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 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 state capital of Albany
was first proposed by Thomas Eddy, a business man 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 studies of feasibility,
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 principle 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.
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 land owners 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 on 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 proposals for a
possible canal to Lake Ontario and
proposed that a totally man made 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 the necessary steps to finance the entire project and granted $15,000
to finance its work. It also added
Robert Fulton and Robert Livingston to the body. Fulton had launched of 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 had 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 proved 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 loosing by a wide margin in the Electoral College. The run strained his relations with loyal
Democratic-Republicans, notably the powerful Livngstons.
At the conclusion of the war, Clinton revived interest in the project by
holding a large public meeting in the 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 had written 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 there must have been satisfaction to
slapping 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 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 were the state Constitutional officers.
 |
| Digging the Deep Cut at Lockport was fatal for many Irish laborers. |
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 had 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
this 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 on 1823 to great fanfare as did another
64 mile section from Watervliet on
the Hudson to Lake Champlain.
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.
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 of 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 appointments.
The governor was forced to sign the measure or jeopardize funding of his
pet project. In 1822 Clinton, despite huge personal popularity, was denied
renomination 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 to far for his opponents.
With the Canal nearing approval, 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 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 water way 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 wheat were transported down the
Canal. By 1837 this had increased to 500,000 bushels and four years later
it reached one million. In nine years 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 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.
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 had fulfilled Clinton’s dazzling prediction. It had leapfrogged its competitors, Boston, Baltimore, and New Orleans and
was handling more freight than all of 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
lies 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.
 |
| The canal at work, 1829. |
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.
The system remained an economic engine for New York
State until the St. Lawrence Seaway
was completed in 1959. Traffic dropped
to a trickle. In recent years the system
has experienced a renaissance as recreational corridor. Abandon 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.
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