Abstract

""'...Productive of Great Benefit to the Public': Invoking the Public Good in the U.S. Canal Age"

Laura Clerx, Boston College (lauraclerx@gmail.com)

In 1792, Philadelphia citizen Thomas Leiper assured the Pennsylvania House of Representatives that he would not have dared to petition their honored body for permission to construct a canal in the southeastern corner of the state were he not confident that his plan “must be productive of great benefit to the public.” Basing his argument in British common law, civil law, and recent American precedent, Leiper made his case to the legislature. When it came to “...the right of the freemen of every part of the state, to enjoy the easiest and the shortest access to the Common Market,” he insisted that “the public good” ought to take precedence over “the territorial rights” of individual freeholders, who, in the interest of defending their pre-existing property, might obstruct his project.

Of course, Leiper's own interest was also at stake in his application for permission to connect the creek along which his property -- a stone quarry -- was situated, to the Delaware River. A canal connection to this large navigable river would greatly facilitate the transport of the heavy stone to Philadelphia markets. Leiper’s petition raises important questions about the motives that spurred public works projects, and, perhaps more importantly, the motives that legitimated them in the eyes of early American legislators. Drawing on case studies that inform my dissertation project, this presentation will situate Leiper’s canal alongside two contemporary canal projects financed by joint shareholders.

Using the diaries of engineer and canal manager James Brindley, and the letters he exchanged with project-financiers, I will explore what the quotidian work of acquiring property, digging the land, and raising funds to pay laborers can tell us about the interplay of private profit and public interest that motivated late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century proprietors of canal companies. Situating these canal projects in the context of corporation history, I will examine how attempts to engineer land and water in the name of the “public good,” played out in a period of U.S. history that witnessed the transformation of the business corporation in American law and culture.