,000 acres in 1852; the Portage Lake and Lake Superior Ship Canal Company, 400,000 acres in 1865-66; and the Lac La Belle Ship Canal Company, 100,000 acres in 1866. Including a grant by Congress in 1828 of 500,000 acres of public land for general canal purposes, the land grants given by the National Government to aid canal companies, totalled 4,224,073.06 acres, mostly in Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan.
Whatever political corruption accompanied the building of such State- owned canals as the Erie Canal, the primary and fundamental object was to construct. In the case of the private canal companies, the primary and fundamental object was to plunder. The capitalists controlling these companies were bent upon getting rich quickly; it was to their interest to delay the work as long as possible, for by this process they could periodically go to Legislatures with this argument: That the projects were more expensive and involved more difficulties than had been anticipated; that the original appropriations were exhausted, and that if the projects were to be completed, fresh appropriations were imperative. A large part of these successive appropriations, whether in money, or land which could be sold for money, were stolen in sundry indirect ways by the various sets of capitalist directors. The many documents of the Maryland Legislature, and the messages of the successive Governors of Maryland, do not tell the full story of how the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal project was looted, but they give abundantly enough information.