Congress appropriated a sum of money,
as the war came on, for making the canal navigable for the gunboats
in order to protect New Orleans. Several similar instances might be
cited during the progress of the war. Under such conditions, it was
an easy matter to include in the Army Appropriation bill of 1819 a sum
for making a complete survey of all watercourses tributary to the
Mississippi on its western side, and on its eastern side north of the
Ohio. There was in the same bill an appropriation for making surveys
with maps and charts of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, from the Falls
of the Ohio to New Orleans, "for facilitating and ascertaining the
most practical mode of improving the navigation of those rivers." No
promise was made, but the ultimate purpose was to have the individual
States or the Union improve the navigation of all these waterways. So
insidiously was necessity making the Republicans commit themselves to
the policies of their predecessors, that no one realised they were
preparing by these actions to inaugurate the vast work of public
improvement in the interior of the continent which characterised the
middle period of American history.
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