and Douglas had therefore thrown their considerable political weight behind the effort to pass the 1846 Rivers and Harbors Bill. When Polk vetoed the bill, Douglas and Wentworth found themselves in a difficult position. The congressmen neither wanted to accede to the veto nor reject outright the principles of their party’s leader. Congressman Douglas accepted Polk’s argument that the constitution forbade federal appropriations for local improvements, but he maintained that many improvements called for in the bill were significant to the nation. Wentworth, on the other hand, denied that the veto rested on constitutional grounds. Rather, he charged Polk with sectional prejudice, noting that “this harbor question is one between north and south.”81
Frustration over Polk’s veto stirred political action. Shortly after Polk’s veto, an agent of the Lake Steamboat Association, William Hall, called on politicians to assemble in protest at a national rivers and harbors convention. Through their attendance, speeches, and resolutions, the delegates would make their message clear: The federal government should pay for internal improvements in the north and west.82
The 1847 Chicago River and Harbor Convention
Many Chicago boosters eager to showcase their growing city clamored to host the event. Political and personal rivals like Democratic Congressman Wentworth and Whig attorney Scammon worked together to organize what came to be known as the 1847 Chicago River and Harbor Convention.83 The two men maintained that their city, with a canal and an accessible harbor, would become the hub of a commercial corridor stretching from New York to New Orleans along the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds. “These great waters, for whose safe navigation this Convention is called,” noted Wentworth and Scammon in a promotional statement, “are soon to be united by … the Illinois & Michigan Canal.” That union of waters, they argued, would bind the nation together in a common political economy: “The commerce of Boston, of Philadelphia, of Baltimore, of New York, of New Orleans … indeed of the whole country, thence becomes in a great measure connected. It has common interest.”84
It was far from clear to all Chicagoans, though, that paying for the convention was in their best interests. As city leaders planned for the convention, some citizens and aldermen hesitated over shouldering the costs of the event. Their concerns echoed the national debate over internal improvements. They wished to pin the costs of the convention on those who stood to benefit. To do so, Chicagoans needed to determine whether the convention served the entire city’s interests or those of a few citizens.
In May, a convention organizing committee of 110 citizens asked the Chicago Common Council to help pay for the River and Harbor Convention. The Council’s Whig Finance Committee chairman, Levi Boone, made a five hundred dollar appropriation, noting that the convention was of an “entirely public & national character.” But, when the organizing committee requested an additional thousand dollars, Boone resisted. He noted that the use of additional public money for the convention was opposed by “some of our fellow citizens, who pay taxes.” Boone’s deference to these citizens was consistent with a principle of antebellum Chicago governance: The bill for city services should be sent to the beneficiaries.85
Boone’s opponents did not dispute this principle. Rather, they claimed that the convention was indeed in the city’s interest. On June 18, 1847, a convention organizer and Democratic Illinois state senator, Norman Judd, led a public rally calling on the Common Council to allocate thousands more dollars for the convention. Judd maintained the convention was “of paramount importance to the best interests … of the city.”86 He and fellow members of the organizing committee regarded the convention as an opportunity to promote Chicago among the nation’s political and economic elite. Convention organizers therefore distributed pamphlets trumpeting the city’s growth from 4,853 in 1840 to more than 16,000 in 1847 and boasting of Chicago’s three libraries, three hundred dry goods stores, five bowling saloons, six foundries, fifty-six attorneys, twenty-four lumber dealers, fourteen newspapers, nineteen schools, and three shipbuilders.87
Many aldermen agreed that hosting the River and Harbor Convention would benefit Chicago. One-third of the city’s aldermen joined the 110-member citizens committee that organized the convention. It successfully pressed Boone to allocate more money for the convention, but it did not get as much as it wanted. The convention was funded, like so much of Chicago’s infrastructure, with a mixture of private and public money. Private donors gave an untold sum, and the city relinquished thirteen hundred dollars from its coffers.88
As the city’s aldermen squabbled over who should pay for the convention, Whig Party leaders used the occasion of their trip to Chicago to highlight the commercial potential of the north and west. The Albany journalist and party boss Thurlow Weed, for instance, described Chicago’s economic utility for residents of New York State in his dispatches to readers of the Albany Evening Journal. With the completion of the Erie Canal between Albany and Buffalo in 1825, Weed noted, New Yorkers had a direct water route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. They could harvest the natural resources of the nation’s interior and ship their products to western cities, thereby building a commercial empire.89
Weed traveled to Chicago from Buffalo in 1847 aboard a “magnificent” steamship aptly named Empire, steaming west across Lake Erie, turning north to ascend the Detroit River, Lake St. Clair, and the dangerously shallow St. Clair River, before bursting out onto the deep blue waters of Lake Huron.90 It was at that point, “passing out of the St. Clair River into broad and deep Huron,” Weed reported, that “you begin to comprehend something of the vastness of the West.” To Weed, the landscape seemed a divine gift. “That America is to be the ‘seat of empire,’” Weed suggested, “‘is a fixed fact.’ A wisdom above that of man has prepared for the inhabitants of worn-out, impoverished, and over burthened Europe, a fresh, fertile, primeval land, whose virgin soil and graceful forests will wave over millions of people.” As the Empire chugged around Michigan and turned southwest toward Chicago, Weed marveled at the seemingly limitless timber stands, highlighting how they might be used to drive commercial progress with his observation that the Empire’s crew pitched six hundred cords of wood—the equivalent of ten acres of heavily forested land—into the boat’s furnace during the trip to Chicago.91 Indeed, much of the timber described by Weed would, in the coming decades, be chopped down and shipped to the lumber yards along the banks of the Chicago River.92
Weed’s suggestion that a divine logic ordained the commercial growth of the Midwest and its soon-to-be leading metropolis of Chicago belied the gritty political, financial, and environmental realities of building cities and marketplaces. That, of course, was the point. Weed’s account was a political text designed to persuade voters and politicians of the wisdom, even the inevitability, of spending money on rivers and harbors to help chart a particular economic geography. The existence of the city to which Weed traveled in the summer of 1847 was anything but foreordained. Rather, the Chicago of 1847 was the contingent outcome of a series of political and financial decisions, made over the course of several decades, about how to reshape the landscape and waterways for commerce. That project continued in 1847, which is why the attendees of the River and Harbor Convention wanted the federal government to pay for improvements.93
Weed’s colleague at the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, exaggerated the level of support for the convention in his dispatches from Chicago, giving the impression that Chicagoans had a singular purpose in hosting the event, which began with a Fourth of July parade. Greeley praised the “magnificent” procession of musicians, military ships on wheels, and fire engines that snaked through city streets along a route that had been shortened “in deference” to the blistering heat. He did not mention that Chicagoans had quarreled over who should pay for it; perhaps he did not know.94 In any case, Greeley painted a picture of a city dedicated to staging a grand event. He claimed the western city of sixteen thousand residents had been overrun with between ten thousand and twenty thousand visitors, even though other estimates put the figure at just over two thousand.95 There was, Greeley
