Executive Times
		2005 Book Reviews
		Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and The Making of a Great Nation by Peter L. Bernstein
		Rating: ••• (Recommended)
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	Wealth Follow the money while reading Peter L. Bernstein’s history of the Erie Canal, Wedding of the Waters, and you’ll understand much about why things happened the way they did. The canal had everything to do with the creation of wealth. While Bernstein recognizes the engineering feat that building the canal represented, he focuses more on the political and financial players who schemed to place the canal in the right place and in the right way. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 10, “The Shower of Gold,” pp. 180-184: Construction on the Erie Canal began on the Fourth of July 1817, just three days after De Witt Clinton had been elected for his first term as governor of New York State. Suddenly, all the years of debate, doubt, and division seemed to melt away. It was such a great moment that even former enemies would reverse course and transform themselves into champions of the canal. Looking back, people could only wonder why the struggle had been so protracted. There had been good reason. At first glance, the resiliency of political resistance is more understandable than the persistence of disbelief and skepticism. Virginians-against-Yorkers reached all the way back to Washington’s day and persisted right up to Madison’s. The neighboring states were jealous of New York’s strategic location and God-given landscapes. Even in New York State, there were many farmers concerned that the canal would open New York to the production of farms far more fertile and productive than their own—and therefore able to offer their output at lower prices. The citizens of New York City in particular had many misgivings, despite the rosy forecasts the canal enthusiasts kept repeating about the city’s future. Aside from the normally timid people scared off by the financial disasters of the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company, the city’s opposition stemmed primarily from merchants and manufacturers concerned over new taxes for which they would receive an insufficient return from a greater volume of business. Assemblyman Peter Sharpe warned that taxes were already draining the city to the limit and that the “most respectable and opulent of [the city’s] merchants are daily becoming bankrupts. ... [The state] will sink under [the debt whose] magnitude is beyond what has ever been accomplished by any nation.” In the state Senate Peter Livingston declared that only a madman or a fool would proceed with such a wildly unrealistic project: “From diggers on up’ he predicted, there were “no worse managers of funds than the public.” Meanwhile, infighting between Clintonians and anti-Clintonians had developed into an indoor sport, and frequently an outdoor sport as well. But indefatigable political forces like these do not exist in a vacuum. If the hostility to the canal had amounted to nothing more than jealousy or bald self-interest, the glittering future promised by its supporters would have quickly conquered the opposition. The opposition’s case had more substance than that. Disbelief was real, not a blind for political discord: many people were simply unable to visualize how such a novel, gigantic, and hugely expensive project could ever fulfill those glowing promises. When Thomas Eddy and Jonas Platt launched their campaign for credibility in 1810, they were well aware of the educational challenge before them. They expected it to be an even tougher obstacle than the ongoing political struggles. The few canals already completed in the United States were less than fifty miles in length—many much less than that—and traveled through populated countrysides without great waterfalls or deep valleys. There Were only two precedents for a project of this magnitude: the intricate canal network the English had built over the past fifty years to link their burgeoning industrial centers throughout the Midlands, and the Canal du Midi connecting the Atlantic to the Mediterranean in southern France. Neither bore any resemblance to the projected waterway across New York State. Both were located in areas where economic activity was already well established, where population densities were many times larger than in the country west of the Hudson River, where distances between towns were short, and where the shape of the land to be crossed was obliging. The King of France had been a powerful sponsor for the 115-mile Canal du Midi, and emerging industrialists like Matthew Boulton and Josiah Wedgwood in Britain represented a wealthy and rapidly growing pool of financial capital. The model for the British canals, the Bridgewater Canal built in 1759, ran all of 7 miles toward Manchester, one of the most populous and dynamic cities in the whole country. None of the English canals, independent of branches, extended more than 100 miles. The Erie Canal had none of these initial advantages. As Noble Whit-ford, the most meticulous of the many biographers of the Erie Canal, put it in 1905, “When we recognize the primitive conditions and review the difficulties, we do not wonder that the people of a struggling republic stood aghast at the vast enterprise?” And he goes on to cite those who predicted that in Clinton’s “big ditch would be buried the treasure of the State, to be watered by the tears of posterity.”One of Whitford’s contemporaries, the writer Samuel Hopkins Adams, would echo these words in 1944 in a riotously funny novel about the canal, in which at one point a character jeers, “The canawl! The canawl! I’ll spit you all the canawl you’ll get.” He spits copiously in front of his companions and then sings: “Clinton, the federal son-of-a-bitch, Taxes our dollars to build him a ditch.” The proposed canal would extend 363 miles through what was then almost entirely wilderness. The population west of the Hudson River Jr and beyond the Albany area had been less than 25,000 when Jesse Hawley published his essays in 1807.* Although almost 100,000 people were living there by 1817, that was still only 7 percent of the entire population of New York State.** Birmingham, England, just one major city in the center of the Midlands, had a population of about 70,000 people at that time.Civil engineering as a profession did not then exist in the United States, but the engineers would have to confront abrupt and dramatic changes in elevation at many points along the way, such as Cohoes Falls at the east end and an even more difficult situation at the Niagara Falls escarpment at the west. Finally, despite New York State’s cavalier attitude about it, the money involved was as intimidating as the cataract at Cohoes Falls. According to one authority, the proposed $6 million was equal to nearly a third of all the banking and insurance capital in the state.^5Six million dollars would be the equivalent of about $90 million in today’s purchasing power, but in an economy that was only a tiny fraction of the gigantic U.S. economy of the twenty-first century.*** The word “visionary,” either stand-alone or as an adjective, came to have a pejorative meaning when applied to canal enthusiasts. According to Jonas Platt, “hallucination” was the “mildest epithet” the opposition liked to employ. The whole thing just seemed too good to be true. Without constant repetition of the accumulated results of successive explorations and analyses over the years, and without the many eloquent recitals of the rewards that would justify the effort and the risks, the canal would never have come into being. De Witt Clinton’s powerful Memorial of December 1815 was the climax of this educational process, but his meticulously itemized citation of numbers and his elegant reasoning would have been just one more document if it had not been preceded by the glut of dreamers and madmen over the preceding twenty years. *Similar hurdles faced the development of the American railroads in their early days. As late as 1874, the Times of London would describe the American railroads as running from “Nowhere-in-Particular to Nowhere-at-All.” The financial historian Carter Goodrich has pointed out that this accusation was only half true. In the typical case— and the Erie Canal was typical in this instance—the project started somewhere and “ended at a point which was perhaps nowhere when the project started, but which was to become an important as a result of the improvement itself.” See Goodrich, Government Promotion of American Canals and Railroads, p. 10 and fn. 18. **The census of 1810 showed 23,416 people in western New York. The census of 1820 showed 108,981. As there were no interim counts, we do not know the exact number for 1817. ***Rough estimates suggest that nominal gross domestic product in 1815 was in the area of $700,000,000, or about $8.5 billion in today’s money; today’s GDP is in the area of $10 trillion. I have derived these estimates based upon data on the War of 1812 in William D. Nordhaus, The Economic Consequences of a War in Iraq. Nordhaus reports that the War of 1812, stretching over three years, cost $90 million, so it was much more costly than the Erie Canal. There were still a few jolts remaining before the vision would finally meld into reality. After the electrifying response to the Memorial, the opposition could put up only a delaying action. They managed to block the canal for another eighteen months. Governor Daniel Tompkins, the “humble farmer’s boy:’ posed one of the more difficult obstacles. Following the publication of Clinton’s Memorial, Governor Tompkins was eager to gain support from the westerners in Holland Land Company country, which would have made him pro-canal. On the other hand, Peter Porter was one of Tompkins’s most powerful supporters in the west, and Porter remained adamantly in favor of the Ontario route. Tompkins chose to resolve this dilemma by equivocating. In a speech on February 2, 1816, for example, he began with enthusiastic support for road building; then he turned to the canal and proceeded to talk out of both sides of his mouth. Clinton could not contain his wrath. He had already characterized Porter as “a tool and a dupe” and, in super-Clintonian language, he depicted Tompkins as “destitute of literature, science, and magnanimity— a mere creature of accident and chance, without an iota of real greatneSs?’^7 When Tompkins subsequently recommended to the legislature that they :: employ the inmates of state prisons in erecting fortification, repairing the roads, or in constructing canals, Clinton lost all patience. “If this is not a full exposure of the cloven foot of hostility, I know not what is,” he declaims, accusing Tompkins of “a sneer of contempt?’^8 Tompkins did not back down easily, even in the face of a lopsided vote of 9 1—18 in the Assembly giving the canal an official go-ahead. The bill stipulated that construction should begin along the relatively flat country between Rome on the Mohawk River and the Seneca River, a stretch of almost ninety miles centered on Syracuse. The bill also provided for financing this work by a tax on the lands bordering the canal by twenty-five miles on each side, plus the authority to borrow up to $2 million. But it was not to be. When the bill came before the Senate, the leader of the opposition was Tompkins’s ally, Martin Van Buren, who would in time be known as the Red Fox of Kinderhook (after his hometown, a village south of Albany) or the Little Fox. Whatever handicaps his five-foot-two size bestowed, Van Buren overcame them by always standing erect, impeccable, and fastidiously dressed. The son of a farmer who was also a tavern keeper, Van Buren disguised his determination and ambition with great charm and amiability. He was a hard man to put down. On this occasion, he complained that the plans of the canal commissioners lacked sufficient detail about the final route of the canal, as well as its projected construction and financing, for the legislature to approve such a large project. Van Buren exhorted his fellow senators to strike out the authorization for construction in the Assembly’s bill. They promptly obliged him, voting 19—6 to delay the work and calling for a brand-new set of surveys to support the detailed delineation of the proposed route. As a consolation prize, the Senate added a provision for $20,000 to pay for the additional research.* The pro-canal forces in the Assembly made a final effort to rekindle their earlier victory but ultimately bowed to the wishes of the Senate on the last day of the session. The Tompkins forces had performed the neat trick of appearing to support the increasingly popular canal project while at the same time seeming more responsible than the impatient * $20,000 in 1816 is the equivalent of about $300,000 in current purchasing power. Wedding of the Waters describes the people, the places and the sentiments of the era with clarity and retains the interest of readers throughout. Steve Hopkins, September 25, 2005
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