by Martin Doyle
And so the young Albert Gallatin must have felt quite satisfied as he wrapped himself in buffalo skins that evening, dozing in a crowded cabin where General George Washington also slept. The next morning Gallatin turned down an offer from Washington to oversee the General’s western landholdings, and Washington headed east over the mountains toward Mount Vernon. It would be another five years before Washington was president. It would be 17 years before Gallatin became Secretary of Treasury and 21 years before Lewis and Clark stood at the Missouri River to christen one of its three tributaries as the Gallatin River.
When Washington returned from his western explorations, he was eager to take the first step to link the East and the West: establishing viable navigation on the Potomac River. Doing the necessary work on the river required the formation of a company that could work on an interstate river. But such a company was difficult to establish due to the existing political climate and structures. In 1784, the United States was governed by the Articles of Confederation. Each of the states functioned independently—and the Potomac River forms part of the border between two states. Getting congressional approval on an agreement between states for work on an interstate river like the Potomac would be nearly as arduous as establishing a treaty between separate countries to do work on an international river like the Rio Grande or the Columbia.
Washington, anxious to get his company off the ground, was exasperated with the unwillingness of Congress—or its inability under the Articles of Confederation—to recognize his already-negotiated interstate deal; the lawmakers’ intransigence was his continued economic loss. He vented to Jefferson that negotiating a treaty for interstate commerce was impossible given the “incertitude which prevails in Congress, and the non-attendance of its members.”4
The following year, in 1785, delegates from Maryland and Virginia—those states bordering the Potomac—gathered in Washington’s home at Mount Vernon. They met to work out an arrangement for commerce on the river that would become known as the Mount Vernon Compact. They came up with plans for governing tolls, fishing, and other commercial interests on the Potomac, as well as navigation on the Pocomoke River and Chesapeake Bay. All of these were steps in the right direction, but in arriving at the agreement that would address the problems Washington’s company confronted, the representatives noted that a whole range of additional issues remained unaddressed. After approving the agreement, which was in turn approved by their respective legislatures, one of the participants—James Madison, from Virginia—suggested holding another meeting on interstate commerce issues and inviting representatives from all the states.
In September 1786, this follow-up conference was held in Annapolis, Maryland. Once again, Washington was unable to push forward his Potomac Company. In fact, reconciling many of the conflicts that arose out of interstate commerce proved difficult, primarily because of the limitations imposed by the existing Articles of Confederation. Annapolis raised many additional issues but did not resolve them. The delegates were frustrated, but saw advantages to broadening the conversation even further, so they issued a call for yet another meeting. This third meeting would be in 1787 in Philadelphia, and it would be a full constitutional meeting. With interstate commerce as its initial purpose, the Philadelphia convention tackled a wide range of issues, eventually even setting aside the Articles of Confederation to develop an entirely new set of governing principles, which yielded the U.S. Constitution. As Teddy Roosevelt would argue over a century later, the Constitution had its roots in interstate river navigation.
The Erie Canal Village Museum in upstate New York is just east of the Rome Sports Hall of Fame Museum. On this hot July day, neither place is crowded. The parking lot at the canal museum is more grass than gravel. The sign is off-kilter and looks as if it was last painted 20 years ago. The weeds at the edge of the property are greedily encroaching on the museum grounds, laying a quiet biotic siege.
The three people working at—or at least loitering in—the museum are startled to see a visitor, but enthusiastically answer my questions about local history. They are a wealth of information about the canal, the boats that traveled on it, and the small villages and cities that developed alongside it. An anecdotal history of the canal in the mid-nineteenth century is forthcoming, but a seemingly simple question flummoxes them: How much commercial traffic moves on the canal system now?
“Wow, that’s a good question.”
“Now, I don’t know that.”
“Can’t say if I’ve ever seen a boat with a real barge.”
“What do you mean by commercial?”
“If you find out anything, can you call us and tell us?”
“Go ask one of the lock tenders on the Barge Canal. They’ll know everything.”
The modern-day Erie Canal is a conundrum, and for a feature of the early American landscape that so profoundly affected the course of history, it is surprisingly hard to find. To understand the Erie Canal demands an appreciation of topography. The canal route really starts at Troy, New York, just upstream of Albany, where the Mohawk River flows into the upstream end of the easily navigated portion of the Hudson River. From there, the route heads directly west along the valley of the Mohawk River, which is remarkable for its flatness—the river rises surprisingly little upstream of Troy as it passes through miles of rolling hills in upstate New York. As you head toward the source of many rivers, their valleys become deeper and narrower, forming a distinct V in the landscape. But as you continue west toward the source of the Mohawk, its valley grows less obvious. West of Rome, the Mohawk valley fades into a broad, flat landscape.
The canal itself sometimes seems to disappear altogether, or at least become almost impossible to find. This is partly because the Erie Canal is now really two canals: the original canal, which was replaced in 1918 by the modern canal, known as the Barge Canal. With a bit of looking, a lot of detailed map reading, and a few missed turns, it is possible to find—really, stumble onto—the original Erie Canal. In many places today, the original canal is little more than an algae-covered gully—no bigger or more attractive than any drainage ditch on one of the sprawling farms nationwide.
It is far easier to track down the Barge Canal. Still, it’s a far cry from the heyday of the canal, when you could have located it most easily by following crowds of people into a bustling downtown hub of villages, towns, or cities. Nowadays you have to use GPS or the small signs along backroads to find the canal.
Like all the buildings along the modern Barge Canal system, the small house and power building at Lock 20 are painted dark blue with bright yellow numbers. These are the same colors as the New York State Thruway, for good reason: the Thruway authority owns, operates, and pays for the canal system. Strangely, and adding to how confusing all things are about the modern Erie Canal, the Thruway charges tolls for cars and trucks, but the canal does not charge the barges and boats.
Today’s lock tender, or lockmaster, is busy reading the newspaper. At my request he kindly takes the time to describe what typically passes through the canal: “Yachts; motorboats; fishing boats. Normal stuff.” When I ask about commercial traffic, his eyes light up. While he’s never locked through a real barge, he mentions “a few hundred tons of oats” expected to come through from Canada sometime this summer.
The route of the Erie Canal in New York State.
At another of the three dozen locks along the Barge Canal, about ten miles away, the two lock tenders are generally hostile to my questions. They are in the middle of locking through four houseboat/yachts—a lot of excitement for the canal these days. At two other locks along the canal, there is no traffic to manage, but there is a great sense of anticipation about the barges of “tons and tons of oats” that will pass through sometime in the future. And at another lock farther west, the lock tender, who had previously worked for years in the toll booths along the Thruway, has also heard about the legendary oats coming from Canada—“a hundred barge loads or so”—but he’s not sure when they will rea
ch his particular lock.
Later, over the phone, an official representative of canal operations for the New York Thruway confirms that she has also heard about the loads of oats coming from Canada: “Several thousand tons, maybe more.” The call is hard to hear over the constant whine of trucks from the nearby Interstate-90, all paying tolls to the State of New York, which manages the Thruway and subsidizes the yacht-facilitating canal.
The modern, derelict condition of the Erie Canal belies its formative role in the nation’s early years as its transportation (“navigation”) system. As we’ve seen, the problem of navigating rivers for interstate commerce motivated the states to convene the Constitutional Convention. The Constitution that resulted was, and is, not easily interpreted. Rather than being conceived of as a coherent set of commandments, it was shaped by a series of compromises among widely differing factions. After thirty-nine delegates signed the Constitution in 1787, they had to convince their respective states to agree to adopt the Constitution as the new binding government. But their work was not finished; they also had to clarify the meaning of the Constitution to their constituents and fellow delegates. Three then anonymous commentators took up the task: Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, who collectively adopted the pen name “Publius.”5 They began writing commentaries for newspapers, eventually penning eighty-five such articles in a series called The Federalist, now known as the Federalist Papers. The significance of the Federalist Papers in our time is that they articulate how the framers understood the Constitution when they wrote it and, just as important, how the people of the United States understood the Constitution when they ratified it.
A central idea proposed in the Constitution involved forming a stronger, national government and dissolving the existing weak union between confederated states, which were linked more by an alliance than a government. That national government—what we call the federal government—would be central for some functions while other functions would be left to the individual states. At the time, many people felt that America was simply too large geographically for a single national entity to govern any functions. It was not clear how people from southeastern Georgia could be stitched together in common interest with people from northwestern Massachusetts. John Jay, in Federalist No. 2, argued that the nation was in fact a union rather than a group of disparate entities and that this coalition was enabled by sharing a common language as well as a network of rivers:
It has often given me great pleasure to observe that the independent America was not composed of detached and distant territories, but that one connected, fertile, wide-spreading country was the portion of our western sons of liberty. Providence has in a particular manner blessed it with a variety of soils and productions and watered it with innumerable streams for the delight and accommodation of its inhabitants. A succession of navigable waters forms a kind of chain round its borders, as if to bind it together; while the most noble rivers in the world, running at convenient distances, present them with highways for the easy communication of friendly aids and the mutual transportation and exchange of their various commodities.6
Rivers would allow movement between disparate states, and the commercial trade they made possible would bind the residents of different states.
Indeed, it was in the interest of facilitating commerce between the various states that people generally agreed on the need for a new form of government. In Federalist No. 11, Hamilton said, “The importance of the Union, in a commercial light, is one of those points about which there is the least room to entertain a difference of opinion, and which has, in fact, commanded the most general assent of men who have any acquaintance with the subject.”7
The first twenty-five of the Federalist Papers focused on articulating the need for a stronger central government and on the types of functions, like commerce on interstate rivers, that could not be readily accomplished without such a government. From there, the Federalist Papers articulated what the central government could not do, in the process establishing a central feature of the Constitution—federalism. That is, while the national government would take up some functions, it would leave others to the state governments. States were to be the locus of power under the Constitution, and they were to be the government entity initiating projects and programs. By necessity, a key function that state governments immediately took on was putting their rivers to work for navigation.8
At the close of the eighteenth century, settlers were moving beyond the Fall Line and into the Piedmont, where farms began appearing up to the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Every city and town along the Fall Line wanted to keep upstream stretches of the rivers through the Piedmont navigable, not least to ensure the ability to easily move people and products from these farms to harbors at the coast, and vice versa. Thus these cities, and their states, needed a canal to pierce the barrier of their local waterfall or rapids. Canal companies and river navigation companies were the entrepreneurial answer. Like twenty-first-century dot-coms, these companies were the investment of choice to change the world and get rich while doing it.
Such companies were formed by private investors and given the right by their state government to build canals and clear rivers for navigation. As an incentive, the companies also got a monopoly over that particular reach of river and the right to collect tolls on it. River and canal companies were among the earliest forms of publicly recognized private corporations, an early test of how the infant American government would interact with the economy: state governments were the sole government entity involved in these new ventures, for the Constitution at the time was interpreted to hold that the national government did not have an interest or function in such private enterprise.
The first river navigation companies had modest ambitions: keeping their river cleared of logs, sandbars, and any other blockages. Often formed by local landowners, who had great personal motivation for the rivers to be navigable, the companies sprouted up along just about every river in a state. The North Carolina legislature, for instance, recognized the Cape Fear Navigation Company, the Neuse River Company, the Tar River Company, and the Roanoke River Company; thus, all four of the state’s primary rivers were controlled by private companies formed to facilitate navigation. Canal companies were a bit more ambitious, for they were more capital and expertise intensive and most often focused their attention on getting traffic around the rapids at the Fall Line.9
State governments supported this development of their internal economies. They invested in these new companies as stockholders without becoming involved in the direct management or operations. In passing legislation that allowed river navigation companies to clear rivers or canal companies to construct locks, legislators were developing a restrained role for government: they would financially support commerce and trade but would not do the actual work nor directly own the public works. Before 1793, eight states had incorporated thirty canal companies; by 1823, New Hampshire alone had chartered twenty.10
Almost immediately, the early companies and their sponsoring states found that the costs involved in designing and building canals and locks were massive, as were the chronic costs of keeping rivers clear for navigation. What’s more, costs nearly always exceeded expectations; timelines were habitually extended; and very little of what was planned actually worked. Even when projects were successfully completed, floods often damaged locks, requiring weeks or months of repairs and frustrating commercial traffic to the point of diverting it to primitive toll roads (called turnpikes) for horse-drawn wagons.11 All of these costs and efforts centered on just getting over the Fall Line; the greater financial opportunity—and the more formidable challenge—would be in getting through the Appalachians and linking the Atlantic economy with that of the West: the Great Lakes and the Ohio River basin. But the mountains created seemingly impossible tasks for entrepreneurs and state governments. In their stubborn efforts to link the Potomac to the Ohio, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company faced a route estimated to require 2
46 locks and a 4-mile tunnel piercing the divide at an elevation of 1,900 feet. Likewise, over 1,400 feet of elevation gain were needed for the path through Pennsylvania along the Allegheny Portage route, which would require over 174 locks. Other west–east paths, like those along the James River in Virginia, were even worse.12 Although stone turnpikes could be constructed for $5,000 to $10,000 per mile through mountainous regions, and most canals in the Piedmont might cost $20,000 to $30,000, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which depended greatly on locks as it gained elevation, cost over $60,000 per mile as it moved into higher reaches.13
When private capital became scarce, state governments pushed the projects along by continuing to invest as stockholders. For states to do this, even though the exorbitant costs exceeded their immediate revenues from taxes, they had to take on debt. They sold state-backed bonds to generate their own capital, some of which they invested in canal and river companies. The revenue from the canal and river tolls—paid directly to the companies and then back to the shareholding states—became a key source of revenue for state treasuries, making the financial success of states inseparable from the success of canal and river companies. State economies and river traffic became irreversibly intertwined. Meanwhile, the national government’s finances remained outside the fray of river traffic. All taxation and spending related to river clearing and canal building was left, practically and politically, to the states, thus separating the national government from the state governments with respect to the frenzy of ongoing river projects.
One state—New York—was different. At its highest point crossing toward the Great Lakes, the Erie Canal route rises less than six hundred feet above the Hudson River at Albany and required just over eighty locks. The heavy lifting of getting up and over the spine of the eastern continent—what engineers, shovels, reservoirs, and locks had to accomplish in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia—had been done largely by the vagaries of glacial erosion in New York.