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Congress and Regulation: The Steamboat

While partisan and sectional tensions gradually stalemated the promotional role of the national government, Congress before the Civil War "never assumed an extensive regulatory role." 17 Unlike the British empire, the new Constitution created a government that stressed promotion and distribution of grants and that encouraged mixed economic enterprise rather than strict regulation of individual economic conduct. Its most difficult tasks were the collection of small revenues generated by the tariff and excise taxes. Congress regularly deferred to local and state control in most matters, refusing, for example, despite repeated pleas from local authorities, to pass federal quarantine laws to stop the spread of cholera. In the case of steamboating, however, the social costs of technological innovation became so great that national regulation became essential. Congress's actions provided a glimpse of a future in which federal lawmakers would become unwilling to leave the distribution of the social costs of enterprise exclusively in private hands.

The steam boiler revolutionized the market economy of the United States by contributing directly to the "transportation revolution." 18 First on steamboats and later on railroads, Americans put the scientific advances in boiler construction to the quiet practical goal of turning a profit. The new technology was far from perfect, and the builders and operators of it were sometimes less than competent. The result was death and suffering among passengers and crews of riverboats where most of the boiler explosions occurred prior to the Civil War. In 1838 alone, for example, at least 496 lives were lost as a result of steamboat explosions, a number that exceeded on an absolute and per capita basis losses in similar accidents in England and France where government regulated the new technology.

Congress in that year attempted to deal with the problem, but Democrats would only agree to weak legislation that did nothing to halt the slaughter. In 1850 and 1851 alone some 764 persons died in boiler explosions aboard steamboats. Even confronted with these staggering numbers, some Democrats were reluctant to act. "A man's property," proclaimed Senator Robert Stockton of New Jersey in opposition to an 1852 bill to regulate steamboats, "cannot be said to be his own, when you take it out of his control and put it into the hands of a Federal Officer." 19 The magnitude of the crisis had become sufficiently great that bipartisan and bisectional sentiment grew in favor of placing the rights of the public above private profit. "I consider that the only question involved," argued another Democratic senator in reply to Stockton, "is this: Whether we shall permit a legalized, unquestioned, and peculiar class in the community to go on committing murder at will, or whether we shall make such enactments as will compel them to pay some attention to the value of life." 20

Congress in 1852 passed the nation's first major regulatory act. It governed the operation of steamboats, set standards for boiler construction, and established boards to inspect, license, and investigate steamboat operators. It also contributed to a dramatic decline in steamboat accidents.



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The 1852 act was a straw in the wind rather than the harbinger of a vast new role for Congress. The trend before the Civil War was for economic promotion and regulation to devolve to the states. The Democratic majority subscribed to a policy of limited national government, and conflicting sectional class attitudes contributed to a political stalemate in Congress that made privatization and decentralization major themes in public policy. When Congress did act it usually did so in ways that fulfilled the existing constitutional mandate to enhance commercial relations, and to this extent business interests and persons holding capital probably fared better than laborers and farmers. The pattern was hardly clear. These latter groups may well have benefited, as Andrew Jackson and his Democratic followers proclaimed, as much by federal inaction as they would have by action. Still, there is no doubt that, while it could have done more, Congress did facilitate the rise of a national market economy. Only, however, after the southern states seceded in 1861 did the new Republican party have a sufficiently commanding voice in Congress that it could orchestrate a public policy that reenergized federal promotion and regulation of the private marketplace.

 


Date: 2015-01-29; view: 1055


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