Wedding of the waters, p.16
Wedding of the Waters, page 16
His fellow canal commissioner Peter Porter, who had been craving an excuse to invade Canada, got himself appointed major general of the New York Volunteers even though, like Clinton, he had no military experience. He proceeded to raise his own untrained troops to join in the fighting. Unlike Clinton, he and his troops saw action in several battles, and a joint resolution of Congress dated November 3, 1814, awarded Porter a gold medal with a citation for “gallantry and good conduct in the several conflicts of Chippewa, Niagara, and Erie.”19
Madison’s war message to Congress on June 1 followed convention in portraying his own country as the injured party. He focused on Britain’s “lawless violence” on the seas over so long a period of time. Then he drew Congress’s attention to “the warfare just renewed by the savages on one of our extensive frontiers, a warfare which…spare[s] neither age nor sex and to be distinguished by features particularly shocking to humanity.” As Madison summed up his view of the struggle, “We behold, in fine, on the side of Great Britain a state of war against the United States, and on the side of the United States a state of peace toward Great Britain.”
Well aware of the constitutional constraints on the president in declaring war, Madison reminded Congress that the choice between accepting “these progressive usurpations” or fighting to defend the nation’s rights was a matter for the legislative branch to decide. He nevertheless pronounced himself assured that the decision would be “worthy of the enlightened and patriotic councils of a virtuous, a free, and a powerful nation.”
On June 4, the House of Representatives obliged by declaring war on Great Britain by a vote of 79–49, with almost all the New York State representatives voting against. The debate in the Senate was both more lengthy and more intense. The vote there did not come until June 18, and the margin for war was slim. In one of the great ironies of history, the British foreign minister announced just two days earlier that Britain would relax its blockade on American shipping—but that news would not reach the shores of the United States for another five weeks, by which time the opposing armies were fully engaged.
The early stages of the war were a demoralizing series of defeats on home territory, including the surrender of Detroit soon after the outbreak of hostilities. Too much time had passed since the Revolution, when many officers in the Continental Army already had combat experience fighting on the British side in the French and Indian Wars. Now the American land forces had no battle-hardened troops or commanders—Jefferson remarked he had never seen “so wretched a succession of generals.”20 Henry Clay observed that Madison “is not fit for the rough and rude blasts which the conflicts of nations generate.”21 Meanwhile, the British had been at war for half a century, with few interludes of peace.
Popular support for this war was far weaker than in the Revolution. The Senate had dickered through two weeks of secret sessions before voting in favor of the war resolution, and even then the vote was close, 18–13. Opposition was intense in New England, where the business community was deeply—and justifiably—concerned about total loss of trade with Europe. Indeed, only 108 vessels entered the United States during the entire year of 1812.22 The governors of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island at first refused to call up the state militias to go into combat. The New England banks, the most prosperous in the nation, even refused to lend the government money for the war effort, forcing Secretary of the Treasury Gallatin to go hat in hand to smaller banks, which then took advantage of the situation by charging usurious rates of interest.23*
But on the west side of the country, sentiment was strongly in favor of the war, especially among New Yorkers. Many westerners saw the war as a perfect excuse for invading Canada, with its rich forests, fur sources, and agricultural lands. Although Jefferson, for one, expected a Canadian invasion to be little more than a matter of marching,24 others felt differently. When war was declared, fear of invasion from Canada prompted the settlers out in Holland Land Company country to move back eastward “in droves,” ignoring Resident Agent Joseph Ellicott’s soothing assurances and entreaties to remain.25
They were right to run. The fighting in the west turned out to be much bloodier than a matter of marching. The first effort by the Americans to invade Canada was a disaster. After Detroit fell so early in the conflict, repeated invasion efforts by both sides led to casualties with no permanent victories for either contender and shockingly stupid military leadership on the American side.26
Throughout the whole struggle, the Americans had to fight simultaneously on both the western and the eastern sides of Lake Erie. Gory battles around Niagara Falls, on the Canadian and on the American sides, would resolve nothing. Many of the western New Yorkers returned to their homes in the course of 1813. The Americans themselves burned Buffalo in a December snowstorm to deny the British any hope of wintering in the vicinity—while inadvertently leaving barracks and tents for 1500 men in perfect condition, along with supplies of ammunition. Even Ellicott at that moment fled from his headquarters in Batavia, citing the atrocities of the British and their Indian allies in killing women and children as well as the men and the resulting “terror, consternation, and dismay” among local citizens.27
Most of the American victories were scored at sea against the vaunted British navy, even though the American oceangoing navy was vastly outnumbered by Britain’s. The British had 245 frigates, each carrying thirty to fifty guns, and 191 ships of the line with sixty to eighty guns.* The Americans had no ships of the line and only 7 frigates, one of which would see no action. The ingenious design of the American frigates made all the difference. These marvels of naval technology, which dated back to John Adams’s time as president, could outmaneuver Britain’s massive ships of the line and also carried more guns than British frigates.28 The combination of greater firepower and greater maneuverability kept the British on the run. The most famous of these frigates was the Constitution, or “Old Ironsides,” which won two skirmishes in the first months of the war against British frigates.
The American navy also achieved crucial victories in battles on the waters of Lake Erie, coveted by both parties because of its access to Canada, to the other Great Lakes, and to the Mississippi beyond. The New Yorkers were especially concerned because the lake was also the planned western terminal of their proposed canal. As neither side had enough warships to mount a proper battle on the lakes at the outset, the real struggle took the form of a shipbuilding race along the shores of the lake. This was no easy task for the Americans, with limited labor supply in the area, no sawmills and no factories in New York, and no good transportation system for bringing in the necessary supplies. The facilities at Erie, Pennsylvania, on the shore of Lake Erie about a hundred miles west of Buffalo, did manage to supply the fighting forces in the lake with shipwrights, blacksmiths, caulkers, and common labor, as well as canvas, rigging, cannon shot, and anchors—but no cannon. The cannon had to come all the way by road from the east coast.
Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, then only twenty-eight years old, took command at Erie of American forces on the lake in March 1813. A veteran of fighting pirates in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, Perry managed to build a fleet of six ships by July. He had also recruited volunteers to man them—including freed blacks, farmers, and soldiers from the army. Perry named his flagship the Lawrence after his best friend, James Lawrence, who had recently been killed in naval combat, and then he hoisted a flag painted with Lawrence’s enduring words “Don’t give up the ship!” Now he was eager for battle.
On September 10, joined by a few additional small craft from Buffalo, Perry engaged a British squadron on the lake. The battle began grimly when Perry did what his friend had not: he gave up his ship as concentrated British fire killed or wounded 80 percent of his crew. He was not to be deterred, however. Carrying the precious flag, he transferred on a small boat to another ship, sailed right into the British line, and compelled surrender within fifteen minutes.
The lake was now secure for the Americans. Perry then doubled his claim to immortality. His message of victory to General William Henry Harrison proclaimed, “We have met the enemy and they are ours: two brigs, one schooner, and one sloop.”
The prospects for the Erie Canal seemed to grow dimmer as the war progressed. The canal commissioners could only bide their time as hostilities proceeded. Perhaps motivated by Weston’s reassurance that “from your perspicuous topographical description, and neat plan and profile of the route of the contemplated canal, I entertain little doubt of the practicability of the measure,” the commissioners sent the legislature a new progress report in March 1814. They confirmed the findings of their earlier messages, added an elaborate set of estimates of transport costs, recommended appropriate tolls to be charged, and provided detailed comparisons of shipping costs in other parts of the country, especially along the Mississippi.
This reminder that the canal was still a matter of high importance had an unexpected result. The report ignited the opposition, who had gathered strength from the dissipation of energy among the canal’s supporters under the clouds of war. In particular, resistance was building up among farmers living far away from the route of the canal, who were concerned their taxes would only finance competition in their markets. A month after the publication of the 1814 report, the opposition forces in the legislature inserted a clause in a supply bill that annulled the authority to create a fund for financing the construction work on the canal. As De Witt Clinton later described this underhanded maneuver, “The commissioners were thus frittered down into a board of consideration…without power and without money.”29
“The Canal bubble it appears, has at length exploded,” reported Joseph Ellicott to his superior at the Holland Land Company in Philadelphia.30 In 1815, the commissioners did not even bother to make a report to the legislature. That year, Clinton’s opponents in the legislature removed him as mayor of New York City; he had already lost the lieutenant governorship in 1813. Thomas Eddy described the friends of the project as “entirely discouraged, and [having] given up all hopes of the legislature being induced again to take up the subject, or to adopt any measure to prosecute the scheme.”31
But the most important friend of the project was far from discouraged. In fact, Clinton’s exclusion from political office was a blessing in disguise for the canal. Free of routine responsibilities, he was able to focus the full force of his abilities on promoting the canal, and he took up the challenge with gusto. As far as he was concerned, the case for the canal was stronger than ever and would prove impossible to suppress once peace was declared.
The widespread fighting in the west had confirmed the area’s military and economic importance. As suspicion of Canadian intentions lingered on, there was a new urgency to avoid Lake Ontario for east-west traffic. Most important, the war revealed the tragic lack of adequate transportation facilities to link the lands around Lake Erie with the east. Supply shortages constantly hampered effective military operations. Wagons repeatedly broke down on the rutty roads, and men as well as horses were exhausted by the hardships of travel over the long distances. A report issued in 1816 by General James Tallmadge, a congressman from New York, claimed that east-west transportation costs for armaments during the war were so high that a cannon manufactured at an eastern factory for $400 cost from $1500 to $2000 to ship to Lake Erie, while a barrel of pork for the troops on the western frontier ended up costing the government $126—and all that without counting in the plodding pace of horses and wagons “over roads so abominable as to make cannon balls cost a dollar a pound.”32
Another and more sophisticated theme came to the fore in the years after the war: the importance of developing a home market in the face of uncertain economic conditions among America’s customers in Europe. The economic case for concentrating on American customers was clear enough. Postwar deflation abroad influenced postwar deflation at home, as prices collapsed even before the official end of hostilities. By 1821, prices were down 40 percent from the 1814 peak. American exports, after a brief upswing, fell off sharply as the slump in European economic activity gathered momentum. Meanwhile British manufacturers, deprived of the insatiable wartime market of their government, now turned aggressively to exports, especially to their former enemies across the seas.
Although the development of the home market appeared as a natural priority under these conditions, the appeal ran deeper than the economics involved. Americans were proclaiming to the world that their United States was destined to become a first-class power—a motif they would repeat on many occasions over the next hundred years. Adam Smith himself had declared in 1766 that “good roads and canals and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expense of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with these in the neighborhood of large towns; and that they account for the greatest of all improvements.”33
After emphasizing how waterways create networks between provinces and districts of the same country, Clinton’s protégé Charles Glidden Haines declared in an 1818 pamphlet that “those nations who have been destitute of means of inland navigation, either by rivers or canals, have remained from one age to another in the same barbarous and uncivilized state…. Such intercourse is vitally essential to the welfare of nations.”34 Haines becomes even more rhapsodic as he expands his case: “It is evident that no country in the world, ever presented natural advantages for internal trade and canal navigation, so bold, so noble, so striking as our own.”35
Almost a hundred years had passed since Cadwallader Colden had asked, “How is it possible that the traders of New-York should neglect so considerable and beneficial trade for so long a time?” Little did Colden know just how possible it was. In his wildest imagination, he could not have imagined that, quite aside from two wars with the British, it would take nine decades of successive explorations, passionate speeches, eloquent pamphlets, authoritative surveys, distinguished commissions, and elaborate reports to overcome the potent combination of vested interests and timidity in the face of bold vision.
But now the barricades to progress were ready to crumble. This particular attack on the opposition began in familiar fashion: one day in the autumn of 1815, Thomas Eddy “could not…resign a favorite project” and invited his old friend Jonas Platt to breakfast. Eddy was convinced they must make one more effort to make the canal a reality. He proposed to Platt that they should reverse the strategy they worked out together back in 1810. This time around, the undertaking should begin by arousing the public instead of going directly to the lawmakers. To that end, he proposed organizing a mass meeting at the City Hotel in New York, “to urge the propriety and policy of offering a memorial to the legislature, pressing them to prosecute the canal from Erie to the Hudson.”36 Platt was enthusiastic and urged Eddy to get going. Eddy once again began with De Witt Clinton, who went to work on the project immediately, attracting additional speakers and generating the necessary publicity to attract a big crowd.
The meeting, held on December 3, 1815, was a huge success, with an overflow audience. A committee was appointed to draft a “memorial” addressed to the legislature, almost all of which was the handiwork of De Witt Clinton. Armed with Clinton’s voluminous and persuasive words, Eddy and his colleagues then proceeded to organize additional mass meetings throughout the city and in twenty-five other cities throughout the state, gathering thousands of signatures to be delivered to the legislature in support of Clinton’s Memorial.*
The Memorial runs to thirteen tightly packed printed pages. Although Clinton includes important passages of his powerful rhetoric, he is equally unremitting in the provision of detail and data. He evokes the success of canals in contributing to the greatness of ancient Egypt and China as well as to modern Holland and England, but he does not linger over the glories to come from uniting “our Mediterranean with the ocean,” nor does he stop to elaborate on how “the wilderness and the solitary place will become glad, and the desert will rejoice and blossom as the rose.” All that is taken for granted. Rather, Clinton explains at length the superiority of New York over its competitors as an artery to the west, the most desirable route for the canal, plans for its design, the remarkable variety of crops and merchandise that the canal will transport, itemized estimates of costs and tolls based on the Gallatin report—as well as the construction costs of other canals, ranging from the Canal du Midi in southern France to the Middlesex Canal in Massachusetts—and the ease of finance and the large acreage of lands that will be contributed by the Holland Land Company and other landholders seeking public favors.
The war, he contends, had proven beyond question the need for the canal and emphasized the “importance of this communication [via New York State]…through the most fertile country in the universe.” Time is of the essence. Lands and men left idle in the wake of the war are now readily available at low cost. Delay would excite “injurious speculation” on the one hand and, on the other, give the opposition opportunity to regroup.
The home market is an urgent matter: “Our merchants should not be robbed of their legitimate profits…public revenues should not be seriously impaired by dishonest smuggling, and…the commerce of our cities should not be supplanted by the mercantile establishments of foreign countries.” Then, on a strikingly modern supply-side note, Clinton goes on to argue that the canal will raise the value of “national domains,” thereby facilitating the repayment of the national debt and releasing resources “to be expended in great public improvements; in encouraging the arts and sciences; in patronizing the operations of industry; in fostering the inventions of genius, and in diffusing the blessing of knowledge….[The canal will] convey more riches on its waters than any other canal in the world.” With his usual remarkable foresight, Clinton asserts that, in addition to the great good the canal would do for the state as a whole, it would transform New York City into “the great depot and warehouse of the western world.”
