Ohio History Journal

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THE MIAMI CANAL

THE MIAMI CANAL

 

 

BY JOHN J. GEORGE, JR.

Much of the politics and planning of the early

decades of the nineteenth century centered around in-

ternal improvements, a topic made possible and popular

by the expansion of the West. This expansion and

development the tidewater political leader recognized;

the representative of the frontier capitalized it. Fruit-

less appeals for aid were made to a central government

whose executive, laboring under strict construction, de-

nied the constitutionality of spending federal money for

"state" purposes. The third decade lifted the constitu-

tional ban, and ushered in a program of internal im-

provement, one of whose important phases, construc-

tion of canals, received its impetus and reached its

zenith in the period of 1825-50. Many states engaged

in canal construction: New York completed the Erie

in 1825, the same year Pennsylvania began the Penn-

sylvania system of alternate sections of tramway and

canal, Virginia and Maryland agreed to build the Ches-

apeake and Ohio Canal, the projects of Illinois were

begun, and the elaborate scheme laid out by Indiana.1

The purpose of this paper is to deal with the Miami

Canal, Cincinnati to Defiance, a port of the canal pro-

gram of Ohio, the first western state to launch her

canal program and the only one to complete it.2 Rea-

 

1 Paxson, F. L., History of the American Frontier, 258-67.

2 Andrews, Israel D., Report on Colonial and Lake Trade, (1852), 354.

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