In the first quarter of the 19th century, we were not the United States of America so much as a loose collection of states joined by a shared past and facing an uncertain future as a nation. “Until,” Gerard Koeppel says in “Bond of Union,” “the Erie Canal opened on a fine fall day in 1825.”
No single event or achievement of the century can be said to have solidified a union that, after all, came apart four decades later, but Koeppel’s superb “Bond of Union” shows that the canal, by more tightly drawing the states together through increased commerce, helped create the conditions for a continental nation.
Koeppel, a former editor at CBS News and author of “Water for Gotham: A History,” has produced a formidably researched account of “the boldest and biggest American engineering project of its century, with enduring political, social, and economic effect.”
Even the history of a transportation venue that has been largely defunct for decades has something to tell us today. Besides being fascinating in itself — the engineering and construction feats are astounding — it shows past as prologue.
Now, as many nations contemplate public works projects to pull themselves out of plunging economies, it is instructive to examine what historian Paul Johnson has called “probably the outstanding example of a human artifact creating wealth rapidly in the whole of history.”
Not that the canal builders received any help from the feds. Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, preferring to see (but in vain) a Potomac-oriented canal westward through their native Virginia, denied it federal funds. In 1809 Jefferson disparaged the proposed New York project, calling it “little short of madness to think of it at this day.”
So New Yorkers made an artificial river by raising their own money. Even within the state there was significant opposition, notably from politicians and merchants in the lower Hudson Valley who feared it would pull business away to the west.
At the time of its construction, the waterway was known as the Great Western Canal or, derisively, as Clinton’s Ditch. The story of its building is largely one of the fluctuating political fortunes of its most influential and enthusiastic champion, De Witt Clinton, sometime New York governor and presidential wannabe.
If any name associated with it is remembered today outside of New York, it is Clinton’s. Jesse Hawley was nearly as obscure then as he is today, yet it was his essays, written in 1807 from debtors’ prison, that caught the attention of prominent people like Clinton. Having little formal education, Hawley managed, by dogged study of books and maps, to help turn his dream for a canal into reality.
Ground was broken for the Erie Canal at Rome on Independence Day, 1817. Forty feet wide at the surface, 4 feet deep, and 28 feet wide at the bottom, it eventually would run 363 miles from Albany, where it connected with the Hudson River, to Buffalo (beating out the competing town of Black Rock to be the western terminus).
Digging the canal and everything associated with it, contracted out by sections, was primarily done by local farmers, workers and merchants. Irish laborers, famed more in legend than numbers, did not come on the scene until late in the project. There was scant corruption.
In the course of their work, they came up with several handy labor-saving devices, such as a tree-feller and a stump-puller. A home-grown variety of waterproof cement, absolutely essential to the work, was also developed.
Koeppel possesses a nice, brisk style. Surveying was “a waking nightmare,” he writes, mostly because “mosquitoes made a bacchanal of Caucasian blood”; during both surveying and digging, hundreds were laid low by malaria. Discussion of the intricacies of early 19th-century New York politics, it must be said, does become confusing — and a bit wearying.
A “Grand Aquatic Procession” was held in New York City Nov. 4, 1825, to mark the canal’s completion. Financially and in many other ways, it was a stunning success — even before completion, as traffic began to move on individual sections. By 1855 the Erie-Canal-and-Hudson-River route had supplanted the Mississippi River as the country’s major transporter of goods.
New York state was lucky, in a way, that it acted to build a canal early and thus grab the commercial dominance that Virginia and the South desired — and resented once the North began to wield it. Ironically, then, the canal, which had done so much to pull the states together, ultimately contributed to pushing them apart.
Roger K. Miller is a novelist and freelance writer, reviewer and editor.
Nonfiction
Bond of Union: Building the Erie Canal and the American Empire, by Gerard Koeppel, $27.95
