Canal Commissioners
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Canal Stories, a series brought to you by the Canal Corridor Association celebrating the Illinois and Michigan Canal and the communities that were shaped by its legacy. The Illinois and Michigan Canal, like all internal improvements, had the mixed blessing/curse of having a bureaucratic group of visionaries in charge of making the vision a reality, the Canal Commissioners. Brought to you by Wayne Duerkes, PhD.
On February 14, 1823, the 3rd General Assembly approved “an act to provide for the improvement of the internal navigation of this state.” The beginning of the act set the tone of responsibility for the project.
“Sec. 1. Be it enacted by the people of the state of Illinois, represented in the general assembly, That Emmanuel J. West, Erastus Brown, Theophilus W. Smith, Thomas Sloo, junior, and Samuel Alexander, be, and they are hereby, appointed a board of commissioners, to consider, devise, and adopt such measures as shall or may be requisite to effect the communication, by canal and locks, between the navigable waters of the Illinois river, and lake Michigan. . .”
These words simply identify the project and who would make it happen. The act went further by discussing replacement commissioners, the power to hire an engineer, make surveys, and make plans for the project. All these tasks were written in such a manner to make the commissioners’ power both broad and ambiguous. The one power that was most important to them was to raise funds. To do this, on January 17, 1825, the General Assembly approved “An act to Incorporate the Illinois and Michigan Canal Company.” This corporation had such luminaries as Edward Coles, Shadrach Bond, Justus Post, Erastus Brown, William S. Hamilton, Joseph Duncan, and John Warnock as some of the initial subscribers. A little over a year later, the General Assembly passed an act repealing the initial act as “…the persons named in the first section…have not performed any act…”
Most canal commissioners were just political appointees with no reasonable qualifications for large projects. In fact, 19 out of the 29 commissioners were career politicians. Some of the commissioners also have no real historical evidence in which to learn anything about them. Starting with Governor Edward Coles, for the next twelve years, a Democratic governor sat at the head of Illinois government, and many commissioners (if their political affiliations are known) were also Democratic. Well, cronyism was not new.
In 1829, the state reinstituted the canal commissioners, though this time, the governor could only appoint three and they needed Illinois Senate approval. The commissioners did not have to raise funds from investors this time, but rather they managed the land sales from the federal government. Two years prior, the Illinois General Assembly sent a memorial to Congress as for a land grant from which the proceeds of the land sales would finance the canal construction. The federal government designated alternate sections of land along a ten-mile corridor with the proposed canal at its center. This checkerboard pattern gave land to the state to sell while the remaining sections were left to Congress for the same. Captain Charles A. Dunn, Dr. Gershom Jayne, and Edmond Roberts took control of the canal’s construction.
Over the next several years, several men took up the role of commissioner. B. Green, Jonathan H. Pugh, William B. Archer, Gurdon S. Hubbard, William Linn, Joel Manning, Edward Coles, William F. Thornton, Jacob B. Fry, John A. McClernand, David Prickett, Newton Cloud, and Isaac N. Morris all served on the commission between 1831 and 1844. There were many politicians in this group, but a few, like Thornton and Fry had extensive military experience making them valuable assets in managing an army of workers. Despite this advantage, several factors continued to raise construction costs, which will be discuss in detail later. The commissioners had to turn to investors to help finish the canal. But that came at a political cost.
By 1845, major canal investors needed reassurance that the canal would be finished in quality condition and able to collect tolls to begin paying off the $1.6 million dollar debt the state incurred to finish the project. As a part of the compromise to establish this reassurance, the governor still was allowed to pick one of the commissioners, but the investors choose the other two. As the investors were from Europe or New York, they selected east coast entrepreneurs that did not have local oversight. It seems a wonder that such a motley crew of individuals were able to pull off such a large project, but they did. That was on account of them making one brilliant decision; they hired an intelligent and capable engineer to oversee construction. We will talk about him in our next story.
That concludes today’s Canal Story. Thank you so much for joining us as we continue our journey through the history of the Illinois & Michigan Canal. If you have enjoyed this episode, pass it along to your family and friends, be sure to leave us a like or drop us a comment, and we will see you again very soon.