The torrent swept through the river channel with “great violence,” smashing canal and lake boats to pieces and pulverizing the bridges at Randolph, Wells, Clark, and Madison. As the rushing waters toppled the bridges at Clark, Madison, and Randolph, four boys and one man perched on those structures drowned. When the current drove a schooner into the side of the Oneida, the canal boat’s captain was crushed to death. The force of water and snapping timbers hurled a spar from the river channel which struck a man dead as he stood on Clark Street. Five steamships, nineteen sail boats, and thirty canal boats were destroyed, along with the bridges of the south and main branches of the river. At the river’s mouth, a “mass of floating material was hurled together at a point near the piers, in a confused jam” of what used to be the contents of the city’s harbor.121 The death toll was unknown.
The sudden destruction of the bridges drove city leaders to adopt more efficient, less democratic methods of decision making. In the 1830s and early 1840s, decisions about where to build infrastructure were made chiefly in the Common Council, and the debates often degenerated into intercity, sectional disputes like the one surrounding the Dearborn Street Bridge. After the 1849 flood, Mayor Woodworth and private property holders took charge of such decisions. The mayor asked owners of riverside property to pay one-third of the cost of new bridges. If they paid, the city would build the span, and the property owners would reap the transportation benefits. If they declined, Woodworth would propose building the bridge elsewhere, near property owners who were willing to pay. In the four years after the flood, the city erected eight new bridges.122
Woodworth and the city of Chicago thus effectively blended the Whig and Democrats’ approaches to internal improvements. By paying two-thirds of the cost, the city acknowledged the Whig view that infrastructure was a public good, benefitting the whole city. At the same time, the city conceded the point championed by Polk and Field—namely, some property owners gained more from new infrastructure than others, and should pay more—by making the primary beneficiaries of new infrastructure pay a third of the cost of a bridge.
At the state level, too, antebellum political leaders devised strategies to build infrastructure that would benefit the public without taxing those who did not stand to directly benefit. The corporation became one of their favored legal mechanisms. More than merely a private, profit-seeking institution, the corporation was an institution that received special privileges from the state, like rights of way, in exchange for providing a crucial service to the public. It therefore sought, simultaneously, to serve the public while enriching its shareholders.123
When Senator Douglas renewed the push for an Illinois railroad in the late 1840s, he determined that a private corporation, not taxpayers, should raise the capital. To realize that vision, he orchestrated the transfer of public lands to the railroad. In 1850, Douglas and Congressman Wentworth muscled through Congress a bill that transferred a two-hundred-foot-wide strip of land running from Cairo, Illinois, to LaSalle, Illinois, the terminus of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, as well as 2,595,000 acres of land to the state of Illinois for the purposes of laying track and selling land to raise money for constructing a railroad. The state of Illinois, in turn, issued a corporate charter to the Illinois Central Railroad on February 10, 1851.124 The state granted the railroad corporation the acreage it had received from Congress, with the stipulation that it construct lines 380 miles from Cairo to Galena and 271 miles from Centralia to Chicago, where it would establish a terminal on the rapidly eroding Chicago lakefront.125
The Illinois Central Railroad’s entrance into Chicago during the 1850s highlighted just how fast the city’s economic geography was changing. During the 1830s and 1840s, Chicago’s leaders fretted over how to build infrastructure to make the city accessible. By the 1850s, the city’s waterfront had become one of the preeminent hubs for people, goods, and information traveling across North America by water and rail alike.
The waterfront’s centrality presented city, state, and business leaders with a new challenge: ensuring that private property owners did not monopolize this crucial site of exchange. Some policymakers and businessmen urged the state to pass laws making key waterfront spaces and infrastructure public—and therefore accessible to all who wished to use them for making money. Others countered that such laws would violate the private property rights protected by the U.S. Constitution. The disputes over private property rights and access to the Chicago waterfront culminated in two landmark Supreme Court cases, Munn v. Illinois (1877) and Illinois Central v. Illinois (1892). In both rulings, the court crafted an expansive definition of public space and dramatically expanded the state’s power to regulate commerce. The court reasoned that broader public powers were essential for protecting Chicago’s position as a site of exchange.126
CHAPTER 2
The Legal Construction of Free Marketplaces
Situated at the nexus of critical water and rail arteries, Chicago grew with astonishing speed, from a frontier crossroads of 350 in 1833 to a metropolis of 300,000 by 1870. When fire scorched and leveled much of the city in October of 1871, Chicagoans rebuilt, bigger and faster, and the population soared past one million by 1890.1 The city’s waterways and railroads stretched into the countryside like tentacles, greedily sucking nature’s bounties—the fruits of fertile farmlands and tall pine forests—into the city, where they were either consumed by the city’s exploding population or shipped out along the same waterways and railroads, supplying the nation’s expanding economy and population with raw materials and finished products.
Chicago’s vitality would not have been possible without its vast network of commercial arteries, but the rise of Chicago as the preeminent commercial hub of the North American interior involved more than digging canals and fashioning structures of timber, brick, iron, and steel. Chicago’s rise was a product, too, of political cataclysm. The Civil War deprived Chicago’s chief rivals, Saint Louis and Cincinnati, of their lucrative trade with the South. As its challengers withered, Chicago profited from the bloodshed. In 1862 alone, the Union Army spent more than $4.7 in the city on supplies of clothing, meat, lumber, and, most critically, grain.2 By war’s end, Chicago had become the nation’s preeminent east-west commercial hub, and the city’s harbor was the busiest in the nation by far. More boats arrived in Chicago during 1871, for instance, than in the ports of New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, and Mobile combined.3
The ships that called at those great seaports tended to be larger than the canal and lake boats that frequented Chicago, but the fact remained: the waterfront of the nation’s great inland metropolis had become a fulcrum on which significant parts of the American economy turned. The Chicago River’s banks had, for example, become the site of leading world markets for lumber and grain. On the South Branch of the Chicago River, lake ships deposited cargoes of timber from the great stands of Wisconsin and Michigan in massive lumber yards clustered around river slips south of Twenty-Second and west of Halsted Street. By 1879, the stock in Chicago’s lumber yards exceeded four hundred million board feet, or over one-fifth of all the milled timber in the region stretching from Cleveland to Minneapolis. Much of this lumber from Chicago would, in turn, be shipped to farmers and merchants on the treeless prairie.4
The main branch of the Chicago River, meanwhile, formed the geographic center of the city’s rapidly growing trade in grain. In 1850, Chicago handled half as much wheat and flour as passed through St. Louis, but within just four years, Chicago handled three million bushels of wheat to its rival’s 2.1 million.5 Midwestern farmers sent even more wheat to Chicago during the years leading up to and during the Civil War. Using mechanical reapers forged in Cyrus McCormick’s factory beside the Chicago River, farmers harvested enough wheat to feed the Union Army. “Without McCormick’s invention,” noted