American Experiment (56 page)

Steamboats also lowered passenger rates for upstream travel, from about one hundred dollars from New Orleans to Pittsburgh to less than half of that. Some farmers saved even this fare by working their way home. The drop in rates made it more profitable for northwestern farmers to raise and sell their produce at New Orleans since now this produce could pay for more eastern manufactures. Farmers had an incentive to expand production for the market; and settlement in the Midwest increased. Before the steamboat, it cost seven to ten dollars per hundred pounds to ship manufactures to Cincinnati or Pittsburgh; the steamboats carried freight for two or three dollars and then as low as one dollar per hundred pounds.

As competition increased in western waters, the Fulton-Livingston monopoly, with no means to enforce it, collapsed by 1817. Their monopoly of New York State waters was also challenged. In 1824, John Marshall’s Supreme Court declared the New York grant an unconstitutional invasion of the right of the federal government to regulate interstate commerce. Steamboats on the Hudson River carried passengers and expensive freight, and after the opening of the Erie Canal, they pulled barges slowly along the canal as rates fell.

As internal commerce expanded, each region of the country
specialized—the South in cotton; the Northwest in foodstuffs; the Northeast in manufactures—with a growth of the internal market and diminishing dependence on Europe. Steamboats on western waters solved one bottleneck to the development of the Northwest—lack of markets for western farm products. Southwestern planters specializing in cotton production for national and international markets needed foodstuffs, and an important river trade, stimulated by steamboats, developed between the two regions. The southwestern planter found it more profitable to devote his slave labor to cotton; and the small farmer of the Northwest supplied the planter with the corn and pork he needed to feed his labor force. A host of cities were springing into existence—Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Louisville on the Ohio; Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez, and New Orleans; St. Louis, Clinton, Dubuque, and St. Paul on the Mississippi.

By the 1820s the newest form of transportation—steamboats on inland, waterways—was coming into competition and combination with one of the oldest forms—canalboats pulled by horses or mules. While steamboats on the Mississippi and other western rivers were binding the South and West together in trade, the Northeast had lain isolated from the Northwest, locked behind the broad Appalachian range. Then, in a daring act of imagination, planning, and execution, some resourceful New Yorkers created a new waterway to the West that would transform the northern transportation system, and alter the whole pattern of American economic and social development.

For years New Yorkers had dreamed of an opening to the West, centered on the Mohawk-Oswego water route running through a fifty-mile break in the Appalachian chain. It took men of vision—dreamers, even—just to conceive of a huge ditch that would run 360 miles from the Hudson to Buffalo, a ditch that would have to be cut through swamps, solid rock, dense forest; that would have to scour out some rivers and bridge others; that would have to climb hills and descend dales; that would need tens of thousands of men to build and thousands to maintain; and that would cost millions of dollars.

Such a visionary was Elkanah Watson. Born in Plymouth, indentured as a servant to the wealthy Brown family in Providence, young Watson had later been entrusted with messages and money from the colonies to Benjamin Franklin in Paris during the Revolution. Fascinated by the Dutch canal system, Watson returned home, settled in New York, and organized the Bank of Albany. After persuading several leading businessmen and landowners to tour central New York with him in 1788, he helped win from the
New York legislature a canal law authorizing the surveying of the Mohawk route. Watson was a director of two canal companies that improved that route, but it became evident that private enterprise could not alone build the big canal. Either the state or federal government must handle the job, but Jefferson and Madison were not interested in spending money on a prodigal northern ditch.

A politician picked up the failing standard. De Witt Clinton was a man of parts—a patron of schools, charities, and the arts, a founder of the New-York Historical Society, an amateur scientist and horticulturalist. A commanding figure and orator, dubbed “Magnus Apollo,” he was also a politician who wanted to realize dreams. As mayor of New York City, canal commissioner, and later governor, he drove the canal measure through the legislature and into realization over the opposition of local interests favoring different routes, Tammany parochialism, and assorted naysayers.

Every step of the authorizing, financing, planning, and building of the canal came hard and dearly. New York lacked trained engineers for such a project, so men like James Geddes and Benjamin Wright and unstoried experimenters and tinkerers had to learn on the job. Canal builders lacked excavating machinery, so ditches were dug by crowds of men with shovels and crude derricks. Hundreds of “Irish bogtrotters” and other untrained laborers were kept at work for long hours amid the muck, and at peace among themselves. Yet the engineering and craftsmanship had to be of the first order. Canal walls and bottoms must be sealed against muskrats and boat wash; this was done by using local muck that was found to set “as hard as stone.” Scores of locks, with their long, stone-lined channels and huge wooden gates, must be built in places with water plentiful enough to fill and empty a basin scores of times a day. Bridges and aqueducts had to be erected high over rivers and impossible terrain, and strong enough to support boat, crew, and cargo. Some of the aqueducts were architectural glories.

Finally the job was done—a canal 363 miles long, 4 feet deep, 28 feet wide at the bottom and 40 at the top, with 83 locks lifting boats to a height of almost 600 feet, and costing over $7 million. Such a feat called for celebration, and the New Yorkers did not fail the occasion. On a morning late in October 1825 the canalboat
Seneca Chief
nosed into the canal at Buffalo carrying two kegs of the “pure water of Lake Erie,” Governor Clinton and other dignitaries, and a giant portrait of Clinton in Roman toga. The
Seneca Chief
and its escorting canalboats—one of which carried two Indian youths, two bears, two fawns, two birds, etc., and of course was named
Noah’s Ark
—traveled east, reaching Rochester the following afternoon, Syracuse two days later, Utica the next day (where the passengers
stopped for church), Schenectady on Tuesday, and Albany the next day, just a week after departure.

Gun salutes, speeches, parades, and official banquets greeted the little fleet at these stops, but the climax came in New York City. Scores of decorated vessels put on a “Grand Aquatic Display,” followed by the “wedding of the waters” consummated when Governor Clinton poured a keg of Lake Erie water into the Atlantic. A huge parade in Manhattan featured a solid mile and a half of bands, military units, trade guilds, and floats representing butchers, tanners, cordwainers, and even a working press mounted on a high wagon and turning out leaflets with verses:

Tis done, ’tis done! The mighty chain

Which joins bright Erie to the Main

For ages shall perpetuate

The glories of our native State.

Philadelphians had followed the progress of the Erie Canal with feelings of admiration, envy, and commercial competitiveness. If the New Yorkers could overcome hundreds of miles of wilderness and inclines, why could not Pennsylvanians conquer the towering mountains to the west? Merchants, bankers, and promoters persuaded the state legislature in 1826 to authorize a canal between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Living up to the heritage of Franklin and Gallatin, the Pennsylvanians built a railroad from Philadelphia to Columbia on the Susquehanna; then, to cross the 2,291-foot-high Allegheny ridge, they fashioned the remarkable Allegheny Portage Railroad. Canalboats were floated onto cradles, which were then pulled out of the water and up a series of five inclined planes by stationary engines; at the top of each plane horses pulled the cradle onto a level stretch. Once over the top, the cradles were eased down inclined planes on the other side by horses, and deposited into a river and canal system headed west to Pittsburgh.

Brilliantly successful engineering—but faulty economics. Canalboatmen on the Pennsylvania found the route slower and more expensive than the Erie. The former had twice the number of locks as the latter, and a complex system of railroad and canal technology, depots, and agents had to be maintained. Virginia canal builders were unable even to overcome the western heights. Promoters of the Potomac and James routes to the West ran into too many problems of local scrambles for canal routes, lack of capital, and inadequate technology to span the Alleghenies and marry with the Ohio.

Still, the success of the big Erie ditch had touched off a kind of canal mania. By 1840 the states had built a total of over 3,000 miles of canals,
at a cost of around $125 million, but the credit systems of three states were almost bankrupted. Canal builders had to be gamblers. When the Indiana “legislature in the mid-1830s authorized construction of more than 1,200 miles of canals, the state bonded itself for $10 million, a debt of twenty dollars for every inhabitant. The construction led to near-disasters. Laborers on the canals were mainly Irish, half from northern Ireland and half from the southern counties. In Indiana’s own “Irish war,” fighting broke out near the present city of Wabash, and the state militia had to be called. Despite floods, cholera, and numerous other difficulties, Indiana’s canal reached the Ohio, but the tolls failed to pay even for its maintenance.

By the 1840s the United States had a canal system—three systems, actually, comprising short tidewater canals along the coast from New England to South Carolina; “trunk line” canals that reached into the mountains and in two cases—the Erie and Pennsylvania—crossed them; and interior canals branching out from the Ohio and from Lakes Michigan and Erie. By the end of the 1830s canal and river boats were the kings of American transportation, but their reign was to be short. Canal transport was slow and cumbersome. At four cents per ton per mile, freight was not cheap. In the North, the waters lay frozen several months a year. Yet the canal system was far more developed in the North than in the South, leading to a regional imbalance. As economic connections developed among the Northeast, the Great Lakes, the Ohio, the Mississippi cities, and New Orleans, the southeastern states were bypassed.

And at its height, the reign of water transport was threatened by a new noisy monster, one that might invade the most sylvan scene—the steam engine on rails. But not for another decade or two would this monster become king.

Early in 1808 Joshua Forman, a New York State assemblyman and Erie Canal enthusiast, heard that Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin had just issued a report calling for a national system of roads and canals, including some kind of canal connecting the Hudson and Lake Erie. Gallatin had even proposed three millions of federal dollars for the Erie project. Elated, Forman journeyed to Washington and, through the good offices of a New York congressman, gained an interview with President Jefferson. To his dismay he found the President rather cool, even surprised that Forman would be trying to tap the federal treasury so quickly. And for once Jefferson’s mind was on more parochial matters.

“Why, sir,” Jefferson said to Forman, “here is a canal for a few miles,
projected by George Washington, which if completed would render this [Washington] a fine commercial city, which has languished for many years because the small sum of 200,000 dollars necessary to complete it, cannot be obtained from the general government, the state government, or from individuals—and you talk of making a canal 350 miles through the wilderness—it is little short of madness to think of it at this day.”

Madness! But the crazy New Yorkers pushed that canal through the wilderness, and afterwards De Witt Clinton could not resist twitting Jefferson about that conversation with Forman. The old man confirmed the conversation, adding, “Many, I dare say, still think with me that New-York has anticipated, by a full century, the ordinary progress of improvement.” Jefferson mused further:

“This great work suggests a question, both curious and difficult, as to the comparative capability of nations to execute great enterprises.” Did New York, he wondered, have an economic advantage? “This may be;—or is it a moral superiority? a sounder calculating mind, as to the most profitable employment of surplus, by improvement of capital, instead of useless consumption. I should lean to the latter hypothesis, were I disposed to puzzle myself with such investigations; but at the age of 80, it would be an idle labour, which I leave to the generation which is to see and feel its effects.”

Others wondered at the time, and have questioned since, how a small nation with a rudimentary economic system could have embarked on such bold and costly efforts, whether successful as in the case of the Erie, or less so as with the Pennsylvania project, but always difficult, expensive, and risky. The ultimate source of the economic changes lay in material needs for better and cheaper food, clothes, and homes, and in requirements for psychic and material security. But we lack the data to measure those needs in the early nineteenth century, and can only assume that they existed among the Americans of that day as they do among all peoples, in various combinations and degrees. How did such needs become translated into economic change and progress in an isolated, mainly rural nation, lacking capital, organized technical training and expertise, and experience in the management of big enterprises?

Perhaps the most striking aspect of economic change during this period was the extent to which innovating leaders with “sounder calculating minds,” in Jefferson’s phrase, stepped forward to experiment, invent, organize, and manage. The exploits of lone, daring men have come down through history. Certainly the tenacity of a Whitney, the creative daring of a Francis Lowell, the imaginative patronage of a Livingston played a major part in technological change and progress. Certainly, too, the involvement
of men of affairs like De Witt Clinton, and of republican aristocrats like Livingston, was crucial in particular moments. But innovating leadership was essentially a collective effort. For one thing, the seemingly solitary innovators were often members of large and influential families, such as the Browns of Providence and the Dwights of Chicopee, that collectively involved themselves in new ventures. Francis Cabot Lowell’s father, John, had married in turn a Higginson, a Cabot, and a Russell, and had sired offspring by all three, so it was not surprising that Francis’ efforts were aided and abetted, and occasionally impeded, by a plethora of in-laws and other members of an extended family that helped form a local and regional community which, in Robert K. Lamb’s words, closely affected “the processes by which certain decision-makers at strategic points in the social structure contribute to economic, political, and social change.”