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 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.
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 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 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
Livngstons.
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 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 also 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 was made up of the state Constitutional officers.
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 the 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.
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 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.
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 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 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.
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 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.
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. 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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