Wedding of the waters, p.30
Wedding of the Waters, page 30
There were two notable killjoys among the celebrations. At Rome and Schenectady, the citizens claimed their towns had been short-changed by the design of the canal and expressed their displeasure by a notable absence of toasts, gunfire, cheers, and feasts.
At Rome, the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company had built a canal in the 1790s right through the middle of town, but the engineers on the Erie Canal determined that a route running along the outskirts would be more efficient. The frustrated Romans were convinced the canal commissioners had treated them unjustly, and they took the occasion of the Wedding of the Waters to make their sentiments clear. At eleven o’clock on the morning of Saturday, October 29, they formed the usual uniformed parade in front of the usual hotel with the usual bands and the usual artillery activity, but the rear of the parade featured four men supporting a black barrel filled with water from the old canal. Marching to muffled drums, the four men escorted their barrel to the new canal, where they unceremoniously dumped its contents.
Having expressed their view of the matter in such eloquent fashion, the citizens of Rome turned around and joined in the spirit of the lively celebration under way. A large throng gathered at the hotel for dinner and toasts, including a toast for the Erie Canal, “to whom honor is due.” When the flotilla from the west arrived on Sunday, Rome’s city fathers received De Witt Clinton and the other officials with “the usual courtesies”—but the visit lasted only about an hour, then the boats departed to a more gracious reception at Utica.
Schenectady had similar complaints about the canal’s route. The leading newspaper even proposed greeting the Clinton party with a funeral procession or some other demonstration of mourning. Nobody went that far, but Schenectady made no preparations for a large-scale reception. When the boats came into sight about three o’clock on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 1, the principal citizens respectfully welcomed the governor and lieutenant governor and provided them with a dinner at the main hotel, but the crowds were silent. The occasion developed into a kind of replay of “the gloomy interval” the commissioners had experienced in Schenectady in 1810. An hour later, the company reboarded the boats and, in a dark and dreary night, continued on their way into the formidable sequence of locks by which the canal descends into the Hudson valley.
At 10:30 a.m. the next morning, Wednesday, November 2, Clinton and his companions arrived at Albany and passed through the last lock of the Erie Canal before entering the Hudson River. Just a week had elapsed since the explosive departure from Buffalo—and the guns here were just as busy: twenty-four cannon on the pier fired a grand salute as the Seneca Chief and her companions left from the last lock and entered the basin leading to the Hudson. The Albany Daily Advertiser caught the spirit of Clinton’s arrival in Albany: “It was not a monarch which they hailed, but it was the majesty of genius supported by a free people that rode in triumph and commanded the admiration of men stout of heart and firm of purpose.”4
The Albany basin was jammed with canal boats and a huge gathering of cheering spectators massed along the wharves, the bridges, and the shoreline. After the line of boats reached the southernmost bridge across the basin, the Clinton contingent went ashore to be received by a welcoming committee that included every available local official and even delegates from the national government in Washington, including Secretary of State Henry Clay, Chief Justice John Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court, Attorney General William Wirt, and high-ranking military men.
Accompanied by a long parade featuring carts loaded with western produce, the honored guests and their innumerable hosts walked through Albany to the Assembly chamber. Here the scene was highlighted with portraits of both De Witt Clinton and his uncle George, as well as an enormous full-length portrait, The Father of his Country, of George Washington, on top of which a carved bird of victory grasped a shot of lightning. A large chorus and full orchestra proceeded to perform as a prelude to the inevitable speeches. The keynote, by a man named William James, contrasted the primitive conditions in New York before 1817 with the striking improvements over the past eight years. James’s vivid description was full of flowery language, like “the dismal and savage trackways…through forbidding forests, where now stand…flourishing towns…celebrated for the elegance and refinement of their inhabitants, the grandeur of their scenery [and] seats of learning.”
Then everyone returned to the bridge, which had been converted into a gothic cathedral, with pointed arches 14 feet high and pilasters capped by gilded gothic turrets. Elaborate lines of shrubbery decorated the sides of the bridge and the arches. Farther on, there were three circular arches topped by huge signs reading “GRAND ERIE CANAL,” “JULY 4TH, 1817,” and “OCTOBER 26TH, 1825.” A vast tent stretched beyond these arches, containing two lines of tables, each 150 feet long, to accommodate six hundred guests.
The aisle was wide enough for another procession to march through the area. And then the guests could finally be seated and begin to enjoy “plenty of the ‘ruby bright’ wines of the best vineyards of Europe,” which must have been mighty welcome by that time. The festivities continued on into the evening, when there was an elaborate theater performance of odes, a full drama, and a canal scene with locks, including horses and boats actually passing across the stage.
Thursday morning turned out to be one of those gleaming and luminous days, ideal for blessing the very first boats about to complete the voyage by uninterrupted waterway from Buffalo to New York City and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. The crowds along the shores at Albany were even larger than on the preceding day, with every dock, store, and vessel full of shouting multitudes.
The nautical procession to New York got under way at ten o’clock. Here there were no towpaths, so the canal boats were pulled down the river by a line of seven steamboats decorated with colorful banners and streamers fluttering in the wind, each carrying a brass band and overflowing with passengers. William Stone, a man of his own time rather than ours, greatly admired “the large columns of steam rushing from the fleet, rising majestically upwards, and curling and rolling into a thousand fantastic and beautiful forms.”
While the steamer Chancellor Livingston took the Seneca Chief in tow, the Saratoga, a small steamboat capable of higher speeds than the others, served as a tender to transport passengers of the other boats to and from the landing places. Between stops, the Saratoga “sported about like a dolphin—now in the wake of one boat, now along the side of another, and now shooting a-head of the whole.” As the flotilla moved down the Hudson, additional small steam vessels joined the Saratoga in darting back and forth and around the majestic line of boats heading to the city, until a total of twenty-two gaily decorated steamers had joined the procession.
As the naval parade sailed down the broad river, with its high banks covered by the rich foliage of autumn, they were greeted by the usual muskets, the cannon carefully placed to signal their arrival, the bands, and the shouts. Evening was approaching as they passed Hyde Park, where bonfires, rockets, and other illuminations spiced the standard trappings of the reception. At West Point, the greeting was even noisier, with a blast of rockets plus a salute of twenty-four guns upon the arrival of the first boats and another volley of twenty-four guns when the last boat passed.
Once West Point was behind them, and all the official greeters had departed, the passengers aboard the boats were finally able to retire and get some rest. They would need it: the following day, Friday, November 4, they were scheduled to arrive in New York City waters before dawn to commence the climactic festivities of their voyage from Buffalo.
When the flotilla reached Ossining, about thirty miles from the northern end of Manhattan Island, they were met by a brand-new steamboat, the Washington, chartered for the occasion. The entire stern area of the ship was covered with the most elaborate kinds of decorations, flaming torches, and sculptured figures celebrating George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, agriculture, commerce, and even the whole globe of the earth.
A group of New York City officials stood in the bow, and one cried out to the Seneca Chief, “Whence come you, and where are you bound?” The answer came back: “From Lake Erie—and bound for Sandy Hook.” Now the boats started ahead and immediately encountered two British warships flying the American flag along with the usual Cross of St. George. An exchange of salutes by gunfire acknowledged the occasion.
By 8:30 a.m., the distinguished guests on the canal boats and their escorts joined the city officials at City Hall and proceeded immediately from there to the line of steamships at the foot of Whitehall Street, where the trip into the harbor would begin. One of the steamers involved was the Lady Clinton, an “elegant safety-barge” decorated with so much foliage it must have looked like a small forest.* The Lady Clinton was reserved for the ladies of the party. According to Stone, the captain “paid every attention to his beautiful charge; every countenance beamed with satisfaction, and every eye sparkled with delight.”
After stops at the navy yard on the East River and greetings from the crowds jamming the shores of Brooklyn Heights, the steamboats sailed past Castle Garden at the Battery and headed out toward Governors Island and Jersey City, and then, in calm seas and brilliant sunshine, sailed on out to Sandy Hook, at the very southern end of New York harbor. Here Clinton, Tallmadge, and a long procession of other dignitaries transferred to the Washington, while all the other boats and ships of varying sizes and shapes formed a great circle around her.
As the very first act of the ceremony, Clinton filled several bottles—noted as “made in America”—with the water from Lake Erie. Then he placed them in a cedar box specially prepared for the occasion by the famous woodworker Duncan Phyfe, to be transported back to France as a gift to the Marquis de Lafayette from the people of New York.
Clinton then performed the culmination, not just of the ceremonies on that day, but of all the years of hope and anger, progress and retreat, and design and redesign that led up to this moment: from the green keg with gilded hoops, he poured the Erie waters into the Atlantic Ocean. Using many fewer words than usual, he turned toward his companions and declared:
The solemnity, at this place, on the first arrival of vessels from Lake Erie, is intended to indicate and commemorate the navigable communication, which has been accomplished between our Mediterranean Seas and the Atlantic Ocean, in about eight years, to the extent of more than four hundred and twenty-five miles, by the wisdom, public spirit, and energy of the people of the state of New York; and may the God of Heavens and the Earth smile most propitiously on the work, and render it subservient to the best interests of the human race.
At that point, Dr. Samuel Mitchill, one of Clinton’s close friends, stepped up with thirteen bottles of water—one each from the Ganges, the Indus, the Nile, the Gambia, the Thames, the Seine, the Rhine, the Danube, the Mississippi, the Columbia, the Orinoco, the Rio de la Plata, and the Amazon—which he proceeded to empty into the Atlantic. Dr. Mitchill was followed by Cadwallader Colden, the extraordinarily verbose but distinguished grandson of his namesake, the man who had visited the Mohawk valley and farther west in 1724 and had enthused over the potentials there for east-west passages by waterway. Colden was there to give the mayor of New York his compendium on the history of canals and waterways, with special emphasis on the Erie Canal, a long but valuable history.
There were some present at these ceremonies who had attended a naval fête given in 1815 by the Prince of Wales on the Thames for the sovereigns of Europe in celebration of the defeat of Napoleon. According to these men, as Stone describes it, the spectacle in the waters of New York “so far transcended that in the metropolis of England as scarcely to admit of a comparison.”
While all this was going on out in the furthest reaches of the harbor, a giant parade was under way in Manhattan. As hawkers came out in force selling Clinton “kerchiefs” and Clinton hats, the procession began on Greenwich Street, moved through Canal Street, proceeded up Broadway to Broome Street and up to the Bowery at its farthest point, after which it turned back down and ended at City Hall. At its maximum, the line of participants was more than a mile and a half in length, the largest parade ever witnessed in America up to that time (and maybe since). In addition to military contingents, just about every social, occupational, and religious group in the city participated—bakers, tailors, sailors, teachers, and even a large representation from Clinton’s alma mater, Columbia University—each aiming to outdo the others in the elaborate character of their badges and in the beauty of their banners. Some groups had gigantic floats covered with rich Turkish or oriental carpets, with members of the sponsoring organization displaying how they pursued their daily activities.
As darkness fell, all the public buildings and main hotels were covered with brilliant illuminations, of which the brightest seems to have been the City Hotel on Broadway. That was most appropriate. The City Hotel had been the site of the mass meeting in December 1815, when the citizens rose up and instructed Clinton to prepare the memorial, insisting that the legislature authorize the construction of the Erie Canal to begin. There might never have been a canal without that meeting.
The citizens of Buffalo were not to be outdone by their fellow Americans at the eastern end of the canal. They had planned to follow the New York ceremony by performing it in reverse. Early on the morning of November 23, the Seneca Chief completed a triumphant return voyage on the canal, bearing a keg of Atlantic waters westward to Buffalo. At 10:00 a.m., Judge Samuel Wilkeson stepped to the bow of the boat to do the deed. Wilkeson had earned the honor as the most aggressive of Buffalo’s aggressive citizens in the struggle to be named the terminus of the canal. He emptied the keg of Atlantic waters into Lake Erie amid the cheers of the crowd and the explosions of the guns.
The Wedding of the Waters was now complete. Stone’s final paragraph to his narrative of these proceedings was right to the point:
The authors and the builders—the heads who planned, and the hands who executed this stupendous work, deserve a perennial monument; and they will have it. To borrow an expression from the highest of all sources, “the works which they have done, these will bear witness of them.” Europe already begins to admire, America can never forget to acknowledge, that THEY HAVE BUILT THE LONGEST CANAL IN THE WORLD IN THE LEAST TIME, WITH THE LEAST EXPERIENCE, FOR THE LEAST MONEY, AND TO THE GREATEST PUBLIC BENEFIT.
Weddings are only beginnings. America’s “Mediterranean Seas” were now wedded to the Atlantic Ocean–a big step toward the northwest passage Henry Hudson had been seeking more than two hundred years earlier—but what was life like after the honeymoon and the glow of this extraordinary wedding had worn off? How well did the marriage settle down to the routines of daily activities? New York State had made an enormous investment in the Erie Canal in terms of labor and reputation as well as in money. The time had arrived to receive the payoff, to evaluate the returns, and to observe the changing future.
PART V
| After the Wedding |
| CHAPTER 18 |
NO CHARGE FOR BIRTHS
The Erie Canal was an instant success. In 1826, the year after the Wedding of the Waters, about 7000 boats were operating on the canal, compared with 2000 boats when Lafayette toured New York in 1824 and 1825. Equally impressive, the canal commissioners could report that toll revenue was running in excess of $500,000, five times the interest due on the canal’s outstanding bonds.1 That was just the beginning. In 1837, the commissioners reported that the entire debt was repaid. This was one of the commissioners’ happier tasks as they continued to administer the canal in the years ahead.
But the swelling flow of freight and passengers was just part of the story. The canal became one of the wonders of the world. Travelers from all over the United States and Europe arrived to taste the enthralling experience of water travel, uphill and downhill, over nearly four hundred miles through dark forests and burgeoning towns. Expressed in the concepts of today’s world, people perceived the canal as a combination of Disneyland, the Grand Canyon, and a high-tech laboratory in Silicon Valley. Literary and theatrical celebrities like William Cullen Bryant, Edward Everett Hale, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Fanny Kemble all came to see the miracle of the age and pass judgment on it.
There is something wonderfully seductive—almost magical—about being pulled along an artificial river by a team of mules or horses.2 The gliding ride has a quality of calmness and quiet that no motorboat or sailboat can match. Nathaniel Hawthorne, touring the canal in 1835, was inspired to describe the boat ride in these lofty words: “Behold us, then, fairly afloat, with three horses harnessed to our vessel, like the steeds of Neptune to a huge scallop-shell, in mythological pictures. Bound to a distant port, we had neither chart nor compass, nor cared about the wind, nor felt the heaving of a billow, nor dreaded shipwreck, however fierce the tempest, in our adventurous navigation.”3
Hawthorne goes on to make a remarkable prediction: “Surely, the water of this canal must be the most fertilizing of all fluids; for it causes towns—with their masses of brick and stones…to spring up, till, in time, the wondrous stream may flow between two continuous lines of buildings, through one thronged street, from Buffalo to Albany.” Although most of the celebrities visiting the Erie Canal, and especially those from Britain, tended to be patronizing about the little towns grouping along the route of the canal, these towns soon had educational facilities and theaters as advanced as any in the country. Indeed, the canal itself set off a long sequence of plays, poems, and novels, serious as well as comic.*
