The Erie Canal, Clinton's Ditch and the Canal That Made America
Near Syracuse, New York
When Governor DeWitt Clinton persuaded New York to fund a canal connecting the Hudson River to Lake Erie in eighteen seventeen, the critics had a name for it. They called it Clinton's Ditch. They said three hundred sixty-three miles of hand-dug canal through swamp and limestone and malarial floodplain was a fantasy. They predicted financial ruin.
On October twenty-sixth, eighteen twenty-five, the canal opened. A boat called the Seneca Chief carried water from Lake Erie to the harbor at New York City, where Governor Clinton poured it into the Atlantic in a ceremony called the Wedding of the Waters. The freight cost from Buffalo to New York City had been one hundred dollars per ton. It dropped to ten dollars per ton almost overnight. Goods that had been flowing south through New Orleans suddenly flowed east. New York City became the dominant commercial port of North America within a decade. Cities along the canal route, Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, became the manufacturing centers of nineteenth-century America.
The canal also opened Haudenosaunee territory to the settler-colonial wave that followed. Within a single generation, six nations that had governed millions of acres were confined to scattered reservations.
The men who built the canal received little of what was celebrated. An estimated fifty thousand workers dug the three hundred sixty-three miles between eighteen seventeen and eighteen twenty-five. The majority were Irish immigrants, recruited with promises of steady wages and given hand tools, blasting powder, and horse-drawn scrapers to work through swamps where standing water bred malaria. They earned roughly fifty cents a day plus a daily whiskey ration. Hundreds died of fever. The Canal Museum in Syracuse holds wage records and contemporaneous accounts from the construction era. The total death toll of the canal's construction is not established in the public record. There is no monument to the workers on the corridor that carries their achievement.
