Ohio Canal Era

Bibliography

Bihliography THE unusually rich archival collections of Ohio supported the emphasis in this book on administrative aspects of canal construction, financing, and management. Abundant documentation of all the major decisions and operations of the state agencies is available in the vast files of the Ohio canal commissions and board of public works, and in the slimmer but ample records of the fund commissioners. These materials, few of which had been examined by earlier scholars, held many surprises; and they supported numerous interpretations quite different from what one would have expected from consulting only the published agency reports. For instance, on canal finance the archives documented the complex interplay of state banking, public bank policy, and interregional capital transfers, a main theme in Chapters 2 and 6. The canal commission records revealed the milieu in which basic policies were formulated during planning of the 1825 and 183638 investment decisions, and also during the long history of canal management. Readily recaptured was the set of assumptions, aspirations, information, and misinformation in which each policy was made or in which drift substituted for policy. Moreover, the state officials of that time, before the advent of the telephone, fWeu intra-agency correspondence with "private" messages, so marked. Indeed, some of the most informative letters that survive were deSignated to have been destroyed. History written exclusively from such evidence risks aU the pitfalls of "conrt history" or "company history," in which the historian shares so intimately the infonnation (and only the information ) available to decision-makers-and often comes to share, despite himself, the decision-makers' aspirations as well-that his perspective becomes identical to that of the men and organizations Bibliography ( 399 that are his subject. Therefore, contemporary comment originating outside the state agencies was especially important. Newspaper reports and editorials were extremely diverse in their assessments of the state agencies, reflecting both their political commitments and the astonishing lack of restraint that marked journalistic mores of that day. In petitions of special interest groups. aggrieved individlwisl and the like; in business correspondence, records, and journals; and above all, in the debates, investigations. and reports of the legislature, I found both data and perspectives that proved invaluable. But I sought to inform my interpretations as well by studies of government activism in other American states and in the developing countries today; and also by consulting sociological theory on formal organization and the writings of economists and historians on entrepreneurial roles and functions. Court decisions and published legal briefs proved highly important as welL For the lawyers of that day spoke eloquently on the ambitions and assumptions of the society; and they also provided perceptive criticism of the means employed in the pursuit of social and political goals. I have attempted also to measure the ambitions of the men who had formulated economic policy against the actual perfonnance of the economy. The core of evidence for this was in the statistical reports of state agencies and the ample (though hardly unfailingly accurate) data in the published U.S. Census reports. I have become painfully aware of the accuracy of William N. Parker's observation that when a researcher adduces statistics on the nineteenth century economy, he constructs a statistical universe but not necessarily the statistical universe that actually existed. However , I have analyzed economic change not only on a statistical base of evidence, but also by giving attention to institutional interrelationships through study of business records, chamber of commerce reports, railroad reports, and the like. In this bibliography, Part I treats all manuscript collections consulted and the most useful printed primary sources. In Part II is a discussion of relevant secondary studies, but for a fuller discussion I must refer the reader to the fine bibliographic essay in George Rogers Taylor. The Transportation Revolution, 18l51860 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1951); to Harry Stevens, "Re- 400 ) OHIO CANAL ERA cent Writings in Midwestern Economic History," OHQ, LXIX (Jan. 1960); and to standard bibliographic reference works. I: PRIMARY SOURCES A. MANUSCRIPTS In the Ohio State Archives, a division of the Ohio Historical Society. are the Canal Commission Papers and the Board of Public Works Papers. 1825-1861, a voluminous collection of correspondence, petitions, reports, pamphlets, and other material relating to construction and management of the canals and other public works. Also in the Archives is a "Stock Issue Book," listing the original purchasers of Ohio bonds, 1826-1839; three volumes of letter-books of the...