Abraham Lincoln as an advocate of improved transportation.

Abraham Lincoln

February 12, 1809-April 15, 1865

"The people and events of the past serve no useful purpose if they are forgotten."

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This issue of the DTJ commemorates the bicentennial year of Abraham Lincoln's birth with a story that our readers will find especially engaging. Sincere thanks go to Jason Emerson for sharing transportation insight from Lincoln's perspective and for sharing his new release, Lincoln the Inventor.

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Abraham Lincoln is renowned today for many ideas and accomplishments, but the one initiative to which he gave more attention than almost anything else was his desire to improve transportation throughout the US. He once said during his early political career that his "highest ambition" was "to become the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois" and improve the internal transportation of his home state as Clinton did for New York with the Erie Canal. Though Lincoln's support of transportation and infrastructure eventually was supplanted by his opposition to slavery's expansion, it never was abandoned or forgotten. In fact, Lincoln's belief in internal improvements spanned his entire political life, influenced a number of his actions as president, and even led to an invention and patent of his own creation.

Abraham Lincoln understood the need for reliable transportation in the early US through his own experiences without it. He had grown up on the frontier regions of Kentucky and Indiana where roads were poor, railroads nonexistent, and the reliability of river travel unpredictable. As a farmer he knew the importance of quality roads and waterways to get produce to markets; as a river boatman who worked the Ohio, Illinois, and Mississippi Rivers, he understood the need for waterways deep enough to travel and clear of obstructions. These early experiences and his affiliation with the Whig Party led him to become a political champion of Henry Clays "American System," which preached the gospel of "internal improvements" throughout the US.

Even in his first failed run for state legislator in 1832, the 23-year-old Lincoln focused his campaign on his great belief in the creation of good roads, bridges, railways, and canals and the clearing of impediments to improve river travel. "Time and experience have verified to a demonstration, the public utility of internal improvements," Lincoln declared in his first printed political pronouncement. "That the poorest and most thinly populated countries would be greatly benefited by the opening of good roads, and in the clearing of navigable streams within their limits, is what no person will deny." Throughout his ensuing four terms in the Illinois state legislature, from 1834 to 1842, Lincoln was a vociferous supporter of internal improvements, and in the 1836 session helped secure $10 million to construct a statewide system of roads, canals, and railroads financed by state bonds.