Heaven's Ditch

by Jack Kelly

  Dow rejected the pretension of the established clergy. “In a religious point of view,” he declared, “all men are on a level.” A devotee of Thomas Jefferson, he took the term “born equal” literally. Yet around him he saw men treated like animals and forced to bow and scrape. “One hath thousands,” he said, “gained by the labour of others.” There was no reason why a man should not think for himself in every field, including religion. He opposed “purse proud” elites, “men of self importance.” He sneered at religious denominations.

  The tottering ideas of Calvinism often came into Dow’s cross-hairs. Calvinist orthodoxy held that man was a depraved sinner, salvation a gift from a merciful God, bestowed on only a few regardless of merit. Jesus died only for these elect. Based on the thinking of French theologian John Calvin in the sixteenth century, these notions had been taken to heart by the Puritan dissenters who first journeyed to New England. Clergymen urged believers to pray and wait for God to act.

  Dow attacked this passivity and raged against the complex, elitist doctrine of Calvinist theologians. He dismissed their insistence that the prize of salvation had been awarded or denied a person before birth. He mocked the paradox that a condemned man still had free will. He often repeated the sneering chant:

  You can and you can’t

  You will and you won’t;

  You’ll be damned if you do,

  And you’ll be damned if you don’t.

  The common people cheered. They wanted a spectacle and Dow gave them one. He became the darling of the camp meetings. He understood the power of celebrity—his very presence launched his followers into a kind of intoxication. He induced a spiritual agitation so powerful that it set his audience twitching and writhing, a phenomenon known as “the jerks.” He encouraged the “holy laugh,” a burst of hysteria that overtook those flooded with grace. Enthusiasts at his meetings got down on their hands and knees and barked like dogs in their ecstasy.

  The gentry dismissed “Crazy” Dow as an ignorant barbarian. One critic said: “His manners have been clownish in the extreme; his habits and appearance more filthy than a savage Indian.” But while they found him uncouth, they had to admit that “he understood common life, and especially vulgar life.”

  He understood life. Dow was no anchorite. Like many in those days of heady expansion, he took advantage of his travels to make money speculating in land. He published numerous collections of his rambling writings, earning royalties as he spread his notoriety. He sold patent medicine of dubious efficacy. He admitted he could outsmart swindlers and “run the rig” as well as any of them. Detractors labeled him “imposter” and “horse thief.” Dow was indeed a confidence man, but he won listeners’ trust not to fleece them but to hand them over to the Lord.

  Dow had a tremendous influence on frontier settlers. Thousands of children were named Lorenzo to honor him. The name was passed down through generations, so that well into the twentieth century the ghost of the bearded wild man haunted America. But the emotionalism he encouraged and the easy path to heaven he promised scared and infuriated the orthodox clergymen of the East. In their eyes, he was turning religion into unrestrained fanaticism.

  Charles Finney was to be the man who would distill Dow’s frontier spirit and inject it into orthodox Christianity. He too rejected the idea that the human constitution was morally depraved, and that God had condemned men for their sinful nature. Like Dow, Finney knew the importance of putting on a show. Religious leaders, he said, should emulate politicians. They should get up meetings, circulate handbills and pamphlets, and blaze away in the newspapers.

  “The object of our measures,” Finney wrote, “is to gain attention and you must have something new.” It would be his mission to bring something new to the age-old truths of Protestant faith in America. His efforts to do so would shake the churches to their foundations.

  Practical

  There is no poetry in cement. Of all the products of man, it is the most prosaic. Canal locks were stone basins. Aqueducts were made of stone. So were bridges, culverts, dams, and waste weirs for draining excess water. All had to be held together with durable cement. Yet neither the canal commissioners nor the engineers they hired had thought deeply about where they would obtain this critical ingredient.

  Mortar made from lime and sand had long been used for stone and brick work. But that mortar, which took months to achieve its full hardness, turned to mush when in contact with water. It would not do for a canal. The builders needed waterproof cement and there was no source of such material in America. They could not complete the canal without it.

  The commissioners wisely pushed back the day of reckoning by starting the canal’s construction with the middle section, almost all of it on a single level. But now they were approaching Onondaga Lake, near present-day Syracuse. They needed nine locks to step the canal down to a lower level. They did not have the material to build them.

  The canal was being overseen by amateurs. A “practical nature is every thing that is necessary” to build a canal, a contemporary observer noted. Americans’ innate practicality would be put to the test as the engineers grappled with the reality of construction.

  The commissioners, rather than try to manage a large workforce, had decided to contract the effort to “native farmers, mechanics, merchants and professional men, residing in the vicinity of the line.” These locals would dig out their section of the ditch under the direction of the engineers. The arrangement relieved New York State of responsibility for permanent employees. It set a precedent for government contracting that endures today.

  The laborers were accustomed to the type of work the canal demanded. Just as Joseph Smith Sr. and his sons were sweating to clear trees and get ready to plant, the canal workers were slashing through forests and hacking brush to prepare for digging. Excavating drainage ditches and diverting streams were familiar tasks. Working out of doors in any weather was usual.

  Digging a three-hundred-mile ditch by hand, however, was a Herculean task. For twelve, sometimes fifteen hours a day, a laborer dug into the soil and removed it. He sweated under a sun that hung motionless in a blistering sky. He withstood the insult of cold rain. He broke through dirt and clay undisturbed for eons, thrust his shovel into the loosened ground, lifted it out, heaped it into a barrow or cart, and repeated the movements over and over and over. Contractors, whose profits depended on accomplishing the work with dispatch, drove their men. When arms and backs began to throb with fatigue, the work went on.

  Excavating dry dirt, the contractors found, was best done using a modified farm plow. A local man invented a blade for the device made from hardened steel rather than wood or cast iron. Pulled by four oxen, it could tear through roots up to two inches thick. Once the sod was broken, a nineteenth-century bulldozer, which consisted of a horse-drawn blade known as a slip scraper, removed the soil.

  Inventors came up with two new devices to help clear forests. One was a winch that could pull down a tree by means of a cable attached to its upper branches. Seeing a tree so uprooted, an observer noted, was “a spectacle that must awaken feelings of gratitude to that Being, who has bestowed on his creatures so much power and wisdom.”

  Another new tool was the stump puller. Imagine a super winch, a thirty-foot-long axle joining wheels sixteen feet in diameter. Fixed to the center, a fourteen-foot wheel is wrapped with a rope cable. Workers attach a chain descending from the axle to a partly dug-out stump. A team of horses, their force multiplied eightfold by the machinery, pulls on the cable, turning the wheel and axle, winding up the chain, and tearing the stump from the soil. The device allowed a crew of six men to grub up forty stumps in a day.

  The worst of the work came when the digging moved into marshy areas. Here the scrapers were useless: only spades and wheelbarrows would do for extracting the slimy soil from wetlands. The traditional wheelbarrow had a boxlike structure that proved inefficie
nt for transporting and dumping mud, which clung to the corners. Rome inventor Jeremiah Brainard fashioned the bed of his new barrow from a single flexible slab of ash wood. He formed it into a semicircular shape “from which the muck slid out instantly.” It was used up and down the canal.

  Ingenuity and intense labor pushed the project forward. By 1818, work on the middle section was approaching completion. The construction of locks, aqueducts, and other stone work was looming. The need for waterproof cement was now dire.

  The technology of cement had reached a high point around the time that Christ walked the earth. Folks in Greece and the Middle East had known how to heat limestone to 900 degrees Fahrenheit; they used the resulting lime to coat their brick buildings. Experimenting, Romans found that a mixture of lime and sand with the addition of volcanic ash made a particularly hard cement. What was more, the material was waterproof, making it ideal for harbors and aqueducts. Some cement seawalls in Italy have withstood two thousand years of battering by salt water (modern Portland cement lasts only about fifty years under similar conditions).

  With the decline of Rome, knowledge of this superior cement was lost for many centuries. Ordinary mortar worked fine for laying up bricks and stone blocks in dry situations. It was used in everything from castles and cathedrals to peasant huts. Stone work in wet locations needed a more durable binder.

  In the early 1700s, a lighthouse on the treacherous Eddystone Rocks at the western end of the English Channel collapsed. John Smeaton, the first man to declare himself a civil engineer, designed a replacement. Smeaton found that mixing lime with clay yielded a cement that could withstand salt water. His fifty-nine-foot tower, finished in 1759, lasted a hundred years. His discovery resuscitated interest in waterproof cement.

  It made sense to American canal commissioners to look to Europe for a source of the critical material. In the winter of 1818, the canal engineer Canvass White, then twenty-eight, volunteered to travel to England at his own expense to gather information. The commissioners happily agreed to the trip. Although British soldiers had burned the White House in 1814, White, who had been wounded in the war, received a cordial reception four years later. He traveled more than two thousand miles on foot during his six-month stay, sketching and taking notes of canals, aqueducts, tunnels, and other works. He acquired new leveling instruments for use by Erie Canal engineers. Everywhere he went, he encouraged men with canal experience, whether as engineers or laborers, to emigrate to America.

  During his tour, he met with John Isaac Hawkins, a prodigiously talented inventor who, in addition to devising a “polygraph” for automatically copying letters, had learned a great deal about canals and building methods. The commissioners’ assumption that “common quick lime” would suffice for stonework, Hawkins told White, was sheer folly. He said he could provide just the thing they needed. He gave White some samples, hoping to sell the material to the Americans in quantity. But importing such a bulky item and transporting it to the interior would be prohibitively expensive. White was convinced that the success of the canal depended on finding a source in America.

  What the canal builders needed was a type of limestone that incorporated the proper proportion of clay. Soon after Canvass White’s return, Chief Engineer Benjamin Wright, accompanied by a man named Andrew Bartow, ventured out to examine rocks along the canal corridor. Forty-five at the time, Bartow had received training in medicine and other sciences and was referred to as “Doctor.” He kept a large farm just north of Little Falls in the Mohawk Valley.

  The two men found a quarry in Onondaga County near Oneida Lake whose stone “resembled the Welch lime.” Bartow tried heating and grinding it. The results were disappointing, but he told Wright he would continue to experiment. He loaded a wagon full of the rock and took it home.

  With an assistant, he burned and ground and mixed samples, adjusting the firing temperature and other variables. “Baffled at first,” he recorded, “we ultimately succeeded.” He arranged a demonstration in which he formed a ball of his new material and left it overnight in a bucket of water. In the morning, it was hard as rock. Suddenly, an abundant local supply of waterproof cement was available along the very path of the canal. The canal commissioners said it was “a discovery of the greatest importance.”

  Now in possession of the critical ingredient to complete the canal’s stonework, the commissioners envisioned smooth sailing. Canal stock began to sell at a premium, loans arrived from British banks, optimism prevailed. No one seemed concerned by the fact that the engineers had finished only the easiest of all the sections of the vast project. Far more imposing obstacles would have to be surmounted before a boat would float across the state.

  All

  Joe and Lucy Smith inhabited a landscape infused with magic. Lucy recorded her husband’s dreams and explained their significance. Along with their neighbors, the Smiths were drawn to a folk religion in which superstition, miraculous healing, impromptu rites, and personal visions were part of everyday experience.

  Outlandish spiritual manifestations had been flaring on the fringes of New England for decades. In the 1790s, when Joseph Sr. was a young man, a prophet named Nathaniel Wood had gathered a group of believers in Middletown, Vermont, just west of the Smith home. His followers declared themselves to be New Israelites, the literal descendants of the Lost Tribes. They referred to nonmembers as “gentiles,” and were said to practice polygamy. They were guided by revelations from God. Under the influence of a man named Winchell (also known as Wingate), they searched for gold with divining rods. They started building a temple. “The zeal of all increased and continued to increase until it amounted to a distraction,” the town historian wrote.

  Winchell predicted that the world was about to end. The Apocalypse, he said, would come on January 14, 1801. His forecast of destroying angels so alarmed authorities that they called out the local militia. Soon afterward, Winchell was exposed as a counterfeiter and the movement collapsed.

  The Smiths did not leave this type of rustic religion behind when they moved to Palmyra. A German immigrant noted that western New York was a “variegated sampler of all conceivable religious chimeras and dreams.” The year after they arrived, the Smiths were exposed to one of the most outlandish dreamers, a man named Isaac Bullard. He led a group of Pilgrims who scorned all denominations. They yearned to restore Christianity to the time of the Apostles. The elusive Bullard was described by some as of “diminutive stature, with a club foot,” and by others as a “red-bearded giant.” He declared himself a prophet guided by messages from God.

  With his wife, an infant son named Christ, and six followers, he trekked southward from Canada in 1817 to the area the Smiths had left a year earlier. The appearance of the Bullardites lit a firestorm of curiosity in Vermont. Their leader, who styled himself “Elijah,” outlawed bathing and hair cutting. His devotees dressed in leather girdles and bearskins, chanted endless supplications to God, and subsisted on gruel from a common trough. Filth and fasting pointed the way to heaven.

  Their appearance and habits drew laughter. A local postmaster called them “insane in a degree.” Like Lorenzo Dow, like William Miller with his Bible-inspired forebodings, like Joseph Smith Jr. with his visions of God, Isaac Bullard was a folk genius. He was intelligent rather than learned, intuitive rather than calculating, inspired, confident, authoritative in his naturalness. Contemporaries and succeeding generations found such characters difficult to fathom, easy to ridicule. Yet in a few weeks, Bullard convinced more than thirty Vermonters to throw over their lives, rid themselves of their possessions, and join his movement. Some elusive quality in him goaded people to accept his teaching in spite of the group’s freakish eccentricity.

  The lost tribes were “beginning to be gathered in,” Bullard told the curious. In August 1817, the Bullardites hit the road, headed for the promised land in the west. His group picked up more adherents as they crossed Vermont. In October,
they passed through the area where the digging of the canal had begun during the summer. In sharp contrast to the industrious farm boys working on that project, the Pilgrims hiked along holding short staffs, bent double and chanting, “Oh-a, Ho-a, Oh-a, Ho-a . . . My God, My God!” Their hunched backs and long beards “gave them a very ludicrous appearance” one observer noted.

  Frontier settlers were hungry for excitement, and the Pilgrims attracted enormous attention. Thousands of spectators lined the roads to watch the motley procession pass through Ohio in April 1818. When they reached Cincinnati, the Pilgrims traded their wagons for a flatboat and headed down the Ohio River, then the Mississippi. Disillusionment set in. By the fall of 1819, only the prophet, his wife, another woman, and two children were left, living on the bank of the Mississippi. In 1824 a merchant on his way to New Orleans encountered the two women, dressed in rags and living in a reed hut. They refused his offer of worldly aid. They were holding out for glory.

  Seven years later, a Vermont newspaper would recount, “Our readers will recollect a similar delusion which raged some ten years ago in the case of the ‘Pilgrims.’ . . . From the resemblance between the Pilgrims and the Mormonites in manners and pretensions, we should think Old Isaac had re-appeared in the person of Joe Smith.”

  On their way west, the Pilgrims stopped briefly at New Lebanon in eastern New York. The town was home to a settlement of Shakers, believers who were, in their own way, as extreme as the followers of Isaac Bullard.

  Today, our impression of the Shakers is colored by their craftsmanship and their celibacy. They fashioned elegant furniture; they shunned conventional eroticism. But in their own day, they were inflammatory. They recognized the equality of women, demonstrated a viable form of communal living, preached the nearness of the millennium, and deliberately turned their backs on the acquisitive society that was taking hold of America.