Wedding of the waters, p.17
Wedding of the Waters, page 17
Clinton does allow himself to introduce his soaring rhetoric in the final paragraphs. He bases his final arguments on the same theme Washington had struck over and over: the critical importance to the nation—not just New York State—of trade and commerce in binding the west to the Atlantic states. “However serious the fears which have been entertained of a dismemberment of the Union by collisions between the north and the south,” Clinton begins, displaying his weird sense of what the future might hold, “the most imminent danger lies in another direction. [A] line of separation may be eventually drawn between the Atlantic and the western states, unless they are cemented by a common, an ever acting and a powerful interest.” Still echoing Washington’s views, Clinton contends that the canal, by providing the channel between “the commerce of the ocean, and the trade of the Lakes,…will form an imperishable cement of connexion, and an indissoluble bond of union.” New York State, “standing on this exalted eminence,” is both Atlantic and western and therefore “the only state…in which this great centripetal power can be energetically applied.”
The case is beyond dispute: “Delays are the refuge of weak minds, and to procrastinate on this occasion is to show a culpable inattention to the bounties of nature; a total insensibility to the blessings of Providence, and an inexcusable neglect of the interests of society…. The overflowing blessings from this great fountain of public good and national abundance, will be as extensive as our country and as durable as time…. It remains for a free state to create a new era in history, and to erect a work more stupendous, more magnificent, and more beneficial than has hitherto been achieved by the human race.”37
| CHAPTER 10 |
THE SHOWER OF GOLD
Construction on the Erie Canal began on the Fourth of July 1817, just three days after De Witt Clinton had been elected for his first term as governor of New York State. Suddenly, all the years of debate, doubt, and division seemed to melt away. It was such a great moment that even former enemies would reverse course and transform themselves into champions of the canal. Looking back, people could only wonder why the struggle had been so protracted.
There had been good reason.
At first glance, the resiliency of political resistance is more understandable than the persistence of disbelief and skepticism. Virginians-against-Yorkers reached all the way back to Washington’s day and persisted right up to Madison’s. The neighboring states were jealous of New York’s strategic location and God-given landscapes. Even in New York State, there were many farmers concerned that the canal would open New York to the production of farms far more fertile and productive than their own—and therefore able to offer their output at lower prices.
The citizens of New York City in particular had many misgivings, despite the rosy forecasts the canal enthusiasts kept repeating about the city’s future. Aside from the normally timid people scared off by the financial disasters of the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company, the city’s opposition stemmed primarily from merchants and manufacturers concerned over new taxes for which they would receive an insufficient return from a greater volume of business. Assemblyman Peter Sharpe warned that taxes were already draining the city to the limit and that the “most respectable and opulent of [the city’s] merchants are daily becoming bankrupts….[The state] will sink under [the debt whose]magnitude is beyond what has ever been accomplished by any nation.” In the state Senate Peter Livingston declared that only a madman or a fool would proceed with such a wildly unrealistic project: “From diggers on up,” he predicted, there were “no worse managers of funds than the public.”1 Meanwhile, infighting between Clintonians and anti-Clintonians had developed into an indoor sport, and frequently an outdoor sport as well.
But indefatigable political forces like these do not exist in a vacuum. If the hostility to the canal had amounted to nothing more than jealousy or bald self-interest, the glittering future promised by its supporters would have quickly conquered the opposition. The opposition’s case had more substance than that. Disbelief was real, not a blind for political discord: many people were simply unable to visualize how such a novel, gigantic, and hugely expensive project could ever fulfill those glowing promises. When Thomas Eddy and Jonas Platt launched their campaign for credibility in 1810, they were well aware of the educational challenge before them. They expected it to be an even tougher obstacle than the ongoing political struggles.
The few canals already completed in the United States were less than fifty miles in length—many much less than that—and traveled through populated countrysides without great waterfalls or deep valleys. There were only two precedents for a project of this magnitude: the intricate canal network the English had built over the past fifty years to link their burgeoning industrial centers throughout the Midlands, and the Canal du Midi connecting the Atlantic to the Mediterranean in southern France. Neither bore any resemblance to the projected waterway across New York State. Both were located in areas where economic activity was already well established, where population densities were many times larger than in the country west of the Hudson River, where distances between towns were short, and where the shape of the land to be crossed was obliging. The King of France had been a powerful sponsor for the 115-mile Canal du Midi, and emerging industrialists like Matthew Boulton and Josiah Wedgwood in Britain represented a wealthy and rapidly growing pool of financial capital. The model for the British canals, the Bridgewater Canal built in 1759, ran all of 7 miles toward Manchester, one of the most populous and dynamic cities in the whole country. None of the English canals, independent of branches, extended more than 100 miles.
The Erie Canal had none of these initial advantages. As Noble Whitford, the most meticulous of the many biographers of the Erie Canal, put it in 1905, “When we recognize the primitive conditions and review the difficulties, we do not wonder that the people of a struggling republic stood aghast at the vast enterprise.” And he goes on to cite those who predicted that in Clinton’s “big ditch would be buried the treasure of the State, to be watered by the tears of posterity.”2 One of Whitford’s contemporaries, the writer Samuel Hopkins Adams, would echo these words in 1944 in a riotously funny novel about the canal, in which at one point a character jeers, “The canawl! The canawl! I’ll spit you all the canawl you’ll get.” He spits copiously in front of his companions and then sings:
“Clinton, the federal son-of-a-bitch,
Taxes our dollars to build him a ditch.”3
The proposed canal would extend 363 miles through what was then almost entirely wilderness. The population west of the Hudson River and beyond the Albany area had been less than 25,000 when Jesse Hawley published his essays in 1807.* Although almost 100,000 people were living there by 1817, that was still only 7 percent of the entire population of New York State.† Birmingham, England, just one major city in the center of the Midlands, had a population of about 70,000 people at that time.4 Civil engineering as a profession did not then exist in the United States, but the engineers would have to confront abrupt and dramatic changes in elevation at many points along the way, such as Cohoes Falls at the east end and an even more difficult situation at the Niagara Falls escarpment at the west. Finally, despite New York State’s cavalier attitude about it, the money involved was as intimidating as the cataract at Cohoes Falls. According to one authority, the proposed $6 million was equal to nearly a third of all the banking and insurance capital in the state.5 Six million dollars would be the equivalent of about $90 million in today’s purchasing power, but in an economy that was only a tiny fraction of the gigantic U.S. economy of the twenty-first century.‡
The word “visionary,” either stand-alone or as an adjective, came to have a pejorative meaning when applied to canal enthusiasts. According to Jonas Platt, “hallucination” was the “mildest epithet” the opposition liked to employ.6 The whole thing just seemed too good to be true. Without constant repetition of the accumulated results of successive explorations and analyses over the years, and without the many eloquent recitals of the rewards that would justify the effort and the risks, the canal would never have come into being. De Witt Clinton’s powerful Memorial of December 1815 was the climax of this educational process, but his meticulously itemized citation of numbers and his elegant reasoning would have been just one more document if it had not been preceded by the glut of dreamers and madmen over the preceding twenty years.
There were still a few jolts remaining before the vision would finally meld into reality. After the electrifying response to the Memorial, the opposition could put up only a delaying action. They managed to block the canal for another eighteen months.
Governor Daniel Tompkins, the “humble farmer’s boy,” posed one of the more difficult obstacles. Following the publication of Clinton’s Memorial, Governor Tompkins was eager to gain support from the westerners in Holland Land Company country, which would have made him pro-canal. On the other hand, Peter Porter was one of Tompkins’s most powerful supporters in the west, and Porter remained adamantly in favor of the Ontario route. Tompkins chose to resolve this dilemma by equivocating. In a speech on February 2, 1816, for example, he began with enthusiastic support for road building; then he turned to the canal and proceeded to talk out of both sides of his mouth.
Clinton could not contain his wrath. He had already characterized Porter as “a tool and a dupe” and, in super-Clintonian language, he depicted Tompkins as “destitute of literature, science, and magnanimity—a mere creature of accident and chance, without an iota of real greatness.”7 When Tompkins subsequently recommended to the legislature that they employ the inmates of state prisons in erecting fortification, repairing the roads, or in constructing canals, Clinton lost all patience. “If this is not a full exposure of the cloven foot of hostility, I know not what is,” he declaims, accusing Tompkins of “a sneer of contempt.”8
Tompkins did not back down easily, even in the face of a lopsided vote of 91–18 in the Assembly giving the canal an official go-ahead. The bill stipulated that construction should begin along the relatively flat country between Rome on the Mohawk River and the Seneca River, a stretch of almost ninety miles centered on Syracuse. The bill also provided for financing this work by a tax on the lands bordering the canal by twenty-five miles on each side, plus the authority to borrow up to $2 million. But it was not to be.
When the bill came before the Senate, the leader of the opposition was Tompkins’s ally, Martin Van Buren, who would in time be known as the Red Fox of Kinderhook (after his hometown, a village south of Albany) or the Little Fox. Whatever handicaps his five-foot-two size bestowed, Van Buren overcame them by always standing erect, impeccable, and fastidiously dressed. The son of a farmer who was also a tavern keeper, Van Buren disguised his determination and ambition with great charm and amiability. He was a hard man to put down.
On this occasion, he complained that the plans of the canal commissioners lacked sufficient detail about the final route of the canal, as well as its projected construction and financing, for the legislature to approve such a large project. Van Buren exhorted his fellow senators to strike out the authorization for construction in the Assembly’s bill. They promptly obliged him, voting 19–6 to delay the work and calling for a brand-new set of surveys to support the detailed delineation of the proposed route. As a consolation prize, the Senate added a provision for $20,000 to pay for the additional research.*
The pro-canal forces in the Assembly made a final effort to rekindle their earlier victory but ultimately bowed to the wishes of the Senate on the last day of the session. The Tompkins forces had performed the neat trick of appearing to support the increasingly popular canal project while at the same time seeming more responsible than the impatient members of the Clintonian camp.9 As James Geddes wrote to Clinton, “After all the expectations raised…it is still ‘hope deferred.’”10
There was one more disappointment to come, and it was a familiar one—in Washington, D.C. The only surprise was that the New Yorkers actually expected a favorable outcome from Washington. Something did seem to be stirring early in 1816 when the U.S. Senate authorized the printing of 800 more copies of the Gallatin report of 1808, nearly as many as the 1200 printed originally. Then Representatives John Calhoun of South Carolina and Henry Clay of Kentucky sponsored a bill very much in the spirit of Gallatin’s work, establishing a fund for internal improvements that specifically provided $90,000 a year for twenty years for a canal across New York State.
It is ironic that Calhoun, a leader in the fatal move to secession in the 1860s, could at this moment call for binding the Republic “with a perfect system of roads and canals…. Neglecting them, we permit a low, sordid, selfish and sectional spirit to take possession…. We will divide, and in its consequences, will follow misery and despotism.”11
The Clay-Calhoun bill passed in the House by a razor-thin margin of two votes. Then victory eluded the New Yorkers once more, for Madison vetoed the bill. The president was still uttering concerns about the Constitution’s silence on any kind of authorization for federal financing of roads and “watercourses.” Was he so in Jefferson’s shadow that he had forgotten the concluding phrases of the Gallatin report, “The National Legislature alone…superior to every local consideration, is competent to the selection of such national objects”? Madison’s words also made a strange contrast to his deeds. On the same day he vetoed the canal legislation, he signed an appropriation bill of $100,000 for work on a road heading westward from Cumberland, Maryland (near the terminal of Washington’s Patowmack Canal), to the Ohio River, a project authorized in 1805 during Jefferson’s administration and now nearing completion.
Clinton’s temper boiled over once again. He described Madison’s veto as “a miserable sophism, contradicted by the whole course of his official conduct…. Lighthouses have been erected on the great lakes for the convenience and safety of inland trade. Are not canals equally conducive to the promotion of this important object?…Whatever gloss may be thrown over this reprehensible conduct of Mr. Madison, it requires no slight exercise of charity, not to connect it with jealousy of the growing prosperity of New-York.”12
Clinton need not have been so exercised. Madison’s veto was the last stand of the canal’s opponents.
The New York legislature’s canal bill of February 1816 contained positive features even as it postponed construction. In addition to the generous sum of $20,000 to finance the surveys, the bill appointed five new commissioners to replace the original group of seven. The legislature also directed the commissioners to come up with specific recommendations for raising the proposed $6 million to finance the canal. In order to link the Erie system to New England, the legislation instructed the commissioners to present plans for an additional canal running due north twenty-two miles from Albany to Lake Champlain, which forms the border between northern New York and Vermont. The Champlain Canal would be in effect a northern extension of the Hudson River.
The business at hand was no longer persuasion. Now the emphasis had shifted to the design, financing, and management of the actual construction of the canal. In selecting a new set of commissioners, therefore, the legislators focused on professional skills as well as political power—in contrast to the original group, where the balance of political alignments had dominated.
The five new commissioners included De Witt Clinton, Stephen Van Rensselaer, Joseph Ellicott, Myron Holley, and Samuel Young. Clinton was an obvious choice. Van Rensselaer offered huge wealth, first-class connections, and a fascination with science. He had spent long hours educating himself in the area, and was so devoted to it that in 1824 he founded an engineering school in his name, now known as Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy. Ellicott, the longtime resident agent of the Holland Land Company and an able and experienced surveyor, was probably the best informed man in the state about the geographical features and available labor force in the west. To Clinton, Ellicott was also a welcome replacement for Peter Porter. Young was a scholar who would become an early exponent of laissez-faire economics; his vocal championship of free private enterprise over government in later years would lead him to consider “internal improvements…eternal taxation.” At this stage, though, he was—like everyone else—still willing to accept public financing and management for a project as large as the Erie Canal.13 Young’s primary contribution was A Treatise on Internal Navigation, his authoritative survey of the canals in Britain and Holland. This lengthy work played a key role in educating the public and the politicians about the feasibility of the proposed canal. Holley, an assemblyman from the Finger Lakes region, was a staunch advocate of government-financed public improvements and an irrepressible promoter of the Erie Canal. Clinton was one of Holley’s most devoted admirers because “he improved his mind by reading, reflection, and conversation [and] devoted his whole time and attention, mind and body, to the canal…. Some of the most luminous…communications have proceeded from his pen.”14
But what about Gouverneur Morris, who had played such an important role as both inspiration and commissioner in years past? Morris’s naïve insistence on the inclined plane was only the beginning of constant friction and conflict with his colleagues. When he was charged with responsibility for finding sources of finance for the canal, Morris succeeded in displaying his lack of practical good sense once again. After locating a Frenchman in Paris to solicit potential lenders, Morris proposed that this agent should receive the proceeds of the loans and then personally remit the funds to Albany. Morris’s colleagues were incredulous that he would consider authorizing this individual to serve as principal rather than as an agent who would arrange for the lenders themselves to remit the money directly to New York. It might have been a different matter if Morris’s choice had been a partner in a bank of some kind, but he was operating all by himself. There was a real risk the man could commit the state as borrower and then abscond, or might die, without having turned a penny over to the authorities in New York. Morris just did not get it. He was deeply offended at the abrupt rejection of the efforts he had put into this project.15
