Heaven's Ditch

by Jack Kelly

  “These days were never to be forgotten,” Oliver Cowdery concurred. “To sit under the sound of a voice dictated by the inspiration of heaven.” The two young men worked tirelessly, in a kind of rapture. Cowdery said, “Day after day I continued uninterrupted to write from his mouth, as he translated . . . the history or record, called ‘The Book of Mormon.’”

  Time

  God and time. The relationship between the Almighty and the dimension in which He causes His creation to unfold is a deep mystery. God lives outside of time, but all His miraculous manifestations occur within the world of growth and decay. The Bible makes time human. Generation succeeds generation, each one comprehensible in relation to the reader’s own limited lifetime. The process continues for hundreds, then thousands of years. Abraham, Moses, Jesus, the march of the Lord’s years for eighteen centuries down to the present—a vast span, but one a man can feel in his bones.

  In 1830, the year after Joseph Smith finished his translation, the Scottish scientist Sir Charles Lyell published his book Principles of Geology. The volume challenged readers to apprehend spans of time far beyond what they had heretofore imagined. Christian observers had long tried to reconcile what they saw in the natural world with the stories found in Scripture. Most religious authorities calculated the age of the earth, on the basis of Biblical evidence, at around six thousand years. If that were true, the forces that had gouged enormous canyons or thrown up mountains must have been catastrophic beyond imagining, events like Noah’s great flood. Late in the eighteenth century, as a scientific view of geology began to emerge, the evidence increasingly supported a different theory.

  Drawing on the work of other scientists, Lyell rejected a static natural world shaped by sudden, divinely engineered events. Familiar processes that could be observed in human time—erosion, sedimentation, volcanic eruptions—had determined the earth’s face. They had acted gradually, not over centuries or even millennia, but across eons of time far beyond man’s intuition—millions, even billions of years.

  Lyell, although a devout Christian himself, introduced ideas that were as challenging to the Christian view of the natural world as were his friend Charles Darwin’s theories of biological evolution. Lyell saw himself as the man who rescued geology from dependence on Biblical authority. The clash between systematic observation and religious belief, which continues in our own day, was particularly contentious in the early nineteenth century.

  The engineers who were hurrying to finish the Erie Canal had no reason to concern themselves with such controversies. But hints about nature’s continual change contributed to their view that man could impose his own changes on the landscape. God had shaped the earth, so could men. Humans could finish the divine work, make God’s world their own.

  No one as yet had a clear idea that during distant eons western New York had sat at the bottom of an inland sea, or that the skeletons of calciferous creatures had formed into limestone, which now stretched in a long, stony escarpment, like a wrinkle in a giant’s brow, between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. Water flowing from Lake Erie tumbled over the precipice of this Niagara Escarpment in spectacular fashion at Niagara Falls, the cataract that had inspired Jesse Hawley’s initial vision of the canal. The ridge continued many miles eastward before finally tapering to nothing.

  The Lake Ontario plain north of this ridge offered a convenient pathway for a canal. After the ditch left Rochester heading west, workers did not have to construct a single lock for sixty miles. But sooner or later, in order to reach Lake Erie and tap its waters, engineers needed to find a way to take the ditch up the ragged, eighty-foot cliff to the south. As early as 1817, the canal commissioners had reported that climbing the escarpment was “one of the most serious difficulties presented on the whole route.”

  Surveyor James Geddes, when sketching a potential route in 1808, had chosen to make this leap at a gorge twenty miles northeast of Buffalo, where Eighteen Mile Creek, flowing over the cliff from the south, had already worn down its edge. The ravine there would make the climb easier, but only slightly. At least eight locks would be needed, Geddes calculated. The engineers took to calling the site the Mountain Ridge, so menacing did the cliff appear.

  Planners had not yet determined exactly how the ascent would be accomplished. Adding to the difficulty was the fact that the edge of the cliff was almost twenty feet higher than the surface of Lake Erie. The land did not reach lake level until it had descended for seven miles to the south. Bringing the canal past this wide lip would present another massive engineering challenge.

  As the canal construction moved westward, the commissioners asked the project’s engineers for detailed proposals about how to overcome this final obstacle. The flight of locks required was unprecedented in America. The commissioners chose a design submitted by Nathan Roberts.

  Like most of the other canal engineers, Roberts had received neither a college education nor any formal training in his profession. Born of Puritan stock on a New Jersey farm, he had begun teaching school at sixteen. He saved his meager salary and, as soon as classes were out, purchased a hundred-acre plot of land in the middle of Vermont. This set a pattern for Roberts, who alternated teaching with buying, selling, and trading land.

  During his travels, Roberts met Ansel White, who lured him to teach at a frontier school near his home at Whitesboro, a town along the Mohawk River between Utica and Rome. White sent four of his own children to the school, including Lavinia, eleven, and Canvass, thirteen. Roberts picked up some extra income surveying what was still a frontier region. Years later, at the age of forty, Roberts was hired by fellow Mohawk Valley resident Benjamin Wright to work on the canal. Roberts honed his craft during Wright’s 1816 survey. He worked with his onetime student Canvass White, and married White’s sister Lavinia, now twenty-four.

  Roberts arrived at his idea for overcoming the daunting Mountain Ridge, a nineteenth-century historian noted, “without consulting any one; with but little aid from published works on the subject of engineering.” His ingenious plan envisioned five locks, each of which would lift or lower a boat twelve feet, rather than the eight feet typical of the other seventy-eight locks along the canal. He designed the locks one after another in a kind of stairway, each one opening into the next. Because of the unlimited supply of water flowing from Lake Erie, the water that drained out each time the system was used would never leave the upper level too low. In fact, the same source of water that supplied the canal also could run mills in the town that everyone knew was sure to grow up around the great engineering project. The village would be named Lockport, yet another inland “port” to join Spencerport, Brockport, Fairport, Gasport, and other nautical-minded towns along the waterway.

  Locks operated slowly, as the water gently lifted or lowered the barge. Roberts knew that his flight of locks would add to the time and cost of shipping on the canal. He planned to minimize the delay by incorporating two sets of locks into his design. At all other changes in elevation, a single lock had to carry traffic in both directions. Passing Lockport, a boat headed east could drop down to the long level while a westbound one was lifted to the top of the escarpment. Roberts basked in the acceptance of his plan, but he knew that constructing a trench to connect the topmost lock with the waters of Lake Erie would be the more formidable challenge.

  How a canal lock works

  by Joy Taylor

  The building of the canal was the largest public works project undertaken in the United States to that point. In fact, it was larger than any industrial enterprise on the continent. It required the organization of a large workforce, twelve hundred men at Lockport alone. Men in the eastern cities who had jobs were not likely to relinquish them to travel to the wilderness, however attractive the twelve-dollars-a-month wage. Workers had to be enlisted from among the poor and the unemployed. New York City’s notorious Five Points slum was a prime recruiting area.

  The arrival o
f this large body of hired laborers in what had so recently been a frontier wilderness was a shock to inhabitants of western New York. The yeomen farmers who populated the area worked hard, but if successful they received sustenance, a small cash crop, and an increasingly valuable piece of property. The daunting labor that the canal workers performed did not offer wealth or security, only dependence. They sold their time and put themselves at the command of contractors and overseers.

  These rough men brought a clash of cultures to the frontier towns where they worked. Canal construction was a mobile version of the factory. The shanties provided by the contractors, “more like dog-kennels than the habitations of men,” resembled the slums that infected major cities. The squalor and violence unsettled established residents. The arrival of so many laborers accelerated the stratification of society. Working for wages, a contemporary essayist wrote, was “the very essence of slavery.” It was in Lockport that the idea of a distinct working class found one of its earliest expressions. Laborers were different from permanent “citizens.” A Presbyterian minister noted that “respect there is paid to caste, as if a man’s rank in society was determined by dollars and cents.”

  Most Imminent Danger

  In November 1822, Thurlow Weed became one of the first travelers to arrive in Rochester by canal boat. The construction project was still a work in progress. Weed had to disembark at the Irondequoit embankment, which had yet to prove itself under a full load. In the center of the bustling mill town, workmen were still fashioning the arches that would carry the aqueduct across the Genesee.

  Twenty-five years old, Weed had started work at the age of eight as a tavern servant and a cabin boy on boats that plied the Hudson River near his home in Catskill, New York. After a stint in the state militia during the War of 1812, he found his vocation as a printer.

  It was an exciting time for the trade. The number of newspapers in the country had quadrupled since 1800 to more than eight hundred, helped along by a similar proliferation of post offices. Novels, almanacs, pamphlets, tracts, and broadsides were being published to quench the expanding middle class’s thirst for knowledge and entertainment.

  Printers operated small shops, often publishing a weekly newspaper. Editors filled out local items with reprinted stories from other publications. The profession offered variety and travel: as a journeyman, Weed’s peregrinations took him to New York City, where he developed a love of theater, and to Cooperstown, where he met and married Catherine Ostrander. A friend suggested that the booming village of Rochester might be a good place to look for opportunity.

  Weed applied at the printing office of Everard Peck, who published the weekly Rochester Telegraph. Peck soon came to depend on Weed’s energy and his incisive editorials. Weed got on well with the young and rising men of the city: lawyers, physicians, and merchants. He loved to talk and he loved to talk politics. He joined a “base-ball club” that included fifty members. They met every afternoon during the summer at Mumford’s Meadow near the middle of town.

  In 1824, Peck appointed Weed editor of the Telegraph. The paper supported John Quincy Adams in that year’s election and favored the business-friendly principles of internal improvements and protective tariffs for which Adams stood. Weed’s interest in politics paid off when he was hired by local merchants to travel to Albany and petition the state legislature to charter a bank for Rochester. Given a $300 expense account, Weed threw a $400 dinner for legislators and managed to secure the only charter issued that year. He loved the role of legislative solicitor, what we would now call a lobbyist.

  Adams made it to the White House over Andrew Jackson. The Tennessee war hero racked up the most popular votes, but lost in the House of Representatives. Weed won his own election for the state assembly and took his seat in Albany in January 1825. He was as adroit at the game of politics as he was on the baseball diamond. He rewarded his friends and did favors for the influential. He traveled to Washington on behalf of New York lieutenant-governor James Tallmadge, who wanted a foreign diplomatic post in the new administration. Weed stood by at “a respectful distance” while President Adams took his daily nude plunge into the Potomac, but failed to secure the boon.

  During 1825, Weed dared to taste one of the first tomatoes grown in Rochester—the fruit had long been thought poisonous. Although he was $250 in debt, he borrowed $2,500 to buy out Peck’s interest in the newspaper. He gave up his Assembly seat and took another printer, Robert Martin, as his partner. With the finished canal now accelerating growth in town, the two men turned the paper into a daily.

  The disappearance of William Morgan in September 1826 had all the elements of a newspaperman’s dream: mystery, pathos, and the shadowy involvement of prominent men. Weed already knew the background of the story. For a time that summer, Morgan had lived next door to Weed while compiling his exposé. Weed’s neighbor Russell Dyer had broached the possibility of his publishing Morgan’s “revelation.” Dyer insisted on secrecy, asserting that if the author’s identity became known, it would be “at the peril of his life.” Weed declined on the grounds that Martin, his new partner, was a Mason.

  The influential Freemasons of western New York were not always subtle in applying pressure. Frederick Whittlesey, a young Rochester lawyer, was a friend and ball club mate of Weed’s. He owned an interest in a rival newspaper. In November, after Morgan’s abduction, he met with his minister, who was a knight templar in the local Freemasons. If Whittlesey valued his reputation, the clergyman told him, he would ignore Morgan’s disappearance. He was to understand that the Masons could easily ruin him, Whittlesey reported. Angered by the threat, he soon became a leader among the growing ranks of Anti-Masons.

  During the first month of the controversy, Weed steered a middle course, expressing concern about Morgan’s kidnapping but suggesting that abductors “must have been over-zealous members of the fraternity.” He found that this moderate stance made no business sense. Both Masons and the swelling number of Anti-Masons were dissatisfied with the Telegraph’s lukewarm coverage. He decided to choose a side in the growing imbroglio. He became an Anti-Mason.

  Incensed citizens were organizing meetings up and down the canal district. Two weeks after Morgan’s disappearance, a crowd in Batavia heard affidavits from persons involved, including Lucinda Morgan. The Canandaigua jailer’s wife, who had released Morgan to his kidnappers, testified. Other eyewitnesses gave their accounts of the abduction. It was clear to all that Morgan had been kidnapped and that prominent Freemasons had been involved.

  Across western New York, women took the lead in demanding action. In early November, “matron ladies” in Wheatland, halfway between Batavia and Canandaigua, declared that “the vultures of Masonry pounced on a defenceless man in the streets of Batavia.” They sympathized with his wife, left with “the horrors of suspense and heart rending anticipation.” The brotherhood, “though supported by High and Mighty names,” should be suppressed, the Wheatland ladies declared. “Reason and religion equally demand its overthrow.”

  The Anti-Masonic phenomenon spread with stunning rapidity. Anti-Masons routinely exaggerated the threat from what was in fact a generally benign brotherhood. They labeled Masons “daring Banditti,” who constituted a “most imminent danger.” They were “a conspiracy more numerous and better organized for mischief, than any other,” one of “monstrous power.”

  Anti-Masons were anxious that the still-fragile American experiment with republican government was drifting off its moorings. If Freemasons, who included justices of the peace, magistrates, and the governor himself, did not respect the rule of law; if they were bound by secret oaths; if they were unwilling to defend a principle as fundamental as freedom of the press; if an American citizen like Morgan could be apprehended, tried, and punished by secret courts outside the purview of elected officials; then how could citizens have confidence that they were living in a free society? If anyone doubted the Masons’ perfidy,
opponents need only point to the desolation of Morgan’s wife and children.

  Citizens at a public meeting in Batavia declared that the law itself had been used “for the purpose of giving an unholy sanction to the violence” against Morgan. They resolved to investigate and to lay the facts before their countrymen. A gathering at the town of Seneca, east of Canandaigua, asserted that “all secret associations are dangerous to freedom.” Participants vowed not to vote for any Freemason for any public office.

  In December 1826, three months after Morgan’s abduction, Thurlow Weed joined a committee to raise funds to investigate the affair. If the state would not get to the bottom of the matter, citizens must. He also decided, perhaps under financial pressure, to sell his interest in the Telegraph to Martin. He elected to stay in Rochester and double down on his commitment to the cause. In early 1828, he found backers to start a new newspaper, the Antimasonic Enquirer. It would eventually be joined by 125 other Anti-Masonic papers.

  Weed was genuinely concerned about the danger of Masonic power. But his penetrating political instinct allowed him to peer into the future and gauge the movement’s long-range potential. Politics had entered the Morgan affair early. Governor DeWitt Clinton’s proclamations following Morgan’s disappearance had offered rewards of up to $2,000 to anyone bringing his abductors to justice. Clinton, like many Masons, was acutely embarrassed by the actions taken in the name of the brotherhood. He was one of Weed’s heroes, but had lately allied himself with those backing Andrew Jackson. Jackson’s faction would soon coalesce into the Democratic Party, while Weed’s loyalty would veer toward the emerging Whigs.

  State and national political alignments were passing through a muddled phase. Martin Van Buren and his supporters in the patronage empire that Weed had labeled the “Albany Regency,” backed by members of Tammany Hall in New York City, held a majority bloc in the New York state capital. They too sided with Jackson. Looking ahead, Weed saw new political fault lines developing. Businessmen wanted internal improvements, strong banks, and protective tariffs. Populists and farmers favored limited spending, tight controls on the money interests, and low tariffs to hold down prices. To keep the Jackson–Van Buren party from dominating by sheer numbers, Weed needed to nourish a third faction. Anti-Masonry, he felt, held the key.