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3 - “A Wilderness of Turnpike Gates”

Roads and Public Authority in Antebellum America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2023

Matthew Titolo
Affiliation:
West Virginia University College of Law
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Summary

During the privatization craze of the 1980s, libertarians advocated toll roads as the cure for America’s “crumbling infrastructure” problem. As Gerald Gunderson writes in “Privatization and the 19th-Century Turnpike,” Americans invented an “ingenious” market mechanism for supplying its road deficit: the public–private partnership. However, as libertarian commentator Timothy B. Lee concedes: “Roads are deeply intertwined with governments. They always have been and as far as I can see they always will be. This means that theyll never be truly private in the sense that other private companies like restaurants or shoe factories can be.” Chapter 3 illustrates Lee’s insight and argues that highways and roads were a defining feature of “publicness” in the American antebellum experience. Although turnpikes were organized as private businesses and charged tolls in order to recoup considerable investment and turn a profit, in the end they could really not be operated as private businesses: they were inherently political undertakings that required the participation of legislatures, courts, investors, and the general public. Moreover, turnpikes were built in a field of political contestation in which Americans often resisted the privatization of customary public spaces.

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Chapter
Information
Privatization and Its Discontents
Infrastructure, Law, and American Democracy
, pp. 87 - 110
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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