A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. Volume 5, part 3: Franklin Pierce

by Unknown

President John Quincy Adams, in claiming on one occasion, after his retirement from office, the authorship of the idea of introducing into the administration of the affairs of the General Government "a permanent and regular system" of internal improvements, speaks of it as a system by which "the whole Union would have been checkered over with railroads and canals," affording "high wages and constant employment to hundreds of thousands of laborers;" and he places it in express contrast with the construction of such works by the legislation of the States and by private enterprise.

It is quite obvious that if there be any constitutional power which authorizes the construction of "railroads and canals" by Congress, the same power must comprehend turnpikes and ordinary carriage roads; nay, it must extend to the construction of bridges, to the draining of marshes, to the erection of levees, to the construction of canals of irrigation; in a word, to all the possible means of the material improvement of the earth, by developing its natural resources anywhere and everywhere, even within the proper jurisdiction of the several States. But if there be any constitutional power thus comprehensive in its nature, must not the same power embrace within its scope other kinds of improvement of equal utility in themselves and equally important to the welfare of the whole country? President Jefferson, while intimating the expediency of so amending the Constitution as to comprise objects of physical progress and well-being, does not fail to perceive that "other objects of public improvement," including "public education" by name, belong to the same class of powers. In fact, not only public instruction, but hospitals, establishments of science and art, libraries, and, indeed, everything appertaining to the internal welfare of the country, are just as much objects of internal improvement, or, in other words, of internal utility, as canals and railways.

The admission of the power in either of its senses implies its existence in the other; and since if it exists at all it involves dangerous augmentation of the political functions and of the patronage of the Federal Government, we ought to see clearly by what clause or clauses of the Constitution it is conferred.

I have had occasion more than once to express, and deem it proper now to repeat, that it is, in my judgment, to be taken for granted, as a fundamental proposition not requiring elucidation, that the Federal Government is the creature of the individual States and of the people of the States severally; that the sovereign power was in them alone; that all the powers of the Federal Government are derivative ones, the enumeration and limitations of which are contained in the instrument which organized it; and by express terms "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited by it to the States are reserved to the States respectively or to the people."

Starting from this foundation of our constitutional faith and proceeding to inquire in what part of the Constitution the power of making appropriations for internal improvements is found, it is necessary to reject all idea of there being any grant of power in the preamble. When that instrument says, "We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity," it only declares the inducements and the anticipated results of the things ordained and established by it. To assume that anything more can be designed by the language of the preamble would be to convert all the body of the Constitution, with its carefully weighed enumerations and limitations, into mere surplusage. The same may be said of the phrase in the grant of the power to Congress "to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States;" or, to construe the words more exactly, they are not significant of grant or concession, but of restriction of the specific grants, having the effect of saying that in laying and collecting taxes for each of the precise objects of power granted to the General Government Congress must exercise any such definite and undoubted power in strict subordination to the purpose of the common defense and general welfare of all the States.

There being no specific grant in the Constitution of a power to sanction appropriations for internal improvements, and no general provision broad enough to cover any such indefinite object, it becomes necessary to look for particular powers to which one or another of the things included in the phrase "internal improvements" may be referred.

In the discussions of this question by the advocates of the organization of a "general system of internal improvements" under the auspices of the Federal Government, reliance is had for the justification of the measure on several of the powers expressly granted to Congress, such as to establish post-offices and post-roads, to declare war, to provide and maintain a navy, to raise and support armies, to regulate commerce, and to dispose of the territory and other public property of the United States,

As to the last of these sources of power, that of disposing of the territory and other public property of the United States, it may be conceded that it authorizes Congress, in the management of the public property, to make improvements essential to the successful execution of the trust; but this must be the primary object of any such improvement, and it would be an abuse of the trust to sacrifice the interest of the property to incidental purposes.

As to the other assumed sources of a general power over internal improvements, they being specific powers of which this is supposed to be the incident, if the framers of the Constitution, wise and thoughtful men as they were, intended to confer on Congress the power over a subject so wide as the whole field of internal improvements, it is remarkable that they did not use language clearly to express it, or, in other words, that they did not give it as a distinct and substantive power instead of making it the implied incident of some other one; for such is the magnitude of the supposed incidental power and its capacity of expansion that any system established under it would exceed each of the others in the amount of expenditure and number of the persons employed, which would thus be thrown upon the General Government.

This position may be illustrated by taking as a single example one of the many things comprehended clearly in the idea of "a general system of internal improvements," namely, roads. Let it be supposed that the power to construct roads over the whole Union, according to the suggestion of President J.Q. Adams in 1807, whilst a member of the Senate of the United States, had been conceded. Congress would have begun, in pursuance of the state of knowledge at the time, by constructing turnpikes; then, as knowledge advanced, it would have constructed canals, and at the present time it would have been embarked in an almost limitless scheme of railroads.