What I'm Reading This Month
By Nadine Holder
August 2006
Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation by Peter L. Bernstein. I picked this up for three reasons - it was on the nonfiction bestseller list, I love history, and my great great grandfather worked on the building of the Erie Canal. I have not finished the book yet as it is a long one but will review in two parts as it will be long with so much information covered in the book. Though I have studied history pretty thoroughly I had no understanding of how the Erie Canal opened up the country for western expansion. Other modes of travel were too slow and too rough to allow for transportation of goods east to west and vice versa. Horses could pull relatively small loads in the vehicles of the day and often they could not make the steep grades and things had to be unloaded and carried by hand or packed onto the horses themselves. One horse could pull a mammoth load in a boat on the smooth waters of a canal. This would open up the west as settler’s produce could be moved to market and European goods delivered at Albany could be spread across the country to the settlers who needed them. It is highly likely that if the canal had not been built that America would never have acquired western lands as they would have been of no use to them. How different our world today would be!
The Erie Canal was a monumental engineering feat. Persons with the idea of a canal west from Albany, NY, had visited and studied the great canal systems in Europe and England but those were done on virtually level land, for short distances, and through populated areas. The Erie Canal as envisioned would extend more than 350 miles through a howling wilderness and through an elevation differential of about 600 feet. That may not sound like much but in the total distance there were many ups and downs so many, many locks would have to be constructed along with the means to fill and empty them. Digging itself would be no small feat as there were giant trees in the forests of those days and they would all have to be removed including their mammoth root systems. The necessity of doing this resulted in many mechanical inventions and set Americans on their path of innovation that leads the way in the world today.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry over the lengthy discussion in the book of the politics of getting approval and funding for the canal. There were heated debates as to whether it should be a federal or New York State project because it was felt that only New York would benefit from it. The political scene could be superimposed on what goes on in Washington today and you would notice no difference. Everyone jockeying for positions that would benefit them in elections without any thought of what was good for the country, who ultimately would pay the price, and who ultimately would benefit. DeWitt Clinton, governor of New York, put together reams of documentation of the benefits the canal would bring and New York State finally embraced the plan. In order to sell their plan nationally some of the New Yorkers undertook a 700 mile journey west to establish the feasibility of the canal. The trip took them 53 days and their many hardships reminded them of how crippled the nation would be with no easy transportation west. The chapter describing their journey is a fantastic picture of the wilderness that existed at that time.
Jefferson was dealing with the War of 1812 and had no intention of actually spending federal money on such a project although words to the effect of doing so had been bandied about in Washington for a long time. Plans went on hold until well after the war but ultimately the politicians began to see the need for restoring traffic with Europe and for a means of expanding settlement to the west. By 1817 funding for the middle portion of the canal was forthcoming and work could begin. Parts of what would be the middle portion held fewer challenges in changes in elevation and it was felt that success there would lead to approval of the rest of the canal. Will stop here and continue next month.
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