Just like in the 19th century, lawmakers today aren’t arguing about whether to build roads or water pipes. They’re arguing about what kind of country they wanted to live in
If all of this sounds a bit histrionic for a simple debate about replacing water pipes, we’ve been here before. Between the 1820s and 1850s Americans hotly debated the merits of public investment in roads, bridges, canals, riverways and, eventually, railroads. At issue was more than whether to tax and spend or the limits of federal authority.
Without a market for goods, and in the absence of a developed cash economy, most families did what was logical, producing enough for home consumption and little more, perhaps selling a small surplus to neighbors, bartering with others for goods and services, manufacturing clothing and other necessities at home, and purchasing what few items they could not produce themselves—sugar and other dry goods, glass for windows—from a nearby country store. Survival demanded a collective outlook.
If canals and steamboats made travel faster, railroads were practically science fiction come true. The same three-week trip that Senator-elect Henry Clay made from Lexington to Washington, D.C., in 1806 took just four days by 1846. But opponents of federal funding for internal improvements feared more than just an empowered federal state. They understood that internal improvements would usher in a new reality—one in which a cherished agrarian republic gave way to a mixed economy of farms and small towns, factories and cities, agriculture and commerce.
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