The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers

by Simon Winchester

  Yet how exactly could these newcomers be bound physically with the people back east? The answer was in theory inescapable: physical links needed to be built across the hills that now separated them.

  There were some roads, true—a small scattering of niggardly and rutted tracks that wound through mountain passes—but they were ill suited for more than the occasional horsemen, let alone wagon trains of trade goods. But rivers, by contrast, were there already, several broad waterways along which cargo-laden boats could move with ease and speed. All that was needed was that they be connected with those on the west, and George Washington and his colleagues knew from the experiences of traders back in Europe that the building of canals would solve this problem.

  So he backed two schemes, first becoming president of the Patowmack Company, set up in 1785 and charged with building a canal in the direction of Cumberland, then naming himself a sponsor a few months later of the James River Company, intended to bring a waterway up to link with the Kanawha and a more southerly section of the Ohio Valley. If either succeeded in actually building a canal, Washington would be doubly enriched—by helping to create major pieces of unifying infrastructure for the new country and by bringing trade and prosperity to the lands he already owned.

  But neither project went anywhere. It mattered little that Thomas Jefferson was an early believer in one of the schemes. “Nature has then declared in favour of the Potowmack,” he wrote to George Washington, noting the river’s seeming closeness to the Ohio, “and . . . it behoves us then to open our doors to it.” Nor did it matter that the auguries had been so good. An engineer named William Weston came over from England to supervise and lend his advice. A clever and eccentric builder of steam-powered riverboats, whom Washington had met on his 1784 expedition, had also pledged to help with the more technical aspects of the construction. But the expense of the thing was the problem, and soon money was flowing faster from the Patowmack Company coffers than waters from a pound lock sluice gate.

  Confidence in the commercial sense of the project sputtered out after only a few miles, after the building of five sets of locks around the Great Falls, which lay just a few miles north of the starting point in Georgetown. The canal never got anywhere close to the Ohio, and it took seventeen years to build to where it was terminated in western Maryland.

  To be sure, Washington’s canal did eventually allow boatmen to travel all the way from the hill town of Cumberland down to the Tidewater—a journey that might take three days going downstream, two weeks for men who had to pole their boats all the way up through the mountains. The cargoes carried on the little keelboats were typical for any passageway between a developed and a developing society—raw materials, flour, whiskey, tobacco, and iron ore on the downstream leg, manufactured goods like guns, clothing, and hardware on the journey back.

  But the tolls that could be charged for the boats scarcely covered the interest on the company debt. When in 1828 the firm was taken over by the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal Company,* it had debts of around $200,000, immense at the time. By this time, George Washington was long dead; he had died two years before even the Grand Falls locks were opened and essentially saw nothing of his vision and never knew of the thwarting of his dream.

  Much the same fate befell the canal that was supposed to link the James and Kanawha Rivers, and again, it failed in spite of Washington’s keen involvement. It ran out of money; wars (such as that with the British in 1812) interrupted its construction; technical problems plagued it; and when it was abandoned in 1851, it had reached only the mountain town of Buchanan, 150 miles west of the starting point in Richmond, with no plans to take it over the summits and down into the Ohio Valley.

  In the matter of canal making, Washington was more of a dreamer than a builder. True, it was he who first came up with the idea that waterways could one day knit the land together. His plans for doing so foundered early on, however, and men of more practical bent were left to design and dig waterways along routes very different from those Washington preferred. He had the vision and set the tone, but his particular dreams were not to be realized, and the country would in the end be connected by waterways that ran westward from starting points a very long way from his home country in Virginia. And so far as the ultimate development of the nation’s geography was concerned, that was perhaps just as well.

  THE FIRST BIG DIG

  In one of those happy synchronicities of history, by the time the first real shipping canals were being excavated in America—an explosion of construction that started in the 1790s—the technology had just been perfected in Europe. In England, France, and Germany, engineers now knew how best to drill the tunnels and create the flights of locks and the aqueducts needed to make navigable artificial waterways.

  So it is no wonder that American engineers made strenuous efforts to learn these new techniques. Before even starting to make a waterway, they needed to know how best to survey the land and how to ensure that the bottom of the ditch they planned to build across it was kept level across great distances. Special equipment that was quite unknown in America at that time was required to achieve this—in particular leveling telescopes, special theodolites, and most particularly an elevation-measuring device known as the Y (or wye) level, developed by William Troughton in London.

  The engineers had to learn how to dig enormous trenches, removing millions of tons of earth, and how to employ explosives safely to deal with heavy nuisances like tree trunks and embedded rocks. They needed to know how to puddle sand and clay together on a ditch bottom, making it watertight, and how to concoct the proper formula for a cement that would set and remain strong while totally submerged and so prevent water from leaking away into the canals’ sides.

  They also needed to know how to design and build proper pound locks—to impound water between gates to raise or lower a craft passing up or down the waterway. They would have to fashion wooden lock gates strong enough to hold the immense tonnages of water yet light enough to be opened and closed by hand by passing boatmen or by lockkeepers and their wives. They needed to know how to make and operate the special valves and sluices and reservoirs that would move the waters into and through the gates, allowing watercraft to pass safely along, up and down the hills through which the canals would be cut.

  They needed, in short, to learn everything in order to begin the frenzy of what came to be known as America’s Canal Era. Britain had become the new center of canal construction, so the Americans went off to towns like Birmingham and Manchester and Gloucester and London to watch and listen and to learn from the great engineers, men like Thomas Telford, John Rennie, Benjamin Latrobe,* John Smeaton, and William Weston, men who were weaving Britain’s canals into the complex and clever system that still exists to this day.

  Among the most celebrated visitors to Britain were the Loammi Baldwins, a father-and-son team of American canal engineers who played vital roles in the churn of invention and practical imagination that seemed suddenly to grip postrevolutionary America.

  Some like to call Loammi Baldwin Sr. the father of American civil engineering. (This was a time of many fathers, in every field from astronomy to zoology, as well as engineering to canal making; to make matters even more confusing, some also like to give Loammi Jr. the same title.) The elder Baldwin had an extraordinarily varied career. He was the son of a Massachusetts carpenter and, thanks to his early but unexplained interest in hydraulics, was first employed by a local firm that made water pumps. He was destined for greater things, however, and in his later youth became greatly inspired by hearing the weekly Harvard lectures given by John Winthrop, a mathematician and astronomer and one of the first American intellectuals to be taken seriously by the academics of Europe.

  Baldwin would regularly walk the ten miles from his home north of the city to hear John Winthrop’s talks, often in the company of a polymath scholar friend, the British inventor Benjamin Thompson, who became famous in his own right.* The Revolutionary War interrupted matters, however. Baldwin
accepted a commission as a major on the rebel side, and his regiment was one that crossed the Delaware with George Washington and fought in most of the famous early battles—Lexington and Trenton most notably.

  On his return home to civilian life, Baldwin briefly became a county sheriff but soon reverted to his interest in hydraulics, physics, and mathematics, all essential in canal building. Massachusetts, in common with most of the early states, had seen the wisdom of waterborne trade, and men like the Baldwins were summoned to help build structures that would change the fate and the future of the American economies and the shape and size of American cities for years to come.

  Few of these canals looked as pretty as those that had been handcrafted by canalsmiths and masons and carpenters back in Oxfordshire or outside Bath or deep in the valleys of Wales, and they were certainly not in the same league as the Canal du Midi in southern France, breathtakingly lovely still. The American canals were industrial monsters built for the demands of big cities and big business. Most of those that remain look that way still. The canal landscape of today’s United States is dominated by rusting iron gates, cement walls, and greasy hydraulic gearings rather than by limestone cottages, wooden lock gates, and baskets of gillyflowers. But in most cases, the canals that were finished worked exceptionally well; they each made local history, and they all changed national geography by doing so.

  There is endless bickering about which canal was America’s first. Much depends on definitions, and proponents press the claims of dozens of early river-improvement schemes and bypass canals. The South Hadley Canal, in central Massachusetts, built in 1792, is a fine example. It was short, only a couple of miles long, and was designed to bypass the rapids on the fall line of the Connecticut River. But it employed something quite majestic to do so: an enormous water-filled iron bath on wheels, a caisson, in which ships floating serenely inside could be winched on iron rails up the slope by a pair of gigantic chains, the whole mighty ensemble powered by waterwheels turned by waterfalls. The South Hadley Inclined Plane has now been lost to time and rust, but a seal memorializes the great engine in an engraving, and the fact that it was built—by an otherwise long-forgotten engineer named Benjamin Prescott—without any template or precedent is a reminder of just how good Americans were quickly becoming as makers of great and complicated pieces of machinery.

  The Dismal Swamp Canal, on the border between Virginia and North Carolina, is an early claimant too. It was basically a dredged passage through the marshes, and it enjoyed brief fame because of a hotel built on its banks directly on top of the state line. Young eighteenth-century swells would hold duels here, one man standing in Virginia, the other on the far side of the border, making their crime legally ambiguous—particularly important if one of them died. And gamblers could scurry across the hotel lounge into North Carolina whenever any Virginia marshals arrived to break up their game.

  The Santee Canal, begun in 1793, connected the South Carolina port of Charleston with the newly made state capital of Columbia, well inland. Designed by a Swede strangely named Senf, built by slaves who worked under terrible conditions of summer heat and insects and snakes, it briefly saw cargoes of indigo, rice, and cotton carried from the plantations through eight locks that took it up and over a series of rises totaling about thirty-five feet and thence down to the sea. But it was poorly made; it was shallow, narrow, and could take boats that carried only a few tons of goods. It swiftly fell into disuse.

  The Santee’s fate mirrors that of all too many of the early canals, whether they were waterfall-bypass constructions or full-dress navigational waterways. For despite all the arguments over to which are due the laurels, there is one reality about all of the major American canals that were planned before the Loammi Baldwins and their successors entered the business. Each one of them ultimately failed, and most of them did so very quickly. Even those that were imagined, planned, and begun by great dreamers and unifiers like George Washington himself turned out to be pipe dreams. They were pioneering constructions of enormous scope and ambition, with profound symbolic importance, but they never turned a dollar of profit, and they joined the country together only in theory, not yet in practice.

  It was shortly after the first sod for the James River Canal was cut that men like Baldwin started to take over from the dreamers and the speculators. The specter of failure that had dogged the pioneer builders for so long finally started to abate. With the involvement of professionals, the true worth of American waterways began swiftly to be realized, and a network of sorts began to take shape.

  Baldwin cut his teeth first on a project near Boston, a navigation canal that would be a model—technically but not financially, for it didn’t do too well either—for most of the other great triumphs of canal engineering that would follow. This first was the Middlesex Canal, which connected the Merrimack River to the port of Boston.

  In applying to be in charge of its design and construction, Baldwin was somewhat hesitant. “It might be said,” he admitted to the directors of the newly formed Middlesex Company, that he had “no Experience at all. It is true I have studied the theory for many years, and have been at Considerable pains to get possessed of the principles of Canaling, but I have never seen one foot of Canal which has been completed in a proper manner.”

  Nonetheless, he was hired, and he quickly got help. The directors agreed to pay $2,000 to William Weston, who had given technical advice to George Washington; he came up from Pennsylvania to lend his British-won experience to Baldwin. And the combination seemed to work: after eight years of construction, the canal was opened in 1803. It was a formidable achievement on many levels. It was the longest canal in the country at the time—and it immediately helped the city of Boston to develop its muscles as a full-blown commercial city and, for a while at least, a great American port.

  The construction, which had been prompted by a fall-line chain of rapids and waterfalls along the Merrimack that made the river essentially non-navigable, coincided with and then accelerated the planned development of the city of Lowell as one of early America’s great mill centers. Long rows of cloth factories, roaring with water-powered loom noise, were promptly thrown up alongside the waterways where the Merrimack and the Concord Rivers join. Bales of Southern cotton were then brought in, and millions of yards of finished textiles were then sent out—and all of them along the Middlesex Canal.

  The twenty locks, seven aqueducts, and well-cemented walls (and the newfangled technical marvel of a floating towpath) of this beautifully built and scrupulously maintained waterway allowed supply boats to get down from Lowell to Boston in only eighteen hours, the goods then being sent on for export or transit to the rest of America. Freight rates dropped almost overnight: the rate from Lowell to Boston fell from $8 a ton to $4, the up-country rate from $13 to $5. The city grew in a fury of construction, and even as a shadow of its former self, it remains at a respectable hundred thousand souls today.

  Unintended consequences were legion. Organized labor came to Lowell in the mid-1830s. Irish navvies came in to dig yet more waterways within and around the city, and thousands of young Irishwomen were brought across the ocean to join refugees from the hardscrabble New England farms who came to Lowell to work in the mills on the endlessly thwacking looms. They became the long-remembered Lowell Mill Girls. These women eventually decided to protest their initially appalling working conditions. They struck blows for the rights of the woman and against the ills of wage slavery. With strikes, slowdowns, and work-to-rule actions, they won reforms that eventually elevated Lowell to national renown as a seat of industrial and social experiments that have affected all of America ever since.

  This is not the place to discuss in detail these changes to the nation’s labor arrangements, but suffice it to say that the reforms made within the immense brick mills of Lowell were born of a simple fact: that this particular industrial town was located where it was, was planned to make what it made, and was designed to do what it did in large part because there
was now a well-run artificial waterway to take its goods speedily and inexpensively to market. The Middlesex Canal was not merely “an example of early American engineering at its finest,” as one history suggests. It was an indication of a new trend: canals were beginning to alter the social fabric of the nation.

  Albert Gallatin, President Jefferson’s Swiss-born (and notably French-accented) treasury secretary, remarked that the Middlesex Canal was “the greatest work of the kind which has been completed in the United States.” Gallatin—among whose many legacies is New York University—made this declaration in a formal report that outlined how important he and his government now believed canals were. Together with good roads, he said, they were central to the making of the nation. They should wherever necessary be financed by governments. They already were changing the geography of the country. And they were now well on their way to achieving a far more profound effect on American society than even the unfulfilled dreams of George Washington had ever supposed.

  Moreover, though commercial success may still have eluded it, the Middlesex was a technical triumph like no other. Those who had worked on its construction learned much that was applicable to later projects, most of them far greater and grander than this. In particular, the success of this waterway was to lead to the construction, with work starting just twenty-three years later, of what is both symbolically and practically the most important canal ever built in the nation. The Middlesex was a pioneer canal, just 27 miles in length, and it changed the face of manufacturing on America’s East Coast. The Erie Canal was to be 363 miles long, and it would change the face of America.

  THE WEDDED WATERS OF NEW YORK

  It was a notorious geography question, well known to teenage schoolchildren of my generation back in the Britain of the 1950s. “Discuss the significance,” it usually went, “of the Hudson-Mohawk Gap.”