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CHAPTER 1

Making a River Run Through It

Until deep into the nineteenth century, it was uncertain that Chicago would become the continent’s preeminent inland metropolis, but even so, the promise and pitfalls of its geography were immediately obvious to the first Europeans who surveyed the center of North America. In 1673, the French explorer Louis Joliet and Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette made the portage at Chigagou after having explored the upper Mississippi River Valley.¹ Marveling at the route’s imperial possibilities, Joliet reported to the governor of French Canada, “we can quite easily go to Florida in boats … There would be only one canal to make by cutting only half a league of prairie, to pass from the lake of Illinois, [Lake Michigan] into the St. Louis River, [the Des Plaines and Illinois Rivers].” Such a canal would link Quebec to the fertile lands of the continental interior where, Joliet advised the governor, there would be “great advantages … to founding new colonies.”²

The French, however, soon realized that constructing just a canal might not suffice to give them access to the center of North America. The explorer René-Robert Cavelier Sieur de La Salle, who camped at the site in the winter of 1682–1683, was similarly enthusiastic about the location, predicting that it would become a “gate of empire” and “the seat of commerce.”³ Yet, he saw obstacles to using the canal proposed by Joliet. In a letter to New France’s governor general, La Salle quipped that Joliet’s “proposed ditch” would do nothing to remove the “sand bar at the mouth of the channel [of the Chicago River] which leads to the lake of the Illinois [Lake Michigan].”⁴ If the river’s mouth remained clogged with sand, most boats would never reach the canal imagined by Joliet.

Together, La Salle and Joliet had identified the main challenges to capitalizing on the site’s transportation advantages: it would be necessary to dig a canal across the portage and to dredge the sand-clogged mouth of the Chicago River. Those were matters of statecraft no less than feats of engineering, and the French lacked the incentive and the capacity to build in so remote a place. It was not until 1718 that the French-Mississippi Company founded New Orleans, completing the imperial arc from Montreal to the mouth of the Mississippi River. The expanse of territory between those two cities was, moreover, only a sparsely populated fur trading region over which the French state had limited administrative control.⁵

Marshalling the money and manpower to construct the canal envisioned by Joliet—and remove the sandbar observed by La Salle—is, of course, a story of American, not French, politics. French-claimed and Indian-controlled, Chigagou became the Anglo-American fur trading post of Chicago in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. From the 1830s to the 1850s, American policymakers worked in tandem with private investors to transform that little outpost into a great port city by making a river run through it, one connecting Chicago to the Atlantic and to the Gulf of Mexico.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the state, city, and federal governments, as well as numerous private individuals, seemed to have resolved the environmental paradox of Chicago—that the city’s location both beckoned and repelled waterborne travelers. Through their combined efforts, the Army Corps of Engineers, Chicago alderman, and various individual property owners had transformed the Chicago River from a sluggish stream into a navigable waterway—albeit one that required constant, costly upkeep—complete with bridges and wharves. Even more critically, the state’s canal commissioners and investors had replaced the portage that was at once so convenient and so unpleasant to use with a canal grander, by far, than the one imagined by Joliet in 1673.

These feats of engineering transformed the waterfront into an asset with great commercial value. At the same time, though, they caused unintended changes in the shape of the shoreline and in the city’s commercial geography that threatened to undermine the value of the waterfront.

The Changing Imperial Landscape

In the second half of the eighteenth century, the site of the portage remained a backwater as great imperial powers fought to establish dominion over the center of North America.⁶ In 1763, at the conclusion of the Seven Years War, the French lost their tenuous grip on most of their lands east of the Mississippi River to the British—who, in turn, lost their holdings south of the Great Lakes and east of the Mississippi to the Americans after the Revolutionary War. Throughout these imperial transfers, the Chicago Portage remained a lonely wilderness crossroads for Francophone and Native American traders. In fact, it did not have a permanent settler until 1779, when a black man thought to have been born in St. Domingue, Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable, established a farm and trading post on the north bank of the river. Du Sable took the daughter of a Potawatomi chief as his wife, and he prospered.⁷

Figure 1. Map of Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds. Chicago sits on the cusp of the subcontinental divide between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds. After the construction of the Erie Canal in 1825, it was possible to travel by water from Chicago to New York City. The completion of the Illinois and Michigan Canal between the Chicago River and the Illinois River in 1848 made it possible to travel from Chicago to New Orleans via water. Chicago thus became a key hub for waterborne commerce in North America. Map created by Jason LaBrosse.

Figure 2. Map of the Chicago Portage. The lower portion of this map depicts contemporary waterways and boundaries of the city of Chicago. The upper portion of the map is a detailed representation of the land route, or portage, that travelers used to drag their boats through to pass between the South Branch of the Chicago River in the Great Lakes watershed and the Des Plaines River in the Mississippi River watershed. The Illinois and Michigan Canal (1848) replaced the portage route. Map created by Jason LaBrosse.

Du Sable’s French and Native American Chigagou became the Anglo-American settlement of Chicago during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century wars for the Great Lakes region. When the American Revolution ended in 1783, the British retained numerous forts in the area that would come to be Indiana and Illinois, trading with Native Americans and encouraging many of them take up arms against the United States in an effort to contain American settlement. To resist American control of the Great Lakes region, Native American tribes banned together, forming the “Western Confederacy.” After a decade of conflict known as the Northwest Indian War, the United States military won a resounding victory against the Western Confederacy and their British allies at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 in present-day Maumee, Ohio. In the subsequent Treaty of Greenville (1795), the Native Americans ceded much of Ohio, the site of Detroit, and the small area that would become downtown Chicago.⁸

To counter the British presence in the western Great Lakes region, the United States Army built Fort Dearborn in 1803 at the spot where the sluggish Chicago River dribbled across a sandbar and into Lake Michigan. Fort Dearborn became a site of battle when the United States declared war on the British in 1812. Six hundred British-allied Native Americans ambushed ninety-four white Americans and their Miami guides, burning the fort and killing fifty-two people. The carnage of what Anglo-Americans dubbed the “Fort Dearborn Massacre” fed many whites’ hostility toward Native Americans.⁹

The U.S. Army rebuilt Fort Dearborn in 1816–1817 as a defense against the region’s Native Americans, a move that foreshadowed a broader shift from coexistence with, to removal of, Native Americans.¹⁰ The policy of removal in this region followed the transformation of the region’s political economy from fur trading to farming.¹¹ Fort Dearborn thus became an instrument of removal, opening lands to Anglo-American farmers.

In 1832, the U.S. military used the fort as a staging ground for a war against the Sauk chief Black Hawk, who was resisting American settlement in northwestern Illinois. Fort Dearborn’s proximity to Lake Michigan made it a natural choice for shipping soldiers and supplies to the region. Yet, the sandbar that La Salle had lamented in the 1680s prevented ships from entering the mouth of the Chicago River. Ships anchored a mile off the coast, and men shuttled their cargos to shore on smaller boats. These complications notwithstanding, American forces—Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis among them—defeated Black Hawk. The federal government and Native Americans negotiated the 1833 Treaty of Chicago. Native Americans exchanged five million acres of land in northeastern Illinois and southeast Wisconsin to the United States government for five million acres west of the Mississippi. With that, Native American tribes were driven from the region that would soon be dominated by the city of Chicago.¹²

At the time, Saint Louis’s geographical strengths—its proximity to the Ohio and Missouri Rivers and its easy connection to the bustling port of New Orleans—suggested that it would dwarf Chicago as an economic force. In light of the nation’s growing sectional crisis, however, Yankee merchants became increasingly reluctant to invest capital in the slave state of Missouri, instead favoring Illinois.¹³ Meanwhile, Illinoisans engineered a new economic geography for Chicago—one conducive to transportation of people, goods, and information—by building a canal and establishing a harbor in the Chicago River.

Remarkably, these monumental projects were completed in a polity where city, state, and federal governments shared authority, and at a time when questions about the balance of power pushed the nation ever closer to cataclysm. It is not surprising that political leaders failed to reach definitive agreements over which governing body should bear the costs of engineering a new geography for Chicago’s waterways. Instead, the city, state, and federal governments created a patchwork of power over the landscape, sharing authority and costs even as they continually renegotiated their responsibilities for building infrastructure. Oftentimes, lawmakers resolved funding questions by selling land and bonds to private investors to raise money for infrastructure. The Illinois and Michigan Canal offers a case in point.

The Illinois and Michigan Canal

The same year that Hubbard first waded through the muddy Chicago Portage, 1818, Illinois congressional delegate Nathaniel Pope redrew the state’s boundaries in anticipation of a canal. In so doing, he radically altered the political and economic geography of Illinois.

Like most early Illinois settlers, Pope hailed from a slave state and gravitated to the more prosperous and populated southern portion of the territory. Born into a prominent Kentucky family, he traded on his family influence to gain a post as Illinois’s territorial secretary in 1809, a post he held until his 1816 election as territorial delegate to Congress. In that role, Pope negotiated key terms of Illinois’s 1818 bid for statehood, including an eight-thousand-square-mile extension of the state’s northern border. According to the Northwest Ordinance, that border was to extend due west from Lake Michigan’s southern tip, thereby depriving Illinois of the Lake Michigan shoreline and the Chicago Portage.¹⁴

Pope could envision the canal imagined by French explorers soon becoming a reality. President James Madison had spoken of the possibility in his 1814 inaugural, and in an 1816 treaty the federal government had forced the Potawatomi Indians to relinquish a twenty-mile-wide strip of land for a canal between Ottawa and the Chicago River.¹⁵ Pope, determined to pluck that canal from the as-yet-to-be organized territory of Wisconsin, requested a forty-mile extension of the state’s northern border, telling Congress that the lake frontage would “afford additional security to the perpetuity of the Union, inasmuch as the State would thereby be connected with the States of Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, through the Lakes.”¹⁶

Congress obliged, and Pope’s prediction that water transportation would help seal Illinois to the Union proved true. From the 1850s on, migrants and capital from New England and New York poured into northern Illinois.¹⁷ By the eve of the Civil War, Illinois had begun to shed its southern character and forge bonds of culture, commerce, and politics with the North. Thus, Illinoisans like Lincoln who were born in southern states would side with the cause of union.¹⁸

The movement of the state line notwithstanding, the canal’s course was still not set. That remained contingent on the decisions of Illinois officials, surveyors, and eastern financiers. In 1827, the state received a land grant from Congress of 284,000 acres, the sale of which would be used to finance construction.¹⁹ Two years later, the governor of Illinois appointed canal commissioners to oversee the project. The commissioners began laying out towns, including Chicago, along the proposed route. The Canal Commission hired surveyor James Thompson to make a plat of the town of Chicago. The Thompson Plat of 1830 established a grid of sixty-six-foot-wide streets, interspersed with lots dissected by sixteen-foot alleyways. The three branches of the Chicago River wound through the map, interrupting its otherwise perfect symmetry. By creating a series of relatively uniform segments, Thompson and the canal commissioners transformed Chicago’s land into a salable commodity for which there would soon be plenty of credit.²⁰

The prospect of the canal, combined with the increasing availability of credit, drove investment in Chicago real estate. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson broke the power of the Second Bank of the United States, freeing western banks to offer credit for land purchases on liberal terms. Speculators with pockets full of easy credit bought and sold Chicago lots at a fever pitch, with buyers from as far away as Europe, New England, and New York snapping up property they had never even seen at continually rising prices. A Lake Street lot, for instance, cost three hundred dollars in 1832 and sold for sixty thousand dollars in 1836.²¹ These grand sums were mainly pocketed by land speculators who flipped lots, not the Canal Commission, which had sold most of its holdings before prices soared. Consequently, land sales did not generate enough capital to build the costly canal, and the state legislature began to consider if there was a cheaper, alternate route for the waterway.²²

In the 1830s, members of the Illinois state legislature debated whether to fix the location of the canal on the basis of construction cost, politics, or topography. Viewed from ground level, the most obvious canal route seemed to follow the portage from the Chicago River to the Des Plaines. The surface of the upper Des Plaines was on a level with that of Lake Michigan, and the land in-between the two waterways rose to a maximum elevation of fourteen feet. Thus, the original plan was to make a thirty-mile “deep cut” in the earth from the Chicago River directly to the Des Plaines, letting gravity pull the water southwest. This plan, if enacted, would have reversed the flow of the Chicago River—a feat that engineers achieved in 1871. But during the 1830s, the deep-cut plan literally foundered on the rocks.

Viewed from beneath the earth’s surface, the proposed route had critical drawbacks. The soil consisted of dense clay called “hard pan,” and worse still, limestone bedrock lurked just below the earth’s surface at key points. The cost of blasting through the bedrock would be enormous: An 1833 estimate put the canal project cost at four million dollars, up significantly from estimates of seven hundred thousand dollars in 1823–1824. With cost projections soaring, some legislators suggested building a railroad or finding a less-rocky alternative canal route. The state, however, simply jettisoned the entire project until its 1835–1836 legislative session, when Hubbard—now a state representative—successfully argued that even if the original canal route was rocky and costly, both political and long-term economic logic argued for making Chicago the terminus of the canal.²³

Figure 3. Maps of the mouth of the Chicago River in 1795, 1812, 1830, 1834 (clockwise from top left). These maps depict the Chicago River at four crucial points in the city’s early history. The map at the top left shows the six square-mile area of land ceded by American Indians to the United States government in the 1795 Treaty of Greenville. The next map depicts Fort Dearborn and the settlements clumped along the Chicago River in 1812. The third map illustrates how surveyor James Thompson laid out the streets and lots of Chicago in 1830. The final map illustrates where the U.S. Army dredged a channel through the sandbar at the mouth of the Chicago River in 1834. Charles A. Kent compiled these maps in 1915 for use in the Chicago Public Schools. This compilation of maps is housed in and was reproduced by the Chicago History Museum.

Since his first slog through Mud Lake in 1818, Hubbard had prospered trading furs and selling livestock to the soldiers garrisoned at Fort Dearborn. Having moved to Chicago permanently in 1834, Hubbard won election to represent the town in the state legislature. In the renewed debate over the canal, a faction of cost-conscious representatives argued for rerouting it through the Calumet River, which was located about a dozen miles south of the Chicago River, along the Illinois-Indiana border, and ran from Lake Calumet into Lake Michigan. The plan’s advocates explained that engineers could cut a channel from the Calumet River through the adjacent Saganashkee Slough, or “Sag,” to the Des Plaines.²⁴ Advocates of the Calumet-Sag route promised that the route would circumvent much of the bedrock, thereby reducing construction costs. Hubbard countered this geological argument with a lesson in political geography. Taking out a map, Hubbard showed his colleagues in the chamber that the mouth of the Calumet River sat only a few hundred yards from the border of Indiana. Hubbard, according to one account, then noted that “it was expected that wherever the canal terminated, a great city would grow up” and asked “whether it was desirable that the coming city should be as much of it in the state of Indiana as in Illinois, when the entire expense of construction would devolve upon our state[?]” Hubbard’s argument prevailed, and on July 4, 1836, the state of Illinois began making the “deep cut” between the Des Plaines and the Chicago River.²⁵

While political considerations dictated that the Illinois and Michigan Canal flow through Chicago, the imperatives of finance forced engineers to abandon the deep cut. Hubbard and his legislative colleagues’ insistence that the canal run through Chicago meant that engineers and laborers had to proceed with the arduous and frequently deadly work of cutting through the hard pan and bedrock along the route, which was carried out largely by Irish laborers. To finance the undertaking, the state of Illinois borrowed great sums. In 1835, the legislature granted Governor Joseph Duncan power to negotiate a five hundred thousand dollars loan for money to build the canal. In 1837, the legislature passed the Internal Improvement Act, authorizing the state to borrow four million dollars for canal construction and millions more to build an intricate railroad network across the state, known as the Illinois Central Railroad (a private corporation would later bear that name).²⁶ Just when the state began to accrue enormous debts, the Panic of 1837 struck, stalling the economy and driving the cost of borrowing higher.²⁷ By 1840, the cash-strapped state of Illinois halted work on the canal and railroads. By 1842, the state was in financial ruin with $10.6 million in public debt, annual interest payments of eight hundred thousand dollars, and a yearly income of just ninety-eight thousand dollars.²⁸

Illinois was not alone. Inspired by New York’s Erie Canal, Ohio and Indiana had also launched ambitious internal improvement projects. In 1832, Ohio completed a canal between Lake Erie and the Ohio River, and its tremendous success galvanized political support for new public works projects. In 1837, the state legislature passed a Loan Law that virtually required the state to match private investment in internal improvements. Hoosiers, meanwhile, started building a “Mammoth System” of railroads, canals, and turnpikes. The Panic of 1837 was a devastating blow to all these Midwestern projects, and to state economies across the nation.

For years, western banks had been making unsound loans to land speculators in Chicago and throughout the nation. In 1836, President Jackson put an end to easy credit with his “specie circular,” an executive order that required western banks to redeem paper money in gold or silver. Deflation ensued. The cost of borrowing soared as many states became mired in expensive internal improvement projects. By 1841, Indiana had spent over eight million dollars on just 281 miles of its proposed 1,289 mile transportation system; it would need twelve million dollars more to complete the work. Already burdened with a total public debt of fifteen million dollars and annual interest payments of at least $615,000, the state of Indiana defaulted. Ohio fared a little better. In the decade after 1836, it spent thirteen million dollars on canals and aid to transportation companies. Meanwhile, the Loan Law alone forced the state to take on three million dollars of debt by 1842. The law, moreover, created numerous opportunities for corruption and misuse of public money. In 1842, the legislature repealed what had come to be called the “Plunder Law.” A combination of New York investors and the economy’s rebound in 1843 saved Ohio from bankruptcy.²⁹

As public debt wrought havoc on the finances of states throughout the Midwest, businessmen supplied private capital to resurrect the Illinois and Michigan Canal project. In June 1842, a New York City land speculator named Arthur Bronson journeyed to Chicago to assess the status of the Illinois and Michigan Canal. In 1833, Bronson had begun buying up Chicago real estate, betting on the successful completion of the canal. As he toured Chicago, Bronson met with business leaders, including William B. Ogden, a real-estate speculator and Democratic politician who served as the city’s first mayor (1837–1838). The men discussed how to secure money to finish the canal. Bronson and Ogden determined that they would appeal to investors in Boston, New York, and London for an additional $1.6 million in loans. In exchange for the capital, the investors required, among other things, that the state abandon the deep-cut plan for a cheaper, shallow-cut channel eight feet above the level of Lake Michigan. In other words, the investors demanded that water run uphill. A canal engineer named Ira Miltimore figured out how to comply. Using giant steam pumps, the engineer would force water from the south branch of the Chicago River into the canal.³⁰

That engineers would make water run uphill at the behest of financiers symbolized the growing role of private businessmen in building public infrastructure. Lawmakers in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were deeply shaken by the financial crises of the 1830s and 1840s, and they moved to severely limit their states’ capacity to build new infrastructure. In 1851, Ohio lawmakers established a new state constitution that prohibited the state from borrowing money. Hoosiers likewise rewrote their constitution in 1850–1851 to forbid the state of Indiana from taking on public debt.

Increasingly, new infrastructure would be built by private corporations.³¹ For instance, when Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas renewed the push for an Illinois railroad in the late 1840s, he assumed that a private corporation, not taxpayers, should raise the capital. In 1851, the state granted a corporate charter to the Illinois Central Railroad, a private version of its defunct publicly funded predecessor.³² The new Illinois Central would, like the Illinois and Michigan Canal, link New Orleans to the mouth of the Chicago River Harbor. Before that could happen, however, Chicago required a navigable harbor.

Public Property, Private Capital, and Wharves

As laborers dug the Illinois and Michigan Canal out of hard rock and clay, the city of Chicago worked on a related project: transforming the sluggish, sand-clogged Chicago River that would link the canal to Lake Michigan into a viable harbor. The river needed to be widened and dredged to allow for the passage of boats. The banks of the Chicago River required wharves for handling cargo and bridges to facilitate overland travel. These feats of construction required effective regulation of public space. They also posed a financing dilemma: how to split the costs of infrastructure between all of Chicago’s taxpayers and the specific individuals who would make money from the harbor.

At first, legal ambiguity over waterfront access delayed its development.³³ In the 1830s, the trustees of the town of Chicago promised to commit public funds to river dredging in order to encourage business owners to construct docks and wharves. The trustees thus tried to channel both public and private money into harbor construction. In 1835, the town trustees, with the consent of the state legislature, leased public riverfront lots to the highest bidder for a period of 999 years. Under the terms of the lease, the lessees had four years to pay for access to the lot and two years to build five-foot-wide docks three feet above the water line. The trustees, on the other hand, agreed to dredge the river channel ten feet in front of the docks within four years of the leasing agreement.

The economic panic that struck in 1837 made it nearly impossible for the city, incorporated in March of that very year, to incur the enormous expenditures required to dredge the river. Nor could the lessees pay for their lots. Since both sides reneged on the terms, the contracts were ignored until 1844, when the Chicago Common Council launched an inquiry into the status of the wharfing leases. It discovered that the city’s wharves were mired in legal chaos. Some lessees had built on and occupied their lots, while others had sold them to third parties. Still others had abandoned them to squatters.³⁴

The Common Council consisted largely of merchants, bankers, lumber dealers, and real estate brokers who had come to Chicago from the northeast in hopes of making fortunes, and many of the aldermen had a stake in port development. Their success depended on the city’s growth, which required a working harbor.³⁵ Seeking an end to the confusion over wharfing rights, in 1845 the Common Council ordered that all wharfing privileges be surrendered to the city, since most of the original lessees had failed to pay.³⁶ It was forced to back off this plan to seize the wharves, since it too had violated the 1835 leases. In 1846, the council issued a new order levying a fifty dollar quarterly penalty against “any person … in possession of any portion of the public landings or wharfing privileges” until “some further settlement be made.”³⁷ With this act, the Common Council acknowledged that the claims to wharf privileges required careful, individualized adjudication. In February of 1847, the state legislature passed “An Act to adjust and settle the title to all wharfing privileges in Chicago,” which returned riverfront lots to the city and established a procedure whereby claimants could negotiate a settlement.³⁸ By 1850, the city had settled the claims and issued a series of new wharf leases with the expectation that business owners would construct the docks necessary for the port.³⁹

After establishing property rights on the riverfront, the city was able to condemn certain lots in order to deepen and widen the channel of the Chicago River. This was essential for the city’s growing harbor. The confusion over wharf leases notwithstanding, the commerce in Chicago’s harbor had increased in value from three hundred thousand dollars in 1836 to five million dollars in 1847.⁴⁰ With the imminent completion of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, the city of Chicago and the canal trustees anticipated even greater increases in Chicago River commerce. In October of 1847, the Common Council began to redraw the map of the riverfront to accommodate the new channel. The city evacuated several streets—all of North Water Street west of Wolcott, Carroll Street east of the river’s north branch, and east of Water Street from North Water to Kinzie—to permit the canal trustees to widen and deepen the Chicago River and build a turning basin on the north branch of the river at Carroll Street. By resolving the uncertainty over property rights, then, the city destroyed an older landscape and created a new one more suitable for the demands of a growing commerce.⁴¹

Through river dredging and the offer of long-term leases, Chicago’s Common Council enticed private parties to build wharves on public lands. The Chicago River Harbor, constructed as a joint public and private enterprise, became a dynamic marketplace.

The Chicago Common Council pinned the costs of wharf construction on those who wished to use them—as opposed to all the city’s taxpayers. This was a matter of fairness, an acknowledgement by the city’s alderman that creating new infrastructure benefitted some people more than others. Even so, the construction of new infrastructure was sometimes a matter of intense dispute. If it was not a matter of cost, it was often a matter of space. Commerce followed infrastructure, as goods flowed into harbors, over roads, and across bridges. Consequently, the power to build or destroy infrastructure on public land was often tantamount to the power to establish or destroy a marketplace. Recognizing this fact, Chicagoans fought bitterly over where to locate the city’s bridges.

Breaking and Building Bridges for Commerce

Before daybreak one morning in July 1839, a “large crowd” gathered on the banks of the Chicago River to destroy the bridge at Dearborn Street. The precise identity and number of the people who came to the riverbank brandishing axes and sledge hammers that morning is unknown, but the crowd likely consisted mostly of Southsiders embroiled in in the great “Bridge War” with Northsiders.⁴²

Ostensibly the Southsiders were acting in the interest of public safety. Built in 1834 on the order of the town trustees, the structure at Dearborn Street was the only bridge that spanned the main stem of the river. It was a rickety, three-hundred-foot-long “gallows” draw with two frames that loomed “like instruments of death” and a sixty-foot passageway for ships that could be opened by a team of six men pulling chains. For years its supports had been pummeled by the “blows of passing vessels,” and its planks worn underfoot of pedestrians and animals, causing the bridge to begin to disintegrate.⁴³ The city had made repairs in 1835 and 1837, but structural problems persisted. In 1838, Alderman Henry Rucker reported on the city’s options: repair the bridge again for a cost of between $135 and $300, insert a float between its piers for $650, or replace it with a floating bridge at Clark Street for $1,090.⁴⁴ In July of the following year, the Chicago Common Council ordered that the hazardous bridge be torn down and replaced with a ferry. The next morning an enthusiastic crowd “chopped the bridge to pieces.”⁴⁵

The crowd’s eagerness to tear down the bridge owed less to concerns over safety than to its desire to control the corridors of commerce in Chicago and, with them, the city’s burgeoning grain market. Before railroads and canal boats stitched Chicago to the Midwestern interior, farmers brought their produce to the city on wagons known as “prairie schooners.” According to the Chicago Times, “Every night there came up out of the south a great fleet of prairie schooners that … often numbered five hundred, and came laden with wheat and corn.” The farmers came in from the south and, since the city’s principal grain warehouses lay north of the main stem of the river, they had to cross a bridge or sell their crops to a middleman on the Southside. Southsiders eager to insert themselves into that lucrative intermediary role were delighted when bridge defects led the Common Council to authorize the destruction of the draw at Dearborn Street. Those Southsiders, however, were not content to merely destroy one bridge. They also wanted to prevent the construction of any new bridges.⁴⁶

During the late 1830s and early 1840s the Chicago Common Council debated not how to fund bridge construction but whether to even have bridges binding the sections of the city. As the Dearborn Street Bridge continually deteriorated, Northside businessmen led by Ogden spearheaded plans for an alternative bridge at Wells Street, for which they promised to pay.⁴⁷ The Common Council included two aldermen from each of the city’s six wards. Its members, evenly split between Northsiders and Southsiders, rejected the proposal.

The council agreed that the Dearborn Street Bridge had to go, but it argued bitterly over whether to replace the span, and, if so, where the new bridge should be located. Southside Alderman Augustus Garrett led the charge against a new bridge; he even went so far as to claim that a span across the river would help British troops enter the city if they attacked from Canada.⁴⁸ Northside real estate moguls Ogden and Walter Newberry, in turn, tried to win Southside aldermen’s support for the bridge. According to the Chicago Times, Ogden and Newberry gifted two blocks of Southside land to the Catholic Church for the purpose of building a cathedral with the understanding the aldermen would acquiesce to a bridge.⁴⁹

By April of 1840, workmen were driving piles for a new span at Clark Street. Even so, the debate over the bridge continued. In 1841, the Common Council considered moving a new bridge from Clark to Dearborn, but took no such action.⁵⁰ When a flood damaged the Clark Street Bridge in 1844, Garrett argued that it should be removed. Northsiders silenced him, however, by repairing it. With financing from private property owners like Newberry, the city constructed several new bridges across the river before the end of the decade, although not without the typical wrangling over location.⁵¹ With each new bridge, it became easier to shuttle people, goods, and information across the Chicago River.

The Shifting Sands of the Chicago River Harbor

As Chicago’s city leaders successfully harnessed public and private funds to build key infrastructure—bridges, wharves, and a deeper, wider river channel—in the 1830s and 1840s, and the Chicago River became a thriving harbor, one vexing barrier to commerce remained. The sandbar, described by La Salle over a century earlier, still stubbornly clogged the mouth of the Chicago River. Because it abutted the army’s Fort Dearborn and Lake Michigan, an interstate body of water, the sandbar was a federal responsibility, but the federal government failed to consistently allocate money to keep the channel open, which continually refilled with sand. Some influential political leaders from the south did not want to spend money developing a northern city, and Chicago’s leaders grew frustrated.

The river was the lifeblood of their city’s economy, and it had the potential to be a key harbor on expansive Lake Michigan, which runs 307 miles in length and up to 118 miles in width, with a maximum depth of 923 feet.⁵² On an 1821 visit to the Chicago River, geographer and ethnologist Henry Schoolcraft observed that “after passing the Manitou Islands [off the cost of northern Michigan] there is no harbor or shelter for vessels in the southern part of Lake Michigan, and that every vessel which passes into that lake after the month of September, runs an imminent hazard of shipwreck.” But, School-craft noted, the “sand which is driven up into the mouth of the Chicago Creek” blocked deep draft vessels from entering that potential harbor.⁵³

The mouth of the Chicago River had to be cleared of sand to permit ships to pass from the waters of Lake Michigan to the proposed canal. In 1830, surveyor William Howard told Congress that “The formation of a good harbor at this place [the mouth of the Chicago] is … indispensable to the efficiency of the proposed canal from Lake Michigan to the Illinois river.”⁵⁴ To establish such a harbor, however, engineers would have to contend with an incessant barrage of water and sand. The force of Lake Michigan’s current drove sand across the mouth of the Chicago River, closing off the stream from all but the smallest of vessels. When he made his survey of the Chicago River in 1830, Howard was surprised to discover that the sandbar did not owe to the sediments carried by the river into the lake. “A remarkable circumstance connected with the formation of this bar is,” Howard observed, “that these deposits of sand seem to be brought almost entirely from the North [by lake currents].”⁵⁵

The Chicago River was generally too sluggish to carry much sand to its mouth. The south branch originated five or six miles southwest of the lake on a low prairie bog and the north branch ran south along a low muddy plain parallel to Lake Michigan for about thirty miles. The two branches met a mile or so from Lake Michigan and flowed east past a settlement of about a dozen houses and Fort Dearborn. After Fort Dearborn, the river then turned south and dribbled over the sandbar and into Lake Michigan.⁵⁶

As Howard had noted, Lake Michigan’s currents had created the sandbar through a process of littoral drift. According to the historical geographer Libby Hill, Lake Michigan’s current often flowed for two hundred nautical miles from Michigan’s Leelanau Peninsula before it pummeled the Chicago lake shore from the northeast. As the lake waters flowed toward Chicago’s shoreline, sometimes aided by storms or great winds, they gained momentum and swept sand and other debris along with them. As a wave washed ashore, however, it lost its energy, dropping much of the debris. Some debris collected on the shoreline and some rolled back into the lake with the receding waves. As the receding waves bounced off the shoreline, they rolled back into the lake, not toward their origin in the northeast, but easterly and slightly to the south, continually moving the sands southeast along the shoreline. That littoral drift clogged the Chicago River’s mouth with sand and bent the channel southward.⁵⁷

In the 1830s, the Army Corps of Engineers cut a channel through the sandbar at the mouth of the Chicago River, forever altering the shoreline in unforeseen ways. To open the harbor, Howard suggested to Congress that the Army Corps of Engineers cut a channel across the sandbar, so that the Chicago River flowed due east into the lake. Howard proposed building two long piers on either side of the river mouth that extended out into Lake Michigan, thereby, Howard hoped, protecting the river’s opening from sand.⁵⁸ In 1833, Congress appropriated money. Army engineers, first commanded by Major George Bender and after 1834 by Lieutenant James Allen, cut a two-hundred-foot-wide channel through the sandbar so that the river flowed almost due east into Lake Michigan about one thousand feet north of its former outlet. By 1835, the south pier ran 700 feet into the lake and the north, or weather, pier extended 1,260 feet. Lieutenant Allen could already see that just north of the weather pier, a new sand bar was forming that threatened to encroach on the river channel as it grew. As the lake currents rolled in from the northeast, the north pier trapped sand, growing the north shoreline of the city by 320 feet between 1833 to 1837 and another 400 feet between 1837 and 1839, creating an area known as the “sands” and later Streeterville. South of the piers, however, the effect was just the opposite. The piers prevented the currents from depositing new sands and created an eddy that eroded the existing southern lakeshore, an area occupied by the U.S. Army Fort Dearborn and the city’s only public parks.⁵⁹

The city of Chicago acquired the valuable but eroding Fort Dearborn lands from the federal government in 1839. By 1833, American forces had crushed the band of Sauk and Fox Indians led by Chief Black Hawk and forced Native Americans to relinquish their lands east of the Mississippi River.⁶⁰ Fort Dearborn, therefore, became largely obsolete except that it housed the army engineers who worked to clear the mouth of the Chicago River. In 1838, Chicagoans petitioned the federal government to relinquish the fort because it was “useless for a military post.”⁶¹ In 1839, the Secretary of War granted 90 percent of the Fort Dearborn land to the city, reserving only a small parcel south of the mouth of the Chicago River for military buildings. The Fort Dearborn Addition to Chicago consisted of valuable waterfront lots and public lands. The addition consisted of seventy-six acres extending northeast from the intersection of State and Madison Streets to Lake Michigan and the Chicago River, most of which the city subdivided into lots and sold to private parties.⁶²

President Martin Van Buren, however, ensured that some of the Fort Dearborn Addition lands were reserved for the public. Campaigning for reelection, the New York Democrat worried that he would lose western votes if eastern speculators bought up too much choice waterfront land in Chicago. Van Buren therefore ordered the General Land Office to designate the block west of Michigan Avenue between Randolph and Madison Streets a “public square,” which became known as Dearborn Park. The land office marked the parcel east of Michigan Avenue “public ground.” This ground became known as North Lake Park since it adjoined a strip of lakeshore land to the south, between Madison and Twelfth Streets. The land had been set aside just three years earlier when the state’s canal commissioners elected not to sell it, instead deeming the space “Public Ground—A Common to Remain Forever Open, Clear and Free of any Buildings or other Obstruction Whatever.” In 1844, the canal commissioners transferred control of that public space to the city of Chicago. By 1847, the land had become known as Lake Park, a popular promenading ground.⁶³ The Fort Dearborn Addition therefore extended the city’s park space and endowed it with additional lakeshore and riverfront lots. But these assets were imperiled because the Army Corps of Engineers’ efforts to open the Chicago River Harbor had precipitated the erosion of the shoreline.

The city of Chicago had contradictory political and environmental imperatives. The city required a harbor. Yet, the acts of dredging the river and extending piers into Lake Michigan caused the erosion of valuable lake shore lands south of the mouth of the river. The city’s position highlights a common environmental and economic tension: the transformation of a landscape often simultaneously increases its value and sows the seeds of its destruction. Even if those goals were contradictory, though, the city had little choice. It had to simultaneously maintain the harbor and protect valuable private and public lands on the lakeshore, and it attempted to achieve these goals—without imposing heavy taxes on its population—by appealing to the federal government for lakeshore protection.

Within months of acquiring the Fort Dearborn Addition, the city of Chicago asked the federal government for the remaining federal lands as compensation for damage done to the shoreline. The mayor and Common Council complained to Congress that the “extension of piers forming the harbor … have caused such a change in the action and effect of the water on this shore of Lake Michigan that … land … on the south side [of the piers] … is rapidly disappearing.” To save “a large portion of the best part of our city” from the lake waters, the petition requested that Congress grant the city additional federal lands to compensate the city for the cost of “erecting a permanent barrier against this invasion.” The petition fell on deaf ears.⁶⁴

If Lake Michigan’s currents posed a threat to the Chicago River Harbor, so too did the shifting sands of congressional politics. From 1839 to 1841, Congress, mired in sectional conflict over the distribution of internal improvement funds, allocated not a cent for harbor improvement. Meanwhile, in Chicago, sand crept around the north pier into the river’s mouth, clogging the channel and putting commerce in peril. In 1842, Chicago’s Democratic mayor, Francis Sherman, and the Common Council petitioned Congress for harbor improvement money. Anticipating a debate over the national significance of the harbor, the mayor and aldermen highlighted Chicago’s emerging position as a gateway between east and west. “The agricultural prospects of all of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Missouri,” noted the petition, “are … greatly dependent upon facilities for business … on the southwest part of Lake Michigan: which lake is part of the great channel by which the staples of these States will best reach the eastern market.”⁶⁵

Indeed, the city of only about six thousand residents already boasted annual imports in excess of $1.5 million and exports of $348,362. The petition warned, however, that “serious and immediate evils threaten the … harbor for the purposes of commerce.” Critically, “the action of the wind … has formed a sand-bar across the pier.”⁶⁶ Congress granted a modest ten thousand dollars in 1843 for Chicago harbor repairs.⁶⁷ Even so, it mattered little in the grand scheme of things. For the harbor to remain open Congress would have to continually pour money into dredging and pier renovations designed to preserve the harbor from an incessant barrage of wind, water, and sand (Table 1).

Growing increasingly frustrated with Congress’s lack of sustained funding for harbor improvements, the Chicago Common Council challenged the federal government’s control of what remained of Fort Dearborn. In April of 1845, on motion of the lawyer and Whig alderman J. Young Scammon, the Chicago Common Council ordered that “the street commissioner be directed forthwith to open the street (Michigan Avenue) and remove the obstructions therefrom.”⁶⁸ So ordered, Street Commissioner Phillip Dean would have to extend the city’s street grid through the Fort Dearborn reservation. In order to carry out this order, Dean needed to destroy up to eight Fort Dearborn buildings—a feat that had not been repeated since Pottawatomie warriors burned the fort in 1812. Perhaps not coincidentally, one of the buildings Dean would have to wreck to execute the Common Council’s order was the Office of Public Works, which housed the army engineers.

Table 1. Federal Spending on Chicago River Improvement, 1833–1843

Year	Federal Appropriation
1833	$25,000
1834	$30,000
1835	$30,000
1836	$25,000
1837	$30,000
1838	$40,000
1839	$0
1840	$0
1841	$0
1842	$30,000
1843	$10,000

Sources: The data from 1833 to 1842 are from Jesse B. Thomas, Statistical Report, in Chicago River-and-Harbor Convention, ed. Robert Fergus (Chicago: Fergus Printing Co., 1882), 192; the data from 1843 is from Mendelsohn, “The Federal Hand in Urban Development,” 259.

Before city workers began wielding their axes and sledge hammers, however, U.S. government agent Charles Schlatter secured an injunction from the district court judge to halt the destruction of federal property. Four years later, the Supreme Court ruled, in United States v. Chicago, that the city’s right to build streets did not endow it with the power to seize federal lands.⁶⁹ In the meantime, Schlatter voluntarily removed several federal buildings in 1845 and 1846 so the city could extend River Street along the main stem of the Chicago River.⁷⁰

Schlatter’s actions eased tensions between the federal government and the Chicago Common Council over waterfront policies, but the détente was short lived. In 1846, President James Polk, a Democrat from Tennessee, vetoed a bill that would have allocated $1,378,450 to over forty different river improvement projects throughout the American north and west, including dredging the sandbar that choked the mouth of the Chicago River Harbor.⁷¹ The veto placed Chicago at the center of a virulent partisan debate over federal power, slavery, and the physical dimensions of the American economy. It centered on the question of who should pay for government services: all taxpayers, or just those who directly benefitted?

The National Politics of Internal Improvement

Polk’s veto was just the latest episode in a larger debate over internal improvements that centered, in part, on distinctive conceptions of political and economic space. Inspired by Thomas Jefferson’s ideals of limited federal power and local self-governance, Polk believed that congressional authority to improve rivers and harbors depended on a geographic assessment of the shape of the market. If a river or harbor carried interstate or foreign commerce, it possessed a “national” character, and Congress could allocate money for improvements. If, on the other hand, a river or harbor carried primarily intrastate commerce, improvements were merely a “local” matter, and Congress could not fund them without breeching the constitutional limits of its power. Thus, Polk’s 1846 veto hinged on his determination that “Some of the objects of appropriation contained in this bill are local in their character, and lie within the limits of a single State.”⁷²

Polk’s language parroted that of Andrew Jackson’s famous veto of the Maysville Road Bill. In 1830, Jackson had denied federal funding to build a road between Maysville and Lexington, Kentucky, the home of political rival Henry Clay, on the basis that the project was of a “purely local character.” Jackson’s veto rejected the integrated approach to internal improvements championed by Whigs such as Clay. Rooted in a Hamiltonian vision of centralized government and economic institutions, Clay’s “American System” advocated funding internal improvements that, even if confined within one state, would function as parts of an integrated, national transportation network.⁷³

Polk and Jackson’s positions on internal improvements proved geographically problematic, but politically astute. It was difficult to distinguish between improvements of a local versus national character as rivers, harbors, or roads in one state might nonetheless handle national commerce.⁷⁴ Polk, moreover, linked his critique of federal support for local improvements to yet another muddy geographic distinction. He suggested that the federal government could improve “natural,” but not “artificial” waterways.⁷⁵

A key problem with the 1846 Rivers and Harbors Bill, Polk noted, was that it made harbors out of some waterways “at the expense of the local natural advantages of another in its vicinity.”⁷⁶ Polk’s position begged the question: How was a statesman to draw the distinction between a natural harbor and an artificial one if both needed improvement? These geographic distinctions, local versus national and natural versus artificial, made little environmental or economic sense, but their malleability made them politically potent. Democrats could claim to stand for limited government and justify spending federal dollars on improvements projects by pointing to, either cynically or earnestly, the national or natural characteristics of the waterway.

Even under Democratic presidents in the 1830s and 1840s, the federal government had poured money into improvement projects. Jackson, for instance, authorized more than sixteen million dollars of federal expenditures between 1830 and 1837 on roads, canals, rivers, and harbors.⁷⁷ Democrats’ previous willingness to fund internal improvements raised doubts as to whether several of Polk’s stated objections to the 1846 bill—the local character of the improvements, the artificiality of some of the waterways, and a desire to limit federal power—could be taken entirely at face value.

Polk’s critics were also deeply skeptical of the president’s claim that he sought to discourage sectional rivalry with his veto. Polk maintained that limiting appropriations for improvements would discourage “combinations of local and sectional interests” from forming in Congress to compete in a “disreputable scramble for public money.”⁷⁸ Without federal spoils to fight over, there could not be sectional rivalries. But, the president’s critics could not accept that logic at the same time he was leading a war against Mexico to acquire the proslavery Republic of Texas. The Whig Chicago Daily Journal, for instance, chaffed at Polk’s exhortations of fiscal restraint, asking: “Are not the treasury doors unbarred whenever the ‘open sesame’ is whispered by the slave-driver?” The president’s “real hostility to the Bill,” charged the paper, owed to the fact that “the objects of improvement lie north of Mason and Dixon’s line.” Polk, the paper concluded, had denied Chicago an effective harbor for commerce not out of political principle, but “because he wants the money for the Mexican War!”⁷⁹ The veto had enflamed the very sectional tensions Polk wished to avoid.

Polk’s veto also drove a wedge between the northern and southern wings of the Democratic Party. Jackson’s views on Indian removal, public lands, and the virtue of the common man had helped the party consistently carry Illinois in presidential elections from 1824 to the 1844 run of Polk.⁸⁰ Polk’s 1846 veto created tensions between the party’s southern leaders and Illinois Democrats like congressmen John Wentworth and Stephen Douglas.

Illinoisans required infrastructure for economic development. Wentworth 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 noted, “scarcely a spare inch of room in any public house,” and many of Chicago’s “citizens had … thrown open their 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 At about half past four o’clock, the crowd turned its gaze from the pumps to the horizon where it glimpsed a boat on the “ribbon like sheet of water which was stretching to the southwest.” A little after five o’clock, the propeller A. Rossiter pulled the General Fry and its cargo of leading citizens from Lockport, Illinois, into the south branch of the Chicago River. They were greeted by cheering Chicagoans and Mayor James Woodworth, a Democrat from upstate New York who had worked as a dry goods merchant as well as a contractor on the Erie and Illinois and Michigan Canals. The opening of the Illinois and Michigan Canal linked Chicago’s economy and ecology more closely than ever before to the large swath of continent between New York and New Orleans.¹¹⁶

The canal was the region’s foremost commercial artery until it was eclipsed by the use of railroads, which moved goods faster and seldom shut down due to winter ice or shallow waters in dry summers. On April 24, 1848, the first cargo boat to arrive in Chicago by canal, General Thornton, hauled sugar from New Orleans through the city on the way to Buffalo, New York. While the canal handled southern goods like sugar from New Orleans, the majority of shipments consisted of products from the upper Midwest, including five and a half million bushels of wheat, twenty-six million bushels of corn, twenty-seven million pounds of pork, 563 million feet of lumber, and fifty thousand tons of coal during the first ten years of operation.¹¹⁷ The Illinois and Michigan Canal was Chicago’s largest feeder of wheat until 1851 (when it was surpassed by the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad) and of corn until 1868 (when the Illinois Central and the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroads eclipsed it). The canal also hauled the most timber from Chicago’s lumber market to the treeless prairie until the winter of 1863–1864.¹¹⁸

The Illinois and Michigan Canal’s role in making Chicago a key commercial center highlights the tensions in the Democratic position on internal improvements. Democrats like Field and Polk supported limited government and opposed wealth redistribution. Consequently, they tried to contain the costs of internal improvements within the boundaries of neighborhoods, cities, and states. Yet, internal improvements like the Illinois and Michigan Canal facilitated movement of people, goods, and information across political boundaries. The growing interconnectedness of the nation made it increasingly difficult to determine who exactly benefitted from the improvement of a given river, harbor, or canal. Many political leaders nonetheless persisted in trying to bill the beneficiaries of government services. This goal was foremost in the mind of Chicago Mayor Woodworth after the destruction of the city’s bridges in the flood of 1849—and of Democratic Senator Douglas when he pushed for the construction of a railroad in Illinois during the 1840s and 1850s.¹¹⁹ Woodworth and Douglas alike would find ways to shift more of the costs of constructing new bridges and railroads onto private investors. At the same time, the mayor and the senator tried to ensure that the private parties who financed new infrastructure were held accountable to public officials.

Billing the Beneficiaries of Internal Improvements

On March 12, 1849, around nine o’clock in the morning, residents of the Southside of Chicago heard “loud reports as of distant artillery” out on the prairie. Soon thereafter, the sound of “crashing timbers” rang loudly through the city.¹²⁰ An ice pack on the Chicago River had burst, unleashing a flood.

It all began a few days earlier, when the winter snowpack melted after a soaking rain. The Des Plaines River and Mud Lake swelled with water, spilling onto the prairie and then filling the Illinois and Michigan Canal and the Chicago River. On March 10, a logjam of ice, wood, and other debris formed on the south branch of the Chicago River beside a packinghouse two miles from the city limits. Water welled up behind the dam for two days before bursting with a sound like cannon fire.

The torrent swept through the river channel with “great violence,” smashing canal and lake boats to pieces and pulverizing the bridges at Randolph, Wells, Clark, and Madison. As the rushing waters toppled the bridges at Clark, Madison, and Randolph, four boys and one man perched on those structures drowned. When the current drove a schooner into the side of the Oneida, the canal boat’s captain was crushed to death. The force of water and snapping timbers hurled a spar from the river channel which struck a man dead as he stood on Clark Street. Five steamships, nineteen sail boats, and thirty canal boats were destroyed, along with the bridges of the south and main branches of the river. At the river’s mouth, a “mass of floating material was hurled together at a point near the piers, in a confused jam” of what used to be the contents of the city’s harbor.¹²¹ The death toll was unknown.

The sudden destruction of the bridges drove city leaders to adopt more efficient, less democratic methods of decision making. In the 1830s and early 1840s, decisions about where to build infrastructure were made chiefly in the Common Council, and the debates often degenerated into intercity, sectional disputes like the one surrounding the Dearborn Street Bridge. After the 1849 flood, Mayor Woodworth and private property holders took charge of such decisions. The mayor asked owners of riverside property to pay one-third of the cost of new bridges. If they paid, the city would build the span, and the property owners would reap the transportation benefits. If they declined, Woodworth would propose building the bridge elsewhere, near property owners who were willing to pay. In the four years after the flood, the city erected eight new bridges.¹²²

Woodworth and the city of Chicago thus effectively blended the Whig and Democrats’ approaches to internal improvements. By paying two-thirds of the cost, the city acknowledged the Whig view that infrastructure was a public good, benefitting the whole city. At the same time, the city conceded the point championed by Polk and Field—namely, some property owners gained more from new infrastructure than others, and should pay more—by making the primary beneficiaries of new infrastructure pay a third of the cost of a bridge.

At the state level, too, antebellum political leaders devised strategies to build infrastructure that would benefit the public without taxing those who did not stand to directly benefit. The corporation became one of their favored legal mechanisms. More than merely a private, profit-seeking institution, the corporation was an institution that received special privileges from the state, like rights of way, in exchange for providing a crucial service to the public. It therefore sought, simultaneously, to serve the public while enriching its shareholders.¹²³

When Senator Douglas renewed the push for an Illinois railroad in the late 1840s, he determined that a private corporation, not taxpayers, should raise the capital. To realize that vision, he orchestrated the transfer of public lands to the railroad. In 1850, Douglas and Congressman Wentworth muscled through Congress a bill that transferred a two-hundred-foot-wide strip of land running from Cairo, Illinois, to LaSalle, Illinois, the terminus of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, as well as 2,595,000 acres of land to the state of Illinois for the purposes of laying track and selling land to raise money for constructing a railroad. The state of Illinois, in turn, issued a corporate charter to the Illinois Central Railroad on February 10, 1851.¹²⁴ The state granted the railroad corporation the acreage it had received from Congress, with the stipulation that it construct lines 380 miles from Cairo to Galena and 271 miles from Centralia to Chicago, where it would establish a terminal on the rapidly eroding Chicago lakefront.¹²⁵

The Illinois Central Railroad’s entrance into Chicago during the 1850s highlighted just how fast the city’s economic geography was changing. During the 1830s and 1840s, Chicago’s leaders fretted over how to build infrastructure to make the city accessible. By the 1850s, the city’s waterfront had become one of the preeminent hubs for people, goods, and information traveling across North America by water and rail alike.

The waterfront’s centrality presented city, state, and business leaders with a new challenge: ensuring that private property owners did not monopolize this crucial site of exchange. Some policymakers and businessmen urged the state to pass laws making key waterfront spaces and infrastructure public—and therefore accessible to all who wished to use them for making money. Others countered that such laws would violate the private property rights protected by the U.S. Constitution. The disputes over private property rights and access to the Chicago waterfront culminated in two landmark Supreme Court cases, Munn v. Illinois (1877) and Illinois Central v. Illinois (1892). In both rulings, the court crafted an expansive definition of public space and dramatically expanded the state’s power to regulate commerce. The court reasoned that broader public powers were essential for protecting Chicago’s position as a site of exchange.¹²⁶