IRISH-AMERICAN-L Archives
Archiver > IRISH-AMERICAN > 2005-06 > 1117939395
From: "Jean R." <>
Subject: "Wedding of the Waters" - Erie Canal NY/Irish Canal Diggers 1817-1825/Visionary DeWitt CLINTON - In-depth 2005 Book
Date: Sat, 4 Jun 2005 19:43:15 -0700
SNIPPET: Listers interested in learning the stories behind the story of the building of the Erie Canal - the brainchild of DeWitt CLINTON (1769-1828), a descendant of Longford immigrants - would appreciate historian Peter BERNSTEIN's new, well-researched book full of fascinating tidbits -- "Wedding of the Waters," (W.W. Norton). The author, with ties to the area, is so impressed by CLINTON (who was one of the most influential politicians in the early republic and NYC mayor) that he has a photograph of him on his desk!
Some background -- DeWitt CLINTON, who oversaw the creation and adoption of Manhattan's street grid (1811), was the visionary who proposed the building of the canal. Unprecedented as a feat of engineering, the Erie Canal provided a stunning success and launched NY on its way to becoming the Empire State. For most of the 19th century, two thirds of the nation's imports and exports would flow in and out of NY Harbor.
Many of the poor and unskilled Irish who arrived in America before the Famine found work building the earliest links in the emerging transportation network. The greatest of these projects, the Erie Canal, was constructed largely using Irish labor between 1817-1825. It was a massive undertaking for any era - a trench 363 miles long across upstate NY connecting the Hudson River with Lake Erie. As this was the era before steam power, all of it was dug using manual and animal labor. The work was dangerous and poorly paid and conditions in the camps along the canal zone atrocious. One English visitor to the canal camps near Troy, NY, wrote that the shacks of the diggers were "more likely dog-kennels than the habitations of men."
Tragically - hundreds died from injury or disease in the making of the Erie and other canals such as the Chesapeake and Ohio and the Illinois and Michigan, giving rise to the oft-repeated statement that the banks of America's canals are lined with the bones of stricken Irishmen. Perhaps the most extreme evidence of this raw exploitation occurred in New Orleans in the 1830s. There, the builders of the city's New Basin Canal expressed a preference for Irish over slave labor for the simple reason that a dead Irishman could be replaced in minutes at no cost, while a dead slave resulted in the loss of more than one thousand dollars.
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