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Wedding of the Waters, page 40
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———. Men and Times of the Revolution or Memoirs of Elkanah Watson, Including Journal of Travels in Europe and America from 1777 to 1842, Edited by His Son Winslow Watson. New York: Dana & Company, 1856.
Werner, Walter, and Steven Smith. Wall Street. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
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ARTICLES AND ONLINE RESOURCES
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| ILLUSTRATION CREDITS |
Part I: Little Falls by William Rickarby Miller (1818–1893), 1852, watercolor on paper, Albany Institute of History & Art, 1946.69.
Part II: View on the Erie Canal by John William Hill (1812–1879), 1829, watercolor on paper, I. N. Phelps Stokes Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
Part III: “Canal at Little Falls” detail of a map by R. H. Pease, 1851, courtesy the Historic American Engineering Record, The Library of Congress.
Part IV: Lockport, New York, from Building the Nation by Charles Carleton Coffin, 1882. Courtesy the Library of Congress.
Part V: Before the Days of Rapid Transit by Edward Lamson Henry (1841–1919), c. 1900, color photographic process on paper, Albany Institute of History & Art, x1940.600.56.
*The derivation of this expression is lost in the mists of the past. It appears to have been in general use by 1820, although there are scattered mentions of it earlier than that. For more detail, see Milton Klein, The Empire State, p. xix.
*The quotation is from Watson’s Memoirs, published in 1856. Pages 164–66 of this volume contain an extended and vividly detailed description of all aspects of the Bridgewater Canal in the 1770s.
*Manchester, as probably the world’s largest importer of raw cotton, has always been a strongly pro-American community. A statue of Abraham Lincoln stands in one of the city parks.
*Hudson is often misidentified as Dutch, because the Dutch financed this particular expedition and referred to him as Hendryk.
*The Mohawk River is named after the local Indians, but the word “Mohawk” means “cannibal” in their language.
*One of these structures, of uncertain date, was named Fort Pentagon, anticipating by over two hundred years the name of a rather larger and more imposing North American military establishment.
*Here, too, Washington and Jefferson were in enthusiastic agreement: Jefferson would later characterize Rumsey as “the most original and the greatest mechanical genius I have ever seen.”
†And a great story it is! Washington was to figure in this story as well. For the full history, I heartily recommend James Flexner’s Steamboats Come True, a great read on many levels.
*In 2005 dollars, this is approximately $1,125,000.
*Daily consumption of water in New York City today is approximately 1.4 billion gallons.
†Burr’s bank was called the Bank of the Manhattan Company because the Manhattan Company had been Burr’s water enterprise, and the bank was an outgrowth of that.
*In 1778, Watson had predicted a population in the United States of 100 million by 1900, but the actual result was 76 million—still, this was a striking projection to have been made only two years after the Battle of Bunker Hill.
*Watson’s group spent their first night just west of Schenectady at an inn known as the Mabee House. This tiny structure and neighboring enormous barn were built in the seventeenth century and remained in the same family until the 1970s, when the property was donated to New York State as a most unusual and interesting tourist attraction.
*One of the surveyors for the Northern Inland Lock Navigation Company was Marc Isambard Brunel, later to become world famous for designing a tunnel under the Thames in London.
*The New York State Museum Web site on the Internet has designs of these shares, providing rare glimpses of the boats in use as well as the construction of the locks at the time.
*At a later date, Clinton was more generous to Schuyler. Still insisting Schuyler was “not a practical engineer,” Clinton, writing pseudonymously, went on to say, “Without his talents and services, [the Western Company] would never have been commenced and prosecuted.” See Tacitus, The Canal Policy of the State of New York, p. 18.
†Watson was convinced that by encouraging competition among farmers, he could make a significant contribution toward improving both the quality and the quantity of New England’s agricultural production and stimulate American industry at the same time. The appearance of prizewinning animals and awards to the finest produce at Watson’s fairs attracted increasing attention and had a lasting influence on agricultural practice in the northeast United States. On occasion, Watson would display broadcloth made up by “the best artists in the country” and woven from the wool of his fairs’ prizewinning sheep. See Watson, History of the Rise, Progress and Existing Condition…, pp. 10 ff., for a long and interesting account of this ambitious effort to stimulate economic development.
*For an extended and stimulating survey of these developments, see Henry Adams, The Life of Albert Gallatin, pp. 350–55.
*Latrobe’s charming two-page “Postcript” [sic] on the attractions of “rail roads” (pulled by horses), written in 1808, is worth the price of admission. Latrobe sees only a limited future for this device, however, because “the sort of produce which is carried to our markets is collected from such scattered points, and comes by such a diversity of routes, that rail roads are out of the question as to carriage of common articles (Gallatin, p. 107).”
*Not quite. Fulton’s engineering drawings are small masterpieces.
*Onondaga County sits just about halfway between Albany and Buffalo, with Syracuse—first organized as a town by Joshua Forman in 1825—at its center.
*General Schuyler and the New York State authorities had tried their best to lure the Holland Land Company into investing in the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company. The story is a long one, but the company never did invest in the Western Company. For full details, see Nathan Miller, The Enterprise of a Free People, pp. 26–29.
*Is this where the American automobile companies got the idea?
*At the time of the Revolution, Virginia, with almost 700,000 people, was by far the most populous state, nearly double Pennsylvania, which was in second place, and far ahead of New York.
*A quotation from Joseph Addison’s 1713 tragedy Cato.
*John Jay, upon hearing of the accident, wrote to a friend that he wished Morris “had lost something else.” See Richard Brookhiser, Gentleman Revolutionary, p. 61.
*Women were smoking in public places in 1810!
*A marquee is in all likelihood a tent, although it may have been a simple stand to provide shade.
*The reference to both shillings and cents in one transaction was not unusual in those days. Before 1788, each of the colonies, and then the states, had its own currency, denominated in English pounds, shillings, and pence but not 1:1 with British pounds. The customary exchange rate between the U.S. dollar, launched in the early 1790s, and the old New York State shilling was 1:8. Hence, the shilling, or twelve pence, the commissioners paid for the basket of eggs was equal to 12.5¢ in U.S. currency. (I am grateful to Professor Richard Sylla of the Stern School at New York University for this explanation.)
*As the years went by, and American industry and commercial trade developed, these views would change. By the 1830s, the voices for operation of public improvements by private industry became more strident, based on concerns about public corruption and expansion in public debts. See Nathan Miller, The Enterprise of a Free People, chapter 1, and Ronald Shaw, Erie Water West, pp. 308 and 398.
*The states were where the action was: beside the examples of Clinton and Tompkins, John Jay had resigned from the U.S. Supreme Court in 1795 to run for governor of New York. He won.
*New England would even threaten to break up the union. In October 1814, delegates from the New England states gathered in Hartford, where they seriously considered secession and proposed constitutional amendments to redress what they considered unfair advantages held by the South under the Constitution.
*The expression “ship of the line” refers to a warship with at least two gundecks and designed to have a place in the line of battle.
*In his History of the Canal System of the State of New York, Noble E. Whitford remarks, “This agitation brought before the Legislature an appeal from more than one hundred thousand petitioners to proceed at once with the work of making a canal.” The population of New York State at that time was about one million.
*Similar hurdles faced the development of the American railroads in their early days. As late as 1874, the Times of London would describe the American railroads as running from “Nowhere-in-Particular to Nowhere-at-All.” The financial historian Carter Goodrich has pointed out that this accusation was only half true. In the typical case—and the Erie Canal was typical in this instance—the project started somewhere and “ended at a point which was perhaps nowhere when the project started, but which was to become an important as a result of the improvement itself.” See Goodrich, Government Promotion of American Canals and Railroads, p. 10 and fn. 18.
†The census of 1810 showed 23,416 people in western New York. The census of 1820 showed 108,981. As there were no interim counts, we do not know the exact number for 1817.
‡Rough estimates suggest that nominal gross domestic product in 1815 was in the area of $700,000,000, or about $8.5 billion in today’s money; today’s GDP is in the area of $10 trillion. I have derived these estimates based upon data on the War of 1812 in William D. Nordhaus, The Economic Consequences of a War in Iraq. Nordhaus reports that the War of 1812, stretching over three years, cost $90 million, so it was much more costly than the Erie Canal.
*$20,000 in 1816 is the equivalent of about $300,000 in current purchasing power.
*The verb “level” refers here to a surveyor’s measurements to find the heights of different points in a piece of land or an extensive area.
*The commissioners also provided detailed proposals for financing and for management of the canal’s funds. For more detail, see Nathan Miller, The Enterprise of a Free People, pp. 65–71 and ch. 5.
*One of Clinton’s more interesting achievements as governor was to establish the second Thursday of November as a day of thanksgiving and prayer—a measure New York’s first governor, John Jay, had been unable to accomplish because of claims he was trying to enlist the religious prejudices of the people in his favor.
*Equity, even in its more limited modern sense, is still distinguished by the principle that no wrong should be without an adequate remedy.
*Chittenango is the birthplace of L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz. A yellow brick road runs through the center of town.
†In a nice bit of irony, the site of Elisha Carey’s tavern is now an engineering school.
*When construction by the United States began on the Panama Canal in 1904, the mosquito attacks were so violent and yellow fever and malaria so prevalent that the Americans employed over a thousand men just to cut grass and clear brush in order to make the working environment as inhospitable as possible to mosquitoes. See David McCullough, The Path Between the Seas, p. 573.
*Here are some guidelines to provide perspective for the figures throughout this chapter. In terms of purchasing power, $1 in 1815 bought the equivalent of about $12 today. Nominal gross domestic product (GDP, or total national production of goods and services) in 1815 was $700 million; today it is over $11 trillion. GDP per capita today is more than thirty times greater than in 1815. The War of 1812 consumed about 13 percent of GDP over three years. On a per capita basis, the Revolution had been four times as costly. At this writing, the war in Iraq is taking less than 1 percent of GDP. Estimates (except for Iraq) from William D. Nordhaus, The Economic Consequences of a War in Iraq.
*Luckily, employees at the State Department had already fled with a mass of important documents, including the Declaration of Independence and the full record of deliberations at the Constitutional Convention.
*The panic of 1814 was an almost perfect echo of what happened in Britain on February 1797, when the comic-opera arrival of three French frigates in the harbor of the tiny fishing village of Fishguard, Wales, set off such a panic demand for gold that the Bank of England itself had to suspend convertibility—go off the gold standard, in other words—along with the rest of the banking system. See my The Power of Gold, pp. 188–89.
