Manifest Destiny - Canals
The Era of Canals
Traveling around America used to be quite difficult. During the colonial period, roads were primitive and rivers did not connect people to all the places they wanted to travel. By the Revolutionary War (1776–83), some had considered the benefits of creating man-made rivers called canals to connect natural waterways. As early as 1790, there were thirty canal companies working in the newly formed nation. The first canal made in America stretched 27 miles and connected the Merrimack River with Boston Harbor. Hundreds of canals were dug throughout America from the end of the Revolutionary War to the beginning of the Civil War in 1861. French statesman and historian Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) noted that Americans had "changed the whole order of nature to their advantage," according to Russell Bourne in Floating West.
One of the most important canals was the 363-mile-long Erie Canal, which linked Rome, New York, to Buffalo,New York. Interest in building a canal across New York started when the new state was still a British colony, but work did not begin until 1817. Part of the appeal of such a canal was the ease and speed of travel it would offer to people eager to reach the frontier lands of western New York and Pennsylvania.
Building canals was slow, difficult work. Surveyors first laid out the path of the canal and planned locks along the route to "level out" the distance. Much of the digging was done by Irish immigrants who had left their homeland because of the potato famine (widespread starvation brought on by a disease that destroyed potato crops). The Erie Canal used about three thousand Irish "bogtrotters" to dig the forty-foot-wide and four-foot-deep ditch. Spending their days shoveling, sometimes through swamps and bogs, the workers were paid between 37.5 and 50 cents per day if they had a set wage, or work crews of three men earned about 12.5 cents for each cubic yard of earth they moved. As work progressed, many native New Yorkers joined the crews, and innovations in digging soon helped the work go faster. Horses and oxen pulled plows to break up the dirt before workers began to dig. The animals were also used to pull dirt off the work area. Cables were strung over tall trees and attached to tree stumps so that a single canal worker could pull out a stump by turning an endless screw. Crews called "blowers" that cleared away rock, could use Dupont's Blasting Powder, a substance that ignited when and how it was supposed to, instead of the more unpredictable black powder.
The Erie Canal was completed in 1825, and within a year it had collected $750,000 in tolls. Much of the canal's success came from the speed it gave travelers. When people walked or rode wagons or stagecoaches, it took them a few weeks to get from New York City to Buffalo. But the journey took only eight days on the Erie Canal. The canal became the most-used route west in the 1830s and 1840s. By 1830, about one thousand people arrived in Buffalo daily, ready to head west to settle in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois. Not only was canal travel faster, but it was a cheaper method of shipping for merchants as well. Farmers in Buffalo who once paid one hundred dollars for a ton of freight to reach New York City in three weeks could now send the same material for ten dollars and it would reach its destination in eight days. The Erie Canal made Buffalo the busiest port on the Great Lakes.
The success of the Erie Canal gave New York State its nickname, "The Empire State", since it made New York State rich from the canal trade. The Erie Canal started America's great canal-building era. Along the Atlantic Ocean, more than 800 miles of canals were completed during the 1820s. By the 1830s, 1,300 miles of canals were under construction, including the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and the Pennsylvania and Maryland systems. By 1840, more than 4,000 miles of canals linked American towns.
Despite the popular enthusiasm for canal travel, which offered unheard-of leisure and speed, America's attention soon turned to railroads. Like canals, trains could take people where rivers could not. But trains offered travelers more speed and luxury, and railroads were quicker to construct. Though revenues on the Erie Canal topped five million dollars annually in 1862, by 1869 railroads were carrying more freight than canals were. The competition from railroads forced many canals to close, and the construction of some canals was abandoned altogether.
