Although the natural waterways provided a substantial web of transport facilities, many productive areas remained regionally and economically disconnected until the canals were built and other internal improvements were made to link the areas. The first major undertaking began in 1816, when the New York legislature authorized the construction of the Erie and Champlain canals. With powerful canal commissioner DeWitt Clinton as its guiding spirit, the Erie Canal was promoted with enthusiasm, and sections were opened to traffic as they were completed. It quickly became apparent that the canal would have great success, and even before its completion in 1825, “canal fever” seized promoters throughout the country. In the tremendous building boom that followed, canals were constructed to link three types of areas. Some ran from the “back country” to the tidewater regions; some traversed, or attempted to traverse, the area between the older states and the Ohio valley; and some, the western canals, linked the Great Lakes with the waterways running to the East. The principal canals of the antebellum period are shown in Map 9.1. They were vital in developing the Northern and Northeastern gateways.
The Erie was the most important of the early canals, though by no means the only profitable one. This system, which still exists in an expanded and improved form as the New York Barge Canal, was a massive undertaking. Beginning at Albany on the Hudson River, it traversed the state of New York westward to Buffalo on Lake Erie, covering a distance of 364 miles. The work cost approximately $7 million (about $150 million in today’s money) and took about nine years to complete. The builders overcame countless difficulties, not the least of which was their own ignorance. Hardly any of the engineers had ever worked in canal construction, and much experimentation was necessary. Some sections did not hold water at first and had to be lined with clay after work had been completed. The locks presented a special difficulty, but ingenuity and the timely discovery of water-resistant cement helped solve the problems of lock construction.
In its final form, the Erie system reached a fair portion of New York state. The Cayuga and Seneca, the Chemung, and the Genesee extensions connected important territory to the south with the canal. A branch to Oswego provided access to Lake Ontario, and the Champlain Canal gave access to the North. The system not only furnished transportation to much of the state but also tapped the Great Lakes areas served by the St. Lawrence route and the vast Ohio Territory. Beginning about 1835, a large part of the traffic from the West that had formerly traversed the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans was diverted over the Erie Canal to the port of New York. This explains much of the convergence (catching up) of the Northern Gateway with the Southern Gateway revealed in Figure 9.2. Lumber, grain, and meat products were the chief commodities to move eastward; textiles, leather goods, machinery, hardware, and imported foods and drugs went west in exchange. Passengers, too, rode the horse-drawn boats in great numbers, with speeds of 100 miles in a 24-hour day compensating in part for the discomfort of cramped and poorly ventilated cabins.
State legislature. But the fate of Pennsylvania’s canals stood in sharp contrast with those in New York. A major disadvantage of the Pennsylvania canals was geographic. The terrain traversed by the Erie to reach the western frontier had been difficult enough for canal construction, rising as much as 650 feet above the Hudson at Albany and requiring many locks to raise the water. But the terrain of western Pennsylvania proved to be insurmountable by canal. The Mainline crossed the mountains, lifted passengers and freight to an altitude of more than 2,000 feet, and deposited both travelers and goods, westbound from Philadelphia, at Pittsburgh some 400 miles away. All this was accomplished by as fantastic a combination of transport as the country had ever seen. From Philadelphia, at tidewater, to Columbia, 81 miles westward on the Susquehanna River, a horse-drawn railroad carried both passengers and freight.43 At Columbia the railroad joined the Juniata, or Eastern Division of the Pennsylvania Canal, from which passengers and freight were carried up a river valley by canal 173 miles to the Portage Railroad at Holidaysburg. Here, intrepid passengers saw their boat separated into front and rear sections, which were mounted on cars and run on underwater rails into the canal. A 36-mile trip on the Portage Railroad then began. The inclined tracks, over which cars were pulled by stationary steam engines winding cables on drums, accomplished a lift of 1,399 feet on the eastern slope to the summit and a descent of 1,172 feet on the western slope to another canal at Johnstown. From Johnstown to Pittsburgh, a distance of 105 miles, the water journey was comparatively easy.
The completion of this colossal work in 1834 was heralded by a celebration at Liberty Hall in Philadelphia. An old print depicts one of the halfboats decked with bunting and flags being drawn away from the hall by teams of prancing horses. In the sense that it carried all the traffic it could, the Mainline was successful, but the bottleneck of the Portage Railroad plus the fact that the system had twice as many locks as the Erie kept it from becoming a serious competitor for western business. Over the years, the Mainline carried 5 to 10 percent of the traffic volume of the Erie Canal, to the great disappointment of the people of a state that had spent more on waterways than any other.
This painting shows the junction of the Champlain Canal and the Erie Canal—an important point on the trade route that was to become the preeminent link between Midwest and East Coast urban centers.
Other states as well expended large sums of money on canals to draw the trade of the new West. The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal was projected up the valley of the Potomac to Cumberland, Maryland, and on to the Ohio River. The canal company was chartered by the state of Virginia with the assent of the Maryland legislature, and the federal government contributed heavily to the venture. However, despite the political blessings of two states and the federal government, the generous financial backing of all three, and the aid of some local governments, technical difficulties resulted in the project’s completion only to Cumberland.
The dazzling success of the Erie Canal and the competitive rivalry among cities and regions for commercial traffic generated many unprofitable investments in canals. The great canal-building era (1815-1843) totaled $31 million in investments, nearly three-quarters from government sources, mostly state governments. Despite the lack of profitability and the arrival and practical demonstration of the railroads, regional competitiveness spurred a second wave of investment in canals, totaling $66 million between 1843 and 1860. Nearly two-thirds of the financing was from the government, again mainly from state treasuries. More might have been invested. However, the commercial crises of 1837 and 1839 and the deep depression of the early 1840s caused financial chaos, and nine states had to suspend payments on their debts (mainly bonds, many sold to foreigners). Major canals in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Indiana, and Illinois never recovered.
Although most of the canal investments were financial failures and could not be justified by comparisons of benefits and costs, they did support the natural waterways in opening up the West. Some that have been considered preposterous mistakes might have turned out to be monuments to human inventiveness if the railroad had not developed at almost the same time. The canals posed problems, it is true. The limitations on horse-drawn vehicles for cargo transport were great except with regard to a few commodities. Canals were supposed to provide a system of waterways, but as often as not, the boats of larger canals could not move through the smaller canals. Floods and droughts often made the movement of the barges uncertain. Yet the chief reason for the eventual failure of the canals was the railroad, which could carry people and a wide variety of commodities at a much greater speed—and speed was requisite to a genuine transportation revolution.
World History
