Clinton's Ditch, The Erie Canal and the Making of the Empire State

Thomas Jefferson called the plan madness. It would be a ditch three hundred sixty-three miles long, four feet deep, and forty feet wide, climbing over five hundred feet in elevation through limestone ridges and hardwood forest, connecting the Hudson River at Albany to the waters of Lake Erie at Buffalo. There was no steam power yet to dig it.

There were no professional engineers in America to design it. When DeWitt Clinton, the governor of New York, pushed the project through the state legislature in eighteen seventeen, his critics renamed it Clinton's Folly and Clinton's Ditch, meaning both as insults. It took eight years and seven million dollars and the labor of thousands of workers, many of them recent Irish immigrants, to prove the critics wrong.

On October twenty-sixth, eighteen twenty-five, Governor Clinton boarded a canal boat at Buffalo called the Seneca Chief. At the bow were two kegs of Lake Erie water. Nine days later, after four hundred celebrations along the route, he reached New York Harbor and poured those kegs into the Atlantic in a ceremony he called the Wedding of the Waters.

The economics were immediate and staggering. Shipping a ton of freight from Buffalo to New York City had cost one hundred dollars before the canal. Within a few years it cost under nine dollars.

Rochester became the fastest-growing city in America. Syracuse and Utica, villages before, turned into cities. New York City's population quadrupled between eighteen twenty and eighteen fifty, made possible by the river of grain and timber and people that the canal moved.

By the eighteen thirties, the seven-million-dollar investment had been entirely repaid in toll fees. The canal did something else: it fixed New York as the economic hinge of the nation. Every trade route from the interior passed through it.

Every immigrant ship landing in New York Harbor had reason to stay, because the canal led somewhere real. It was an act of public engineering that created the Empire State not as a slogan but as a fact.