Wedding of the waters, p.14
Wedding of the Waters, page 14
The commissioners were impressed with many of the towns where they stayed overnight, and especially with Utica, which they reached on July 10, six days and eighty-six miles from “the gloomy interval” at Schenectady. There were three hundred houses and 1650 inhabitants in Utica, a town with churches for Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Welsh Presbyterians, and Welsh Baptists. In addition to six taverns, fifteen stores, two breweries, and three printing offices, Utica also had a bank—a branch of the Manhattan Company masterminded by Aaron Burr—a post office, and a state supreme court as well as the county court.13 Most impressive to Clinton, the townspeople enjoyed a choice of two newspapers.
Clinton takes note of the elegance of some of the houses in Utica as well as the numerous stores and the variety of merchandise they displayed. He was impressed with the bridge over the Mohawk and a turnpike of two miles through the town. Nearby, at a large cheese factory, thirty-six cows produced enough milk for four hundred cheeses a year plus milk to support a great number of hogs. There was also a substantial manufacturing establishment for spinning cotton, with 384 spindles on six frames. Shares in the cotton factories were selling 40 percent over their original offering price, but Clinton noted that the forty young girls employed there had “an unhealthy appearance.” As a result of all these facilities, real estate appeared to be priced very high indeed in Utica in 1810: lots, corresponding to double lots in New York City, were selling from $400 to $800. Ten years earlier, a judge named Cooper had bought fifteen acres for $1500; they were now worth more than ten times that price.
Rome, on the other hand, was much less impressive than Utica, even with its excellent position between the headwaters of the Mohawk and the rising of Wood Creek. With seventy houses, it had a post office, a courthouse, and only one church but four lawyers. The town had little appeal for Clinton: “Rome being on a perfect level, we naturally ask from what has it derived its name? Where are its seven hills? Has it been named out of compliment to Lynch [the largest property owner], who is a Catholic?”14 Rome was in fact originally known as Lynchville. Transforming Lynchville to Rome was minor compared with replacing Mud Creek with Palmyra. Rome did provide one exciting event, when they shot a bald eagle with a wingspan of eight feet and formidable talons.15
The group was impressed with the huge salt deposits spread out over a large area about halfway between Albany and Buffalo and centered around what would one day be the city of Syracuse. These resources had provided much of the wealth of the Iroquois and were still an important feature of the local economy. The salt deposits would be even more important after the opening of the Erie Canal, which greatly facilitated the transportation of large quantities of salt both west to Lake Erie and east to the growing industrial economy of New York City.
The commissioners reached their final destination and turnaround point at Buffalo and Lake Erie on August 4, having traveled the 363 miles from Albany in thirty-two days. Here they put up at a tavern, where they were “indifferently accommodated in every respect.”16 Buffalo contained only thirty to forty houses, a courthouse, a few stores and taverns, and a post office, but appeared to be busy as a base for sightseeing. Just about everyone traveling westward toward Ohio and beyond came through Buffalo, and few could resist the opportunity to visit the wonders of Niagara Falls just a few miles away.
On Lake Erie, the commissioners visited the only United States naval vessel on the lake, the Adams, a brig of 150 tons and four guns. This ship could travel to Fort Dearborn at the southwestern corner of Lake Michigan and back in two months. The British had two gunboats on Lake Erie, one with sixteen guns and the other with twelve, as well as a fort southwest of Black Rock, a town just north of Buffalo. During the War of 1812, the waters of the lake would become a major battleground between the Americans determined to invade Canada and the British equally determined to prevent them from doing so.
The commander of the Adams informed Clinton that vessels drawing up to seven feet of water could continue on from the western end of Lake Erie to “Chaquagy [Chicago] and then up a creek of that name to the Illinois River…and so down to the Mississippi.”17 With an uninterrupted canal from New York City to Lake Erie, Gouverneur Morris’s dream of 1800 could now come true: the way would be open for travel by water from London all the way to the Mississippi River.
The seven hundred miles across New York State and back took the commissioners fifty-three days. Now it was time for them to get down to business and settle on the contents of the report they would submit to the legislature. They faced a daunting task. In view of the magnitude of the undertaking and its prospective impact on New York State and, indeed, the entire nation, their report would have to be authoritative, complete, and compelling. They would have to provide specific recommendations, with full supporting arguments, for the enormity of the job ahead, the technology to be employed, the route of the canal between the Hudson and the Great Lakes, and the methods of financing the record-setting outlays that would be necessary. Above all, the report should articulate and underscore the grand theme underlying the whole concept: the necessity of binding the new western communities to the original thirteen states strung out along the Atlantic. As a result, it would take six months, until March 1811, before the report of the commissioners was ready for presentation to the legislature.
During the deliberations of the commissioners, Gouverneur Morris turned out to be the most stubborn obstacle to progress. The group looked to Clinton as their leader, but they had named Morris as the senior member of the commission because he was the oldest and in all likelihood the best known among them. This role was largely ceremonial while the expedition was under way, but as senior commissioner, Morris was responsible for drafting the report of the commission’s findings and decisions. He had, after all, drafted not only the constitution of the State of New York, but the Constitution of the United States of America; “We, the people” launch his words, which come down to us today.
Now Morris had every intention of putting his handprint on the report in big, bold letters.
In 1803, when Morris had described to Simeon De Witt his idea of “tapping Lake Erie…and leading its waters in an artificial river, directly across the country to the Hudson River,” he meant precisely what he said. At an early commission meeting at Rome, Morris urged breaking down the high grounds along the eastern banks of Lake Erie and letting the lake’s waters follow the level of the country down as far as Utica, providing uninterrupted navigation for that entire sector of the route without dependence on any supply of water other than the lake. For this purpose, and to avoid the complexity of building locks, Morris proposed the construction a single inclined plane, all of one piece, starting at the eastern shore of Lake Erie and carrying the Erie waters on a downward tilt as far as Utica. The drop to sea level beyond that point is so steep that locks would be unavoidable the rest of the way to Albany.
Imagine a huge downward sloping trough, about five feet deep. The trough would be filled by water pouring in at its western end from the shores of Lake Erie and emptying out into the Mohawk River some two hundred miles to the east. At the average downward slope of six inches per mile specified by Morris, the water would flow steadily eastward but so gently that towing a boat in the direction of Lake Erie, up the inclined plane against the current, would still be feasible.
Nature was not so cooperative. The surveyors could confirm Morris’s calculations of the drop in the level of the land from the high point at Lake Erie down to Utica, but they had to emphasize that Morris’s six inches to the mile was an average. The levels vary wildly from valley to flatland and up and down again. For about forty-five miles east of Rochester, for example, the land drops off steeply at a pitch of 2.8 feet a mile, almost six times the slope of the inclined plane. The embankments to support the inclined plane would have to be more than 100 feet high—the equivalent of at least a ten-story building in modern times—at many points over the hundred miles between Rochester and the town of Brewerton on Oneida Lake. To add insult to injury, every single creek, river, and lake on the route would have to be bridged.
Despite all these difficulties, Morris was convinced beyond argument of the superiority of this structure, undeterred by Simeon De Witt’s view of it in 1803 as a “romantic thing.”18 When De Witt had reminded Morris that “the intermediate hills and valleys [were] insuperable obstacles,” Morris replied “labor improbus omnia vincit [essentially, the human mind devoted to improvisation could achieve anything], and the object would justify the labour and expense, whatever that might be.”19 Years later, Benjamin Wright would recall, “I feel very confident he [Morris] had no local knowledge of the peculiar formulation of that part of the state.”20 At the time, Morris had his way. Thomas Eddy reported that the commissioners, “believing that [Morris] knew much more than he really did, and distrusting, perhaps too scrupulously, their own judgment, signed, and therefore sanctioned, [Morris’s version of the] Report.”21
Throughout the discussions, Clinton kept urging unanimity even though he was opposed to Morris’s brainchild. He was concerned that the entire enterprise would come to nothing if differing recommendations from the commission encouraged new excuses for argument in an already fractious legislature. With his unshakable confidence in the workings of the democratic process, Clinton argued that common sense would prevail once the whole matter were set before the public.
The westerner, Peter Porter, was the most stubborn in opposing the report, and not only because of the inclined plane proposal. In the deliberations of the commissioners, Porter joined the others in their enthusiasm for an east-west route by water, but he did want to make money out of the project if at all possible. Porter’s booming business in Black Rock held a monopoly on trading privileges along the road, or portage, carrying freight around Niagara Falls. As a north-south canal coming down from Lake Ontario right there would be a bonanza for him, he consistently favored the route across Lake Ontario—a route that Elkanah Watson had blessed during his trip west in 1792—instead of the overland route all the other commissioners supported.22
A graduate of Yale, Porter had been born in Connecticut in 1773 but moved to Canandaigua in western New York to practice law in 1793. He soon became a strong enthusiast and spokesman for the area. He had settled in Buffalo only the year before the expedition of 1810. Porter was the only participant who would unabashedly pursue his own self-interests throughout the whole process, from beginning right up to the end in 1825. Clinton’s observation about him at this moment has a strong sarcastic flavor: “It cannot be supposed that this gentleman was governed by selfish motives on account of his interest…but it is proper to say, that his conduct throughout was marked by singular inconsistency.”23
Despite the underlying validity of this accusation, Porter had been fighting in Congress, where he was serving the first of two terms, for financing of a waterway to the west. In that same year of 1810, he had warned his fellow members of the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C., that the western settlers were in desperate need of a cheap means of transporting their excess production to an Atlantic port, and that the absence of good transportation to the markets was already hampering the settlers and holding back the growth of the entire area.24
Although there were moments when Morris’s fantasy prompted one or another of the commissioners to threaten to withhold their signatures from the report, Clinton succeeded in keeping the group in line. After the fact, Clinton did confess to second thoughts about his commitment to unanimity. Writing in 1821, he admitted that the board could have avoided a great deal of the ridicule provoked by its report if its recommendations had been more practical. But Clinton felt they had to defer to Morris, whom he characterized as “a man of elevated genius, but too much under the influence of a sublimated imagination.” Clinton’s choice of the term “sublimated imagination” may sound odd to modern ears, but “sublimated” does mean diverted from an immediate goal to some higher use. In context, it is clear Clinton means an imagination tending toward the sublime but impractical. In any case, the commission was stuck with the glowing hue of Morris’s “sublime” idea. When the members assembled to review Morris’s draft, as Clinton tells it, they went out of their way to avoid hurting Morris’s feelings, especially as they hoped his proposal would be seen as “hypothetical from its very nature, and a mere gratuitous suggestion.”25
On everything else, the commissioners quickly reached agreement.
The decision stood—with even Porter’s acceptance—that the canal would run over land all the way from the Hudson to Lake Erie. Any other route would defeat the primary purpose of the canal, which was to join the west to the east in one seamless community, as Washington himself had envisioned many years earlier. The Lake Ontario route, which Porter had favored, exposed the Americans to the risk of losing the trade of the westerners to Canada, as much of the traffic moving eastward via Lake Ontario would continue on to the Atlantic by way of the St. Lawrence River and Montreal instead of through New York. This unfortunate pattern was already established in the western part of the state, thanks to the federal government’s embargoes and non-intercourses.
With remarkable foresight, the commissioners had no doubt that a canal along the inland route they favored would soon stimulate a rapid rate of economic development along its shores. By assuring a large volume of traffic within the territory of the canal as well as traffic moving from the Hudson all the way to Lake Erie and vice versa, the interior route would fully justify the investment involved.
As any financing by way of Washington was clearly out of the question, the commissioners were emphatic on public financing, ownership, and control of the canal by New York State. They considered this matter to be paramount. Here, even Porter chimed in enthusiastically, delighted at the prospect of having the government pay for providing access by water to his properties and forwarding business in the west. None of the commissioners wanted to repeat the sad experience of the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company, with its constant need for funds. Later, Jesse Hawley would put it that Clinton’s determination to make the canal a state undertaking took great courage when others were insisting that “it would require the revenue of all of the kingdoms of the earth, and the population of China, to accomplish it.”26
A great national interest appeared to be at stake. Although the commissioners considered the risk that private financing might turn the canal into a raw opportunity for speculators, they were more concerned about the difficulty of raising money in a capital-short country like the young United States. Their report sounds remarkably contemporary in their recognition of the significance of the cost of capital: “Few of our fellow citizens have more money than they want, and of the many who want, few find facility in obtaining it…. Among many other objections, there is one insuperable: That it would defeat the contemplated cheapness of transportation…. Such large expenditures can be made more economically under public authority than by the care and vigilance of any company.”27
These unqualified assertions favoring public expenditure were among the least controversial features of the commissioners’ report. The notion that government spending might tread on private interest was still many years in the future. At that moment, anything looked better than the Western Company.
Through it all ran a hope that the federal government might still participate, because New York would not be the only state to benefit from the canal. Despite the failure of Forman’s mission to Jefferson the year before, Gallatin’s words from 1805 still rang in the air. Gallatin’s powerful report and keen analytical approach had stirred widespread anticipation of the federal government’s role in financing and planning a modernized national transportation system. As Gouverneur Morris reflected this state of anticipation in the commission report, “The wisdom, as well as the justice of the national legislature, will, no doubt, lead to the exercise on their part of prudent munificence.”28
Finally, the commissioners insisted that the canal must be an artificial waterway over its entire distance, no matter which design would finally be chosen. To support this position, they cited the immensely successful canal networks in Britain and Holland, which had demonstrated so clearly that riverbeds were treacherous and even dangerous for internal navigation. They did not have to look to Europe to prove their point. Right in their own backyard, the Mohawk looked like an ideal east-west water route, and yet it had stubbornly fought off the costly efforts of the Western Company to tame it into full navigability.
When the commission’s report finally appeared in March 1811, public response was divided. There were those who were proud that a young nation could undertake a project of such imposing size. Doubters continued to balk at the sheer size of the proposal, despite Jonas Platt’s effort to discourage the skeptics by selecting some of the most famous and respected men in New York State for the commission. The most serious opposition loomed up among the settlers in the west, jealous of their thriving trade with Montreal. Joseph Ellicott, the Holland Land Company’s chief representative in the west, now wrote to his superior in Philadelphia, “I have therefore much less opinion of this great object than I formerly had…. I am pursuaded [sic] that it will be more advantage at once to make Montreal our market; and it makes no difference to us what Market we go to; the great object is to go to such a Place where we can make the most profits.”29
These were all words. The action was still in the legislature, and here the momentum was positive. A month after the publication of the report, the legislature passed the first of a long series of canal laws it would enact over the years ahead. This bill added the distinguished names of Robert Fulton and Robert Livingston, his business and engineering associate, to the board of commissioners. It appropriated $15,000 to finance the board’s further activities. It authorized the commissioners to take all necessary steps to arrange for financing the canal, to purchase the interests of the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company, to seek grants of land from property owners along the proposed route, and, most important, to approach Congress for fulfillment of the splendid promises of Thomas Jefferson and Albert Gallatin.
