| Adams on internal improvements in his message of December 6th, 1825. Van Buren's resolution against internal improvements. |
The question of internal improvements was a better issue, from this point of view. In his first annual message President Adams took high national ground upon this subject. He seemed to attribute to the general Government unlimited power to construct roads and canals, establish universities and observatories, and to do any and every thing conducive to the improvement of the people. Clay himself, it is said, was a little staggered by the exceeding broadness of Mr. Adams' ideas. While Mr. Van Buren, the leader of the opposition in the Senate, offered a resolution in that body, a fortnight after the message, which declared that Congress did not possess the power to make roads and canals within the respective Commonwealths, and proposed the formation of an amendment to the Constitution, which should prescribe the powers that the general Government should have over the subject of internal improvements.
| The practices of the Adams Administration in respect to internal improvements. |
Mr. Adams seems to have yielded before the opposition in this matter, and to have thus avoided making it a further issue. In his subsequent messages he confined himself chiefly to observations upon the work done by the engineers appointed under the Congressional Act of April 30th, 1824, for making surveys, plans, and estimates for national routes. The Administration and Congress simply put into practice the Monroe ideas upon the subject. Money was appropriated by Congress for the construction and repair of roads, and was expended under the supervision of the President, and stock was taken by the Government in private corporations, organized under Commonwealth law, and subject to Commonwealth jurisdiction, for the construction of canals; but no jurisdiction and no administrative powers were exercised or asserted by the general Government over such improvements, except, perhaps, the power of eminent domain.
The opposition, however, which had been excited at first by Mr. Adams' proposition to make a large advance upon Mr. Monroe's principles, was not satisfied with his return in practice to those principles. They professed to entertain the fear that the Administration had a settled policy of encroachment upon the reserved rights and powers of the Commonwealths, and they now began to watch and combat the movements of the Administration chiefly from this point of view. This attitude must not yet, however, be ascribed wholly or chiefly to the conscious influences of the slavery interest. Factional hostility to the Administration, and the general settling back into the "States' rights" view of the Constitution, which manifests itself all through the history of the United States as a reaction from the tension of war and the enthusiasm of strong national exertion, did more to determine it than the views of the slaveholders in regard to the interests of their peculiar institution.
| The chief practical difficulty in the way of a national system of internal improvements. |
The great practical difficulty in regard to the subject was in making such determinations as to the national or local character of the proposed improvements as would be satisfactory to the mass of the people. Naturally every Congressman considered the roads of his district as matters of national concern; and, in spite of the law of 1824 vesting in the President and his board of engineers the laying out of such routes as the President might decide to be required by the general welfare, the scramble for national money to be expended for local purposes increased from one session to another.