travellers would hurry from the hotel and board a vessel not unlike a Noah's ark. The hull was eighty feet long by eleven feet wide, and carried on its deck a long, low house with a flat roof and sloping sides, which were pierced by a continuous row of windows provided with green blinds and red curtains. At the forward end was a room six feet long containing four berths, and called the "Ladies' Dressing Room." Behind it was a room thirty-six feet long, which was used as a cabin and dining-room by day and a bedroom by night. Precisely at nine o'clock the steward and his helpers would appear loaded down with adjustable berths, sheets, pillows, mattresses, curtains, and in a little time the cabin would resemble the interior of a modern sleeping car. Each berth was a narrow wooden frame with a strip of canvas nailed over it, and was held in place by two iron rods which projected from one side and fitted into two holes in the wall of the cabin, and by two ropes attached to the other side of the frame and made fast to rings in the ceiling. In this manner the berths were suspended in tiers of three, one over the other, along the two walls of the cabin, making thirty-six in all, with curtains hung before them. If more than four women were on board, and there usually were, one or two tiers in front of the "Ladies' Dressing Room" were cut off for their use by an opaque curtain. When the passengers outnumbered the berths, the men slept on the dining table or the floor. Behind the cabin was the bar, and in the rear of this was the kitchen, always presided over by a negro cook. When the weather was fine, the travellers gathered on the roof, reading, sewing, talking, and playing cards, till the helmsman would shout, "Bridge! bridge!" when the assembled company would rush headlong down the steps and into the cabin, to come forth once more when the bridge had been passed. To walk on the roof, if the packet was crowded, was not possible. It was the custom, therefore, to jump ashore as the boat rubbed along the bank, and walk on the towpath till a bridge was reached, and then jump on board as the boat glided from beneath. Three horses, walking one before the other, dragged the boat four miles an hour, and by dint of relays every eight 1825. SUCCESS OF THE CANAL. 135 miles Utica was reached in just twenty-four hours. According to the inscription on the china plates of the packet boats, Utica, the site of which thirty years before was a wilderness, was then "inferior to none in the western section of the State in population, wealth, commercial enterprise, active industry, and civil improvements." At this thriving town other packets were taken to Lockport, whence passengers bound for Niagara went by stage to the Falls. At the end of the fourth day from Schenectady the jaded traveller reached Buffalo, three hundred and sixty-three miles by canal from Albany. The debt entailed on the State by this noble work, and by another joining Lake Champlain and the Hudson, was a trifle under eight millions of dollars, carrying an annual interest of four hundred and twenty-eight thousand, to meet which the State had pledged a duty on salt and sales at auction.* But, to the astonishment of the most eager advocates of inland navigation, before the canal was finished the tolls began to exceed the interest charges. In 1825 five hundred thousand, and in 1826 seven hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars, were paid in tolls. Fifty boats starting westward from Albany day after day was no uncommon sight. During 1826 nineteen thousand boats and rafts passed West Troy on the Erie and Champlain Canals. The new business created by this immense movement of freight cannot be estimated. Before the Champlain Canal was opened there were but twenty vessels on the lake. In 1826 there were two hundred and eighteen bringing timber, staves, shingles, boards, potashes, and giving employment to thousands of men in navigation, shipbuilding, and lumbering. Rochester became a flour-milling centre, and turned out one hundred and fifty thousand barrels a year. Even Ohio felt the impetus, and boats loaded with pig-iron * Governor Clinton, in his message in 1826, stated that the debt created by the Erie and Champlain Canals was $7,944,770.90, on which the interest was $427,673.55, and that the fund available for the extinguishment of the debt was: from Madison County were seen in the basin at Albany. Orders for cherry boards and dressed lumber were received at Buffalo from Hartford and from dealers in Rhode Island. The warehouses along the canal bank at Buffalo were filled with the products of the East and the West; with wheat, grain, lumber, posts and rails, whiskey, fur and peltry bound for the markets of the Atlantic, and with salt, furniture, and merchandise bound for the West. To the people of the West the opening of the canal was productive of vast benefit. Said a Columbus newspaper: "It takes thirty days and costs five dollars a hundred pounds to transport goods from Philadelphia to this city; but the same articles may be brought in twenty days from New York by the Hudson and the canal at a cost of two dollars and a half a hundred. Supposing our merchants to import on an average five tons twice a year; this means a saving to each of five hundred and sixty dollars." It meant, indeed, far more: it meant lower prices, more buyers, a wider-spread market, increased comfort for the settlers in the new States, and, what was of equal importance, an impetus to internal improvements which should open up regions into which even the frontiersman would not go. As section after section of the Erie Canal was finished and opened to travel, and the day of its completion came nearer and nearer, a mania for internal improvements swept over the commercial States, and one by one many of the long-discussed projects began to take shape. On July fourth ground was broken in Ohio for a canal to join Lake Erie and the Ohio river. A fortnight later a goodly company from the counties of Ulster, Sullivan, and Orange in New York assembled at the summit level of the Delaware and Hudson Canal, and with music, prayers, and speeches beheld the beginning of that great work.* The Delaware and Chesapeake was well under way; the Chesapeake and Ohio was about to be commenced; while plans were on foot for canals to join New Haven and Northampton, Providence and Worcester, Boston with the Connecticut river, and Long Island Sound with Montreal by way of the * Albany Argus, July 26, 1825. 1826. THE RAGE FOR CANALS. 137 valley of the Connecticut river, Vermont, and Lake Memphremagog. Indeed, early in 1826 a convention of delegates from the towns of New Hampshire and Vermont met at Concord to consider the expediency of such an enterprise.* Massachusetts, alarmed at the prospect of a diversion of her trade to New York, had already appointed a commission to examine into the possibility of cutting a canal from Boston harbor to the Hudson, that she might tap the great western trade on its way down to New York. In a message on the subject, the Governor told the General Court that trade was passing from Boston. The cheapness of transportation from Albany to New York, and the abundant and variously supplied market at the basin of the Erie Canal, had drawn west, he said, the produce of the green hills of Berkshire and the rich valley of the Housatonic. If the navigation of the Connecticut were improved as proposed, the produce of that valley would go to enrich a seaport of Connecticut, while the Blackstone Canal, joining Worcester and Providence, would open a new way from the interior of Massachusetts to the coast of Rhode Island, and all the trade of western and central Massachusetts would be taken from Boston. Land transportation from Boston to Worcester or Providence then cost ten dollars a ton; but by the canal a ton of freight could be hauled from Worcester to Providence for three dollars and thirty-three cents. Philadelphia was in much the same condition as Boston. Her western trade was seriously threatened. The day seemed at hand when articles of her own manufacture would be sent. by sloop to Albany and by canal to the West, when she would be outstripped by cities on the shore of Lake Erie, and would find herself surpassed in trade and manufactures by Pittsburg. If the great western carrying trade-an industry to which the interior of the State owed no small part of its prosperity-was not to be taken away by New York, a short and cheap route to the Ohio river must be opened, and opened quickly. Thus impelled by necessity, the community went seriously to work on the problem before it, and was soon engaged * New England Palladium, January 13, 1826. in discussing the relative merits of railroads and canals. As far back as 1811, John Stevens, of Hoboken, a man who richly deserves to be called the father of the American railroad, applied to the Legislature of New Jersey for a railroad charter. None was granted, and the following year he turned to New York, where the Erie Canal Commissioners had just been appointed, and by means of a memoir, with plans and estimates, endeavored to persuade the commission to build a railroad and not a canal across the State to Buffalo.* Again he failed, but the events of the next few years greatly changed public opinion. War with Great Britain destroyed the coastwise commerce, and developed an enormous inland-carrying trade. The sight of thousands of wagons hurrying across New Jersey with military stores and ammunition; the sight of great fleets of "the ox-marine" + scudding along between New York and Trenton; the report that two million dollars had been paid during the war for the cartage of goods, wares, and produce between the Hudson and the Delaware, convinced Jerseymen that a highway of transportation was really needed across their State. When, therefore, Stevens again applied to the Legislature, he met with no difficulty in securing, in 1815, the first railroad charter ever granted in the New World.‡ His road was to join the Delaware and Raritan rivers, and serve to connect the steamboat lines from Philadelphia to Bordentown with those from New Brunswick to New York. the project was far ahead of the times; the money wherewith to build it could not be secured, and Stevens was again doomed to disappointment. Nevertheless, the idea of moving vehicles by steam on a railway was taking root, and in 1819 another projector yet more advanced applied to Congress for aid with which to test the utility of his invention." He had, he said, devised in theory a way of moving wheeled carriages by steam But * Documents Tending to Prove the Superior Advantages of Railway and Steam Carriages over Canal Navigation. New York, 1812. + History of the People of the United States, vol. iv, pp. 220-221. Laws of New Jersey, Thirty-ninth Session, Second Sitting, Statute 68, 1815. * This man was Benjamin Dearborn, of Boston. His memorial was presented to the House of Representatives February 12, 1819. Journal of the House of Representatives, Fifteenth Congress, Second Session, p. 258. |