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By Root 7794 0

not quite problem-free. Annoyingly enough, Britain and France once again closed down the West Indies to American trade, and British exporters began using the Pearl Street auction houses to dump a huge backlog of cheap manufactures on the American market. But if local importers and retailers suffered for a time, deep-water merchants and shipbuilders adjusted without serious difficulty—partly because the success of anticolonial revolutions in Latin America cracked open markets once monopolized by the Spanish and Portuguese, but mainly because industrializing and urbanizing Europeans remained willing to pay high prices for American cotton and wheat.

Whether or not New York would continue to dominate the trade in those lucrative commodities was an open question, however. Thousands of settlers were flooding into the Ohio and Mississippi valleys every year, shifting the heartland of American agricultural production ever westward, ever farther from Manhattan. Every year, too, increased the likelihood that the output of these myriad farms and plantations would be siphoned off by rival ports—New Orleans, for example, or Philadelphia (now linked to Pittsburgh by turnpike), or Baltimore (eastern terminus of the new National Road, which ran to Wheeling on its way toward Columbus and Indianapolis).

It was the heightened urgency of maintaining New York’s connections to the West that enabled De Witt Clinton to bring his campaign for the Erie Canal to fruition. At the end of December 1815, he assured a conclave of businessmen at the City Hotel that the canal would make New York “the greatest commercial emporium in the world” and easily persuaded them to sign a memorial to the legislature calling for construction to begin as quickly as possible. Although his Tammany opponents denounced the “big ditch” as a costly folly and depicted it—not incorrectly—as a vehicle for Clinton’s political ambitions, the legislature established a Canal Commission to consider costs and routes. When the Madison administration refused federal aid, an action some saw as a Virginiabased effort to forestall New York’s ascendancy, Clinton persuaded the state to proceed on its own. In April 1817 Albany formally authorized the project. Two months later Clinton was elected governor. On July 4, three days after he assumed office, construction commenced on the state-owned, state-financed, state-run enterprise.

THE WEDDING OF THE WATERS

Work on the canal advanced swiftly, despite the carping of skeptics, daunting natural obstacles, and a financial crisis that shook the country in 1819, when—in part reflecting a severe postwar depression in England—the price of American cotton in Europe fell off sharply, dragging down western land values and triggering an avalanche of bank failures and foreclosures. Eight years after the first spade went into the ground and an amazing two years ahead of schedule, the great project was finally done—a marvel of human ingenuity and sacrifice by its engineers, who learned their trade on the job, and its laborers, many of them Irish and Welsh. Three hundred sixty-three miles long, forty feet wide, and four feet deep, the canal rose and descended a distance of 660 feet through eighty-three massive stone locks and passed over eighteen stately aqueducts.

On October 26, 1825, in Buffalo, Governor Clinton and assorted dignitaries boarded a flat-bottomed canal boat, the Seneca Chief, to begin a triumphal “aquatic procession” east to Albany and down the Hudson to New York harbor. Their arrival ten days later touched off one of the most spectacular celebrations in the city’s history—a grand Festival of Connection. On November 4—one of those brilliant autumn days for which the city is famous—the Seneca Chief drew near the Battery and was hailed by city officials on an elegantly appointed steamboat: “Whence come you and where are you bound?” “From Lake Erie,” came the reply, “bound for Sandy Hook!” Crossing the Upper Bay, the procession wound its way through an “Aquatic Display” of gaily decorated vessels while bands played, the Battery’s guns fired