ROCHESTER HAD OFTEN boasted of being the boomtown of upstate New York, the “Young Lion of the West.” But in October 1825, its horizons expanded dramatically: Rochester became a city of the world. Its residents celebrated appropriately. “Such was the enthusiasm of the people that at two o’clock, eight handsome uniform companies were in arms, and an immense concourse of people had assembled,” recorded William Stone, the official chronicler of the event. A small flotilla arrived from the west, on a newly completed canal. A local boat called the Young Lion of the West hailed the Pioneer, at the front of the arriving group. A dialogue between the captains ensued:
Question.—Who comes there?
Answer.—Your Brothers from the West, on the waters of the Great Lakes.
Q.—By what means have they been diverted so far from their natural course?
A.—By the channel of the Grand Erie Canal.
Q.—By whose authority, and by whom, was a work of such magnitude accomplished?
A.—By the authority and by the enterprise of the patriotic People of the State of New York.
The opening of the Erie Canal was the greatest event in the history of New York. Dreamed of during colonial times, endorsed by George Washington, projected and surveyed by boosters and engineers since American independence, funded and fought over by politicians for a decade, begun in the aftermath of the War of 1812, completed in the fiftieth anniversary year of the battles of Lexington and Concord, the Erie Canal transformed the economic geography of the eastern half of North America. With 360 miles of channel, forty feet wide and four feet deep; scores of dams and locks, which raised and lowered boats over ridges and hills; and aqueducts that spanned rivers and creeks, giving the impression that the boats they carried were soaring through the air, the Erie Canal defeated the force of gravity that had compelled farmers west of the Appalachian chain to send their produce west and south, down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico, even when that produce was bound for the markets of the East. From the moment of the canal’s 1825 opening, transport costs for wheat, corn, pigs, lumber, iron and everything else from the interior fell by as much as 90 percent. The canal reordered the leading cities of America. New York City surpassed New Orleans as America’s first port, and it eclipsed Philadelphia as the nation’s financial hub.
The business and political classes of New York saw what was coming and made the most of it. To announce the linking of Lake Erie to the Atlantic, they arranged an artillery salute that spanned the five hundred miles from Buffalo to New York City. At ten o’clock in the morning of October 26, 1825, just as the flotilla left Lake Erie and entered the canal, a cannon fired. The report was heard a few miles to the east, and the sound signaled a cannon there to fire. This discharge caused another discharge farther east, then another and another and another, the full length of the canal. At Albany, where the canal met the Hudson River, the artillery salute turned south, arriving at New York City a mere eighty-two minutes after it began and completing the most rapid long-distance communication in human history until then. For good measure, an echoing salute was sent in the opposite direction, and the thousand-mile call-and-response was accomplished in less than three hours.
Every town and village on the new canal was as thrilled as Rochester at the prospect of traffic that would make them all rich. Albany outdid itself. “Twenty-four pieces of cannon were planted on the pier,” William Stone recorded, “from which a grand salute was fired as the boats passed from the Canal into the basin, down which they proceeded, towed by yawls manned by twenty-four masters of vessels, and cheered onward by bands of music, and the huzzas of thousands of rejoicing citizens, who crowded the wharves, the south bridge, the vessels, and a double line of Canal boats, which extended through the whole length of the basin.”
But New York City, suddenly the gateway to the American West, was the most delirious. “All attempts at description must be utterly in vain,” Stone declared. Enormous crowds lined the route of a congratulatory parade. The harbor shone in unexampled glory. “Never before has been presented to the sight a fleet so beautiful as that which then graced our waters. The numerous array of steam-boats and barges, proudly breasting the billows and dashing on their way regardless of opposing winds and tides; the flags of all nations, and banners of every hue, streaming splendidly in the breeze; the dense columns of black smoke ever and anon sent up from the boats, now partially obscuring the view, and now spreading widely over the sky and softening down the glare of light and color; the roar of cannon from the various forts, accompanied by heavy volumes of white smoke, contrasting finely with the smoke from the steam-boats; the crowds of happy beings who thronged the decks, and the voice of whose joy was mingled with the sound of music, and not unfrequently drowned by the hissing of the steam; all these, and a thousand other circumstances, awakened an interest so intense, that ‘the eye could not be satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing.’ ”
An orgy of illuminations—fireworks—climaxed the festivities. “Such rockets were never before seen in New York. They were uncommonly large. Now they shot forth alternately showers of fiery serpents and dragons, ‘gorgons, and hydras, and chimeras dire,’ and now they burst forth and rained down showers of stars, floating in the atmosphere like balls of liquid silver. The volcanic eruption of fire-balls and rockets with which this exhibition was concluded, afforded a spectacle of vast beauty and sublimity. They were sent up apparently from the rear of the Hall”—City Hall—“to a great height, diverging like rays from a common centre, then floating for a moment like meteors of the brightest light, and falling over in a graceful curve, presenting a scene magnificent and enchanting.”
William Stone was exhausted at the end but still enthralled. “Thus passed a day so glorious to the state and city, and so deeply interesting to the countless thousands who were permitted to behold and mingle in its exhibitions. We have before said that all attempts at description must be utterly in vain. Others can comprehend the greatness of the occasion; the Grand Canal is completed, and the waters of Lake Erie have been borne upon its surface, and mingled with the Ocean.”
THE OPENING OF the Erie Canal stood as proxy for a series of events that launched America into the modern era. Canals had existed since colonial times, but in the first half of the nineteenth century they spread and ramified until they formed a network of watery avenues that linked cities and towns, farms and villages across much of the eastern United States. The steamboat further improved water transport; demonstrated by Robert Fulton in the initial decade of the century, the steamboat grew sufficiently safe and reliable to allow shippers to overcome the current of rivers and send goods economically upstream as well as down. In time the steamboats would be enlarged and altered for ocean travel, finally supplanting sailing vessels in the second half of the nineteenth century. Steam power was meanwhile applied to land travel. The first railroads appeared in America in the 1830s; within two decades they crisscrossed the East.
By then America’s industrial revolution would be well begun. Manufacturing had been part of American existence since colonial days, with power provided by human and animal muscle and falling water. But the application of steam power to the production process triggered a surge in output. Textile looms, stamping presses and machine tools fashioned products far faster and at lower cost than they had been made before. The reduced costs generated broader demand, which in turn inspired additional investment in new equipment. A virtuous circle of growth developed, with the effects spilling over into the cities and regions where the labor-saving devices were located.
Strikingly—and fatefully—most of the industrial development occurred in the North. The saving of labor had little appeal in slave-based economies, where labor was a fixed cost rather than a variable one. The economy of the South grew, but by extension rather than by transformation. In essence, Georgia replicated itself in Alabama and Mississippi; Tennessee was another North Carolina. The additive growth of the South couldn’t match the multiplicative growth of the North, and by the 1820s it was clear to objective observers that the South would fall further and further behind in wealth and population.
Travelers on the Ohio River, the boundary between North and South west of Pennsylvania, often noted the disparity between the degrees of economic development on the opposite banks of the river. On the north shore, the river towns of Ohio and Indiana bustled and throbbed, and the farms between the towns thrived. On the south bank, Virginia and Kentucky comparatively slumbered, with few towns and mile after mile of apparent wilderness.
Not coincidentally, the Ohio became an American River Jordan to Southern slaves. Beyond the stream was the promised land, the land where they might achieve their freedom if only they could reach it. There had always been kindhearted souls to help them on the journey; as the industrial revolution sharpened the divide between North and South, the number of such helpers increased. They established a covert network of routes and stopping points they called, in a metaphor apt to the moment, the Underground Railroad.