• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Internal Improvements

During the 19th century, officials debated the role of the central government in internal improvements. The Constitution gave Congress the authority to “establish post offices and post roads,” but what did that phrase mean? Did “establish” mean Congress could approve funds for government agencies to build post roads or only designate which existing roads, built by some other means, would be used to carry the mail?

Presidents and Members of Congress also differed on the role of the central government and the value of involvement by the central government. Some thought the Constitution provided the authority to authorize construction of internal improvements while others disagreed but thought a constitutional amendment was a good idea. Others thought Federal funding for internal improvements was a bad idea, in part because the prospect would encourage Members of Congress to fight for improvements in their State, regardless of merit, and to trade projects for votes on other matters.

Early internal improvements in Virginia facilitated movement into unsettled lands and provided for the development of existing trade patterns and the establishment of new ones. Geography played a major part in shaping Virginia’s internal improvement policies.

The projects were often dependent on geography, and each geographical division — Tidewater, Piedmont, Valley, and Trans-Alleghany — required different methods of transportation, as did the areas between the major rivers.

By 1816, Virginia was ready to implement one of the earliest programs of internal improvements in the United States. Debts incurred during the American Revolution and the War of 1812 were no longer enough of a consideration to put off needed projects, and there developed within the state a sense of urgency to share more lucratively in the commercial wealth of the new country.

Since many of Virginia’s rivers drain into the Ohio and the Mississippi, and others drain into the Chesapeake Bay, western settlers could deal effectively with Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania — if they were not persuaded to keep their trade in Virginia.

Virginia had depended on an extensive river system, flowing from the line of mountains stretching from New York through the Carolinas, to facilitate commercial interests throughout the state. However, navigation inland from the Atlantic was halted at fall lines—those points marked by waterfalls and rapids noting abrupt descents of waterways from upland to lowland areas. This prevented service to the west both in receiving goods or bringing them to markets. The growing movement west after the Revolutionary War, often away from the waterways, necessitated an organized program of canals, river navigations, railroads, turnpikes, and bridges to permit successful settlement and commerce.

With a strong national economy in the 1830s and the national debt retired, the States undertook many improvements, as historian Stephen Minicucci wrote: "Across the nation, the popularity of improvement schemes was never greater than during the last six years of [President Andrew] Jackson’s administration. State constitutions written during the period, in Tennessee, Michigan, and Arkansas, contained explicit clauses encouraging state support for internal improvements. In part inspired by the success of New York’s $7 million Erie Canal, opened in 1825, a number of states undertook very ambitious schemes of improvement and were willing to incur substantial debts to do so . . . . Collectively, the states that borrowed only $25 million during the 1820s, incurred more than $40 million in debt in the first five years of the 1830s, and almost $108 million in the three boom years before the depression [that began in 1837]. Many of these efforts were undertaken with the express expectation that the projects, like Erie, would be self-financing (that is, that projected earnings would service the debt). " [Minicucci, Stephen, “Internal Improvements and the Union, 1790-1860,” Studies in American Political Development, 18 (Fall 2004), page 166]

Illinois provides an example. In the mid-1830s, internal improvements fervor swept the State. In 1836, when young Representative Abraham Lincoln arrived in the State capital of Vandalia, he was eager to support internal improvements, a tenet of his Whig Party and a personal preference. Lincoln had always favored a system of canals and roads and railroads for the state. In Vandalia he found that most of the other members of the Tenth General Assembly were of the same mind.

In no portion of the world was the public attention more powerfully attracted by the importance of Internal Improvements, than in the United States. Canals and rail-roads were piercing the country in every direction: projects which a few years ago would have seemed visionary and chimerical, had been carried into execution, with results outstripping the most sanguine calculations; immense expenditures of capital had been made, and investments still more enormous were contemplated throughout every part of the Union for the construction of these important works, which were destined to revolutionize the inland commercial intercourse of the civilized world.

In a few years, they extended from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, connecting the extremities of this widely extended republic, and binding the population by links stronger than iron, by lines extending thousands of miles, and thereby promoting commerce, and strengthening the means of defence.

It had been discovered, as a new demonstration of power in political economy, that works of internal improvement, if wisely executed, enrich, instead of impoverishing a country. Nothing but physical impossibilities were beyond the sober hopes of a great and growing people, whose national wealth was accumulating, and whose physical resources were constantly developing hy new discoveries of the materials necessary to bring these resources into play.

Wagons, drawn by animal-power, generally began to give place to canal-boats, or rail-road cars, impelled by steam; and the whole country became chequered by canals and rail-roads, as it was by the common roads of the country.