Wedding of the waters, p.8
Wedding of the Waters, page 8
For the rest of his life, Watson would assert that he was the first person to lay out the concept of the Erie Canal. He claimed he was assured by the knowledgeable people he encountered on a trip over part of the territory in the fall of 1788 that “no such idea existed at that time, otherwise than as we now contemplate balloon stages; or, what is more plausible, a great canal to unite the Pacific with the Atlantic Ocean, at the isthmus of Darien.”* His only concession was to admit the possibility that the idea might have occurred to “the enlarged mind” of Henry Hudson himself, had Hudson had a map of New York’s inland waters.12
The journey to New York in 1788 originated from a business trip to western Massachusetts, after which Watson decided to continue heading west to indulge in some sightseeing. He crossed over to Albany and headed up the Mohawk valley. The scenery was magnificent, with “the majestic appearance of the adjacent mountains, the state of advanced agriculture…and the rich fragancy [sic] of the air, redolent with the perfume of the clover, all combined to present a scene…[I was] not prepared to witness.”13 He was also impressed by the large numbers of settlers pouring in from “the Connecticut hive, with its annual swarms of industrious and enterprising immigrants, so highly qualified to overcome and civilize the wilderness.”14
There were problems, however, not the least of which was the lack of comfortable places for a night’s rest or a good meal. Watson also describes the roads as almost impassable, cluttered by broken bridges, logs, and stumps, to say nothing of mud so thick his horse sank knee-deep into the road at every step. At one point he encountered a band of Indians “drunk as lords,” looking like “so many evil spirits broken loose from Pandemonium…wild, frantic, almost naked, and frightfully painted.”15
When Watson reached the headwaters of the Mohawk and the marshy land of Wood Creek, he contemplated the likelihood that “a canal communication will be opened, sooner or later, between the great lakes and the Hudson.”16 The imposing prospect led to a further prediction, also to be realized, that the citizens of “the state of New-York have it within their power, by a grand stroke of policy, to divert the future trade of Lake Ontario and the great lakes above, from Alexandria and Quebec, to Albany and New-York.”17
Bad weather prevented Watson from continuing westward beyond Wood Creek, but his enthusiasm for the idea of a canal to the west was only beginning to flower. A year later, he moved from Rhode Island to Albany, in order to be closer to where he was convinced the action would soon begin to take place.
He described Albany at that moment as a most unattractive place, a hilly town with streets lacking pavements and ungraded, and no street lamps. The houses were equipped with long spouts that on rainy days poured water on the heads of unwary passersby. He was later to be known by some of the locals as “that infernal paving Yankee.”18 But he knew what he was about, for he was going to play a major role in converting this primitive village into a thriving and cosmopolitan center of commerce and trade.
| CHAPTER 5 |
“A CANAL TO THE MOON”
Elkanah Watson had seen enough to convince himself that a canal across New York State was feasible and would work economic miracles. But his irrepressible enthusiasm and impeccable contacts with the high and mighty were not enough to get the job done. The time had come to orchestrate political support, and that in turn meant preparing documentary evidence and credible witnesses to support his case.
In September 1791 he gathered a small contingent of influential friends and a staff of servants to accompany him from Albany on a six-week trip up the Mohawk and beyond, traveling wherever possible by water, on rivers and across lakes. The most important of his companions was Jeremiah Van Rensselaer, one of the largest landowners in the state and a resolute supporter of Watson’s plans. The terminus of the tour was at Geneva, which is situated on Seneca Lake, about ninety miles beyond Watson’s stopping point three years earlier at the headwaters of the Mohawk. At that point, having started from Albany, the group had covered about half of what would one day be the route of the Erie Canal.
Although some of the towns the travelers passed through had inns and occasionally churches and law courts, the countryside was more populated with fur-bearing creatures, fish, and eagles than with human beings.* The first national census of 1790 reported the total population of the state as only 340,000 people, including New York City, which worked out to a density of only 6¼ individuals per square mile; even this, however, was more than double the estimates for 1771 under the colonial regime.1 Nevertheless, more than a quarter of a century after Watson’s escorted tour, no town in western New York had a population greater than 6000 and most were less than 3000. Just a tenth of the eight million acres of land along the future route of the canal was under cultivation.2 We can only wonder how this sequence of sightseers, from Colden to Watson’s group, could pass through such a wilderness and still visualize how an extended waterway could create the tremendous economic development that lay ahead.
Watson set to work drafting a report of the trip as soon as he returned to Albany, explaining in detail everything they had seen and done. There was an extended catalog of the landscape, the attractive climate, the economic activity of the areas they visited, and estimates of the work needed to improve the navigability of the waterways they had traveled over.3 The group had been especially impressed by the abundant output of the farmlands and by the large salt deposits lying just to the north of the Finger Lake region. They expected both to make good use of improved waterway routes to the New York City area and to generate substantial tolls toward making the improvements on these waterways pay for themselves.
Watson summed up his case by asserting that the more he and his companions observed on their way west, the more convinced they became of the necessity to “assist nature” so that loaded boats could travel from the Hudson to the borders of New York State without interruption. Then he proceeded to turn up the volume: “The first impression will not fail to be heightened into a degree of enthusiasm, bordering on infatuation.”4
Watson was not a man to mince words. Nevertheless, there is some question as to how far his imagination reached. A careful reading of what he had to say suggests that his vision of a canal stretched only from Albany to Utica, about a third of the total distance out to Lake Erie. In later years, when the canal was already under construction and Watson was busy defending his view of himself as the first to propose a canal across New York State, he made a revealing confession in the course of recalling his trip west in 1791: “The utmost stretch of our views, was to follow the track of Nature’s canal [the rivers and lakes] and to remove natural or artificial obstructions; but we never entertained the most distant conception of a canal from Lake Erie to the Hudson. We should not have considered it much more extravagant to have suggested the possibility of a canal to the moon.”5 This sentence floats alone in all of his vast writings, with no hint of it before he revealed it and no mention of it in any subsequent work.
As soon as he had finished drafting his report, Watson arranged to meet with his Albany friend and neighbor State Senator Philip Schuyler at their favorite local tavern. By then, Schuyler was already a convert to the wonders of canals, having visited England in 1761 in the midst of the roaring canal boom unleashed by the success of the Bridgewater Canal. Now he was eager to help Watson in getting some action on the canal front in New York. As Schuyler was a war hero, a wealthy property owner, Alexander Hamilton’s father-in-law, and a member of an old Dutch family, he was the ideal member of the rich and famous to join Watson’s team.
Three days after receiving Watson’s report, Schuyler told Watson to prepare a second copy for a Mr. Lush, a member of the legislature, assuring Watson, with much enthusiasm, that he would do everything possible to get a canal law passed during that winter’s legislative session.6 Watson was prepared to go further, however. He submitted lengthy articles on the subject to the Journal and Patriotic Register in New York, the Albany Gazette, and, anonymously, the Albany Northern Centinel.
To top it all off, Schuyler arranged for Watson to send a long document to the legislature in December 1791, which Watson signed as “A CITIZEN.” Here Watson proclaimed that the configuration of the land and waters from the mouth of the Hudson north to the branches of the Mohawk and from thence to the “utmost limits of this state…are disposed by the Great Architect of the Universe, just as we would wish them.” Indeed, by merely opening a short canal between the headwaters of the Mohawk and the neighboring Wood Creek—over the Great Carrying Place or Wood Creek Carry—New York State could open a water communication from the Atlantic that would be the most extensive in the world. “Suffice it to say,” he concluded, “the [result] would be more precious than if we had encompassed the [Bolivian gold] mines of Potosí.”7
Watson’s eloquence was mighty, but the Great Architect of the Universe had been nowhere near as cooperative as Watson would have wanted his audience to believe. In 1804, Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College and an intrepid traveler through the northeastern United States, declared that navigation on the Mohawk was “so imperfect merchants often choose to transport their commodities along its banks in wagons.”8 And a report of 1818 from De Witt Clinton and the authorities in charge of building the Erie Canal would describe the Mohawk as a “serpentine route” where the entire waterway “became a portage” in the dry season.9 They would build an artificial waterway over the entire distance from Albany to Buffalo.
Yet, from the vantage point of 1791, improving the navigation of the Mohawk appeared as a compelling project because the payoff could be so enormous. Merchandise as well as humans traveling west from Albany had to begin by wagon instead of boat because no boat could mount the steep slopes to Schenectady, twenty-four miles away; this segment would require twenty-seven locks when the Erie Canal was built. The passage from Schenectady to Little Falls, sixty-two miles up the river, was manageable for small boats of limited capacity, although more than fifty shallow rapids, or “rifts,” would provide formidable obstacles. At Little Falls, another portage of over a mile was necessary as crews and passengers had to carry all the gear and all the cargo around the falls and over the hilly countryside. Beyond Little Falls, the forty miles westward to Rome involved another twenty-two sets of rapids. And after that, the westernmost reaches of the Mohawk turned into little more than a mushy creek.
Watson’s ringing phrases, accurate or not, seduced a willing audience. A navigable river all the way from Schenectady, or even Albany, to Rome would change the whole course of the nation. The legislature promptly passed the Mohawk Improvement Bill, which had been drafted and sponsored jointly by Senator Schuyler and Governor George Clinton, accompanied by the governor’s recommendation that the company established by the act be provided with “every fostering aid and patronage.”10 A sequence of bills established the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company to develop the route up the Mohawk and beyond to Lake Ontario and, if possible, as far west as the Finger Lakes.11 Another piece of legislation established a Northern Inland Lock Navigation Company to create a navigable waterway due north from the Hudson to Lake Champlain on the border of northern New York State and Vermont.*
Senator Schuyler was named president of both companies; the Western Company board of directors included Elkanah Watson and Thomas Eddy, a wealthy Quaker merchant and insurance agent deeply involved in social movements such as prison reform and public welfare.
Neither the Western Company nor the Northern Company considered its goal to be canal building. The word “navigation” in these contexts had long meant improving the navigability of the rivers and nothing more than that. Locks to circumvent major obstacles like waterfalls and rapids might be included, but only as devices to bypass rapids, falls, and long stretches of shallow water, with the river itself always as the primary route. This was essentially the structure of Washington’s Patowmack Canal Company, even though it contained the mighty word “canal” in its title. Nothing in the Mohawk Improvement Bill and its successors included any possibility of a point-to-point waterway fed by the river waters but otherwise completely separate and apart from them.
Each of the companies was authorized to take subscriptions for a total of one thousand shares at $25 a share, in addition to receiving a grant of $12,500 from the State.* The provisions for the shareholders provided for payments spread over time, as is customary in today’s venture capital investing: “The directors of the incorporation shall, from time to time, as occasion may require, call on the subscribers for additional moneys to prosecute the work to effect,” but then they added, “whence the whole sum for each share is left indefinite.”12 Not many venture capitalists today would accept that open-ended provision. On the bright side, the legislation provided for an annual dividend of 6 percent of the capital together with authority for the company to raise tolls until the profits were sufficient to cover that dividend. After attempting to guarantee some minimum amount of profitability, the provisions also set the dividend’s upper level at 15 percent.
Many of the subscribers were merchants, businessmen, and bankers from New York City. But fifteen out of the original thirty-six had lands along the Western Company’s route and stood to benefit from the project. Their participation was significant. Unlike the great landowners in Britain, who looked down their noses at “industry” while clinging to their pastoral enterprises, American landed aristocrats had a taste for the adventure of commercial enterprises.13
Despite the bright expectations, these investors were in no hurry to deliver the hard cash to which they had committed themselves. In an effort to galvanize more support, Schuyler announced in May 1792 that he would increase his own subscription from ten shares to one hundred. Schuyler also enlisted the participation of the famed financier and land speculator Robert Morris (no relation to Gouverneur) whose personal credit had financed a significant portion of the American Revolution. Morris had also served with distinction as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and had been a member of the first U.S. Senate.
There was never enough money, even with this high-powered backing. In the end, 743 out of the authorized 1000 shares were sold, but 240 of those were forfeited because their owners refused to meet the calls for additional capital. By 1801, the stockholders had been called nine times to increase their investments. The State had to donate an additional $10,000 in 1795 and then lend the company another $37,500 the following year. Total outlays for construction amounted to $400,000, but the investment was never a rewarding one. The company paid only two dividends in its lifetime, one of 3 percent in 1798 and another in 1813.
The novelty of the project and the lack of skilled personnel created problems from the start. Poor Schuyler had to appoint himself chief engineer, although he was suffering from gout and was still active in the State Senate.14 De Witt Clinton, one of Schuyler’s political opponents and then secretary to Governor George Clinton, his uncle, took a dim view of Schuyler’s decision and castigated Schuyler in a newspaper article as a “mechanic empiric…[who is] wasting the property of the stockholders.”15* Schuyler’s feelings may have been hurt by the intended insult—and he was doubtless fully aware of Clinton’s political ambitions—but he could hardly have disagreed. As he complained in 1793 to William Weston, a British engineer he hoped to employ, taking on this responsibility was a counsel of despair, for he was “without the least practical experience in the business.”16 Then Schuyler and Watson began to quarrel over Schuyler’s salary and Schuyler’s “tyrannical manner,” bringing to an end both a beautiful friendship and Watson’s active participation in the company’s affairs.17 Watson soon moved himself from New York to rural Massachusetts, where he would launch the first livestock and agricultural fairs, which developed into major annual events throughout New England.†
Meanwhile, the clearing of the Mohawk and the building of locks moved ahead despite the obstacles, the interruptions, and the inexperience of the designers, contractors, and work crews. More than four hundred men, recruited from Pennsylvania, Vermont, Connecticut, and Canada, worked on the project at a time, but the labor supply on the Mohawk was as stubborn an obstacle as it had been for Washington on the Potomac. Although the New Yorkers did not follow Washington in reverting to slavery to overcome that difficulty, they did employ Irishmen who emulated their fellow countrymen on the Potomac by engaging in riots against the local population.
The effort of building locks between Albany and Schenectady, which included bypassing the massive Cohoes Falls, was beyond the limited engineering skills available. This stretch would also pose a major challenge thirty years later when the Erie Canal itself was under construction. Work therefore started in a westerly direction from Schenectady, the true gateway to the Mohawk valley. The most significant improvements to navigation on the Mohawk were at Little Falls, sixty-two miles farther west, where the river fell over forty feet in three-quarters of a mile. The company bypassed the falls with five locks over a reach of about a mile, with each lock lifting boats by nine feet. It also built two miles of canal with two locks near Rome to fulfill Watson’s dream of a connection between the Mohawk headwaters and Wood Creek, cutting the travel time at this crucial link from a day to an hour and opening the way by water to Oneida Lake and thence up to Lake Ontario.
