Boone’s opponents did not dispute this principle. Rather, they claimed that the convention was indeed in the city’s interest. On June 18, 1847, a convention organizer and Democratic Illinois state senator, Norman Judd, led a public rally calling on the Common Council to allocate thousands more dollars for the convention. Judd maintained the convention was “of paramount importance to the best interests … of the city.”86 He and fellow members of the organizing committee regarded the convention as an opportunity to promote Chicago among the nation’s political and economic elite. Convention organizers therefore distributed pamphlets trumpeting the city’s growth from 4,853 in 1840 to more than 16,000 in 1847 and boasting of Chicago’s three libraries, three hundred dry goods stores, five bowling saloons, six foundries, fifty-six attorneys, twenty-four lumber dealers, fourteen newspapers, nineteen schools, and three shipbuilders.87
Many aldermen agreed that hosting the River and Harbor Convention would benefit Chicago. One-third of the city’s aldermen joined the 110-member citizens committee that organized the convention. It successfully pressed Boone to allocate more money for the convention, but it did not get as much as it wanted. The convention was funded, like so much of Chicago’s infrastructure, with a mixture of private and public money. Private donors gave an untold sum, and the city relinquished thirteen hundred dollars from its coffers.88
As the city’s aldermen squabbled over who should pay for the convention, Whig Party leaders used the occasion of their trip to Chicago to highlight the commercial potential of the north and west. The Albany journalist and party boss Thurlow Weed, for instance, described Chicago’s economic utility for residents of New York State in his dispatches to readers of the Albany Evening Journal. With the completion of the Erie Canal between Albany and Buffalo in 1825, Weed noted, New Yorkers had a direct water route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. They could harvest the natural resources of the nation’s interior and ship their products to western cities, thereby building a commercial empire.89
Weed traveled to Chicago from Buffalo in 1847 aboard a “magnificent” steamship aptly named Empire, steaming west across Lake Erie, turning north to ascend the Detroit River, Lake St. Clair, and the dangerously shallow St. Clair River, before bursting out onto the deep blue waters of Lake Huron.90 It was at that point, “passing out of the St. Clair River into broad and deep Huron,” Weed reported, that “you begin to comprehend something of the vastness of the West.” To Weed, the landscape seemed a divine gift. “That America is to be the ‘seat of empire,’” Weed suggested, “‘is a fixed fact.’ A wisdom above that of man has prepared for the inhabitants of worn-out, impoverished, and over burthened Europe, a fresh, fertile, primeval land, whose virgin soil and graceful forests will wave over millions of people.” As the Empire chugged around Michigan and turned southwest toward Chicago, Weed marveled at the seemingly limitless timber stands, highlighting how they might be used to drive commercial progress with his observation that the Empire’s crew pitched six hundred cords of wood—the equivalent of ten acres of heavily forested land—into the boat’s furnace during the trip to Chicago.91 Indeed, much of the timber described by Weed would, in the coming decades, be chopped down and shipped to the lumber yards along the banks of the Chicago River.92
Weed’s suggestion that a divine logic ordained the commercial growth of the Midwest and its soon-to-be leading metropolis of Chicago belied the gritty political, financial, and environmental realities of building cities and marketplaces. That, of course, was the point. Weed’s account was a political text designed to persuade voters and politicians of the wisdom, even the inevitability, of spending money on rivers and harbors to help chart a particular economic geography. The existence of the city to which Weed traveled in the summer of 1847 was anything but foreordained. Rather, the Chicago of 1847 was the contingent outcome of a series of political and financial decisions, made over the course of several decades, about how to reshape the landscape and waterways for commerce. That project continued in 1847, which is why the attendees of the River and Harbor Convention wanted the federal government to pay for improvements.93
Weed’s colleague at the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, exaggerated the level of support for the convention in his dispatches from Chicago, giving the impression that Chicagoans had a singular purpose in hosting the event, which began with a Fourth of July parade. Greeley praised the “magnificent” procession of musicians, military ships on wheels, and fire engines that snaked through city streets along a route that had been shortened “in deference” to the blistering heat. He did not mention that Chicagoans had quarreled over who should pay for it; perhaps he did not know.94 In any case, Greeley painted a picture of a city dedicated to staging a grand event. He claimed the western city of sixteen thousand residents had been overrun with between ten thousand and twenty thousand visitors, even though other estimates put the figure at just over two thousand.95 There was, Greeley noted, “scarcely a spare inch of room in any public house,” and many of Chicago’s “citizens had … thrown open their dwellings” to accommodate the guests.96
Greeley’s account reinforced the twin purposes of the convention: western boosterism and protesting the policies of President Polk. The delegates first met to discuss these issues formally on July 5. The heat had broken, giving way to a pleasant lake breeze, which cooled the delegates crammed into a tent in Chicago’s Dearborn Park.97 They contemplated the power of government to build new, public infrastructure and, in so doing, to create new markets.
To Regulate and Create a Marketplace
On July 6, David Dudley Field transformed the convention from an act of political theater to a substantive policy debate by challenging a position widely held by the delegates: that the federal government had the constitutional authority and responsibility to build waterways and harbors.98 The day began with the reading of letters of support for the aims of the convention sent by absent politicians such as Missouri Democratic Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Kentucky Whig Senator Henry Clay, and former Democratic President Martin Van Buren.99 Then Pennsylvania Whig Congressman Andrew Stewart made a “vigorous” speech calling on the federal government to spend money on infrastructure, a theme that met with the majority of the crowds’ approval, but that also incited a rare show of opposition.100
Field voiced a fear common among Jacksonian Democrats that government policies might privilege favored citizens. Field, a prominent New York City attorney, was the son of a Congregationalist minister who had been raised in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Growing up, Field had been schooled in law and Jacksonian politics by several members of the prominent Sedgwick family. As a student at Williams College, he had studied under Henry and Robert Sedgwick, impressing his mentors so much that they later entered into a legal practice with him in New York City. While in New York, Field cultivated a relationship with perhaps the most influential member of the Sedgwick family, Theodore, who was an attorney, New York Evening Post columnist, and author of influential legal and economic treatises. Sedgwick’s writings hit key Jacksonian themes, especially an aversion to government redistribution of wealth through “legal privileges given to some, and denied to others.”101 Field, too, shared this concern; the fear that government policies would privilege some citizens over others formed the core of his objection to federal funding for internal improvements.
He argued that the federal government had the power “to regulate not to create” new commercial arteries—an act that redistributed wealth.102 Field warned the delegates, not unwisely, that political power tends “ever toward accumulation.”103 He thus believed it critical to mark the limits of federal power. The Constitution, Field reminded his audience, accorded the federal government the power to “regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states.”104 That interpretation had been affirmed in Chief Justice John Marshall’s famous ruling in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), which denied the state of New York the power to grant a monopoly on