Ohio History Journal

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40 Ohio Arch

40         Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

ring a man's relationship to the God who made him and the home over

which he presides, has a political significance.

You might as well talk of removing politics from business as to

talk of asking the sun to stop shining, as long as a human being votes

upon the election of a man who will vote for a law there is always

politics, and there always should be politics. Instead of there being

too much politics in this country there is too little politics in this country.

It is not a question of the volume of political activity so much as it

is a question of the quality of it. If we could amend the Constitution

and disfranchise the man who did not vote, strike dumb the man who

criticises another for doing what he does, and split the tongue of the

man who agitates the people for the purpose of selling that agitation

at so much per year, some problems would now disappear as the mist

before the sun.

Wednesday morning the chairman Harry Brent Mackoy

called the meeting to order and introduced Professor Callahan

of West Virginia University:

 

 

 

THE PITTSBURGH-WHEELING RIVALRY FOR COMMERCIAL

HEADSHIP ON THE OHIO.

 

BY JAMES MORTON CALLAHAN,

Professor of History and Politics, W. Va. University.

 

The Wheeling Bridge Case in the Supreme Court in 1849-52 and

1854-56 is as interesting through its relations to the industrial history

of the period as it is from the standpoint of constitutional questions

involved. Its study introduces us to the earlier rivalries of coast cities

to secure the trade of the West, the systems of internal improvements

planned to reach the Ohio, the development of trade and navigation

and the extension of improvements and regulations by Congress on

the Ohio, and the rivalries of Pittsburgh and Wheeling to obtain the

hegemony by lines of trade and travel converging and concentrating at

their gates.

Pennsylvania was early interested in plans of internal improvements

to connect Philadelphia with Pittsburg and the free navigation of the

Ohio. Occupying a central position, resting eastward on the Atlantic,

north on the Lakes, and flanking on the Ohio which connected her with

the Gulf and the vast region of West and South, she had advantages

over other states for both foreign and domestic commerce. These ad-