“My present purpose . . . is to present a figure seldom heard of nowadays but one deserving a lasting place in the history of North Carolina.” In 1911, journalist Louis D. Wilson so described Thomas H. Hall, a Congressman from Edgecombe County, North Carolina. Almost 100 years later, Wilson’s statement still rings loudly.
Although born in Virginia, Thomas H. Hall (1773-1853) called North Carolina home. With a medical practice in Tarboro, Hall was first elected to Congress as a Jeffersonian-Republican (1817-1825). In 1824, he lost his Congressional seat. As a Jacksonian-Democrat, Hall regained it, and served in Congress from 1827-1835. In Washington D.C., Hall was on several committees, including chairing the Committee on Expenditures in the Department of the Treasury. After his Congressional career, Hall served in the North Carolina Senate, practiced medicine, and farmed. In 1853, he died in retirement.
Like his friends, John Randolph of Virginia and Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina, Hall vigorously opposed federal involvement in internal improvements—a term used for government-supported public works. Concerning this issue, Hall was immovable; he once proclaimed, “I never shall abandon my principles on this subject.” His principled stance should not be mistaken for senseless stubbornness, however. Hall believed, after much contemplation, that federal intervention in building transportation networks was unconstitutional and an infringement of the doctrines of dual sovereignty and separation of power.
The U.S. Constitution, claimed Hall, enumerated exclusive powers to the federal and state governments, and both had “appropriate spheres of actions, separate and distinct from each other.” He was troubled particularly when Congress imposed taxes on all states for transportation projects exclusively in one state. Opposing such legislation in one 1830 Congressional speech, Hall read from the North Carolina Declaration of Rights (1776): “That the people of this State ought to have the sole and exclusive right of regulating internal government and police thereof.”
In his opposition of federal-sponsored transportation projects, Hall avoided saying “internal improvements,” for the term, he said, was “most comprehensive,” including not only highways but also vehicles and their owners. “If Congress has the right to make, alter, end, or abolish our highways within the States . . . does not even a blind man see that the consequence must soon be an entire obliteration of all the power of the State authorities, and in that case our system of government is destroyed by consolidation?” He also feared that, via internal improvements, legislators would redefine “general welfare”; if Congress could tax for the betterment of everyone, everywhere, Hall reasoned, then legislators had power to select outcomes and then raise whatever amount was needed to accomplish them. To Hall, corruption and abuse of power resulted from government having the means to accomplish any goal.
The conflation of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches also distressed Hall. Debate over the separation of powers doctrine, was needless, for it was, he said, the “plainest part of the Constitution.” During an 1834 Congressional speech, Hall warned his colleagues that disregarding this doctrine, in effect, created a new form of government: “Instead of a Government of three centers, acting as mutual and salutary checks on each other, you unite the Executive, the Legislative, and Judicial into one, which is the very definition of despotism.”
Hall believed federal internal improvement legislation led to tyranny: government taxed everyone for the benefit of a few, powerful officials predetermined the logistics of transportation networks for personal gain, and such legislation invited logrolling sessions. Exasperated by what he considered a “system of iniquity” and the federal government continually superseding its “proper sphere of authority,” Hall urged Tar Heels to demand public officials to maintain records of “credit and debit, showing precisely what they pay for the article and what it yields.” That’s good advice for us today.
No one has devoted significant attention to Hall. For those interested in learning more about this North Carolinian and his ideas, the Registers of Debates in Congress is the best place to start.