1830—The Maysville Turnpike.
The President vetoed this bill on the ground that the proposed improvement was of purely local, and not national, importance.
It has no connection with any established system of improvements; it is exclusively within the limits of a State, starting at a point on the Ohio River and running out 60 miles to an interior town, and even as far as the State is interested conferring partial instead of general advantages.
However, he went on,
What is properly national in its character or otherwise is an inquiry which is often extremely difficult of solution . . .
If it be the wish of the people that the construction of roads and canals should be conducted by the Federal Government, it is not only highly expedient, but indispensably necessary, that a previous amendment to the Constitution, delegating the necessary power and defining and restricting its exercise with reference to the sovereignty of the States, should be made. . . .[1]
Jackson was not personally hostile to internal improvements; in fact, less than a year before in his first annual message to Congress he had recommended distributing the embarrassing annual surplus Federal revenue among the States to be used by them for internal improvements.
The Maysville Turnpike veto not only put an end to all thought of national aid to local road improvements, but it also forestalled any efforts that might be made to provide Federal aid to such genuinely national promotions as the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Over 20 years would pass before Congress would provide any significant subsidy for railroads.
The Maysville Turnpike was eventually completed with State and private funds. The road had long been a mail route, so the Government insisted it could run the mails over it without paying tolls. This question was settled by the courts in favor of the Turnpike Company in 1838; thereafter mail contractors paid the same fees as the general public.[2]
The Michigan Road
The first settlements in Indiana were along the Ohio River and the Wabash and White Rivers. By 1826 settlement had reached the southern limits of the Potowatomi Indian lands, which extended from the Wabash River to Lake Michigan. At this time the only overland communication with central Indiana was along a poor dirt wagon road from Indianapolis, the capital, to Madison on the Ohio River.
In October 1826, the U.S. Government concluded a treaty with the Potowatomi under which the Indians ceded a large area of northern Indiana and southern Michigan to the United States. Among other things this treaty provided that the State of Indiana should be given a strip of land 100 feet wide for a road commencing at Lake Michigan and extending to the Wabash River, plus a section (640 acres) of good land contiguous to every mile of the road, and in addition, a section of land for every mile the road was extended southward from the Wabash River. Congress, in March 1827, authorized Indiana to locate and build this “Michigan Road” in accordance with the treaty, from Lake Michigan to Indianapolis and southward to Madison, using funds from the sale of the designated Indian lands.[3]
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