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Show LAND GRANTS FOR RAILROADS AND INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS 343 Then, taken up by New York and pushed to completion in 1825, the Erie Canal was a spectacular success in showing the results that could be expected from the building of internal improvements into largely undeveloped areas. Before its completion profound changes were occurring along its route in the agricultural development of the area it was to serve, in the shift from subsistence to commercial agriculture, and in the emergence of new flourishing cities of Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, and the rapid growth of Albany, and most of all New York, which thus captured the trade of the interior.6 The canal era came to flower with the completion of the Erie. State after state hoped through canal construction to emulate New York's success. Among the canal projects undertaken as a result of the remarkable success of the Erie were the Welland Canal around the falls at Niagara on the Canadian side,7 Pennsylvania's costly and unsuccessful effort to connect the waters of the Susquehanna with the headwaters of the Ohio,8 the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, and the James River and Kanawha Canal.9 These were planned to return to Montreal, Philadelphia, Washington, and 6 Ronald E. Shaw, Erie Water West. A History of the Erie Canal, 1792-1854 (Lexington, Ky., 1966), pp. 32, 63-69, 299. The total of collections to 1883, when tolls were abandoned, was $121,461,871 or an average of more than $2 million yearly. The original cost of the canal was 87,143,789, which with all costs, including enlargement, was more than taken care of by tolls. 7 Hugh G. J. Aitken, The Welland Canal Company. A Study in Canadian Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), pp. 20-21. 8 Richard I. Shelling, "Philadelphia and the Agitation in 1825 for the Pennsylvania Canal," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 62 (April 1938), 175 ff.; Avard L. Bishop, "The State Works of Pennsylvania," Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, XIII (New Haven, 1907), 149 ff. 9 Wayland Fuller Dunaway, History of the James River and Kanawha Canal (New York, 1922), passim. Walter S. Sanderlin, The Great National Project. A History of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal (Baltimore, 1946). Richmond trade with the interior they had lost to New York. John Quincy Adams had a breadth of view regarding the powers of the Federal government that was forward-looking and modern, in contrast to those of Madison and Monroe.10 He had no doubts about the power to aid in building internal improvements or the wisdom of such a policy. During his administration and that of the National Republicans an astonishing number of major enterprises that were to absorb huge sums before they were completed were undertaken by a young country of less than 12 million people, widely scattered, and possessed of no great wealth. Surveys for roads and canals were energetically pushed by the Army Engineers, and Congress was prodded by local interests to adopt a series of measures that put the government squarely into the financing and to a certain extent into the construction of roads and canals. Included were post or military roads in Alabama, Florida, Arkansas, and Michigan, as well as the extension of the National Road in Ohio; improvement of the navigation of the Ohio and subscriptions to the stock of the Louisville and Portland Canal ($235,000) to be built around the falls of the Ohio at Louisville; the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal (SI million) to parallel the Potomac River to Cumberland, Maryland; the Chesapeake & Delaware ($450,000) to unite these two great bays; and the Dismal Swamp Canal ($200,000) to link by water Chesapeake Bay and Albemarle Sound in North Carolina.11 While commercial interests of the seaboard were hatching these and many other schemes for the building of canals to extend into the interior from the coast, the people of the 10 Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union (New York, 1956) displays Adams' rugged nationalism. 11 Carter Goodrich, Government Promotion of American Canals and Railroads, 1800-1890 (New York, I960), p. 41; Ralph D. Gray, The National Waterway. A History of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, 1769-1965 (Urbana, 111., 1967), passim. |