dwellings” to accommodate the guests.96
Greeley’s account reinforced the twin purposes of the convention: western boosterism and protesting the policies of President Polk. The delegates first met to discuss these issues formally on July 5. The heat had broken, giving way to a pleasant lake breeze, which cooled the delegates crammed into a tent in Chicago’s Dearborn Park.97 They contemplated the power of government to build new, public infrastructure and, in so doing, to create new markets.
To Regulate and Create a Marketplace
On July 6, David Dudley Field transformed the convention from an act of political theater to a substantive policy debate by challenging a position widely held by the delegates: that the federal government had the constitutional authority and responsibility to build waterways and harbors.98 The day began with the reading of letters of support for the aims of the convention sent by absent politicians such as Missouri Democratic Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Kentucky Whig Senator Henry Clay, and former Democratic President Martin Van Buren.99 Then Pennsylvania Whig Congressman Andrew Stewart made a “vigorous” speech calling on the federal government to spend money on infrastructure, a theme that met with the majority of the crowds’ approval, but that also incited a rare show of opposition.100
Field voiced a fear common among Jacksonian Democrats that government policies might privilege favored citizens. Field, a prominent New York City attorney, was the son of a Congregationalist minister who had been raised in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Growing up, Field had been schooled in law and Jacksonian politics by several members of the prominent Sedgwick family. As a student at Williams College, he had studied under Henry and Robert Sedgwick, impressing his mentors so much that they later entered into a legal practice with him in New York City. While in New York, Field cultivated a relationship with perhaps the most influential member of the Sedgwick family, Theodore, who was an attorney, New York Evening Post columnist, and author of influential legal and economic treatises. Sedgwick’s writings hit key Jacksonian themes, especially an aversion to government redistribution of wealth through “legal privileges given to some, and denied to others.”101 Field, too, shared this concern; the fear that government policies would privilege some citizens over others formed the core of his objection to federal funding for internal improvements.
He argued that the federal government had the power “to regulate not to create” new commercial arteries—an act that redistributed wealth.102 Field warned the delegates, not unwisely, that political power tends “ever toward accumulation.”103 He thus believed it critical to mark the limits of federal power. The Constitution, Field reminded his audience, accorded the federal government the power to “regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states.”104 That interpretation had been affirmed in Chief Justice John Marshall’s famous ruling in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), which denied the state of New York the power to grant a monopoly on ferry service between New York City and New Jersey on the basis that only Congress, not the state, had the “power to regulate, that is, to prescribe the rule by which commerce is to be governed.”105 Incident to the power to regulate commerce, Field continued, Congress must also protect it, “because protection is indispensable to the effect of the regulations.”106 Thus, Field concluded that the federal government had the power to erect lighthouses and piers, and to dredge the “natural channels” on which commerce flowed.107
Field then turned to what he considered the limits of federal power, provoking his audience. He asked rhetorically: “Can the government open new avenues for commerce? Can it enter upon the soil of the states, and dig canals, build railways, and scoop harbors out of the unindented coast for new marts of trade?” The majority of the delegates no doubt answered in the affirmative, but Field declared: “I deny that it has any such power.”108 Field’s audience bristled at this.109 The lawyer nonetheless tried to pull them over to his side by speculating on the potentially radical economic implications of permitting the federal government to create new markets, or “marts.” If given the power, he commented, nothing could stop the federal government from buying up vast quantities of grain to manipulate its market price.110 Field believed that whether the federal government manipulated grain prices or transformed the landscape to create new “marts of trade,” the effect was the same. The federal government would take wealth from some and shower it on others, exactly what Theodore Sedgwick and other Jacksonian Democrats feared.111
The Whigs in attendance at the convention immediately challenged Field’s distinctions between legitimate government regulation and illegitimate government creation of commercial arteries, demonstrating that they broke down on a practical, spatial level. The New York Whig and former member of President John Tyler’s cabinet, John Spencer, for one, noted that most Democrats, including Field, accepted the federal government’s power to establish lighthouses for purposes of safety. If the federal government could build a lighthouse to protect commerce, Spencer reasoned, it could certainly “provide harbors of shelter on these lakes.”112 The act of establishing a safe harbor for stormy weather would, of course, also create a new artery for commerce.
Greeley expanded on the link between safety regulation and creating new harbors, arguing that environmental conditions dictated that the federal government establish ports in places like Chicago. The journalist inverted the Democratic Party position that the federal government should improve only “natural” harbors. The absence of natural harbors on the Lake Michigan coastline was not, Greeley maintained, reason to deny federal funding for improvements. Rather, it meant that federal harbor funding was all the more critical for safety. Since natural harbors did not exist, harbors of refuge would have to be “made entirely—scooped out of the shifting sands and fortified by expensive piers.” The “greater the natural deficiency,” Greeley reasoned, “the more palpable the necessity and thus the Constitutionality of National interposition.”113 If the federal government had the duty to protect a ship’s safety, then it had to make harbors in places where nature had not. Regulation then would be equivalent to creating a new marketplace, a point lost on Field.
Field’s distinction between market regulation and creation indicates that he believed commercial arteries existed on their own, independent of government. The Chicago of 1847, however, belied that view. That city and its principal arteries of commerce were products of intense environmental engineering carried out by public and private actors alike. The harbor Field entered in July 1847 was dredged by the Army Corps of Engineers and the city of Chicago. The dock he disembarked upon was leased from the city and built by a private individual. The bridges Field used to cross the Chicago River were constructed by the city, on public land, with private capital. Commercial centers like Chicago were not created primarily by market forces.114 Rather, government leaders and private businessmen collaborated to build the infrastructure that made the city a marketplace.
The Opening of the Illinois at Michigan Canal
In 1848, Joliet’s vision from two centuries earlier finally came to fruition. The state of Illinois and private investors completed the commercial artery that linked the Chicago River to the Mississippi River system. They replaced the portage that was at once so convenient, and so unpleasant to use, with a canal. So great was that achievement that, at three o’clock on April 10, 1848, Chicagoans crowded the river bank to witness its completion and wonder about its meaning.
As one reporter wrote, it was as if the “whole city had been emptied down at ‘Lock No. 1.” A crowd had gathered on the banks of the south branch of the Chicago River to greet the arrival of the very first boat to pass over the summit of the Illinois and Michigan Canal and enter the Chicago River. As the crowd waited, the onlookers inspected two “splendid” 160-horsepower pumps. Those pumps, the brainchild of engineer Miltimore, reconciled the canal financiers’ demand for a cheaper, shallow-cut channel with the laws of gravity; each minute they pushed seven thousand cubic feet of water out of the river channel upward into the canal.115
