Wedding of the waters, p.32
Wedding of the Waters, page 32
Furthermore, strong positive social forces were also at work along the canal. Attendance at schools and the level of education was consistently higher in the canal counties than in the rest of New York State. According to one authority, the number of New Yorkers going to college in 1829 exceeded the number from New Jersey and Pennsylvania combined.31
At the same time, the canal’s revolutionary impact on the economy and the networking of a new nation in an expansionary mode shattered social structures as well as the ecology of the countryside. Here, too, the results surpassed expectations, but not always in a favorable direction. What psychologists like to describe as a sense of alienation took hold and soon affected large numbers of people in the area.
Although the New York economy remained primarily agricultural until well after the Civil War, the rapid growth of commerce and industry uprooted patterns reaching back two centuries. On the farm, the family had always been the center of economic activity. Now the traditional family structure began to crumble as men went to work in the new factories, mills, stores, and offices, leaving their women at home. Or the women, and occasionally the children, also went out to work as the manufacture of textiles moved from the spinning wheel at home to the mill-powered factories along the route of the Erie Canal.32 By the 1830s, children accounted for more than a quarter of the workforce on the canal itself, working long hours as drivers who handled the horses and mules or doing menial tasks on the boats, like scrubbing the decks and keeping the lines unsnarled.33 A resident of the town of Watervliet near Albany—the original home of the Shaker religion—testified in 1839 to the canal board that “the Boys who Drive the horses I think I may safely say that these boys are the most profain [sic] beings that now exist on the face of this whole erth without exception.”34
The canal towns developed into veritable seaports, with piers, cargo forwarders, mercantile establishments, and a profusion of grog shops; one report counted more than fifteen hundred of these enterprises along the banks of the canal.35 Although the advertising by boat companies emphasized the sobriety and good behavior of their crews, a dark and boisterous side of life was soon flourishing among the canawlers and in the taverns. In 1831, the Rochester Observer proposed that the canal should be renamed “the Big Ditch of Iniquity.”36
Herman Melville was so horrified by the behavior of the canawlers in the 1840s that he devoted a long passage to it in Moby-Dick, with Captain Ahab protesting that, “Through all the wide contrasting scenery of those noble Mohawk counties; and especially, by rows of snow-white chapels…flows one continual stream of Venetianly corrupt and often lawless life. There’s your true Ashantee, gentlemen; there howl your pagans.”37 Was it any wonder that a New York State report of about the same date could declare that a quarter of the inmates at Auburn prison had “followed the canals.”38
This environment, and the whole sense of something brand-new and unproven, would in time provoke extreme responses among religious fanatics, reformers, and would-be social workers. The stretch of New York from the Hudson to Lake Erie came to be known as the Burned-Over District, combining images of “the fires of the forest and those of the spirit.”39
The most puritanical groups active in the Burned-Over District drew their numbers from the Yankee immigrants, the less educated and more restless New Englanders who came primarily from the western side of the region rather than the coastal areas. They began a fervid campaign for temperance, which reached the point where as distinguished a member of the community as Eliphalet Nott, president of Union College in Schenectady, could declare that alcohol in the stomach was vulnerable to spontaneous combustion that would burn the drinker to ashes.40
Heated controversies broke out over what was called sabbatarianism, or the movement to prohibit traffic movement on the Erie Canal on Sundays. The American Seaman’s Friend Society took a practical view of the importance of temperance and Sunday closings by pointing out that a sinful set of crews on the canal would be bad for business. Without “steady, honest, and respectable persons, of both sexes,” working on the canal, they argued, “the dregs of the community” would be working there and no respectable citizen would want to make use of it.41 The opponents of sabbatarianism took the exact opposite position by contending that Sunday closing would back up boats all along the length of the canal, and, even worse, it would be a prescription for the canawlers to take advantage of twenty-four hours of idleness to get drunk and stay drunk, and goodness only knows what other depravity might take over to fill the idle hours. The canal remained open around the clock despite the brouhaha, which lasted well into the 1840s, even though a few lines sought customers by boasting of their closing down on Sundays.
All of these changes coincided with what the historians describe as the Second Great Awakening—a powerful wave of revivalism and evangelism aiming to hasten the Second Coming of Christ. There was a plethora of fiery sermons, camp meetings attended by thousands, and a sudden increase in church attendance in the urban centers. Although this development provokes many patronizing comments in the literature on the canal, in fact it was testimony to the powerful democratic spirit in the area. The evangelists talked to the people and were of the people, stimulating rapid growth in the Baptist and Methodist churches while attendance declined at the older and more hierarchal congregations, such as the Congregational church.42
The coining of the term Burned-Over District for the Erie Canal area is sometimes ascribed to the most zealous, and probably most successful, of the evangelists, Charles Finney. Finney was a fiery preacher who gathered huge crowds to hear him preach virtue with a capital V. Finney underscored the urgency of carrying the moral word to the thousands of dissolutes living and working along the banks of the Erie Canal. He spent about ten years in the area but then, in the summer of 1835—despite realizing that he would greatly miss the excitement of preaching to his large and responsive audiences—Finney became a theology professor at Oberlin College in Ohio. He accepted the Oberlin offer only under the stipulation that the faculty should be allowed to receive “colored people” on the same conditions as whites and that discrimination of any kind on account of race would be prohibited. Oberlin, then just two years old, was the first college in America to accept African-American students and would also become the first to go coeducational.
The most famous of the religious leaders associated with Erie Canal country was Joseph Smith, who inaugurated the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the Mormons. Smith was a Vermonter, born in Sharon in 1805 to a family who regularly saw visions, heard heavenly voices, and believed in miraculous cures. When he was about ten years old, the Smith family moved from Vermont to Palmyra, on the canal about twenty-five miles southeast of Rochester.
Although he was given to both visions and epilepsy as a child, Smith was able to recover from the illness and became a crystal gazer with a “peepstone” to help him and his father discover hidden treasures. On September 21, 1823, he claimed later, the angel Moroni appeared to him three times to tell him that the Bible of the western continent was buried nearby, at a spot now known as Mormon Hill. Four years after that, Smith reported he had dug up a stone box containing his “gold bible.” As he could read but did not know how to write, he dictated the Book of Mormon to his wife and several associates in 1830, which was then printed in an edition of five thousand copies. Not long after, the Church of Jesus Christ was formally established nearby at Fayette. Persecution began almost at once, driving Smith and his group out of New York and across the border into Ohio.
More intense and persistent persecution attacked the Catholics, whose numbers increased as German and Irish immigrants continued to move into western New York. As immigrants, the Catholics were often willing to work at wages lower than the amounts earned by men born in America. In 1834, Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor and painter, published a series of letters in the press claiming that the pope, in cooperation with unnamed European powers, was planning to subvert American society by encouraging immigration.43 All this opposition accomplished little: at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1860, Catholicism was the single largest denomination in New York and in the nation at large.
Bigotry struck at the center of New York State politics in September 1826, when William Morgan, a Mason originally from Rochester, published in the Batavia Advocate what he claimed were the secret rituals of the order. This betrayal provoked the local Masons to attempt to set fire to the publisher’s shop and then to have Morgan arrested on trumped-up charges. Although Morgan was soon released from jail, he was kidnapped as he left the prison and was never seen again; it was rumored that he had been tied to weighted cable and dropped into the Niagara River where it joins Lake Ontario.44
Because of widespread convictions that Masons practiced secret, evil rituals at their meetings—although the Masons insist that their so-called secrets are solely used as a ceremonial way of demonstrating that one is a Freemason—anti-Masonic movements had always been present to some degree all over the United States. Now the tendencies toward persecution were fueled by the intense emotional environment of the Burned-Over District. Crowds all across the state broke out in wild and noisy protests demanding the destruction of the Masonic order. These movements became veritable crusades and soon turned into anti-Masonic political organizations, claiming that Masonic influences dominated and were corrupting both local governments and the state legislature. Charles Finney later asserted that the hysteria forced just about all the lodges in western New York to shut down.
Two years later, anti-Masonic political activity in New York centered on Andrew Jackson’s membership in the Masons and the powerful Van Buren party’s support for Jackson’s run for the presidency. In an odd twist to this story, Van Buren now found himself on the same side as his old nemesis De Witt Clinton, but Clinton did not live to see the results of the forthcoming contest.
Jackson succeeded in the presidential election of 1828, and his ally Van Buren was elected governor of New York. Jackson squeaked through with less than 51 percent of the popular vote nationally, while Van Buren earned three thousand fewer votes than the combined votes of his two opponents. As Jackson and his faithful New York ally had been very popular before the excitement erupted over Morgan’s disappearance, these election results in calmer times would in all likelihood have turned out to be much more one-sided victories for both men.
None of the canal’s most enthusiastic advocates, nor any of its more skeptical supporters, ever promised that a channel of high virtue and social stability would be constructed across New York State. The primary vision was Elkanah Watson’s prediction in 1791 of “a water communication of several thousand miles [to] be opened from the Atlantic, to the most extensive inland navigation to be found in any other part of the world…. Suffice it to say, the [result] would be more precious than if we had encompassed the [Bolivian gold] mines of Potosí.”45
The key to Watson’s vision was in its final words. In the end, the Erie Canal was about creating a network that would be the equivalent of a gold mine for people seeking to earn great profits from business, money, trade, and industry. As the French foreign minister had observed about Americans as far back as 1785, “These people have a terrible mania for commerce.”46 Most Americans shared George Washington’s concern about uniting a nation, but even he had emphasized the importance of trade and commerce in achieving that vital objective.
On that score, the canal delivered everything that could be hoped for. As Hawthorne had predicted, the route of the Erie Canal would indeed turn into “one thronged street, from Buffalo to Albany.”
| CHAPTER 19 |
THE PRODIGIOUS ARTERY
In his Memorial of 1816, De Witt Clinton had predicted that the Erie Canal would “convey more riches on its waters than any other canal in the world,” 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.” Just nine years later, this far-reaching vision was about to become a reality.
The Erie Canal would transform New York into the Empire State, standing on what Clinton had portrayed as “this exalted eminence.”* The national impact of the canal was even greater. The dramatic reduction in travel time on an east-west route into the heartland of the country was an imperative for building a great nation across a huge and fertile continent, where trade, money, and business were rapidly becoming second nature. This narrow ribbon of ditch, less than 375 miles long, provided the spark, the flashpoint, and the inspiration for a burst of progress in America that would eventually coin the buzzwords of the early twenty-first century: economic growth, urbanization, national unity, globalization, networking, and technological innovation.
It was no coincidence that the Erie Canal inspired the route of the very first steam railroad in the United States, the Mohawk & Albany, which opened for business in 1831 between Albany and Schenectady, pulled by a locomotive sporting the name De Witt Clinton on its coal car. Although only sixteen miles long, the Mohawk & Albany took passengers in one hour past the twenty-seven locks and a full day’s travel needed to cover this distance by the canal.
In time, the railroads would eclipse the Erie Canal and the complex network of canals it inspired across the country from Chicago to the eastern seaboard, but it would be a long time. Steam mattered more in powering the boats on the Great Lakes, which brought population to the lake ports and enhanced the connection between the Erie Canal and the lands farther west. And well before the railroads could make a difference, a major innovation in networking would arrive: Samuel F. B. Morse’s telegraph lines, which began to weave their way across the nation in 1844, along the Erie Canal and along the new railroad lines as well. The flood of information pouring at breathtaking speed across those telegraph wires radically collapsed both time and distance.
However, as late as 1852, thirteen times more freight tonnage was carried on an enlarged Erie Canal than on all the railroads in New York State.1 This huge disparity reflects the mix of business in the early years of the railroads, which was only incidentally to carry merchandise and primarily to transport passengers under more comfortable conditions than the crowded and often disagreeable conditions aboard the packets. The railroad system in its early days was not sturdy enough to carry the heavy bulk of grain and timber that sailed with so little effort on the waters of the Erie Canal.2
Consequently, the canal continued to put up stiff competition even as the railroads matured. When tolls were abolished in 1882, the Erie Canal was serving over twenty million people annually and had produced revenues of $121 million since 1825, more than quadruple its operating costs.3 And it was still going strong.
After a significant enlargement in the 1840s, the canal went through a second and far more impressive enlargement at the turn of the century, when total freight traffic exceeded six million tons—triple the volume in 1860.* The moving spirit in this massive project was none other than George Clinton, grandson of De Witt Clinton and the namesake of De Witt’s beloved uncle. This George earned the title of “Father of the Barge Canal” for his contribution.4
Once again, New York State turned to the federal government for financing, as it had at the very beginning of the Erie Canal, and once again was disappointed. Governor Theodore Roosevelt was not to be deterred, proclaiming, “We [New Yorkers] cannot afford to rest idle while our commerce is taken away from us, and we must act in the broadest and most liberal spirit if we wish to retain the State’s supremacy…. While giving all weight to the expense involved, we should not be deterred from any expenditure that will hold the supremacy of which we are all justly proud.”5
Financed by a bond issue of $101 million—the equivalent of a billion dollars in today’s money—digging on the enlarged Erie began in 1905 and continued for thirteen years. This was more than fifteen times the cost of the original Erie Canal. It was also almost double the time required for its construction from 1817 to 1825, even though very powerful steam shovels and explosives had long since replaced the hand shovels and blasting powder of 1817. When completed, the new canal could carry huge barges with a draft of 10 feet, 250 feet long, and 25 feet wide, towed by steam-powered tugboats on an uninterrupted waterway between the Atlantic Ocean and Buffalo, leading to the Great Lakes and the Midwest.†
By 1951, annual freight traffic on the barge canal had risen to 5.2 million tons. Today, the railroad is a much less significant competitor than the St. Lawrence Seaway as well as the New York State Thruway, which extends like a continuous ribbon from New York to Buffalo. Business on the barge canal has dwindled to almost nothing other than pleasure boaters and an occasional freight shipment of modest size.
But when the Erie Canal opened for business in 1825, it was ready to play a critically important role in the economic development of what was, in today’s parlance, still a clearly underdeveloped country. The canal provided a fantastic wealth-creation machine for the powerful forces of economic change at work in the United States, motivated by the unquenchable passion of Americans for money and business and by their impatience to get ahead. This set of attitudes was well summed up by the play on words Laissez nous faire! (let’s go).6
After an American visit in the mid-1830s (one that sounds remarkably like a visit to the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century), the French economist Michael Chevalier observed that work in this country “goes on à l’américaine, that is to say, rapidly…. Here all is circulation, motion, and boiling agitation. Experiment follows experiment; enterprise follows enterprise.”7 Like most foreign visitors of the era, he took a trip on the Erie Canal—“simple as a work of art, prodigious as an economic artery”—and was struck by the restlessness of Americans he encountered there. “The full-blooded American,” he reports, “has this in common with the Tartar, that is he is encamped, not established, on the soil he treads upon.”8
