How did you get involved with American History and specifically the Erie Canal?
I was an English major in college and took some history classes but didn’t engage with history professionally until I got interested in the history of New York City’s drinking water. I wrote a magazine article about it; a book editor saw it and asked me for a book. That book got a lot of attention, and another editor asked me for a book on the Erie Canal, which in all honesty I didn’t know much about at the time. But I learned.
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How did the Erie Canal contribute to the establishment of New York City as a center of culture and commerce?
New York City was the spigot through which all of canal-related commerce flowed. Natural products of farm, forest, and earth from the newly opened American interior traveled east along the canal to Albany, down the Hudson River to New York, and off to Europe and other markets. European immigrants and manufactured goods came to New York, where some of them stayed while the majority went via river and canal to the interior. All of this commercial and human activity made the city a richer place, monetarily and culturally. Its wealth and population soared, and it became the densest and most diversified American urban place, where the arts and entertainment naturally increased as well.
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What did it take to convince the New York State Assembly government to build such an ambitious project?
The Erie Canal was such an immediate success that it seems impossible to believe that many in the state legislature were very hesitant to approve building it. In fact, every state senator and assemblyman from the New York City area who voted on the 1817 bill to begin constructing just the middle section of the canal (the easiest part because the middle hundred miles was mostly on flat land) voted no. Like most of the people they represented in and around the city, they believed that the canal was an upstate boondoggle that would prove impossible to build through mostly unsettled and rugged territory with limited technology and engineering experience but that the city would pay for with wasted tax money. Fortunately, a few leaders in the legislature, especially former New York City mayor and future governor DeWitt Clinton, convinced enough of the rest of the state’s legislators that the canal would be a great success, which it rapidly proved to be.
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What do you think of controversies with the canal and its creation?
As with many extraordinary new things, it takes visionary people to understand what the future holds and convince enough people to support it. It is easy to see how many very reasonable people thought the 365-mile canal through mostly wilderness was “madness,” as president Thomas Jefferson had believed. It was important then for the handful of avid and influential canal supporters to keep their eyes on the goal. It’s the same today with other visionary creators.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
How did New York State citizens view the Erie Canal when it was first being built?
One important bit of strategy by Clinton and other canal supporters was to seek funding, through bonds and taxes, for just the easy middle section first, starting in 1817. As they expected, the middle section work did proceed so quickly toward completion by 1819, that doubters, in government and throughout the state, were convinced that year that the rest should get built too. It took until 1825 to finish the canal with much difficult engineering and dangerous labor. Had work started first on the very steep eastern section or the very swampy and rocky western section, it’s likely that the whole project would have failed. Instead, as portions of the canal were completed, local people and travelers spread amazing tales of boats floating on a man-made waterway through the landscape and few doubters remained by the time the entire canal was opened.
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Do you think the Erie Canal exceeded expectations?
Clinton and other early supporters knew the canal would make New York rich and great. For the majority of other people, in New York, the rest of the country, and around the world, the canal far exceeded their limited expectations. Within ten years of its completion, the entire $7 million cost of the canal had been paid for with tolls; none of the dreaded taxes were ever collected. Fifty years and a complete enlargement later, the canal had earned a profit of $40 million dollars and New York had become the “Empire State.”
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
How important was the canal in the cultural shaping of America?
When a handful of influential New Yorkers began promoting the idea of a cross-state canal joining the Lake Erie with the Hudson River in the earliest 1800s, the United States was a seaboard country of loosely affiliated former colonies. By the time the canal was completed and the seaboard for the first time was connected with the interior, the idea of a continental nation seemed like only a matter of time. That this first route joining east to west was through the north was an early indicator that America would develop as the free market, industrial society promoted by New York’s Alexander Hamilton and not the agrarian, slave-based society envisioned by Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
What do you believe to be the most important lasting effect of the Erie Canal?
The Erie Canal created the first commercial and social “bond of union” between New York and the continental interior before railroads, a new technology, made east-west connections possible from any port. This assured that the young nation’s developing economy would be centered on New York, a position it has retained ever since.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
How would America be different without the Erie Canal?
If its early supporters had been let doubt diminish their resolve that New York build the Erie Canal, southern states, in particular Virginia, would have used the new technology of railroads two generations later to reach west and claim primacy of the national economy. Without the Erie Canal, we might today have a coastal city in the South as the focal point of the American economy. Without the canal and the commercial prosperity it brought to the north at the expense of the increasingly marginalized plantation economy of the south, the Civil War might never have been fought, and America today could be a very different place.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
Is there other information you would like to add about the Erie Canal?
With railroads, highways, and airplanes now long dominant in American commerce, the Erie Canal has been irrelevant in the national economy and consciousness for many generations but without it being built at great risk by confident visionaries America today might be a very different place. This is why it is important to study and understand history, especially the history of things whose greatness is long past. When we understand the past, we see how to do things in the future.
I was an English major in college and took some history classes but didn’t engage with history professionally until I got interested in the history of New York City’s drinking water. I wrote a magazine article about it; a book editor saw it and asked me for a book. That book got a lot of attention, and another editor asked me for a book on the Erie Canal, which in all honesty I didn’t know much about at the time. But I learned.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
How did the Erie Canal contribute to the establishment of New York City as a center of culture and commerce?
New York City was the spigot through which all of canal-related commerce flowed. Natural products of farm, forest, and earth from the newly opened American interior traveled east along the canal to Albany, down the Hudson River to New York, and off to Europe and other markets. European immigrants and manufactured goods came to New York, where some of them stayed while the majority went via river and canal to the interior. All of this commercial and human activity made the city a richer place, monetarily and culturally. Its wealth and population soared, and it became the densest and most diversified American urban place, where the arts and entertainment naturally increased as well.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
What did it take to convince the New York State Assembly government to build such an ambitious project?
The Erie Canal was such an immediate success that it seems impossible to believe that many in the state legislature were very hesitant to approve building it. In fact, every state senator and assemblyman from the New York City area who voted on the 1817 bill to begin constructing just the middle section of the canal (the easiest part because the middle hundred miles was mostly on flat land) voted no. Like most of the people they represented in and around the city, they believed that the canal was an upstate boondoggle that would prove impossible to build through mostly unsettled and rugged territory with limited technology and engineering experience but that the city would pay for with wasted tax money. Fortunately, a few leaders in the legislature, especially former New York City mayor and future governor DeWitt Clinton, convinced enough of the rest of the state’s legislators that the canal would be a great success, which it rapidly proved to be.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
What do you think of controversies with the canal and its creation?
As with many extraordinary new things, it takes visionary people to understand what the future holds and convince enough people to support it. It is easy to see how many very reasonable people thought the 365-mile canal through mostly wilderness was “madness,” as president Thomas Jefferson had believed. It was important then for the handful of avid and influential canal supporters to keep their eyes on the goal. It’s the same today with other visionary creators.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
How did New York State citizens view the Erie Canal when it was first being built?
One important bit of strategy by Clinton and other canal supporters was to seek funding, through bonds and taxes, for just the easy middle section first, starting in 1817. As they expected, the middle section work did proceed so quickly toward completion by 1819, that doubters, in government and throughout the state, were convinced that year that the rest should get built too. It took until 1825 to finish the canal with much difficult engineering and dangerous labor. Had work started first on the very steep eastern section or the very swampy and rocky western section, it’s likely that the whole project would have failed. Instead, as portions of the canal were completed, local people and travelers spread amazing tales of boats floating on a man-made waterway through the landscape and few doubters remained by the time the entire canal was opened.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
Do you think the Erie Canal exceeded expectations?
Clinton and other early supporters knew the canal would make New York rich and great. For the majority of other people, in New York, the rest of the country, and around the world, the canal far exceeded their limited expectations. Within ten years of its completion, the entire $7 million cost of the canal had been paid for with tolls; none of the dreaded taxes were ever collected. Fifty years and a complete enlargement later, the canal had earned a profit of $40 million dollars and New York had become the “Empire State.”
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
How important was the canal in the cultural shaping of America?
When a handful of influential New Yorkers began promoting the idea of a cross-state canal joining the Lake Erie with the Hudson River in the earliest 1800s, the United States was a seaboard country of loosely affiliated former colonies. By the time the canal was completed and the seaboard for the first time was connected with the interior, the idea of a continental nation seemed like only a matter of time. That this first route joining east to west was through the north was an early indicator that America would develop as the free market, industrial society promoted by New York’s Alexander Hamilton and not the agrarian, slave-based society envisioned by Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
What do you believe to be the most important lasting effect of the Erie Canal?
The Erie Canal created the first commercial and social “bond of union” between New York and the continental interior before railroads, a new technology, made east-west connections possible from any port. This assured that the young nation’s developing economy would be centered on New York, a position it has retained ever since.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
How would America be different without the Erie Canal?
If its early supporters had been let doubt diminish their resolve that New York build the Erie Canal, southern states, in particular Virginia, would have used the new technology of railroads two generations later to reach west and claim primacy of the national economy. Without the Erie Canal, we might today have a coastal city in the South as the focal point of the American economy. Without the canal and the commercial prosperity it brought to the north at the expense of the increasingly marginalized plantation economy of the south, the Civil War might never have been fought, and America today could be a very different place.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
Is there other information you would like to add about the Erie Canal?
With railroads, highways, and airplanes now long dominant in American commerce, the Erie Canal has been irrelevant in the national economy and consciousness for many generations but without it being built at great risk by confident visionaries America today might be a very different place. This is why it is important to study and understand history, especially the history of things whose greatness is long past. When we understand the past, we see how to do things in the future.