Building Waterways, 1802-1861: Science and the United States Army in Early Public Works

Abstract

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has often worked outside the mainstream of American building tradition. During the early years of federal aid for navigation programs, the corps advanced controversial science, an elite concept of the professional engineer, and an alien approach to waterway engineering. The corps built massively and with great precision. It called for networks of federal projects, new kinds of harbors, canals, and excavated channels, improvements that seemed extravagant to many builders. Army lent support to the grand improvement programs that were targets of the resistance to federal public works. Today the published history of waterway has little on the formative years of America's oldest and largest construction agency, the Corps of Engineers. The corps merits about page in K. Jack Bauer's civilian story of maritime development.' A new history of hydraulics defines hydraulic engineering as a branch of civil devoted not to military or repressive purposes but to the well-being of all people.2 Standard works on transportation seem unaware that waterways-not railroads-were the focus of army assistance in antebellum times. One statistical study calls