The Reason for Government

The building of canals, according to one historian, was the reason behind the creation of the first known governments (in Ancient Sumer, to divert the unpredictable river floods). These were specifically the first city states.

By the time of the American Revolution, little had changed in many ways. Men still wanted to create waterways, but now it was principally for transportation, mostly to trade goods.

Geography is historical destiny, according to another famous historian. Canals changed geography radically.

They had already done so in recent memory in Britain and continental Europe, in an ongoing way that generated the early industrial revolution.

In America, especially in the Northern United States, the idea was as is Europe: use canals to leverage the existing navigable river network. In America this river system was  extensive and navigable throughout the continent, hindered only in certain areas requiring portages, or the crossing of mountains, but in a way that could be overcome through the right engineering.

The earliest canal networks in America were not surprisingly in New England, and in the Middle Atlantic states. The one that would become the cradle of the expanded America network was the one centered on the Delaware River, specifically by linking this river to the Hudson to the east and the Susquehanna to the west. This network destined upper New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania to be the natural cradle of American industry, especially given the coal reserves nearby. It carried Philadelphia into a prominence past the colonial era and into the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries.*

The most profound single alteration of the natural geography of the continent, however, was the building of the Erie Canal, which, after it opened in 1825,  solidified a link between New York City (and Boston) and what would become Chicago. The nation (at least the North) was thus bolted together by water, one end to the other, by the third decade on the Nineteenth Century.

Out in frontier Illinois, at the furthest inland reaches of the navigable system, where the portages connected to the Mississippi basin, men like Abraham Lincoln, who had traveled on the river extensively in his youth, could easily see that canals would one day make Illinois the center of a great network of trade and civilization.

They formed political movements and ran for legislature with the idea of using the power of the state in order to make this happen.

In a way  it was full circle, back to Ancient Sumer.

* The strategic position of Philadelphia was amplified by the later construction of the navigational part of the Main Line of Public Works, that boldly leaped across the ancient barrier of the Allegheny Mountains, and linked the Susquehanna (and thus the whole eastern seaboard) to the upper Ohio valley. This network across the Allgeghenies drew both parts of Pennsylvania together as a powerful trans-mountain political entity, as well as opened the West.