WEDDING OF THE WATERS
The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation
By Peter L. Bernstein. Norton. 448 pp. $24.95
Several years ago, spending a few days in western New York on business, I left my motel room in Rochester and struck off on a late afternoon walk. Following nothing more reliable than my nose, I took a few sidewalks to a grassy patch, struck off in what seemed a promising direction, and suddenly found myself on a well-worn path that ran alongside a straight, narrow body of water. As a sign soon informed me, it was the Erie Canal, one of the most storied and influential transportation systems in American history, its old path for the horses that pulled canal barges now reduced to little more than a pleasant route for joggers, hopelessly outmoded by contrast with Interstate 390, the Genesee Expressway, which runs parallel about a mile to the south.
Do an Internet search on the canal and you'll find loads of stuff, much of it fascinating and richly illustrated, but apart from a few stretches where it still functions as a working waterway, the canal is now little more than a tourist attraction for people with a taste for transportation nostalgia. At a time when goods travel between east and west by freight trains, trucks and -- when speed matters -- airplane, it's difficult to imagine just how revolutionary the canal was when it opened in October 1825 after, as Peter L. Bernstein puts it, "nine decades of successive explorations, passionate speeches, eloquent pamphlets, authoritative surveys, distinguished commissions and elaborate reports." The canal transformed New York "into the Empire State," Bernstein writes:
"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."
That's saying a lot, but Bernstein makes a persuasive case for it. A great deal has been written about the canal but relatively little in recent years, so Wedding of the Waters is a valuable history lesson for people -- i.e., most of us -- who have forgotten about the canal or never knew about it in the first place. Bernstein, an economist who has written a number of books that attempt with considerable success to address complex subjects for a general readership, gives the story of the canal's conception and construction all the drama it deserves, and -- as is suggested by the quotation above -- puts it into larger perspective. Almost certainly it is no exaggeration to say that the United States wouldn't be what it is today had it not been for the Erie Canal; it was the Interstate Highway System of the 19th century, and its impact was comparable if not even greater.
What's remarkable, in hindsight, is that the idea of the canal stirred so much opposition and was so long in coming to fruition. Once it was finally built, "Americans perceived the canal as an expression of faith in the potentials of a free society, a message of hope for a great young nation on the move," but in the decades before that, opposition was fierce and, as Bernstein points out, not without foundation. Dating back to George Washington, who wanted to extend the Potomac River westward to Ohio and beyond, many Americans believed that if there was to be any artificial waterway at all, it should originate in Virginia. Business interests in New York City were "concerned over new taxes for which they would receive an insufficient return from a greater volume of business," and "many people were simply unable to visualize how such a novel, gigantic and hugely expensive project could ever fulfill those glowing promises" made by its proponents.
Chief among these was a man whom history now largely, and wholly unjustifiably, ignores. This was De Witt Clinton, who in the early 1800s was "the most powerful politician" in New York. He was "a serious intellectual and amateur scientist" who had been in the United States Senate, served as mayor of New York City, and eventually would become governor of the state. He "had the commanding physical presence of a natural leader -- tall and broad, with a notably high forehead, clear eyes, and a set expression around the mouth," and "was never someone to be trifled with, as his many enemies would learn to their sorrow." He was difficult, arrogant and loathed in many quarters -- "In true Shakespearean style, he was both admirable and despicable, more brilliant, more foresighted and more effective than his enemies and yet he himself wreaked the greatest damage to his hopes and dreams" with the consequence that he never achieved the presidency for which he clearly was qualified, but he was a true visionary, and in the story of the Erie Canal he was "the heroic protagonist."
Another immensely influential figure was Jesse Hawley, "bankrupt businessman and jailbird," who wrote more than a dozen essays arguing the case for a canal in a western New York newspaper in 1807 and 1808. These "are extraordinary for the way they combined the boldness of vision with . . . painstaking attention to an immense compendium of detail," and they "attracted attention in the highest places." They laid the groundwork for what followed, most notably the appointment of a New York State commission in 1810 that transformed pie-in-the-sky dreaming into hard, specific plans for a canal to be built under "government ownership, sponsorship and management."
To the immense good fortune of the canal's designers, the Mohawk River of New York State provided a "perfect portal to the vast lands and immense riches of America's west," with "a deep gorge rising 500 feet above the water and squeezing the river down to its narrowest point as it carves its way through a preglacial divide in the mountains." It is "the only river that slices right through the Appalachian Mountain system," and though there were plenty of other obstacles with which the engineers had to deal -- "broad rivers, chasms, fissures, precipitous cliffs and thunderous waterfalls, deep and narrow valleys, squishy sandstone on which to base great piers and supports, and through it all the dense wilderness" -- the Mohawk made it possible to build a canal with the technology of the day.
Digging the canal -- "a ditch four feet deep and 40 feet wide with hand labor through hundreds of miles of this primeval forest" -- was an incredible task, yet it was done: "363 miles from Buffalo on Lake Erie, part of the Great Lakes system (referred to by Clinton as 'our Mediterranean seas'), to Albany on the Hudson River." From there it was a piece of cake down to New York City, which as a consequence became "the greatest city in the nation and, some would argue, in the world." The effect of the canal was almost literally incalculable :
"Its impact on travel and the movement of goods was spectacular. In 1810, De Witt Clinton and his fellow commissioners had needed 32 days to go from Albany to Buffalo. Now, in spite of the speed limit of four miles an hour -- and even the most impatient drivers could not push their horses to pull at more than five miles an hour -- passenger boats were making the trip from one end of the canal to the other in less than five days. Flatboats loaded with as much as 50 tons of freight took no more than six days. Traveling day and night, these boats slashed the costs of moving merchandise and commodities to only a small fraction of what wagon transport had charged, and in so doing vastly expanded the quantity and variety of merchandise that could profitably be brought to market."
The canal hastened the transformation in the United States from an agricultural to an industrial economy, Bernstein argues -- "the momentum of America shifted increasingly from the slaveholding and cotton-producing South to the free labor and Industrial Revolution of the North" -- and made it possible to ship grain from the American West to the cities of the East and, from there, to Europe. Similarly, he says, this made it possible for England and the Continent to let America become their breadbasket and to concentrate on commercial and industrial development rather than agricultural production.
Bernstein resists the temptation to say, as so many authors and publishers now like to do, that the Erie Canal "changed the world," but it did. It is almost impossible to imagine what the country would be like had it not been built. Peter Bernstein does it full justice. •
Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj@washpost.com.
