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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

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