“Our agriculture is discouraged, the fisheries abandoned, navigation forbidden; our commerce at home and abroad restrained, if not annihilated; our navy sold, dismantled, or degraded to the service of cutters or gunboats; the revenue extinguished; the course of justice interrupted, and the nation weakened by internal animosities and divisions, at the moment when it is unnecessarily and improvidently exposed to war with Great Britain, France and Spain.”
The most peculiar and damaging political view held by Mr. Jefferson was that appropriations by the government for national internal improvements were unconstitutional. This was enforced as a cardinal principle of his “Republican-Democratic” party, and so influenced his party successors, Madison and Monroe, that during their administrations, appropriations and surveys were refused on constitutional grounds. However good, influential and honest the actors may have been, it is quite evident the political influences of those in power, from the commencement of the administration of Thomas Jefferson in 1801 to the end of Monroe’s in 1825, blocked the wheels of progress in civilization under the pretext of reverence for the Constitution.
It was generally rumored in Ohio politics that the Jeffersonian party were opposed to expenditures for national internal improvements, and before entering the Union the state presented her influence with the Eighth Congress for a national highway, from Cumberland, Maryland, to the Ohio river at Wheeling, Virginia, and from Wheeling westward across the proposed State of Ohio. The measure passed Congress and was approved by President Jefferson as “a war measure and bond of union,” instead of an “unconstitutional improvement.”
This, however, was not considered, by Mr. Jefferson nor his party, binding in policy as a precedent; but Ohio politicians thought differently, and from necessity and importance of the subject kept it agitated in and out of Congress. And in 1816, after an able and full discussion of the constitutionality and expediency of a system of internal improvements by the general government, both houses of the Fourteenth Congress passed a bill appropriating the bonus which the United States Bank was to pay the Government for the charter, to purposes of internal improvement; but the bill was returned to Congress by the President (Mr. Madison) with his veto involving constitutional scruples, and the measure failed to become a law.
Notwithstanding both houses of Congress were at times favorable to improvements, the majority was not often found conservative, and in 1822 killed a small appropriation to repair the Cumberland road, built and controlled by the Government.
A small majority of the Eighteenth Congress, in 1823 and 1824, came around partially to the grounds occupied by the Ohio people on the subject of improvements, and made an appropriation of thirty thousand dollars, authorizing the expenditure on surveys, plans and estimates of such roads and canals as the President might deem of national importance.
President Monroe, after mature deliberation, gave the bill his approval. At that date, a portion of the New York and Erie Canal was in operation, and as an orator was very convincing and converting. This could not justly be called a “war measure,” nor a “bond of union;” and was universally accepted as a second precedent in favor of “internal improvements,” and ended the Jeffersonial dynasty as far south as the City of Washington; and in 1829 Andrew Jackson, in direct opposition to his supporters in the South, New England, and in New York, followed the precedent of Ex-President J. Q. Adams, indorsing the action of the Twentieth Congress, which declared the constitutionality and expediency of such improvements.
This fixed the policy of the Government for all future time, Ohio, feeling proud in the active part she had taken, having the honor of bringing about the first national internal improvement in the United States.
Spinning-Wheel.