The event marked the first stage of a 10-day trip celebrating the completion of one of the world’s most astonishing feats of sweat and engineering. Begun eight years earlier, the Erie Canal ran 363 miles across upstate New York, connecting the Hudson River with Lake Erie. It opened a water highway from the Midwest to New York harbor and beyond. It was a monumental project that owed its existence to a diverse cast of Irishmen.
It was no chance election that allowed Gov. Clinton to preside over the ceremonies marking the opening of the Erie Canal. He was in every respect the “father” of the Erie Canal. The descendant of Irish immigrants from County Longford, Clinton was born in 1769 in Little Britain, N.Y. Educated at Columbia College, he followed the example of his uncle, then governor of New York, and entered politics. He served in the state legislature and one term in the U.S. Senate before winning his first term as mayor of New York City in 1803. He served in that office until 1815 and won election as governor in 1817.
Clinton was no mere politician. He was a visionary who foresaw New York’s greatness as the Empire State long before most of his contemporaries. He was also a radical who believed — to the horror of his conservative counterparts — that the proper role of government was not merely to administer the laws and keep the peace. Rather, it was also obligated to support bold initiatives that would benefit the public, everything from public schools to a massive canal across upstate New York. The latter, with a staggering price tag of $7 million, faced enormous opposition but Clinton waged a ceaseless campaign of support and in 1817 the state legislature passes a bill approving of the project. Critics sneered that “Clinton’s ditch” would never succeed.
Construction began that same year under the direction of a second key Irishman, J.J. McShane, a Tipperary-born canal construction engineer. He’d learned the business in England and was brought over specially to oversee the building of the Erie Canal. Much of the actual work of digging the canal and building locks, reservoirs, bridges, and walls was performed by Irish immigrant workers. Immigration from Ireland had just begun to soar following the end of the Napoleonic Wars (and America’s War of 1812) in 1815 and many new arrivals were greeted on the docks of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York by agents telling them of magnificent job opportunities on the canal. By 1818 some 3,000 Irishmen were swinging picks and lifting shovels in the big ditch.
The life of the Irish canal worker was a rough one to say the least. They worked long hours in exceedingly dangerous conditions for paltry wages. Hundreds died in construction accidents or from disease contracted in the grim canal camps. Far from home and isolated from settled society and the civilizing influences of family, faith, and law, canal worker camps were marked by hard drinking, fighting, and gambling. Food was notoriously bad as was the shelter. Visitors to the canal zone were shocked and scandalized by what they saw and before long Irish-America leaders began to dissuade Irish immigrants from taking canal work. Boston’s Irish newspaper, The Pilot, for example, warned its readers that canal work “was the ruin of thousands of our poor people,” whom the contractors treated “like slaves.”
Despite these conditions, contractors never lacked for laborers and the monumental project reached completion in the fall of 1825. It took just eight short years using only human labor aided by horses and mules to dig a canal 40 feet wide and 363 miles long with 77 locks and 18 aqueducts. No project would rival it in scale and cost until the Interstate Highway program of the 1950s.
All that remained was the massive state-wide “Festival of Connection” that began with Gov. Clinton and a host of dignitaries boarded a canal boat in Buffalo. Ten days later (Nov. 4) they arrived in New York City to one of the most spectacular civic celebrations in the city’s history. Thousands cheered from the shore as cannons boomed and brightly decorated vessels of all sizes moved about the harbor. When Clinton’s boat reached the Narrows, he marked the “wedding of the waters” by emptying two barrels of Lake Erie water into the ocean. Parades, speeches, barbeques, and bonfires went on late into the night.
New Yorkers were justifiably proud of their new canal, but one vital question hung in the air: was it worth it? Clinton, of course, had no doubts. On the evening of the great celebration he boasted of New York that “the city will, in the course of time, become the granary of the world, the emporium of commerce, the seat of manufactures, the focus of great moneyed operations. And before the revolution of a century, the whole island of Manhattan, covered with inhabitants, will construe one vast city.” Proof of his prescience would not be long in coming. Within a year canal boats transported some 221,000 barrels of flour and 435,000 gallons of whiskey, to name but a few of the leading products floating on the canal. More astonishing than volume was the speed and cost savings. The cost of moving Midwestern grain from Lake Erie to New York harbor dropped from $100 per ton to $9 per ton. The time of transit was similarly slashed from 20 days to seven. So much commerce moved along the canal in its first nine years that toll receipts paid off the entire debt and began to finance 13 more canals in the state (likewise built with Irish labor).
The stunning success of the Erie Canal touched off an era of “canal madness” that saw nearly every state in the union launch canal projects from Massachusetts to New Orleans. In every case Irish labor provided the necessary muscle. The same was true in the succeeding “railroad madness” of the 1840s and ’50s. Many workers stayed put after the projects were completed and developed inland Irish communities in cities like Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and St Louis.
The Erie Canal remained a key commercial highway into the 20th century. But competition from railroads and later trucks (neither of which froze in the winter) doomed it to obsolescence by the late 1940s. Today the canal is a National Heritage Corridor with many of its adjacent towns investing in museums, historic sites, and heritage tourism designed to lure visitors and boost local economies hit hard by the canal?s demise and the loss of manufacturing. Much of it is also open for boating, hiking, and camping.
HIBERNIAN HISTORY WEEK
Oct. 25, 1920: The lord mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, dies in a British prison after a 74-day hunger strike during the War for Independence.
Oct. 26, 1931: Eugene O’Neill’s play “Mourning Becomes Electra” opens at Guild Theatre in New York City.
Oct. 26, 1990: Tom Clancy of the Clancy Brothers dies.
HIBERNIAN BIRTHDATES
Oct. 22, 1920: Harvard psychologist and 1960s LSD advocate Timothy Leary is born in Springfield, Mass.
Oct. 24, 1911: FBI chief Clarence M. Kelley is born in Kansas City, Mo.
Oct. 26, 1914: The first child star of the silver screen, Jackie Coogan, is born in Los Angeles.