The fact is that the building of railways was the chief force which put an end to road- and canal-making by the general Government. The construction of the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad, the parent of the New York Central system, was begun in 1825. In 1827 the survey of the Boston and Albany line was begun. The same year the Pennsylvania system had its origin. One year later the Baltimore and Ohio system was founded. The year of the veto of the Maysville road bill forty-one miles of railroad were being operated in the United States, and at the close of the decade more than two thousand miles. As the railway system spread over the country, through private enterprise, the appropriations of national money for internal improvements became more and more confined to the specific improvements of rivers and harbors. The roads and canals of a national character were being made unnecessary by the extension of { 170} the railways. It is undoubtedly, then, far more plausible and natural to attribute the overthrow of the policy of internal improvements by the general Government to the growth of the railways, constructed and operated by private corporations under Commonwealth charters, on the one side, and, on the other, to the settled conviction that the general Government did not have the constitutional powers adequate to the successful establishment and protection of a system of works based upon that policy, and to the unsatisfactory experience which the country had had in attempting to distinguish local from national enterprises and to confine appropriations to those of the latter character.
It is difficult to see any special connection of the interests of slavery with the decline of the policy. It is true that the slaveholders were becoming strict constructionists generally. They had learned from the Missouri struggle that Congress must not be allowed to magnify its powers when forming the Territories into Commonwealths, and they had learned from the tariff struggles that Congress must not be allowed to magnify its powers in regard to the regulation of foreign commerce and the raising of revenue, but, as to internal improvements, no reliable evidence of a consciousness, on the part of the slaveholders, of any particular connection between their peculiar interest and a policy upon this subject by the general Government is discoverable.