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

Abstract

Building Waterways, 1802—1861: Science and the United States Army in Early Public Works TODD SHALLAT 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 a controver­ sial 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 civilian builders. Army engineering lent support to the grand improvement programs that were targets of the resistance to federal public works. Today the published history of waterway engineering has little on the formative years of America’s oldest and largest construction agency, the Corps of Engineers. The corps merits about a page in K. Jack Bauer’s “civilian story” of maritime development.1 A new history of hydraulics defines “hydraulic engineering” as “a branch of civil engineering 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 Dr. Shallat directs the public history program for the School of Social Sciences and Public Affairs at Boise State University. This article is based on research supported by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Office of History and the Boise State Research Associate Program. The author acknowledges the helpful comments and critiques of Martin Reuss, Joel A. Tarr, Frank N. Schubert, Dale E. Floyd, Paul K. Walker, Martin K. Gordon, John T. Greenwood, Milton Small, and the Technology and Culture referees. ‘K. Jack Bauer, A Maritime History of the United States: The Role of America's Seas and Waterways (Columbia, S.C., 1988), p. xiii. 2Giinther Garbrecht, ed., Hydraulics and Hydraulic Research: A Historical Review (Rotterdam, 1987), p. ix.© 1990 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/90/3101-0002$01.00 18 Science and the United States Army in Early Public Works 19 federal involvement with western rivers “limited,” “irregular,” and “picayune.”3 In fact, Congress spent about $43 million on waterway projects before 1861—the cost of six Erie Canals. That expenditure estab­ lished a critical precedent in civilian government. It opened a vast civil works jurisdiction for the corps and its sibling organization, the U.S. Topographical Bureau. It funded a half-century of hydrographical investigation. It allowed about seventy top graduates of the U.S. Military Academy to manage water resources—to survey every major river, identify hazards, propose improvements, hire contractors, and supervise construction.4 The neglect of these waterway activities has slighted the corps and its science in three important ways. First, students of antebellum construction have focused too narrowly on the fingertip methods of the practical mechanic, largely a British tradition. Second, some writers overlook the engineer’s politics by calling him “subservient” and “supremely sensitive to every wish of Congress.”5 Third, because a man’s craft seems more transferable than his science, historians have discounted the practical value of engineering theory. “There were not available at that time many general ideas or theoretical considerations that would help in building and making new things,” Elting E. Morison has explained. “Men derived useful procedures—rules-ofthumb —from repeated experience.”6 Thus, according to Morison, Daniel H. Calhoun, Daniel J. Boorstin, and others, the greatest 3Erik F. Haites, James Mak, and Gary M. Walton, Western River Transportation: The Era of Early Internal Development, 1810—1860 (Baltimore, 1975), pp. 89, 95, 100; for the general neglect of army water projects see George R. Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815 to 1860 (New York, 1951); and Carter Goodrich, Government Promotion of Canals and Railroads, 1800—1890 (New York, 1965). 4The waterway appropriation included more than $1 million invested in canal company stock, about $2 million for piers, harbor repair, and cost surveying before 1824, $13 million for river and harbor work, 1824—60, and $27 million for lighthouses, beacons, and buoys. Most were army projects administered by West Point engineers; see...