Evading Capture: U.S. Army Engineers and Railroad Policy, 1827–1853

Abstract

Until 1838 the U.S. government lent railroads Army engineers to survey routes. Though not strictly regulators, these army engineers would consequently face powerful versions of the incentives that make regulatory capture a pervasive problem—including an intensified “revolving door,” the opportunity for institutional empire building, and a fertile ground for cognitive capture. Nevertheless, engineering officers would push to abolish federal railroad aid, succeeding by 1838. This article argues that they turned against railroad aid when the nation’s growing rail network revitalized long-standing republican hopes of replacing standing armies and fortifications with floating batteries and militias. Though this scheme was strategically quixotic, Jacksonian populism and fiscal retrenchment during the Panic of 1837 combined with the transportation revolution to make it appear a credible threat to the Corps’s institutional raison d’être—building coastal fortifications. Engineers thus turned against railroad aid to protect their core competency, highlighting underappreciated tensions between institutional and industry interests.

On Saturday January 9, 1841, a capacity crowd of 2,500 amassed in the pews and rising circular gallery of Charles Grandison Finney’s Broadway Tabernacle to hear General Edmund Gaines lecture on “National Defense.” After ascending the rostrum “dressed in the full uniform … with belt and sword,” the General drew worried applause, declaring New York was “in the power of any crowned head in Europe to take … in no time; 20 steam ships of war might glide in abreast your city fronts … receiving scarce a shot.” “Pointing to his diagram with his glistening sword,” Gaines outlined his solution: to deploy floating batteries to defend the nation’s harbors and “construct seven large railroads from the central and western states to” transport “everything necessary for the defense of the seaboard and the frontier … with inconceivable rapidity.” ¹ Though exceptionally ambitious, Gaines was hardly the only army officer to lobby for federal railroad policy in antebellum America. Until 1838, the War Department lent railroads engineering officers to survey routes. This program gave those officers every incentive to favor further railroad aid. Yet army engineers and the War Department, generally, not only avoided capture by the railroads but took the lead in repealing this policy.

This article will contend that General Gaines’s lobbying offers the key to understanding this development. His call to reorganize America’s defense strategy was merely a steam-powered restatement of a long-standing republican vision—albeit one voiced with pomposity at least equal to Gaines’s bête noire, Winfield Scott. Nevertheless, Gaines’s fuss ruffled the military establishment’s feathers. Proposals to replace fortifications and standing armies with gunboats and militias had long appealed to Jeffersonian republicans, but steam power lent them new credibility. With Jacksonian populism placing the Army’s most aristocratic branch under suspicion and the Panic of 1837 tightening belts, they appeared to be a credible threat to fortification policy. Thus, army engineers retreated from their posture of bureaucratic imperialism to defend their core competency, building fortifications—the basis of their claims to administrative autonomy and political influence. This story reflected Americans’ wider attempts to reconcile Jacksonian democracy with the bureaucracy, professional expertise, and standing armies demanded by technological development and military exigency. It also represents a case study in how a government agency avoided capture despite facing powerful versions of the financial, personal, and institutional incentives that drive regulatory capture.

–

Regulatory capture occurs when regulatory agencies come to serve the regulated industry rather than the public. Though he was far from the first modern social scientist to observe this pattern, George Stigler is closely associated with capture theory for applying Chicago-School price theory to model regulatory policy as a problem of supply and demand. ² Industries, he suggested, demand use of the state’s coercive power while policy makers supply it in exchange for votes and resources. ³ Scholars like Jean-Jacques Laffont and Jean Tirole have since extended this model to account for the information asymmetries that exist between legislator, regulator, and industry leading to a principal-agent problem where regulators can be bribed to serve industry rather than the uninformed public. ⁴ One classic way capture theorists have seen such bribes taking place occurs via the oft-observed “revolving door,” where individuals shuttle between regulatory agencies and well-compensated positions in the regulated industry. ⁵ Though theorists have primarily focused on legislators and agencies regulating natural monopolies, incentives like those created by this revolving door are present in other fields as well. Recognizing this, scholars have increasingly applied capture theory more broadly to examine cases where special interests attempt to shape public policy. ⁶ For example, Luigi Zingales has productively applied capture theory to analyze the effects of his fellow economists simultaneously undertaking academic research and pursuits like corporate consulting and sitting on corporate boards. ⁷ Following this lead, this article adopts the frame of “administrative capture” to evoke the incentives engineering officers and other War-Department officials faced vis-à-vis railroad policy though, strictly speaking, they were not regulators. ⁸ Not all incentives driving capture involved express corruption. Scholars have also increasingly called attention to “cognitive capture” in which officials unconsciously conflate a regulated industry’s interest with that of the public. ⁹

Though nineteenth-century Americans were obsessed with the problem of “corruption” ¹⁰—a blunt term analogous to capture—social scientists across the full spectrum of fields and ideologies begin their analyses of the topic around the founding of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887. ¹¹ Legal historian William Novak points out that this chronology “embeds some strong assumptions about regulation and administration as comparatively recent developments in American history”—assumptions belied by historical and political-science scholarship over recent decades. ¹² In addition to state and local governments wielding extensive authority, ¹³ Stephen Skowronek influentially reminded readers, the federal government “maintained an integrated legal order …, fought wars, expropriated Indians, secured new territories, carried on relations with other states, and aided economic development.” ¹⁴ These efforts reflected not only the initiative of legislators but also bureaucratic entrepreneurship and government agencies’ developing organizational priorities that might parallel the public interest, industry interests, or neither. ¹⁵

Historians have long recognized one area where federal administration shaped America’s economic development largely through the agency of bureaucratic entrepreneurs: the military’s engineering aid to the first decade of railroad construction. ¹⁶ The War Department was crucial to the General Survey Act of 1824’s passage and its application to railroads. Thus, the Army solved, what contemporary French observer Michel Chevalier declared, “[t]he greatest difficulty which Americans encountered in the execution of public works” by lending engineers to survey canals, turnpikes, and (after 1827) railroads until 1838, in addition to training the bulk of the nation’s civilian engineers. ¹⁷ The government even paid “for all expenses incidental to the survey[s]” until an 1832 reform. ¹⁸ This reform was no sign of general Jacksonian retrenchment. Despite his famous Maysville-Pike veto and hatred for outspoken internal-improvements advocates John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, the federal government spent twice as much annually on internal improvements under Jackson as it had under Adams. ¹⁹

Survey-aid policies meant Jacksonian-Era army engineers and the officer corps, generally, faced a textbook recipe for capture—railroad-survey duty afforded ill-paid officers the opportunity to draw two salaries simultaneously, access to networks with more opportunity for advancement than the antebellum Army, and a reprieve from the monotony of garrison duty. ²⁰ Moreover, the War Department and its Engineer Division faced institutional incentives to extend their power by administering railroad aid while its officers ran in social circles that were a fertile ground for cognitive capture.

Nevertheless, by 1838 War-Department efforts would prove crucial to the General Survey Act’s repeal. Engineering officers led the charge against railroad aid and would lobby against its resumption—despite facing the strongest incentives for capture. General Gaines’s lobbying offers a key to understanding this development. His call to reorganize America’s national defense around floating batteries and railroad-aided militias was merely an ambitious restatement of a long-standing republican vision. Holding fortifications and standing armies in suspicion as unrepublican tools of tyranny, its adherents sought to empower the yeoman militia in their place. Long mobilization times had always frustrated such schemes. By 1835, however, War Secretary Lewis Cass concluded that railroads would soon be able to throw “almost any amount of physical force … in a few hours, upon any point” and reinvigorated the standing army-militia debate—at the height of Jacksonian-Era reevaluations of bureaucracy, professional expertise, and standing armies’ place within a democratizing society. ²¹

By then, railroad surveys had stretched the Army’s engineering manpower thin. With an already-limited Jacksonian-Era appetite for budgetary increases for the Army’s most aristocratic branch weakened by the Panic of 1837, engineering officers retreated to their core competency. Led by Colonel Joseph Totten, they took the offensive against proposals to reorganize American defense around railroad-aided militias to defend their organizational priority and source of personal pride: permanent coastal fortifications. Congress would follow their counsel to repeal the General Survey Act in July 1838—removing railroads’ connection with the War Department. Engineers and other officers would thus actively oppose federal railroad policy until 1853. By then the completion of the trunk lines was a fait accompli and America’s victory over Mexico had transformed the meaning of railroad policy before Secretary of War Jefferson Davis signaled a new era by advocating for federal efforts to link the Pacific coast to the East with rails.

Engineering officers’ mid-1830s turn against the railroad policy thus offers a case study in combatting capture at agencies facing powerful versions of the financial, personal, and institutional incentives for capture. Nevertheless, this case’s broader applicability should not be overstated. Totten and his fellow engineers’ turn against railroad policy took place in a political-economic context that made challenges to the fortification system that was the core competency of the Corps of Engineers—and source of pride for its officers—appear particularly viable.

THE WAR DEPARTMENT, THE GENERAL SURVEY ACT, AND THE ROAD TO CAPTURE?

The War Department shaped some of America’s earliest laws authorizing federal support for road and canal construction and proved the primary mover behind their application to railroads. In an 1819 report to Congress, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun touted infrastructural development as “among the most efficient means for ‘the complete defence of the United States’” and assigning army engineers to survey roads and canals as the way to achieve this goal. ²² In February 1821, a board of engineering officers led by Simon Bernard, an exiled French engineer, and Joseph G. Totten, who ironically would become railroad aid’s most notable opponent by the late 1830s, prominently featured “interior communications by land and water” in its influential report that laid the framework of America’s Third System of Defense. ²³ Two years later, Bernard and Totten outlined the policy implications of this strategy—coauthoring another report endorsing federal assistance for canals with national purposes that could “only be undertaken at the charge of the public treasury.” ²⁴ Simultaneously, Calhoun’s War Department unilaterally undertook this policy. ²⁵ In 1824, Congress retroactively authorized Calhoun’s action by passing the General Survey Act, which granted the executive the power to use army engineers

to cause the necessary surveys, plans, and estimates, to be made of the routes of such roads and canals as he may deem of national importance, in a commercial or military point of view, or necessary for the transportation of the public mail. ²⁶

In 1827 Calhoun’s successor, James Barbour, deployed three engineering brigades to survey the Baltimore and Ohio’s route under the General Survey Act, effectively amending the three-year-old law to include railroads along with “roads and canals.” ²⁷ Chief Engineer Alexander Macomb bolstered this effort with expert testimony declaring the B&O to be “of great national importance,” requiring the “service [of] as many military … and civil engineers as could be withdrawn.” ²⁸

During the eight years following Barbour’s 1828 resignation, his successors—Peter Porter, John Eaton, and Lewis Cass—sought to crystallize his survey-aid policy. Each extended Barbour’s arguments, ²⁹ and Cass protected survey aid from political and financial pressures with a reform requiring railroads to pay incidental survey expenses—allowing the War Department to administer it with more independence from Congress. ³⁰

Railroads had reason to appreciate this aid. When Secretary Barbour assigned three brigades to survey the B&O and superintend its construction, they quickly vindicated Benjamin Latrobe’s remark that “Nothing is so easily converted to civil use, as the science common both to the … civil and military engineer.” ³¹ The B&O would represent an “effective school of practice for railroad engineers,” with Colonel Stephen Long developing principles for managing curves and grades that have remained fundamental since his 1829 Rail Road Manual. Though the army engineers would feud with the B&O’s civilian management and leave its service by June 1830, their contributions surveying its initial route were crucial. ³² Beyond their many innovations, they helped the road overcome a primary constraint felt throughout America’s transportation revolution—the availability of engineers. After all, the nation had boasted only thirty civil engineers before Sylvanus Thayer’s reforms beginning in 1817 transformed West Point into America’s first engineering and technical school. ³³ With the War Department exercising significant discretion dispensing crucial technical aid, railroads had every reason to curry favor with engineering officers both to secure aid directly and to capture them as allies vis-à-vis legislative policy. ³⁴

Advocacy for federal railroad policy pervaded the officer corps during the 1820s and early 1830s. Engineering officers stood at the heart of this trend—from Chief Engineer Macomb backing Barbour’s extension of survey aid to railroads to the young lieutenant agitating publicly to build the Cumberland Road as a railroad rather than as a turnpike. ³⁵ Engineers were hardly alone in their advocacy. Their comrades throughout the officer corps like General Gaines—who later played the central role in debates on the topic—wielded pens and mounted podia to battle for federal railroad projects during the early 1830s. ³⁶ Their endorsements validated railroad boosters’ ubiquitous claims about roads’ military utility with the imprimatur of martial expertise. ³⁷ These claims were doubly important as military roads offered the strongest precedent for railroad aid’s constitutionality and engineering officers rendered the bulk of it. ³⁸

The Alabama, Florida, and Georgia Railroad represents an instructive case study. In 1835, the United States Topographical Engineers assigned Major James Graham to survey its route. His resulting report declared that the road was “long since demanded by the interests of the General Government” in defending the Gulf of Mexico and, therefore, merited federal aid. ³⁹ Graham’s report was not entirely disinterested. Soon after its delivery he became the road’s chief engineer and republished it in the American Railroad Journal to promote his new venture. A few years after Graham—who had retained his army commission and salary throughout—left the Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, it paraphrased his report while petitioning Congress for a land grant. ⁴⁰ This strategy proved successful. Not long after the Senate Committee on Roads and Canals issued a favorable report parroting the petition’s Graham-inspired language, Congress authorized its land grant. ⁴¹ The Alabama, Florida, and Georgia proved less successful economically than politically. Unable to comply with the land grant’s conditions, it soon sought an extension. During the ensuing debate, a less financially interested officer than Graham—Chief Engineer Joseph Totten—forwarded Congress a copy of a naval report arguing, “The Government seems imperatively called to patronize and accelerate all works of interior communications leading” to the naval depot at Pensacola. ⁴² This argument, coupled with Totten’s credibility as the chief engineer, helped convince Congress to extend the road’s land grant. ⁴³

Graham and Totten’s support for the Alabama, Florida, and Georgia reflected the complementary forces of self-interest and policy beliefs motivating officers’ survey-aid advocacy. During the 1820s and early 1830s many officers supported railroad aid, in general or to specific roads, due to an honest assessment of the public interest. Humiliations experienced during the War of 1812—as well as the logistical and mobility challenges that contributed to them—loomed large in policy makers’ minds. ⁴⁴ This memory held a special significance for the officers and administrators tasked with preventing their repeat, prompting even ideological opponents of federal activism to back internal-improvement policy. ⁴⁵ These officers had reason to believe that railroads could be valuable defensively. The western frontier extended over swaths of sparsely populated territory with little infrastructure and rivers that provided no direct connection to the Atlantic coast. The revolutionary geostrategic implications of the speed, reliability, and upriver access that steamboats provided were on full display in these regions during the two decades following the War of 1812. And they were not lost on America’s officer corps. In this context, it was no major imaginative leap for officers like General Gaines to see possibilities for “the application of steam power on railroads … to surpass any other … discovery known to military history.” ⁴⁶ Though Gaines’s enthusiasm was exceptional, many other officers, War-Department officials, and subsequent geostrategic analysts would reach similar conclusions. ⁴⁷ Thus, officers with no pecuniary interest in a road, such as Totten in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, commonly advocated its case to Congress. ⁴⁸

Moreover, late-1820s and early-1830s officers, especially engineers, faced strong personal incentives to support federal railroad aid. At a time when the War Department regularly (and accurately) complained that it was only authorized to pay its engineers well-below-market wages, railroads lavishly supplemented the modest army salaries of officers assigned to surveys. Officers like Major Graham who continued drawing army salaries while serving roads could consequently step through capture theory’s revolving door without leaving the Army. ⁴⁹ Thus, engineers on survey duty could make several times more than their army salary alone. ⁵⁰ The peacetime Army’s limited opportunity for promotion made this difference all the more glaring. More West-Point alumni served as railroad presidents than as generals, highlighting survey duty’s appeal as a networking opportunity. ⁵¹ And officers used those networks with gusto. One historian found that 47 of the 166 officers on the Army’s register in 1830 pursued civil engineering as their post-service careers. ⁵² West Point’s Board of Visitors found more. ⁵³ Contemporary critics like then-Senator James Buchanan thus saw survey policy and the financial incentives it created as a source of corruption that allowed railroads to “buy” the officer corps, which “accumulated large fortunes in the service of these companies, while the business of the Government was neglected.” ⁵⁴ Not all self-interested reasons officers had to support railroad aid were financial, however. Survey duty also provided them with a break from the monotony of more common—and more isolated—garrison duty. ⁵⁵

Furthermore, the growing number of former officers employed by railroads created a fertile environment for the cognitive capture of even unimpeachably civic-minded officers. With a plurality of former officers becoming civil engineers on internal-improvements projects and many active engineering officers simultaneously receiving War-Department and railroad salaries, officers were surrounded by friends and colleagues whose financial cart was hitched to the iron horse—a social context that could easily instill a mindset conflating railroad interests with national interests.

All told, engineering officers and the War Department, generally, faced a textbook recipe for capture by railroad interests during the 1830s. They faced strong and growing personal incentives to favor railroad aid. Moreover, survey aid gave army engineers—the officers most liable to politic in defense of their institutional priorities—the opportunity to expand their institutional power, seemingly aligning their institutional incentives with those of railroads. ⁵⁶ Yet, they evaded these incentives for capture. And, by 1838 they would play an influential role in the General Survey Act’s repeal before spending the subsequent 15 years advocating against federal railroad policy.

REPEALING THE GENERAL SURVEY ACT

The first fissures in the foundation of the military’s survey-aid advocacy appeared shortly after Barbour applied the General Survey Act to railroads. Soon the Corps of Engineers’ leaders began complaining that surveys stretched its limited resources thin. ⁵⁷ At first, War-Department officials like Secretary Eaton defended engineers’ use on “what could be considered civil purposes” such as railroad surveys and—like members of any bureaucracy—“expressed a concurrence in the opinion … of the necessity for increasing the number of officers” within their ranks. “The advantages … from such an increase,” Eaton argued, would be visible “in the construction of fortifications and other works of general improvement.” ⁵⁸ But appropriations for additional engineers did not prove forthcoming—elitist engineers were hardly a funding favorite of Jacksonian populists. And by 1835, Chief Engineer Gratiot’s annual report betrayed increasing frustration in its request for them. ⁵⁹ Cass diplomatically shielded railroad surveys from Gratiot’s increasing acerbic complaints behind recapitulations of survey aid’s value and assurances that “[a]ddition to the corps offers the only remedy for this state of things.” ⁶⁰

In 1836 and 1837, Gratiot “reiterate[d his] recommendations … that the corps of engineers be increased to double its present number” with less palpable frustration than previous years. ⁶¹ Gratiot’s newfound equanimity was ironic. Since December 1835, the Second Seminole War had increased the Army’s manpower demands even as the long, deadly war in the Florida swamps witnessed an exodus from the officer corps—especially of officers on railroad-survey duty. ⁶² Despite Gratiot’s newly tactful tone and entreaties from Chief Topographical Engineer J. J. Abert to continue survey policy, both Interim Secretary Butler and Secretary Poinsett shifted attention to the demand-side of the engineer shortage, arguing that it necessitated the General Survey Act’s repeal. ⁶³ They thus signaled the engineers’ retreat from a posture of bureaucratic imperialism to a defense of their core competency—one of the main factors Daniel Carpenter identifies as underwriting bureaucratic institutions’ claims for autonomy. ⁶⁴ Upon becoming war secretary, Poinsett declared that he “fully concur[red with]…the opinion of [his] predecessor,” while developing a far more involved case against survey aid than Butler had and increasing the department’s efforts to push legislative changes through Congress. ⁶⁵

On Wednesday January 24, 1838, two weeks after Daniel Webster gave his celebrated speech on “Slavery in the District of Columbia,” Thomas Hart Benton took the Senate floor to introduce a bill to expand the army officer corps. Rather than deliver an original oration, however, Benton “read statement[s] from the Secretary of War, and high military officers” showing that “orders had been given …, which it was physically impossible to carry out” with the number of officers available. ⁶⁶ After hearing Benton’s speech, Senator James Buchanan announced that “[h]e was not aware … that the regulations permitted” survey aid and borrowed a point directly from Poinsett, stating “There was some reason for [engineering aid in 1824], as civil engineers were scarce, but now the necessity no longer existed as they were scattered all over the country.” ⁶⁷ Buchanan and Benton achieved a consensus “that some increase of the topographical and military engineers was necessary” but only if the bill also “prevent[ed] the employment of engineers by private companies.” ⁶⁸ When Congress passed the Act of July 5, 1838, journals declared, “The communication of Mr. Poinsett … became the foundation of the legislation …, a sort of preamble to the law.” ⁶⁹ Most notably for railroad policy, the bill declared, “Officers of the army shall not be separated from their regiments and corps for employment on civil works of internal improvement, or … engage in the service of incorporated companies.” ⁷⁰

RAILROADS, FORTIFICATIONS, AND THE SEARCH FOR A REPUBLICAN DEFENSE POLICY

In early December 1839, a steamboat named the General Gaines snagged and sank near Louisville. ⁷¹ Ignoring—or perhaps spurred to action by—the omen of his eponymous ship’s ill-fated cruise and frustrated that Congress had ignored his “Plan for the Defence of the Western Frontier,” Gaines dispatched another memorial to Congress on New Year’s Eve. ⁷² Anticipating the havoc another steamer, the Royal Navy’s Nemesis, would soon wreak in China, ⁷³ Gaines proposed to “lay aside our old obsolete military books of last century … and prepare to defend ourselves by the agency of this mighty power [steam], by which the invading foe will inevitably attack us.” ⁷⁴ In his eyes, this meant replacing the nation’s coastal fortifications with floating batteries and a federally built 4,200-mile double-tracked rail network. Centered in Kentucky and Tennessee, it would stretch from the Atlantic coast “to the Missouri river north of the mouth of the Big Platte.” ⁷⁵ This proposal marked the start of 13 months of frenzied railroad advocacy, which would spark policy debates illuminating the motives behind engineers like Totten’s mid-1830s turn against survey-aid policy.

After lobbying Congress, Gaines began a national lecture tour with a speech at the Mechanic’s Institute in St. Louis on November 15, 1840. Halfway through his oration he announced he felt tired and invited his independently famous wife to finish for him. This decision instantly earned Gaines’s lectures a reputation for spectacle—it was “an interesting scene to see the gallant old man, in full uniform, looking over the shoulder of his young and lovely wife, as she read with a clear and distinct voice … emphasiz[ing] the words ‘my services in Canada were approved by a Madison, and in Florida censured by a Jackson.’” ⁷⁶ The “novel and uncommon scene” of Myra Clark Gaines “addressing a large audience” helped the General draw crowds over the next two months in Cincinnati, Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia again—along with nationwide headlines. ⁷⁷

These lectures brought attention to the defense strategy Gaines had outlined in his memorial to Congress. “Steam power has effected such a complete and astonishing revolution,” he argued, countries could any longer possess “the means of defence, unless they resort to” its use. Doing so, he declared, meant abandoning standing armies and fixed fortifications in favor of floating batteries and rapid responses from the nation’s “many fine volunteer corps—some finer than any in the regular service”—using “quick transportation … provide[d] in his great system of railroads.” ⁷⁸

General Gaines won many converts and many critics during his 13-month crusade. The Baltimore Sun declared, “The whole plan … is well worthy of careful investigation.” ⁷⁹ “Like the Sun,” the New Orleans Daily Picayune announced, “we are becoming converts to the Gaines system.” ⁸⁰ Diarist and one-time New York Mayor Philip Hone, however, thought “Gen. Gaines and his wife have been making fools of themselves” after “taking the applause … given for the novelty of the exhibition as … the public opinion of its merits.” ⁸¹ More diplomatically, The Farmers’ Cabinet recognized “the old hero” as “a brave man and a good fighter,” before adding that “He handled the king’s English as roughly as he did the Indians on the Withlacoochie” and “had better stick to his trade.” Regardless, the large audiences drawn “out of curiosity excited by the announcement that General Gaines and his lady would both deliver lectures” brought new attention to defense-policy debates that had gained steam across the Jacksonian Era. ⁸²

The competing defensive visions that had organized these debates would receive their fullest articulation when Congress passed an 1840 resolution directing the War Department to deliver “a report of a full and connected system of national defence” like Gaines proposed. ⁸³ The military establishment responded with a series of reports so thorough that the Totten-led engineering board feared they “may prove tedious.” ⁸⁴ Addressing Gaines’s many-pronged defensive system, the War Department could only generate positive words about establishing a national foundry—already a pet project in military circles frustrated by their inability to keep pace with Third-System forts’ armament needs. ⁸⁵

Historians have attributed this response to General Gaines’s “well known facility for making enemies.” ⁸⁶ Gaines agreed. ⁸⁷ Even the briefest examination of Gaines’s career lends at least some credence to this argument. ⁸⁸ But personal animus can only explain so much. ⁸⁹ Although the engineers’ response to Congress’s inquiry on Gaines’s defense strategy drips with contempt, it heaps its scorn on those “inculcating doctrines we believe to be highly dangerous” and “disturb[ing] the confidence of the public” in “the system of defence.” ⁹⁰ This category was far larger than Gaines. He had merely offered a steam-powered restatement of long-standing objections to the officer corps’s engineer-led drive toward a defense policy based on coastal fortifications, standing armies, and professionalized expertise. ⁹¹

–

Gaines’s railroad advocacy represented the evolution of a long-standing tradition that sought to realign defense policy around the idealized republican militia of Jeffersonian fantasy rather than standing armies and permanent fortifications. This counterintuitive association between republican ideology and railroad subsidies traced its roots to 1808, when Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin proposed a $20-million internal-improvements program. Providing frontier farmers a commercial outlet would promote the yeomanly virtue of industry. Equally important, roads and canals would “afford the means of a rapid concentration of … a formidable body of militia on any given point.” ⁹² They would thus empower the militia, displacing the standing armies that had long represented unrepublican tools of tyranny in country-party ideology. ⁹³ This view retained ideological power even after the militia’s mixed performance in the War of 1812. “Opposed in principle to a large standing army,” Secretary John C. Calhoun summarized, America’s “main reliance for defence must be on the militia.” Yet, the then-nationalist lamented, “the late war amply prove[d] … the present state of our internal improvements” was inadequate to provide the “speedy communications” needed to make militias effective, necessitating federal spending to rectify the situation. ⁹⁴

Though internal-improvement advocates like Gallatin had long voiced opposition to standing armies with revolutionary zeal, turnpikes and canals ill-afforded militias the alacrity necessary to supersede professional arms. ⁹⁵ Railroads gave the debate new life. Their boosters like William Redfield reaffirmed belief in the “duty of a free nation to make preparation not by the increase of standing armies” but by preparing to mobilize civilian resources rapidly in times of war. Railroads, Redfield reasoned, made such a scheme practical by removing constraints of speed and seasonality that dogged turnpikes and canals. ⁹⁶ In the decade following Redfield’s 1830 proposal, a railroad mania swept the United States—leaving the nation exceeding Europe’s total with almost 3,000 miles of track by 1840. Suddenly, railroad advocates’ hopes that railroads could render standing armies superfluous appeared significantly more realistic.

From 1831 to 1836, Secretary Lewis Cass repeated Redfield’s arguments within the War Department, scaring engineers with suggestions that such schemes would soon label their fortifications redundant. Referring to “a large standing military” as “that just dread of all free governments,” the former militia general argued that the nation “should be prepared to make [powerful use] of steam” to enable a more republican defense strategy. Cass contended that railroads would deter any invaders as they could throw “almost any amount of physical force … in a few hours, upon any point threatened.” Thus, he came to “doubt the necessity of … extensive permanent works.” ⁹⁷ Totten contended that internal improvements’ primary wartime role was not directly military but “to sustain … domestic commerce.” This role, he added, depended upon “the security of the coastline” maintained by the navy and fortifications. ⁹⁸ Nevertheless, Jackson—another one-time militia general who considered himself the restorer of Jeffersonian ideals—wrote to Congress “to add [his] concurrence in the views expressed by the secretary.” ⁹⁹ Cass and Jackson’s endorsements lent arguments like Redfield’s expert credibility. They also provided the template for subsequent military railroad advocacy, escalating the strategic debate between fortifications and infrastructure to an almost Manichean dualism.

When asked for a report on Gaines’s scheme in 1840, the Corps of Engineers thus seized the opportunity to counterattack. Totten flipped Cass and Gaines’s critique of fortifications in the age of steam on its head. The speed and maneuverability of steamships rendered constant preparedness more necessary. Coastal fortifications had become more—not less—important. As Mark Smith notes, Totten’s answer thus stepped beyond Congress’s direct questions to attack Cass’s 1836 report, reflecting his increasingly proactive lobbying on behalf of the Corps’s priorities through the ensuing decades. ¹⁰⁰ “If a sudden attack with a large squadron of armed steamers … is to be repelled” from New York, Totten would repeatedly ask, “in what way could the 100,000 or 200,000 new men poured into the city and environs by railroads, … armed with muskets and field-pieces, aid the half-million of people already there?” ¹⁰¹ The answer was self-evident. As Secretary Poinsett explained, this meant disagreement with anyone who “proposes to abandon the system of permanent defences as obsolete, and to rely entirely upon … vast floating batteries and extensive lines of railroads.” ¹⁰²

These objections largely reflected a clear-minded assessment of defense strategy. ¹⁰³ But institutional priorities were also at stake. Opponents of standing armies and fixed fortifications had long hoped with General Gaines that the transportation revolution would allow dispersed militiamen to act as “the sword and shield of the Republic”—supplanting “fortifications designed for the immediate protection of our seaports” in the nation’s defense. ¹⁰⁴ By the mid-1830s America’s exploding railroad network made these hopes appear increasingly plausible. Thus, army engineers could little swallow the personal and institutional recipe they faced for capture by railroads when these roads appeared to threaten the Corps’s core competency. Nevertheless, railroad advocates’ anti-standing-army and antifortification rhetoric, by itself, offers only a partial explanation for how engineering officers avoided capture.

POPULISM, PANIC, AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF RETRENCHMENT

While Colonel Totten’s engineering board occupied most of its 1840 report defending fixed fortifications, the topographical engineers—a separate army branch since 1838—focused on fiscal matters. In so doing, they reflected the broader political and economic context that shaped the defense-policy debates that turned the military establishment against survey aid. Contesting Gaines’s claims about his plan’s long-run frugality, ¹⁰⁵ their report led Senator Franklin Pierce to label the General’s proposal “extravagant”—despite the future president’s sympathy with Gaines’s overall vision. ¹⁰⁶ These fiscal concerns represented more than a battle over budget priorities. They seemed to combine with a rising populist tide and mounting military commitments to undermine the Third System—even as the Caroline incident ushered in years of tension with Europe’s greatest naval powers—motivating army engineers’ retreat to defend their core institutional competencies.

A strong antiestablishment current arrived in Washington with President Jackson in 1829. By 1836, that current had sunk the Second Bank of the United States ¹⁰⁷ and capsized John McLean’s attempt to forge an administrative model of development founded upon tenure in office, bureaucratic autonomy, and internal improvements at the Post Office. That is, the early republic’s only other major federal bureaucracy had already fallen in favor of rotation in office, mass democracy, and subservience to party when Cass mused that steam technology “may well lead us to doubt the necessity of … extensive permanent works.” ¹⁰⁸ And, the Corps of Engineers, itself, fell under suspicions as a bastion of elitism.

Its critics were right—the Corps represented America’s antebellum military establishment, and its officers took pride in leading the Army’s professionalization. It controlled West Point, where it molded the post-1812 generations of officers into an increasingly cohesive, professionalized cadre who remained committed to careers in military service. Despite the Military Academy’s engineering orientation, only the top 5 percent of its graduates would receive commissions in the Corps—creating a body with exceptionally strong esprit du corps while also provoking resentment among the Army’s line officers. Again, Gaines is instructive. In a November-1840 speech, he mocked the Corps-run West Point: “I received my military education in a log cabin, without French books, without French or other European professors.” ¹⁰⁹ Since creating the Third System, the Corps of Engineers had also emerged as the primary institution concerned with nationwide defense strategy. Combined with their technical expertise, this made them key advisors to the War Department’s civilian leadership. ¹¹⁰ Engineering officers would also make themselves heard as the Army’s most politically-active branch—often lobbying to defend their priorities and prerogatives from military and civilian critics who resented the Corps’s influence and elitism. None of these priorities came before the Third System, which began as 50 forts costing $18 million not including armaments. But these plans would expand to 124 forts in 1836 and 186 works by 1851. ¹¹¹

Ironically, the Corps had justified the Third System, in part, as a cheap, republican alternative to large standing armies. While they certainly disagreed with her blaming the military profession for war, they had thus mouthed words much like Myra Clark Gaines’s argument that her husband’s proposed rail network “provide[d] only against attack; it propose[d] not to be an aggressor”—inuring America against the imperial ambition to which Athens and Rome had succumbed. ¹¹² The engineers were no strangers to classical allusion, and they had justified the Third System as “harmoniz[ing] … with the institutions and spirit of the country” since introducing it in 1821. Coastal fortifications, they argued, limited the need for large standing armies—“militia practiced to the manœuvres of artillery” could man them in wartime. ¹¹³

From the Third System’s 1821 introduction to the mid-1830s Congress had steadily appropriated funds for it. Yet, as Table 1 shows, these appropriations would quickly become far more erratic. In 1835, Congress failed to pass any after a dispute over how much discretion to leave Jackson’s War Department while preparing for possible war with France. The next year saw Congress make up this deficit—but only after fortifications funding became embroiled in disputes over Cass’s report and the distribution bill. Though Cass had merely suggested exploring alternatives to the Third System, senators seized on it to argue against funding fortifications. With Western senators like John Bell seeing the fortification bill as “the one of the least importance,” it would await June 1836’s Deposit Bill before its passage. Though these funding fights were symptoms of broader partisan disputes, by 1836 engineering officers had learned that there were no guarantees about their funding. ¹¹⁴

Table 1. Appropriations and Expenditures on Fortifications, 1821–1842

Note: All figures are rendered in thousands of dollars. Fortifications appropriations did not include the cost of arming the forts, appropriations for which were earmarked separately through the Ordnance Department. The increased War-Department expenditures from 1836 to 1838 reflected both the Second Seminole War and heightened tensions with Britain and France.

Sources: Mark A. Smith, Engineering Security: The Corps of Engineers and the Third System Defense Policy, 1815–1861 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press), 88-89; John Joseph Wallis, “Series Ea638,” in Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition, ed. Susan B. Carter, et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

By the next year, panic-induced budget battles would combine with Jacksonian anti-elitism and long-standing republican distrust for a permanent military establishment to place the Corps of Engineers and their War-Department allies further on the defensive. America’s mid-1830s inflationary boom witnessed unprecedented government land sales, contributing to the federal debt’s January-1835 retirement and federal surpluses reaching $34 million by June 1836. That summer Jackson would sign the Deposit Act and the Specie Circular. Along with the Bank of England raising the discount rate to stanch the flow of gold from Britain, this created a liquidity crunch, climaxing in May-1837 suspensions of species payments across the United States—marking the transition from panic to depression. ¹¹⁵ Although controversy persists over the length and depth of this depression, government receipts shrank substantially through 1843 (see Table 2). From 1837 to 1843, federal receipts peaked at 62% of 1836 levels with most years substantially below half of them. ¹¹⁶ These years also witnessed eight states and a territory default upon debts contracted largely through internal-improvements spending. ¹¹⁷

Table 2. Federal Revenue, Expenses, and Debt, 1824–1842

Note: All figures are rendered in thousands of dollars. The figures for 1843 ($8,303,000 in revenue and $11,858,000 in expenditures) are excluded from the table because these only include the first six months of the year before the federal government switched to a July-to June fiscal year.

Source: John Joseph Wallis, “Series Ea638,” in Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition, ed. Susan B. Carter, et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

With the surplus distributed and federal receipts declining, federal fiscal constraints became powerfully binding. Moreover, the federal debt’s retirement, Jackson defeating the Bank of the United States, and the growing specter of state-level insolvency weakened federal mechanisms to secure credit—further tightening this constraint. The Corps of Engineers certainty felt these fiscal constraints through heightened budget battles and growing appropriations shortfalls vis-à-vis planned works.

These financial constraints bound more tightly because these years witnessed a confluence of military crises. December 1835 marked the beginning of the Second Seminole War—a long, unpleasant quagmire that stretched the War Department’s resources thin. Even as war expanded manpower demands, 17 percent of the officer corps joined an exodus from the service. ¹¹⁸ December 1837’s Caroline incident would announce a half-dozen years of tension with Britain, which strengthened the engineers’ argument for fortification appropriations. Nevertheless, it deepened the Corps’s belief in the urgency of completing the Third System—a goal that remained unachieved in the 1850s—rather than expending manpower and funds on other projects like railroads. ¹¹⁹

All told, this context left the military’s most elitist branch—which drew the ire of republican ideologues and budget hawks alike for its expensive permanent fortifications—perceiving an exceptionally credible threat to its institutional prerogatives. Thus, it responded to policy challenges by retreating from its bureaucratic imperialism into transportation policy to defend its core competency—the foundation of bureaucratic institutions’ claims for autonomy and political influence per political scientist Daniel Carpenter—in fortifications that had been threatened by fiscal and manpower pressures. ¹²⁰

–

Worried that “the Corps of Engineers is in the greatest peril,” Totten increasingly acted as both its chief engineer and its chief whip politically. ¹²¹ He regularly pestered fellow officers to “address a private letter to the secretary of war” or “come at once” to lobby to defend fortification appropriations, to create of a corps of sappers and miners, or to ensure its continued control of West Point. ¹²² Totten let engineers know that their superiors believed press coverage of antifortification arguments’ flaws “could not fail to enlighten the public mind” and “hope[d] that some of the officers of the corps might … take the matter in hand.” ¹²³ Moreover, Totten strategized to maximize reports’ political effect. In a letter marked “private,” he told Poinsett that “there are reasons for omitting my name” from a board on fortification policy: He had already prepared “several reports on … fortifications,” prompting some to ask, “Why have we only the reports of Col. Totten?” ¹²⁴ With Totten’s encouragement, however, other engineers would offer creative defenses of fortification policy. For example, Lieutenant Colonel René Edward De Russy offered a developmentalist case for fortification expenditures’ economic value. “[I]ndependent of the security it affords,” he wrote, fortifications spending “create[d] a revenue by bringing out the latent resources of the country.” ¹²⁵ Throughout, Totten and his fellow engineers worked hard to defend and extend the Corps’s institutional power and autonomy.

Nonfinancial personal incentives joined institutional incentives motivating officers’ opposition to Gaines’s scheme. More than they ever succumbed to cognitive capture by railroads, engineering officers defined themselves through a valorization of the Corps itself—particularly its coastal fortifications. Again, Totten was indicative. When gadfly engineering Major William Chase expressed skepticism about the Corps’s prominence, Totten “admit[ted] no misgivings as to the eminent position which the Corps” possessed because “it has a noble cause.” ¹²⁶ Totten’s other letters make it hard to imagine he would have disagreed with his eulogist and fellow-engineer declaring “the fortification of our seaboard frontier … the great work of his life.” ¹²⁷ They show Totten maintaining a year’s correspondence because he was “not … willing to stop short of … perfection” designing the castle buttons for engineers’ uniforms and complaining when the Army Register listed his name without mentioning the Corps. ¹²⁸ Other officers reflected Totten’s pride more closely than Chase’s jaundiced view. ¹²⁹

As both Skelton and Angevine point out, attacks on fortifications thus represented attacks on the engineers’ worldview and life’s work. ¹³⁰ They had not “doubted … the genuineness of [Major Chase’s] Esprit du Corps” when he questioned their pay or wrote a Senate critic that “favoritism exists at our national school.” ¹³¹ But calling some fortifications “a useless waste of public money” was a personal affront. ¹³² Gaines had likewise made “a butt, a mockery, a laughing stock” of engineers when he declared “that steam power … must soon so change the nature of all military operations as to render FIXED fortifications a butt, a mockery, a laughing stock … for any of the purposes of national defense.” ¹³³ For these architects of America’s Third System of Defense, personal pride thus aligned with institutional interests to overwhelm the incentives for their capture by railroad interests during the late 1830s. With public debates framing railroads as an alternative to permanent fortifications and the political-economic context turning hostile, they retreated to their core competency and attacked their one-time bureaucratic outpost in transportation policy. ¹³⁴

THE OFFICER CORPS AND RAILROAD POLICY AFTER THE ACT OF JULY 5, 1838

Congress’s 1838 repeal of the General Survey Act codified the military establishment’s turn against railroad aid. It removed much of the railroads’ engagement with the War Department—obviating their incentive to capture officers’ allegiance beyond hopes to gain expert testimony on their lines’ military necessity. ¹³⁵ At the same time, career-minded officers faced a different calculus, with railroad payrolls no longer featuring active officers, the Army offering more competitive salaries, and its civilian leadership declaring the Third System “the settled policy of the country.” ¹³⁶ Military advocacy for federal railroad policy dwindled still further, but the terms of debate remained polarized.

The press had internalized Cass and Gaines’s arguments by January 1841 when the latter went “south to fight ignorance in Baltimore, and Indians in Florida,” ending his most active 13 months of railroad advocacy. ¹³⁷ Defense-policy debates would continue to pit railroads against fortifications. ¹³⁸ Pennsylvania’s Andrew Stewart would echo Gaines in Congress, proposing a national railroad network on the eve of the Mexican War. ¹³⁹ And, in 1851, Congress raised the issue when directing the War Department to report on fortification strategy. Among other questions, it asked, “How far [has] the invention and extension of railroads have superseded or diminished the necessity of fortifications on the seaboard?” ¹⁴⁰

In response, Totten and other engineers restated their earlier arguments against Cass and Gaines. De Russy stressed railroads’ fragility. ¹⁴¹ Totten repeated his assessment that railroads “have little or no bearing on the immediate means of defence.” ¹⁴² After all, Third-System fortifications existed to prevent enemy navies from accessing bays and channels—something rapid troop movements could not forestall. ¹⁴³

However, one gadfly engineering major would loudly reiterate Cass and Gaines’s earlier case while foreshadowing the military’s subsequent railroad-policy track. This was not the first time William Chase took Gaines’s mantle promoting railroad policy. Chase had headed the Alabama and Florida after having—like the earlier engineering major James Graham—been involved in attempts to link Montgomery and Pensacola with rails. ¹⁴⁴ Now, the major contended, railroads “greatly diminish[ed] the necessity of adding to the … fortifications on the seaboard.” ¹⁴⁵ Moreover, Chase followed Gaines’s lead by publicizing his congressional appeal—publishing his report in De Bow’s Review. ¹⁴⁶ Chase’s report also foreshadowed the route railroad advocacy would soon take—including a non sequitur about how he “hoped that Congress will not long delay … in making such a donation of lands as will enable private enterprise to … complete a railway … to San Diego.” ¹⁴⁷

–

Shortly after sunset on July 12, 1853, Jefferson Davis rose to speak at a banquet honoring President Pierce at the Merchant’s Hotel in Philadelphia. Although Davis would soon preside over the Confederacy’s rebellion, in 1853 he was charged with the Union’s defense as its secretary of war. His speech addressed potential threats to the “integrity of the Pacific possessions” recently won from Mexico and his proposed solution: “by skip[ping] the mountains, tunnel[ling] them, or pass[ing] them by any means known to civil engineering, binding men together … [and, answering] the question of protection.” ¹⁴⁸ This speech marked a transformation in the military’s stance vis-à-vis railroad policy. Henceforth, it campaigned aggressively for federal efforts to effect a transcontinental’s construction. The surviving disagreement revolved around the project’s route rather than its general advisability. ¹⁴⁹ This reflected the Secretary’s expansive vision of the War Department’s mission—a vision inherited in part from his one-time commanding officer, General Gaines. ¹⁵⁰ Yet Davis’s vision had room for railroad aid and coastal fortifications, as well as curious projects like the experimental camel corps. ¹⁵¹

The context had also changed. By the mid-1850s, the skeleton of the East’s rail network was approaching completion. If railroads were to render standing armies or fortifications redundant, the damage was already done. Along with America’s Mexican-War conquests, this changed the terms of railroad-policy debates. Transcontinental railroads represented a different policy question than their eastern counterparts had. Located in the interior West, they no longer threatened the Corps’s coastal fortifications program but rather promised interior communications with America’s new Pacific outpost. ¹⁵² Finally, Davis and Chase’s baldly sectional motives for promoting a Pacific railroad marked another departure in the military’s railroad-policy activism—prefiguring the coming Civil War. ¹⁵³

Fort Sumter’s surrender would not only announce the Civil War but also the Third System’s obsolescence. The conflict would confirm Major Richard Delafield’s little-heeded Crimean-War observations that recent advancements in large-caliber ordnance, rifled artillery, and steamships meant “earthen parapets are gaining … ascendency” over expensive masonry works like Third-System fortifications. ¹⁵⁴ By then, the same commitments that had helped engineering officers avoid capture by railroad interests during the 1830s would leave them ill-equipped to recognize the implications of changing technology.

–

As Daniel Carpenter and David Moss suggest in their call to arms for a new wave of empirical research, “reaching a new level in the treatment of regulatory capture will require” attention to the various institutional and cultural channels driving capture and the multivariate “mechanisms for mitigating it.” ¹⁵⁵ During the 1830s, the Corps of Engineers evaded capture by railroads—despite a textbook recipe for it. With survey duty augmenting ill-paid officers’ salaries, giving them access to networks for career advancement, and freeing them from the monotony of garrison duty, they faced strong personal incentives to support railroad aid. The same applied to Corps-of-Engineers and War-Department leaders hoping to extend their institutional power. Both also existed within a fertile ground for cognitive capture. Nevertheless, a confluence of factors mitigated these strong personal and institutional incentives. Ascendant Jacksonian populism and fiscal austerity following the Panic of 1837 combined to create an exceptionally hostile environment for the Corps of Engineers’ institutional priority: permanent coastal fortifications. This hostile context made railroad advocates’ claims that rail-aided militias would soon supplant fortifications and standing armies appear to be a credible threat to the Corps’s institutional interests. It set the incentives driving capture at loggerheads with the engineers’ core competency—the basis of their claims to administrative autonomy, appropriations, and political influence. Perhaps none of this would have mattered without the engineers’ esprit du corps, but they took pride in an institutional mission of national defense they saw embodied in fortifications. All told, engineering officers and War-Department leadership, generally, avoided capture and retreated from the posture of bureaucratic imperialism to defend the engineers’ core competency. This experience suggests that fiscal austerity and populist distrust of elites could combat capture by prompting a retrenchment to administrative agencies’ core competencies. This mechanism, however, depends upon agencies’ organizational interests aligning with the public interest and the presence of an esprit de corps among its officials that is far from universal in agencies prone to capture.