Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [334]
The History was also an exercise in literary nationalism. For all its obeisance to Sterne and Swift, Knickerbocker’s earthy irreverence, extravagant bombast, and blustery tall tales would soon be considered hallmarks of American humor. Walter Scott claimed that reading it made his sides “absolutely sore with laughter,” Dickens wore out his copy with repeated reading, and Coleridge, who picked up a copy at an English inn (a remarkable fact in itself), couldn’t put it down until he’d finished. Irving’s was the first American book so favorably received abroad. It put the United States—and New York City—on Europe’s cultural map.
And Irving really had provided Manhattan with a past, of sorts. “Cities of themselves” Knickerbocker told his readers, tongue only partly in cheek, “are nothing without an historian,” and Irving believed that creating his book had been an act of the highest civic patriotism. Although his version of colonial New Amsterdam was a burlesque, and deeply resented by New Yorkers of Dutch descent (Gulian Verplanck excoriated it as “coarse caricature”), Irving had done some real research, rummaging in documents and collecting family legends and lore from those same Dutch New Yorkers—who like it or not were soon known as Knickerbockers. Through Diedrich Knickerbocker, Irving wrote, “I hailed my native city, as fortunate above all other American cities, in having an antiquity . . . extending back into the regions of doubt and fable.” And he credited Knickerbocker’s flights of fancy with provoking serious research into that antiquity: “It is only since this work appeared that the forgotten archives of the province have been rummaged, and the facts and personages of the olden time been rescued from the dust of oblivion.”
Irving would recall, in the preface to a much later edition, that he had set out to give the Manhattan cityscape historical depth and texture—“to clothe home scenes and places with imaginative and whimsical associations, which live like charms about the cities of the old world.” He believed that he’d succeeded, too, claiming that the “popular traditions of our city” now formed a “convivial currency” and “link[ed] our whole community together in good-humor and good fellowship.”
Too good, perhaps, for Irving’s “community” was devoid of slavery, Indian wars, poverty, and other unpleasantness—and too many New Yorkers would for too long accept his affectionate mythmaking as authentic history. He had accomplished something remarkable, nevertheless. In inventing a past for his city, he chose not to revel in “gunpowder and carnage” but rather to detail the amiable everyday life of a contented and pleasure-loving people. Virgil he wasn’t, but New York could have done worse.
INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS
While Irving was imagining a past for New York, some of his fellow citizens were busily imagining its future. Their vision, however, would be inscribed on the landscape itself.
In the spring of 1810 De Witt Clinton threw his influence behind the efforts of Gouverneur Morris, Thomas Eddy, Philip Schuyler, and Jonas Platt—Federalist land developers and empire builders—to drive a canal between the Hudson River and the Great Lakes, a distance of some 360 miles. That summer, named by the legislature to a new Board of Canal Commissioners, Clinton accompanied a team of engineers and surveyors up the Mohawk, through the Finger Lakes, and on to a rude little frontier village called Buffalo. Their report, issued in March 1811, proposed construction of a single continuous waterway from Albany to Lake Erie at a cost of five million dollars.
It was an idea—a dream—of pharaonic proportions. This great “national work,” the commissioners proclaimed, was the “key to the commerce of our