Murfin Verse Muses--When You Wear a Hat as Long as This One

 

The hat was still young and healthy when I wore it at this Peace Vigil in Harvard, Illinois in March of 2002.

Twelve years ago, back in 2014 I was stumped for a blog post.  Everything I found either bored me or would require an enormous effort to research and probably turn into one of those things that runs to 6,000 words.  I know that no one reads those posts unless a blood relative is the subject.  Sometimes I do them anyway if the topic interests me, but I always regret it.   So, I lay idly on a couch for an hour or so, turning my old brown felt hat over and over in my hand closely examining the damning evidence of long hard usage.  After a while I said to myself—aloud because the house was empty—“I may as well just write about the damn thing!”  Five minutes later I was pounding out the ode below. 

The hat in question was a Christmas gift from my wife Kathy in 2001.  I was in desperate need of a new dress lid.  My everyday work hat was an Indiana Jones style brown fedora I acquired in the mid-80’s and re-creased into my favored style with a peaked center ridge pinched on either side and the brim slouched.  I wore it every day to work as an elementary school head building custodian in Cary, Illinois and to whatever second job I held—at the time as a second shift gas station clerk at a Crystal Lake Mobile.  It was battered, sweat stained, filthy, and looked like it had been run over by a garbage truck.

An ancestral Open Road in Old Town's Piper's Ally in 1970.  This is the one I wore all through the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention demonstrations.

The trouble was my dress hat was not in much better shape, even though it was a much higher quality sombrero.  I ran across it, as I recall, in a thrift shop and I snatched it up for four or five bucks.  It was a nice off-white Stetson Open Road.  I likewise reshaped it but with a higher crown and with a brim bound with a ribbed silk ribbon.  It had once gleamed spectacularly atop my head.  It was then only five years old but because of it its light color now looked grimy and dingy sort of like old urban snow in February.  A hole was even emerging from the front of the peak where I grabbed the hat between my thumb and forefingers to take off and on.  It clearly no longer qualified as my dress hat and Kathy was embarrassed to be seen with me in either hat.  She was a motivated giver.

Kathy spotted the hat on sale during a Christmas shopping expedition we made to Springhill Mall, the closest big merchandising Mecca, at a still bustling Sears.  Later, when we split up to check out other stores in the Mall, she doubled back and bought it then hid it somehow in the car.  It was a light brown, soft felt with a low, flat crown and a wide brim.  It had a narrow, light beige suede band that had not been well cut—it varied in width from here to there.  It was a then popular style of an exaggerated fedora with an extra wide brim but was on the low end of the quality scale.  She paid about $15 for her prize.  With three young adult children and their spouses or mates and three grandchildren there was damn little money to frivol away on the Old Man.

When I opened her present on Christmas morning, I was a bit skeptical.  I had never worn a hat with such low a crown.  It would not hold my attempts to re-crease it in my favored center peak.  It would just pop back into shape.  The damn hat had a will of its own.  It would not be anything other than how it was made.  Sigh.  But I needed a hat, so I put it to work.

A week after Christmas, it got its baptism of activism, when I wore it to a small New Year’s Day peace vigil organized by the American Friends Service Committee—the Quakers—by winter dormant Buckingham Fountain in Chicago.  Kathy and I met my former sister-in-law Arlene Brennan and her husband Michael, my nephew Ira S. Murfin, and a girl he knew who was on her way to a winter job shooing bison back into Yellowstone Park to keep them from being shot by Montana ranchers.  

                                            The hat and I at the Haymarket Monument in Chicago one May Day after I led a Labor service at a U.U. Congregation. 

It was the first of scores of vigils, marches, rallies, and demonstrations over the next 16 years at which I wore the hat.  Paired with a trench coat, it went with me to a giant anti-war march in Washington, D.C. in January and sheltered my head through weekly roadside vigils that the McHenry County Peace Group kept up over the next two and a half years through all sorts of inclement weather.

When I wrote and posted my poem twelve years ago, the old chapeau was still in daily service.  Today it has been demoted to rough duty status.  Although it has held its shape remarkably well and resists popping holes at pressure points—which eventually dooms my higher quality Stetsons—the fading and sweat stains can no longer be ignored.  I no longer wear it for regular daily use unless there is heavy rain—its broad brim makes it the best rain hat I ever had.  It also holds up well when it is snowing so hard it measurably accumulates on the brim.  I threw it on for yard work, snow shoveling, or I just going out to fetch the newspaper in the pre-dawn gloaming.

 

                                                    The "new" everyday hat, then nine-years-old, on the Old Man's head in Woodstock in 2018.  Photo by Bill Delaney.  

The old brown hat was replaced for dress and then everyday use by a grey Bailey’s U-Roll-It that I picked up in Sheridan, Wyoming back in 2009.  It is very different from the old brown one—a curled brim with the front slouched down and a higher crown.  It shows its age too but is still serviceable for the general running around of a retired geezer.

The black best dress hat celebrating with Mother Jones on her instillation in the Chicago Irish American Hall of Fame at the Irish American Cultural Center in 2019.

Another Christmas some years ago Kathy got me another new dress hat.  This one is very nice but black, a hat color I had never worn.  I have to keep it in a tightly closed plastic bag because each speck of dust stands out against the black.

 

                                            

                                            The new brown dress hat got an early spin at Joe Cavallo's Paladins of Poetry reading in Crystal Lake.

Since I wear the black hat only for weddings, funerals, and other state occasions with my boxy old dress suit, two Christmases ago I picked out a new dress hat—a nice brown Cody James model perfect for date nights with Kathy and Sunday morning go-to-meeting.

When You Wear a Hat as Long as This One

 

When you wear a hat as long as this one—

            you know, the old brown one

            with the broad flat brim

            and low crown,

            the one Kathy bought you for Christmas

            the holiday after 9/11—

you learn to understand that the Universe

            is falling down upon you day after day

            that stardust, ashes, and cat dander

            sift unseen and constant

            day after day,

            year after year,

            one decade into the next

drifting into the creases of the crown,

            balling just a tad if you rub your

            thumb or fingers across the brim

            which has subtly changed color

            under the weight

nothing to be done about it

            the heaviest downpour does not

            wash it away,

            nor can you brush it,

            or beat it against your leg,

the stuff clings to the fine wool fibers

            of the soft felt

            and where the sweat and

            oil from your dirty hair

            touch it, it becomes a little hard

            and shiny

and the old band twisted and stained

            must be covered by one braided from

            bright fabrics somewhere in Nicaragua

            and even that band is faded and

            dusted in its folds and knots,

and the universe continues to fall unconcerned.

 

      —Patrick Murfin

America's Elite University or Nest of DEI Vipers It's Harvard's Birthday

 

Two years after its founding as The College at New Town, John Harvard, a young Puritan minister died and left a tidy fortune and a 400-book library to the school which was shortly re-named in his honor.  No reliable portrait of Harvard exists, but the College erected a statue anyway.  Note the hand rubbing his toe--a good luck tradition among students that leaves that toe preternaturally bright and shiny.

Flags at half-staff at Fox News and Make America Great Again prayer breakfasts.  On October 28, 1636, the greatest bastion of “cultural elitism” in American history came into being and despite stiff competition, it remains a force with tendrils deep into the highest echelons of government, law, business, and the arts.    

It was on this day that the College at New Towne was created by an act of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  New Towne was just up the Charles River from Boston would soon be named Cambridge, in honor of the English university where many leading citizens received their education.  A fitting name for the home of the very first institution of higher learning in North America.

This was only 16 years after Separatist dissenters, known to us as the Pilgrims, established a tiny colony at Plymouth and eight years since the dour Puritans had established themselves.  Despite a steadily growing population due to new arrivals from England and extraordinary fertility, settlements still clung close to the coast and not many miles inland was still a “howling wilderness” populated by Native tribes and confederacies.  The urgent mission of the school was to train new Puritan divines to fill the pulpits of the town churches that the members of the General Court were sure would be built.  The school began with one Master, Nathaniel Eaton, and nine students. 

After just two years of existence and without graduating a single student the struggling College received a startling and totally unexpected windfall.  John Harvard was a young Puritan minister who arrived in the New World in 1637 and was settled as minister in Charlestown.  He was the son of a butcher and tavern keeper who rose in the world. In 1625, his father, a stepsister, and two brothers died of the plague.  Only his mother and one brother survived.  His mother remarried and was widowed twice more by men of substance.  She was able to send her son to the Puritan hot bed of Emmanuel College, Cambridge from which he graduated in 1632.  

His mother died in 1635 and his brother in 1737 leaving John the unexpected heir of a small fortune.  Unfortunately, the minister contracted the dreaded consumption (tuberculosis) and was dead within a year.  Among Harvard’s closest friends was Eaton, the Master of the New School.  In his will Harvard donated his impressive library of more than 400 volumes to the school in addition to £779 17s 2d, half of the cash value of his estate.  Eaton was entrusted with using it for the benefit of the school.

Eaton put the money to work right away.  He saw to the erection of a fine frame two story building with a stone foundation and a cellar.   The building could supposedly house the Master and up to 30 students with a parlor for instruction. The property included its own apple orchard, barn, and garden plot.  Eaton was glad to rename the school Harvard College on March 13, 1639.

The wood frame Old College was built in 1638 largely with John Harvard's bequest and stood until it burned down in 1670.
 

Eaton was not to enjoy his stewardship of the college for long.  He and his family ran afoul of notoriously high-handed Governor John Winthrop.  Eaton was fired and brought up on charges that he had “whipped too harshly” two of his students and that his wife had served others hasty pudding contaminated with goat feces—an event which inspired the name for a much later college humor society.  After being convicted, Eaton fled to Virginia and was later accused by the Governor of absconding with £100 of the Harvard bequest—an allegation that dogged the man until his dying day in an English debtor’s prison.

Eaton was succeeded in 1640 by Henry Dunster, the first man to hold the title President.  The first students graduated in 1642. During his tenure, in 1650 Harvard College received its official Charter. Dunster remained in his post until 1654 when he too ran afoul of Puritan authorities in a dispute over infant baptism.

Harvard was never officially affiliated with the church.  It didn’t need to be.  The authorities of Massachusetts Bay assumed that all institutions would be subject to “instruction” by a virtual theocracy.  A 1643 pamphlet summarized the mission of the college, “To advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministery to the Churche.”

In the early years there periodic eruptions of campus misbehavior and scandal—even Puritan boys away from home for the first time were apt to go a bit wild, drinking, gambling, whoring, insulting good townsfolk, and occasionally openly rebelling against bad food, inept instruction, and capricious discipline.  These instances were usually met with canings, expulsions, prosecution by local authorities, and—once in a while—the dismissal of faculty members for being too lax or too harsh.

Despite this, the College was succeeding in supplying new ministers—plenty of them, even more than there were pulpits to fill.   Its classic education, drawn from the colleges of Cambridge in the Mother Country, however, was a suitable preparation for other professions as well.  Soon the college produced lawyers in as great abundance as divines, followed by medical doctors.  Even failed students who did not succeed in a profession could fall back upon the calling of the desperate gentleman—school mastering.  Others found their way into business, particularly maritime trade, where a good education in figures stood them well.

In 1664 the College building burned to the ground taking with it all but one of John Harvard’s library books.  It was quickly replaced with grander accommodations.

Concerned with both rowdyism on campus and creeping infidelity, Increase Mather, the powerful pastor of Boston’s North Church, was named Acting President in 1685, named Rector following year, and made permanent President in 1692.  Although not in residence on campus, and seldom even a visitor, Mather instituted sweeping changes in curriculum and discipline.  He purged classic, but heathen Latin writers from the curriculum, instituted study of Greek and Hebrew and emphasized Biblical text and commentaries by Christian writers.  To reign in the unruly students, he enforced rules that they must live and dine on campus.  Mather held sway at Harvard until 1701.

Despite the turmoil and the rigidity of Puritanism, Harvard had done its job well.  At the dawn of 18th Century New England had the highest concentration of college graduates in the world, the most literate general population, and quite likely the highest standard of living.  Although the society had a rigid social structure, it was not a hierarchy of unbreakable class or caste distinction.  The sons of farmers and tradesmen, could, and often did, acquire an advanced education and rise to prominence.  A profusion of ministers, lawyers, teachers and merchants trained at Harvard provided a core of educated civic leadership that was unmatched.

However much Mather and his Puritan peers might have wished it, however, an education inevitably caused inconvenient questioning of authority and received wisdom.  Mather’s successor as President was John Leverett, the first non-minister to serve.  He quietly began distancing the college from control by the Boston clergy.  In the next century the ideas of the Enlightenment would begin to percolate through the school, as well as a growing restiveness with Calvinist rigidity.

Harvard Yard in 1740, soon educating a generation that would spark a Revolution.

Graduates of Harvard like Samuel and John Adams became leaders of the drive for Independence.  When the notions of Harvard cross fertilized with Virginian aristocrats who had were schooled by tutors and at institutions like the College of William and Mary where the radical notions of the Scottish Enlightenment held sway, there was revolution in political thought as well as simply politics.

The earliest known official reference to Harvard as a university occurred in the new Massachusetts Constitution of 1780.  Undergraduates still attended Harvard College, with the University offering graduate education in many fields.

Through the last half of the 1700s, Harvard and the ministers it was still producing became more and more unorthodox.  Rival Yale, founded the same year as Mather left the helm of Harvard, was soon become an orthodox bastion against Harvard liberalism.  In 1805 the Harvard Board of Overseers filled the Hollis Chair of Religion with liberal Henry Ware, Sr. a move that eventually led to the rupture of the New England Standing Order and leave Unitarians firmly in control of the College, and over most of the congregations of Eastern Massachusetts.  The orthodox Congregationalists responded by founding Andover Theological Seminary in 1808 to train reliable clergy.

Henry Ware, Sr. whose appointment to the Holis Chair of Religion set off the Unitarian Controversy eventually leading to a schism in the New England Standing Order and established Unitarian dominance over the Harvard for the next 150 years.

Over the next fifty years a Unitarian establishment came to dominate the College.  Early on, Unitarians and High Federalists instituted a series of societies and institutions on campus meant to shore up their authority against possible challenges by orthodox Congregationalists.  Ironically, the religious liberals instituted an illiberal regime that was constantly being challenged.  And the challenge was not only from the orthodox. 

By the 1840 Unitarians of Ware’s sort were seen as enforcers of their own orthodoxy and were the subject of rebellion by a new wave of philosophy—Transcendentalism exemplified by Ralph Waldo Emerson who shocked sensibilities with his Divinity School Address.  Many Harvard graduates became leading members of the New England Renaissance, a cultural phenomenon that gave the nation its first full throated literary voice.

Harvard Presidents--Unitarians all--spanning 1829-1862.  From right to left in order of their service--Josiah Qunincy III, scion of a distinguished Massachusetts family;  famed orator Edward Everett;  Jared Sparks whose ordination was the occasion of William Ellery Channing's Baltimore Sermon which was the a virtual Unitarian declaration of a unique identity; James Walker, and Cornelius Conway. 

By the Civil War, Harvard was the firm foundation of the rule of Boston and Massachusetts by an insular elite—the Boston Brahmins.  The management by a succession of stodgy Unitarian Presidents nearly killed the college by the Civil War, however.  Wealthy Bostonians were becoming reluctant to entrust their young men to religious indoctrination and not practical training for the business world.

To the rescue came yet another Unitarian, Charles William Eliot, who became president in 1869.  He was a trained scientist and attended the advanced polytechnic universities of Europe.  He was also a Transcendentalist who determined to secularize the college in order to free the minds of the students.  

Under his long leadership he instituted the New Education meant to enable students to make intelligent choices but did not attempt to provide specialized vocational or technical training.  He radically reformed and expanded the curriculum, supplementing the traditional Classics education with a broader sampling of the humanities including modern language and literature as well as a firm grounding in science and mathematics.  He instituted an elective system that let students participate in building their own education.  He reformed graduate schools and added new ones, emphasizing original research as well as instruction.  

An administrative reformer as well, Elliot reorganized the faculty into schools and departments and replaced recitations with lectures and seminars. He encouraged both private and public secondary schools to change their curricula to prepare for college admission, thus almost single handily inventing the modern High School.  He instituted admission to the school by standardized testing. 

 

Long-time Harvard President Charles William Eliot transformed Harvard into a modern research university and the most prestigious school in the United States.

A tireless fundraiser, he solicited the generous support of the very wealthy to create a huge endowment and build the many new structures his expanding university required.  In doing so he tied Harvard closely to the emerging plutocracy of Gilded Age America.  Although a noted progressive and liberal—he insisted on educating Blacks and admitting Jews, for instance, he displayed class loyalty by fierce opposition to unionism and the labor movement and encouraging Harvard students to actively become strike breakers. By the time Eliot’s tenure ended in 1909 Harvard was transformed into a world class research university.

Over the rest of the 20th Century Harvard evolved away from being a de facto Unitarian fiefdom.  They ceased to dominate the Corporation.  Presidents came from other religions and traditions.  The very Brahmin elite that empowered Unitarian domination was dispersing and drifting away from the New England tribal faith to more conservative, conventional, and less controversial faiths.  While Harvard Divinity School remained an important and prestigious training ground for Unitarian Universalist ministers—indeed bright pink Harvard doctoral robes are still a passport to the most prestigious pulpits, and leadership positions within the Unitarian Universalist Association—most students and graduates are now not UUs.  Indeed, for several years there were no active Unitarian or Universalist professors at all on the faculty until the endowment of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Chair of Divinity and the appointment of its first professor in 2008.

Jews and Catholics, previously admitted on a strict quota basis, began being admitted in large numbers beginning in the 1960’s.  Black and other minority students became actively recruited and supported as the 20th Century closed.  Harvard absorbed Radcliffe College, founded in 1879 as the Harvard Annex for Women in 1977 making it fully co-educational.  Women now are a majority in the College and are enrolled in large numbers in all graduate schools.  

Today Harvard remains the most prestigious American University with 2,000 faculty to teach and advise approximately 6,700 undergraduate and 13,600 graduate and professional students in 12 degree-granting Schools and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.  The Harvard University Library is the largest academic library in the United States, and the second largest library in the country.  

Harvard President Claudine Gay being grilled by a Congressional hearing.

Harvard displayed its institutional commitment to diversity of the student body, faculty, and leadership in 2023 when Claudine Gay was named the 30th President amid much hoopla.  She was a political scientist, academic administrator, and the Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies whose research addressed American political behavior, including voter turnout and politics of race and identity.  Her appoint was seen as a slap to the long campaign of conservatives to overturn consideration of race in admission policies and sniping at every work-around the University came up with to still insure full and equitable participation by racial, ethnic, and religious minorities.  She was prominent in supporting Black Lives Matter protests both on and off campus.  

But after just a year in office Gay was forced to resign after she defended the right to protest by War in Gaza activists and campus organizations who were charged with being Anti-Semitic in their attacks on Israel and Jews in general.  She was grilled and humiliated by a Republican-led Congressional investigation and many Democrats with historic ties to Israel and major Jewish American organizations chimed in.  Along with two other University Presidents she was forced to resign for failing to use maximum police force to clear their campuses of tent cities and daily protests.   

In his second Term, Donald Trump targeted Harvard at every turn for refusing to toe his anti-DEI edicts.  He tried to strip funding from all its programs including critical scientific and medical research.  He tried to ban most international students and filed harassing lawsuits at every turn.  Federal courts have struck down almost every gambit.  But the threat remains.

Despite it all Harvard is—by a wide margin—also the wealthiest school in the world.  In June 2009 the University had an endowment of $25.7 billion despite having lost maybe as much of half of its value in the economic crisis of 2008.  The losses resulted in some major finger pointing—largely at former President Lawrence Summers who departed a controversy wracked tenure to become President Barak Obama’s top economic advisor.  The losses caused some belt tightening, the delay of a capital project or two and a review of a previously announced policy that would make undergraduate admission free to needy students.  But the Stock Market recovered its losses and regularly flirts with record highs.   Even with calls to boycott contributions from wealthy Jews and other donors, no one is going to have to hold a bake sale for Harvard any time soon.

Most universities like to list a handful of distinguished alumni in their brochures.  It would take a phone book for Harvard with 8 Presidents of the United States including both George W. Bush and Barak Obama and 21 Supreme Court Justices.

The school, even with a far more diversified student body than in the past, continues to pump its graduates into all of the elite institutions in the nation.  Since most of them can read, write, and formulate independent informed opinion, this continues to depress and outrage the Right.
 

Sanctuary in a Very Bad Week Eight Years Later--Murfin Verse

 

A memorial to the victims of the Tree of Life Synagogue mass murder in Pittsburgh.

 

Note—Today marks the eighth anniversary of the mass murder at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018.  I was asked to do the Chalice Lighting at the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation in McHenry, which may have felt a special kinship with a congregation of the same name.    The topic for the morning was sanctuary.  I threw away what I had carefully prepared.  I was planning on reading this new poem instead which was totally inadequate to the situation but due to a scheduling mix up, I didn’t read it that day.   As you will see the poem also references other ugly, hateful episodes the same week, but current outrages could easily be plugged in--The mass shooting at a Hindu Temple in a Chicago suburb last week, for instance.

Sanctuary in a Very Bad Week

October 27, 2018

 

Headlines: 

Trump Attempts to Erase Transgender Identity

Two Blacks Killed at Walmart by Angry Racist

14 Bombs Sent to Targets Denounced by Trump

11 Dead at Tree of Life Synagogue Mass Murder

 

Sacred shelter—A haven offered or sought, 

   a holy obligation and a desperate resort.

The Church once offered it to those fleeing

   the wrath of a king or war lord.

Today we are called to offer it to

   immigrants and refugees,

      the homeless and unwanted,

            the despised of color, gender, faith,

               abused women and families,

                  all the wretched.

 

Know this—Sanctuary can fail.

   Ask Thomas Becket, Ann Frank,

      the four little Girls of Birmingham,

            the frozen bum,

               the murdered wife,

                  the deported asylum seeker,

         the immigrant children in cages,

            the dead Jews of Tree of Life.

 

But failure does not cancel hope or duty.

   Time to step up,

      to take our chances,

            to become a People of Sanctuary.

 

—Patrick Murfin

 

Clinton's Ditch Opened the Old Northwest and Made New York the Richest City

 

      Mule tow grain barges in the 1880s.

I’ve got an old mule and her name is Sal

Fifteen years on the Erie Canal

She’s a good old worker and a good old pal

Fifteen years on the Erie Canal

We’ve hauled some barges in our day

Filled with lumber, coal, and hay

And every inch of the way we know

From Albany to Buffalo

 

Chorus:

Low bridge, everybody down

Low bridge for we’re coming to a town

And you’ll always know your neighbor

And you’ll always know your pal

If you’ve ever navigated on the Erie Canal. 

—Thomas S. Allen, 1905.  Original lyrics written to commemorate the 15 years of construction on the Erie Canal.

                                        The original sheet music for Thomas Allen's song.  It is often mistaken for a 19th Century folk song.

The Erie Canal opened October 26, 1825.  Few innovations in American history had such immediate and far-reaching consequences as the public works project once derided as Clinton’s Folly.

A canal linking Lake Erie with the Hudson River at the New York capital of Albany was first proposed by Thomas Eddy, a businessman with interests in a failing canal digging company and sponsored in the New York State Assembly by Jonas Platt, leader of the Federalists in the Senate.  To gain bi-partisan support for the ambitious project, Platt proposed a commission carefully balanced between leading figures in both his party and the Democratic-Republicans. 

On March 13, 1810 the Erie Canal Commission was created with the assignment to do preliminary feasibility studies, explore possible routes, and come up with plans to finance what would be by far the biggest engineering project yet undertaken in North America.  Gouverneur Morris, a distinguished former Federalist Senator and one of the principal authors of the Constitution, was named as President.   The other commissioners were Federalists Eddy, Stephen Van Rensselaer, and William North plus Democratic Republicans DeWitt Clinton, Simeon DeWitt, and Peter Buell Porter.

                                    DeWitt Clinton. the man most responsible for guiding the Erie Canal to reality, in a portrait by George Catlin.

The driving force on the Commission quickly became Clinton with strong support, despite their different political connections of Van Rensselaer, the heir of the greatest of the Patroon dynasties of semi-feudal landowners in Up State.  The Commissioners quickly went to work and several of them explored the route as far as possible by water and on an arduous cross-country trek via unimproved roads and trails.  Clinton kept a detailed diary of his adventures on this trip. 

The following March the Commission issued a report that dismissed competing plans for a possible canal to Lake Ontario and proposed that a totally manmade channel be dug straight west from Albany to Lake Erie at Buffalo.  Morris dissented proposing instead a physically impossible scheme to deepen existing rivers and have Lake Erie “empty into them to fill them.”  Little wonder that his leadership on the Commission was by-passed.  Perhaps most importantly, the commission acknowledged that the project was too big to be financed by private capital and recommended public financing by the State.

In April 1811 the Legislature responded by authorizing the Commission to take all necessary steps to finance the entire project and granted $15,000 to begin its work.  It also added Robert Fulton and Robert Livingston to the body.  Fulton had launched a commercially viable steamboat service between New York City and Albany with Livingston, a member of a powerful political family, as his partner in 1807 which spurred interest in a western canal.  Both men were Democratic-Republicans, giving Clinton extra clout in addition to lending their enormous prestige to the project.  Fulton would actively work with Clinton on engineering aspects of the project until his death in 1815.

The War of 1812 ground progress to a halt.  Van Rensselaer was appointed General in command of the New York Militia.  The frontier with Canada around Buffalo became a major theater of operations in the war and was a jumping-off point for attempted invasions by both sides.  The lack of reliable transportation to bring artillery, arms, powder, and supplies to the front crippled American efforts and provided a national defense justification for a canal. 

Meanwhile, Clinton, then serving as Mayor of New York City and Lt. Governor, was reluctantly drafted by a dissident Democratic-Republican rump and backed by the Federalists to run for President against James Madison in 1812.  It was a close-fought election and Clinton took 47% of the popular vote while losing by a wide margin in the Electoral College.  The run strained his relations with loyal Democratic-Republicans, notably the powerful Livingstons.

At the conclusion of the war, Clinton revived interest in the project by holding a large public meeting in the New York City.  He promised residents that the project would bring about a boom:

The city will, in the course of time, become the granary of the world, the emporium of commerce, the seat of manufactures, the focus of great moneyed operations.  And before the revolution of a century, the whole island of Manhattan, covered with inhabitants and replenished with a dense population, will constitute one vast city.

In 1816 the Legislature reformed the Commission with explicit authorization to supervise acquisition of land and the actual construction of the project. Clinton was named the new President and Van Rensselaer, who now abandoned the dying Federalists to become a Clintonian Republican, were held over.  Joseph Ellicott, an agent for the powerful Holland Land Company which donated 10,000 acres of land to the project; Myron Holley, a state Assemblyman and political ally; and Samuel Young, who wrote the influential book A Treatise on Internal Navigation: A Comprehensive Study of Canals in Great Britain and Holland. 

In 1816 outgoing President James Madison vetoed a bill that would have contributed Federal funds to the construction.  Madison supported using Federal funds for internal improvements but doubted that barring an authorizing amendment to the Constitution that the government had the authority.  But it must also have been a satisfaction to slap back at Clinton.

1817 proved to be a big, break-out year for the canal. Clinton became the beneficiary when Daniel D. Tompkins was elected as James Monroe’s Vice President.  Despite the bitter opposition of the growing Tammany organization in New York City, Clinton was easily elected to serve out Tompkins’s term as Governor.  With his support, in April the Legislature created a Canal Fund which was authorized to spend $7 million for construction of a canal 363 miles long, 40 feet wide, and four feet deep. Commissioners of the Canal Fund was made up of the state Constitutional officers.

The route of the Canal across Upstate New York from the Hudson River to Lake Erie.

Construction began on July 4 at Rome.  The first 15 miles to Utica took two years to build due to the difficulty in felling trees through the virgin forest, excavating and removing earth by hand.  An innovative stump puller was used, but at best three-man crews with mules could only build a mile of canal and adjacent tow path in a year of arduous labor. 

Also holding up construction was the fact that in the entire United States there was not one trained civil engineer.  The surveyors who laid out the route, James Geddes and Benjamin Wright, were in over-all charge of construction and learned by doing.  They were aided by Canvass White, a 27-year-old amateur engineer who traveled to England at his own expense to study canal construction there and Nathan Roberts, a mathematics teacher.  Despite their inexperience they laid out an impressive record of achievement, carrying the “Canal up the Niagara escarpment at Lockport, maneuvered it onto a towering embankment to cross over Irondequoit Creek, spanned the Genesee River on an awesome aqueduct, and carved a route for it out of the solid rock between Little Falls and Schenectady...” according to Canal historian Peter L. Bernstein.

The eventual arrival of thousands of Scotch-Irish laborers greatly speeded construction.  These navies, although Ulster Presbyterians, were the first of a wave of hundreds of thousand Irish laborers who dug the canals and built the turnpikes and railroads of their new country.  Conditions were brutal.  Over a thousand men died of swamp fever at Montezuma Marsh, the outlet of Cayuga Lake west of Syracuse.  Work there ground to a halt until Winter when the marsh froze over.  But work in the frigid weather by men without adequate coats was almost as lethal.  Soon Catholic Irishmen were replacing the Ulstermen.  In 1825 Father John Raho wrote to his bishop that “so many die that there is hardly any time to give Extreme Unction to everybody. We run night and day to assist the sick.”

Despite the hardships, year after year the work pressed on.  The middle section from Utica to Salina (now Syracuse) was completed in 1820 and traffic on that section started up immediately. The eastern section, 250 miles from Brockport to Albany, opened in 1823 to great fanfare as did another 64-mile section from Watervliet on the Hudson to Lake Champlain. 

Construction a Lockport where the canal needed to raise boats up the Niagara Escarpment was the most significant engineering feat.  Powder was used to blast through the rock and cranes used to hoist blocks but most of the labor was still dangerous pick and shovel work.  The mostly Irish canal diggers suffered and died on the job.

Next, climbing the Niagara Escarpment up though an 80-foot wall of hard limestone was the great challenge.  Generally following the course of a “wild” stream pouring over the cliff, a series of five locks were carved out so that barges could be lifted to the level of Lake Erie.  This is the only section where wide-spread use of blasting powder occurred, predictably with fatal consequences for many workers. 

The step locks at Lockport pictured in the early 20th Century post card have been preserved and still are operated for tourist exhibitions.  

On the west end the village of Buffalo they dredged a channel of Buffalo Creek to make it navigable and built a port facility on Lake Erie.  That secured the village as the terminus of the canal over neighboring, and much less enterprising, Black Rock on the Niagara River.  In doing so Buffalo secured a future as an industrial powerhouse and the economic center of the region.

Despite the apparent success of his great project, Clinton was in political trouble.  Tammany politicians in New York City allied themselves with the Albany Regency, a masterfully assembled Up State political machine created by Martin Van Buren.  Together they became known as the Bucktails faction of the Democratic Republican Party and declared war on Clinton and his supporters.  Gaining control of a state Constitutional Convention in 1821, the Bucktails shortened the term of governor to two years and moved the term from a July 1 start to a January 1, thus shaving a year off Clinton’s term.  They also passed a 2 million dollar appropriation for the canal attached to a measure that stacked the Canal Board with Clinton’s political opponents.  The governor was forced to sign the measure or jeopardize funding of his pet project. In 1822 Clinton, despite huge personal popularity, was denied re-nomination by the Democratic-Republicans and he was out of office at the end of the year.  In 1824 the Legislature ousted him as President and a member of the Canal Commission.

The last act proved a step too far for his opponents.  With the Canal nearing completion, voter indignation over Clinton’s shabby treatment propelled him back into the Governor’s chair that fall.

Gov. Clinton Mingling the Waters of Lake Erie with New York Harbor.

It was with understandable glee that Governor Clinton got to preside over the ceremonies opening the canal in October 1825.  He sailed on the packet barge Seneca Chief along the Canal from Buffalo to Albany then transferred to a steam packet for the trip down the Hudson to New York City.  He poured two casks of Lake Erie water into the harbor in the City making a symbolic Marriage of the Waters to officially open the whole waterway system.

The economic and social effects of the Canal quickly surpassed the most optimistic predictions.  The vast resources of the Great Lakes Basin were immediately accessible in the east as they had never been before when the Allegany and Appalachian Mountains presented a substantial barrier to commerce.  Freight rates from Buffalo to New York went from $100 per ton by road to $10 per ton by Canal. In 1829 3,640 bushels of wheat were transported down the Canal.  By 1837 this increased to 500,000 bushels and four years later it reached one million. In nine short years Canal tolls more than recouped the entire cost of construction.  

Equally, if not more important, the Erie Canal became the great highway to the West for hundreds of thousands of settlers who were eager to claim land and begin to ship their crops east for good hard cash money.  Previously growth of the trans-Appalachian West was limited to the heartiest pioneers who had to stay close to the great river systems to ship their produce to market via the long trip down to New Orleans.  The younger sons of New England and New York farmers, craving land and with the resources to buy it flooded the Old Northwest transforming Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and even distant Minnesota from frontier wilderness to prosperous, populous states by 1850.

A Canal passenger packet circa 1850.

Not only did the mostly farming settlers find easy access to market, others began to ship the endless lumber of the Great North Woods, iron ore to feed the smelters and furnaces of an industrializing nation, and other resources.  Within 15 years New York City fulfilled Clinton’s dazzling prediction.  It leapfrogged its competitors, Boston, Baltimore, and New Orleans and was handling more freight than all those cities combined.  The Canal also spurred development in towns and cities along the route from Buffalo on down the Hudson.  Many cities developed industries that fed manufactured goods into the interior.  New York State communities along the path of the canal, the lateral canals built to feed it from the more remote interior of the state, and the Hudson River became boom towns.

The Canal was deepened and widened twice in the 19th Century to accommodate larger barges and greater traffic.  Between 1905 and 1918, engineers decided to abandon much of the original man-made channel and use new techniques to “canalize” the rivers that the canal had been constructed to avoid—the Mohawk, Oswego, Seneca, and Clyde plus Oneida Lake.  A uniform channel was dredged; dams were built to create long, navigable pools, and locks were built adjacent to the dams to allow the barges to pass from one pool to the next.  When it opened in 1918, the whole system was renamed the New York State Barge Canal.

Today most of the traffic on the New York State Barge Canal is private pleasure boats, canoes and kayaks, tour boats, and on some sections reproductions of mule drawn canal boats..  Here boat await entrance to the Canal at Buffalo during an annual Canal Fest.

The system remained an economic engine for New York State until the St. Lawrence Seaway was completed in 1959.  Traffic then dropped to a trickle.  In recent years the system has experienced a renaissance as recreational corridor.  Abandoned stretches of the original canal have been preserved in many places, including a 36-mile stretch in the Old Erie Canal State Historic Park from the town of DeWitt near Syracuse to Rome.