The Source
Page 3
Most of the river valleys on the eastern flank of the Appalachian Mountains had been formed by very gradual river-dominated erosion. These valleys are typically steep and narrow in their headwaters, followed by occasional rapids or falls through the Piedmont until their rivers wander through shoaled coastal plains. But along the Hudson River and its tributary the Mohawk, glacial erosion scoured existing river valleys far deeper and wider than those made by rivers alone in the warmer, unglaciated south. As glaciers receded and sea level rose, the Hudson Valley became a tidal inlet, creating a deep river that was easily navigated. Its tides extended all the way to Troy—a full 160 miles inland—where the water surface at high tide is only 10 feet above sea level. So Pleistocene glaciation did a marvelous job of digging the Hudson River deep; in the Mohawk River valley the same glaciation scraped away bedrock and, as the glaciers receded, deposited massive layers of soft, easy-to-excavate sediments across the valleys. This glacially smoothed gap is an exceptional, peculiar landscape that is unusually perfect for a canal.
The Erie Canal was all that was needed to penetrate the barrier between the Atlantic and the burgeoning West. It funneled traffic and commodities along its northern pathway instead of through the South. When initially completed, the canal was only 4 feet deep and 40 feet wide. It allowed two horses on the parallel towpath to pull over thirty tons of freight at the steady clip of 4 miles per hour. Costs to move freight dropped from $125/ton before the canal to less than $6/ton after. Within a year of its completion, over seven thousand boats were operating on the canal. The canal was part and parcel with industrializing the North, and the once obscure towns along the canal—Syracuse, Utica, Rochester, and Buffalo—became hubs of nineteenth-century manufacturing and industrialization.
While other canals in other states were struggling to keep only a handful of locks operating, the Erie Canal was successful even before it was completed in 1825—a pivotal year for rivers in the United States. A year before the canal opened, its revenues exceeded its loan interest by over $400,000. Villages on the river turned into towns as even the partial opportunities offered by the incomplete canal were vastly superior to the hazardous and hit-or-miss conditions of the Potomac and other canals or portage roads to the south. The swampy village of Syracuse sat on isolated lowland in the middle of the state and had an anemic population of 250 in 1820 when the Erie construction crews approached it. Five years later, Syracuse’s population had more than doubled to 600; it then leaped geometrically to over 11,000 by 1830 and to over 22,200 by 1850. Despite few other resources or geographic advantages, Syracuse managed to flourish as a hydraulic crossroads of northern economies where the Erie Canal provided continuous passage to Lake Erie and the Oswego Canal headed north to Lake Ontario.14
The canal also established New York City as the entry point for immigrants heading toward America’s interior. An 1836 letter from Karl Brunnhuber, living in Ohio, to his brother Frederick back in Germany shows the role of the Erie Canal and tells of the hopscotching immigrants had to go through to make their way to the American interior:
If you can leave Erlangen by mid-June at worst, you will arrive in time to help with the harvest. . . . Go first to Albany then buy a passage on a line boat on the Erie Canal. A passenger boat would be faster but a line boat is cheaper and has room for the woodworking tools I want you to bring. Try to find a clean boat that is not too crowded. At Buffalo you must get a steamboat across Lake Erie to Cleveland where you can take a stagecoach to Warringville. Always remember what Herr Goettel told us in school: think twice before trusting a stranger.15
The movement of such immigrants and European-manufactured goods on the Erie Canal epitomized the shift taking place in the nineteenth century. In the 1830s, just after the canal was completed, westbound traffic on the canal was six times that of eastbound traffic; people and goods were flowing to the West. By 1847, the West was becoming a tremendous source of goods; the tonnage of goods moving east exceeded that of goods moving west. By the start of the Civil War, eastbound freight was five times that of westbound freight. The hinterlands had become a source of excess, and that excess flowed through the Erie Canal.16
All of this growth along the Erie was to the detriment and dismay of the many other canal companies in other states. As difficulties mounted for canal and navigation companies elsewhere and traffic was concentrated toward the Erie, private capital for other canals began to dry up. Revenue along the Potomac exceeded expenses only in good years, and profit for investors was only 1.5 percent—hardly enough to lure additional capital.17 As private capital continued to shrink for almost all canal and river companies, state governments constantly had to step in and increase their own already tremendous investments rather than letting the companies abandon half-completed projects. Canal companies, like the auto or banking industries of the early twenty-first century, had become too big to fail. Nationally, between 1820 and 1824, states invested (by going into debt) over $13 million in various projects and programs; by 1837 they had taken on another $108 million in debt. Over half of this public debt was for canal building alone.18
The national government remained isolated from this growing canal craze, even when things went badly. Starting in the mid-1830s, the canals went bust—and with them the states—in America’s first great depression. The Panic of 1837 was driven by the enormous debt states had taken on to prop up their canal and river navigation companies; when the companies went bankrupt, they took state treasuries down with them. Most of the chastened state governments passed debt limit laws, self-constraining their ability to take on such massive, unsustainable debt in the future. This financial experience also reinforced the rationale of fiscal federalism of the time, ensuring separation of the national treasury from those of the states.
New York was the exception. In 1837, while most other states were spiraling toward bankruptcy, the Erie Canal commissioners reported that the entire debt for the canal had been paid. The Erie Canal had punctured the Appalachians and linked the Great Lakes with the Atlantic in a way that no other Eastern Seaboard river could, and for decades it remained the dominant path for commercial traffic. In 1905, the State of New York began work on the larger Barge Canal. The canal was completed in 1918, although it was never as successful as the original canal in luring waterborne traffic through the region. The Barge Canal takes a slightly different route from the original, bypassing some of the towns that the original canal helped create. It even misses the town of Rome and the Erie Canal Village Museum, which sits beside remnants of the original canal. Today the Interstate highway and railroad lines run parallel to the Barge Canal with its yachts, motorboats, and soon-to-arrive barges of oats from Canada. Commercial traffic moved to rail in the late nineteenth century, then to trucks in the twentieth; the state no longer modernizes the canal but maintains its condition using Thruway tolls on trucks and cars. Despite its diminished stature over time, the Erie Canal is partly responsible for the shape of the contemporary United States. It positioned New York to be the commercial heart of the nation it is today, and it established the Hudson as the riverine focal point for the first half of the nation’s existence and for its infant military.
Travelers going up the Hudson from New York Harbor toward Albany and the Erie Canal will find a notably tight S-curve meandering around a point that juts out from the west bank of the river. This place on the river has long been noted for its potential strategic importance. During the Revolutionary War, the Hudson River was so easily navigated that the British navy sailed quite effortlessly upstream to quell the rebellion in the Hudson Valley in 1777. To stop the ships from moving up the river, local patriots pulled an enormous chain across the Hudson at this storied point. The British ultimately dismantled the chain and proceeded upstream to the then capital, Kingston, which they promptly burned to the ground. A year later, however, American rebels successfully defended the point. The rebels hung another chain across the river and then built a fort that eventually would guard an arsenal. The fl
edgling army later built a parade ground nearby; for the next two centuries, military cadets practiced marching there—at the U.S. Military Academy, also known simply as West Point.
Locating the U.S. Military Academy at a strategic point on a river was no accident. In the early days of the military academy, its primary focus was training future river engineers. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the United States was a technological backwater. Certainly there were individual scientific luminaries like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. But there were no sources of technical training. There were few engineers and even fewer institutional pathways to develop engineers. This lack of engineers had been a challenge for the Continental Army, as George Washington noted only seven days into his command. In April 1776, a recruiter was sent to Paris to ask for reinforcements, munitions, and good engineers. At least sixteen engineers came to support the cause. These French engineers did the planning and building that is critical yet often overlooked in long military campaigns; their efforts ranged from designing fortifications for the Continental Army to outlining the siege of Cornwallis at Yorktown. Among them was the young Pierre L’Enfant, who proved essential to the war effort and later would lay out the plan for the city of Washington, D.C.
At the end of the Revolutionary War, almost all the formally trained engineers were associated with the Army. But under the Constitution, it was not clear that there should be an army of any kind once the war had ended. The states were made up of former colonies that had found many of their complaints against the British bound up with the actions and behavior of its army during peacetime. Ever fearful of electing a potential tyrant as president, particularly when the president was a former general, those skeptical of a centralized national government sought to constrain such a tyrant’s potential by restricting the country’s ability to maintain an army to times of war only. Even if the army itself were not active in oppression, the high costs of sustaining an army would require taxes that could be their own form of oppression, or as James Madison expressed it in Federalist No. 41, “Liberty crushed everywhere between standing armies and perpetual taxes.”19
Hamilton defended the need for a standing army and navy through his typical lens: commerce. As he put it, the entire purpose of uniting the states was “the common defense of the members; the preservation of the public peace, as well against internal convulsions as external attacks; the regulation of commerce with other nations and between the States.”20 These central functions of a government would be impossible to execute without a military that could be mobilized in peacetime, as well as during war, to ensure that the people of the nation would not be “subjected to continual plunder.”21 Besides that was “a constant necessity for keeping small garrisons on our Western frontier,” into which settlers continued to move.22 As to whether such security and defense of commerce justified the expense, Hamilton noted that the United States was encircled by other nations—Britain, Spain, and the Native American nations—and that some states, particularly New York, were more directly exposed than others. To support commerce between the states and avoid placing too heavy a burden on any particular state, the United States had to maintain a standing army to conduct military-related functions beyond fighting in battles.
Thus, though small, the national government did include a standing army and navy. Beyond maintaining garrisons or using a navy to protect against piracy, military duties included planning and construction of the fortifications that would be necessary in case of future wars. At the time, the young nation effectively had no engineers who could design and oversee such work. Although well equipped to train in the classics and law, the universities had only a smattering of actual scientists and no engineers. Thomas Jefferson saw the lack of engineering training as something to be directly addressed when he became president in 1801. Accordingly this president, so linked with the University of Virginia’s pursuit of classic training in the liberal studies, established the first American university for the technical training of military officers and engineers.
For instructors, Jefferson looked overseas. The question was what nationality of instructors to hire for the academy. The British model of engineering was based on practical, on-the-ground training either with or without formal education. The French model was for students to attend an elite academy where they would learn the basic sciences and theory before moving on to actual engineering. Washington had relied on British engineers for advice on building canals along the Potomac. But Jefferson was a Francophile: he spoke French; he had lived in Paris as U.S. Secretary of State. And hostility still simmered between Britain and the United States. With these considerations, Jefferson adopted the French model in almost every way: he envisioned a military academy where an elite cadre of officers would be trained in the theoretical basis for the sciences and would then fill the intellectual ranks in the military hierarchy. Following the model suggested by L’Enfant immediately after the Revolutionary War, Jefferson developed a plan for the United States to have a department of public construction whose ranks were filled with academically trained engineers who would be charged with, among other things, “the means of raising or changing the course of water.”23
Thus President Jefferson permanently established the Army Corps of Engineers, along with a military and engineering academy at West Point, in 1802. This academy became the nursery for U.S. military leaders and engineers, and it kept its strongly French roots; for two decades, four of the seven professors were French, and almost half of the textbooks used were available only in French. It was not until 1824 that another university focused on technical and engineering training—Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute—was founded, also along the Hudson River in New York.
The line between engineering training and military training at West Point was blurry, but the reputation of the army engineers was strong thanks to their rigorous training and their strong intellectual—if theoretical—grounding. For decades, the Army’s elite first received engineering training at West Point on the banks of the Hudson. Only then did they begin their careers as river and harbor engineers, and eventually as military commanders. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the Corps of Engineers was so selective that only top graduates of the Military Academy were steered into the engineering corps pipeline. Robert E. Lee was a paragon of this system. Graduating at the top of his class at West Point in 1829, Lee chose to spend his required time in military service in the Corps of Engineers. He ultimately worked with the Corps for two decades, during which he designed and helped build coastal fortifications in Savannah and Baltimore and flood control levees along the Mississippi River at St. Louis. He later moved on to military posts at the Western frontier.24
Although training at the Military Academy at West Point has evolved significantly from its initial focus, West Point alumni continue to fill the upper echelons of the Corps of Engineers. When critical decisions are made about rivers in the United States, the person behind them is likely wearing an Army uniform and is often a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy. Part of this river management legacy derives from the Army’s very early role as a source of engineering expertise, a role made possible because of the young nation’s resolution to have a standing army. Another part of this Army-based legacy in river management stems from a particular Supreme Court decision that centered, again, on the Hudson River and profoundly changed America’s technological and legal landscape.
Only a few years after Jefferson established the Corps of Engineers, a loud, smoky boat chugged by West Point at a speed slightly slower than the average walking pace. It was the first sign of a new era. In 1807, Robert Fulton had loaded up his first steamboat outside New York City and headed for Albany. This first trip was a proof of concept. When he made it, everyone knew that river navigation had changed. When Fulton demonstrated that steamboats could move with or without wind, and with or without tide, he made towpaths irrelevant.
Fulton knew that what he had come up with was going to be worth big, big money. The
State of New York did too. So did other states. All of them wanted Fulton’s steamboats on their rivers, and so they competed to lure Fulton’s company. But New York, ever the entrepreneurial state, won out by offering Fulton exclusive rights for constructing, operating, and employing steamboats on the waters of the entire state of New York—a statewide hydraulic monopoly.
As entrepreneurs, Fulton and his business partner Robert Livingston didn’t want to do all the work themselves. They quickly created a franchise by leasing certain portions of their steamboat monopoly—specific river routes—to other operators. These other steamboat operators used the patented Fulton-Livingston steamboat technology on those routes and paid a small royalty to the founders. Among the takers: Aaron Ogden, who leased the route across the Hudson from Manhattan into New Jersey.
Steamboating was big business on the Hudson; it attracted go-getters and competition. Another entrepreneur, Thomas Gibbons, set up a steamboat line unconnected to the Fulton-Livingston monopoly and began directly competing with Ogden’s line across the Hudson. To help with this new competitive line, Gibbons hired an 18-year-old unknown but ambitious ferryman named Cornelius Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt’s entrepreneurial edge vaulted him to the role of business manager of the new steamboat service, which quickly drew traffic away from the original, state-sanctioned line. Ogden cried foul and sued, saying that the monopoly granted by the State of New York to Fulton-Livingston, which he leased, should preclude any competition from any other steamboats on the route. Gibbons said that the link to New Jersey across the Hudson made steamboating interstate commerce, and that a monopoly granted by New York didn’t matter. The case went to court.