Quote of the Day (Henry Adams, on Friendship)

“One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.” — U.S. historian (and descendant of Presidents) Henry Adams (1838-1918), The Education of Henry Adams (1907; posthumously published 1918)

Quote of the Day (Henry Adams, on How a June Day Inspired a Fashion Designer)

“One afternoon in early June of the preceding summer, Mr. Worth had received a letter on the part of the reigning favourite of the King of Dahomey, directing him to create for her a ball-dress that should annihilate and utterly destroy with jealousy and despair the hearts of her seventy-five rivals; she was young and beautiful; expense was not a consideration. Such were the words of her chamberlain. All that night, the great genius of the nineteenth century tossed wakefully on his bed revolving the problem in his mind. Visions of flesh-coloured tints shot with blood-red perturbed his brain, but he fought against and dismissed them; that combination would be commonplace in Dahomey. When the first rays of sunlight showed him the reflection of his careworn face in the plate-glass mirrored ceiling, he rose and, with an impulse of despair, flung open the casements. There before his blood-shot eyes lay the pure, still, new-born, radiant June morning. With a cry of inspiration the great man leaned out of the casement and rapidly caught the details of his new conception. Before ten o'clock he was again at his bureau in Paris. An imperious order brought to his private room every silk, satin, and gauze within the range of pale pink, pale crocus, pale green, silver and azure. Then came chromatic scales of colour; combinations meant to vulgarise the rainbow; sinfonies and fugues; the twittering of birds and the great peace of dewy nature; maidenhood in her awakening innocence; "The Dawn in June." The Master rested content.” —U.S. historian, novelist, and descendant of Presidents Henry Adams (1838-1918), Democracy: An American Novel (1880)

Quote of the Day (Henry Adams, on ‘Practical Politics’)

“Practical politics consists in ignoring facts, but education and politics are two different and often contradictory things.” — U.S. historian (and descendant of Presidents) Henry Adams (1838-1918), The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Quote of the Day (Henry Adams, on Experience)

“All experience is an arch, to build upon.” —American historian (and descendant of two U.S. Presidents) Henry Adams (1838-1918), The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Flashback, July 1817: Erie Canal Begins Construction

With a second war with Great Britain concluded, New York State could stop worrying so much about its borders and start a construction project with deep nationalistic implications. Backers of the Erie Canal were intent on boosting the economic power of their state, but in the process they cemented commercial ties between the Northeast and the Midwest that proved essential in binding the two regions together 40 years later against a slaveholding South before and during the Civil War.

The project, whose construction began, with appropriate symbolism, on July 4, was the engineering wonder of its era, using 18 aqueducts to carry the canal over ravines and rivers, and 83 locks, with a rise of 568 feet, winding through 363 miles of New York’s interior from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. Four feet deep and 40 feet wide, it floated boats carrying 30 tons of freight, allowing heavy loads to be transported at one-tenth the cost of moving them by road. 

And all of this was finished two years ahead of schedule. Impossible to believe in this era of cost overruns.

Because of the methods he used here and on other canals, as well as the men he employed on them who went off to work on still other projects, chief engineer Benjamin Wright was called “The Father of American Civil Engineering” in 1969 by the American Society of Civil Engineers. But another man was more fundamental to the project in mobilizing popular support and seeing it through every difficulty: DeWitt Clinton.

New York governors, even those who have served a considerable length of time, are often known for one accomplishment that serves as historical shorthand. With Thomas E. Dewey, it was New York’s extensive highway-building program; with Nelson Rockefeller, expanding the state university system; and with Hugh Carey, rescuing New York City from bankruptcy.

Clinton served in almost every conceivable office at the local and state level: State Assemblyman and State Senator, New York City Mayor, U.S. Senator, and Lieutenant Governor. But none of his achievements in any of these posts matched the importance of what he was able to do as Governor, except maybe his 15 years as New York Canal Commissioner, when he advocated for both the Champlain and Erie Canals.

Henry Adams’s towering account of a critical period in the early America, History of the United States of America During the Second Administration of James Madison, noted that proposals had already been made for canals and roads in the Carolinas, Pennsylvania and Virginia (George Washington was an especially prominent proponent), but they could not overcome rough terrain—100 miles of mountains—in their interior. In contrast, “New York had but to people a level and fertile district, nowhere fifty miles from navigable water, in order to reach the great Lake system, which had no natural outlet within the Union except through the city of New York. So obvious was the idea of a canal from the Lakes to the Hudson that it was never out of men's minds, even before the war; and no sooner did peace return than the scheme took large proportions.”

In a landmark 1808 Report on Roads, Canals, Harbors and Rivers, Thomas Jefferson’s Treasury Secretary, Albert Gallatin, proposed four great canals along the eastern coast. Gallatin’s credibility with the Jeffersonians bode well for New York legislators' hope that federal funding could be secured for the Erie route.

But Jefferson’s convictions that federal funding for internal improvements required a constitutional amendment persuaded his friend and successor James Madison, who vetoed, as one of the last acts of his Presidency, John C. Calhoun’s bill for a system of canals and roads. (See my prior post on this foiled legislation.)

By forcing New York to act on its own, however, Madison ensured that the Southern agrarian economy championed by him, Jefferson and Madison’s successor, James Monroe, would become increasingly dependent on a single crop—cotton—and that it would fall behind the North in industry.

The impact of the Erie Canal on New York—on the nation as a whole, even—was widespread:

*It opened vast stretches of the interior of the state. Before 1810, New York was most heavily populated in the east, along the Hudson River. The Western portion of the state was even considered the frontier. The canal changed all that. Business and industry followed settlers in the wake of the canal.

*It boosted cities upstate. Except for Binghamton and Elmira, every major city in New York State lies along the trade route established by the Erie Canal, from New York City to Albany, through Schenectady, Utica and Syracuse, to Rochester and Buffalo.

*It made New York City the indispensable commercial city of the Northeast. Not long before construction began on the canal, Philadelphia and Boston exceeded New York in size. Just 15 years after the canal’s opening, however, Gotham had overtaken them as the busiest seaport in the country. It had what those other ports didn’t: access to the booming granaries of the Midwest.

*It ignited settlement of the frontier. New York City became the principal entry point for immigrants planning to press on to the West, as the canal provided a quicker, overland route past the Appalachians. The vast waterways of the Midwest—the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri rivers—lay beyond, to lands that, after the Treaty of Ghent ending the War of 1812, was less likely to suffer from British incitement of Native-Americans against new settlers.

*It spawned immigration with opportunities for low-paying labor. Although an estimated three-quarters of canal workers were born in the United States, construction of the canal still meant gainful employment for Irish and Welsh immigrants. It was an important precedent of assimilation before the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s.

*It inadvertently became a national security asset to the United States. Without the Erie, the United States would have been left with one principal means of moving food from the Midwest: the Mississippi. Lying deep in Southern territory, New Orleans would have presented rich possibilities for antebellum politicians to exert economic pressures on anti-slavery forces in the Midwest, including a blockade or boycott. Instead, because New York became an alternative port because of the Erie, as a “free-soil” ideology hostile to the use of slave labor flourished in the Midwest.

* It became a symbolic advertisement for the free enterprise system. This commercial and engineering marvel had not been built by slaves, as in the case of Egypt’s pyramids, but by free men. It also served as a lasting rebuke to the slaveholding south, a point made by Revolutionary War poet Philip Freneau in “On the Great Western Canal of the State of New York”:

“Not China's wall, though stretching far,

Which this vast object can compare,

With such gigantic works of old

This proud Canal may be enrolled,

“Which to our use no tyrant gave

Nor owes its grandeur to one Slave.”

*It inspired a wider program of public-works projects and politicians committed to them. One of these was an ambitious attorney-politician in the Midwest who hoped to become “The DeWitt Clinton of Illinois.” As a state legislator, he advocated the construction, use, and expansion of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, as well as wider improvements in transportation supported by his idol, Henry Clay. Once he became President, this former railroad lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, made one of the biggest non-war priorities of his administration passage of the bill starting the Transcontinental Railroad.

This Day in Naval History (British Invasion Stymied at Plattsburgh)

September 11, 1814—In a war partly caused by British seizure of personnel aboard U.S. vessels, one such victim made good on his vow to “make England remember the day she impressed an American sailor.” 

Outnumbered in ships and men, Master Commandant Thomas Macdonough not only stopped what could have been a ruinous invasion of New York State via Lake Chaplain at the Battle of Plattsburgh, but through his victory gave American negotiators in Belgium a better position to achieve more favorable terms in ending the War of 1812.

Approximately 11,000 of the best, battle-hardened troops from Britain’s Napoleonic Wars had been dispatched to move down from Upper Canada into the Empire State. The movement was both a retaliatory measure (against an American republic that, by the British way of thinking, should have joined them against Napoleon, a dictator who posed a clear and present danger to European security) and a necessity (two-thirds of the British army in Canada were fed by American contractors—mostly Vermonters and New Yorkers who showed no scruple about trading with the enemy during war).

The American flotilla had been so hastily cobbled together that many matches for its guns were discovered to be defective, and the captain of one of its divisions was a mere 16-year-old midshipman. In fact, the makeshift navy possessed “a decided advantage only in their commander,” Henry Adams observed admiringly in his History of the United States During the Administrations of James Madison. Still only 30 years old, Macdonough had already lived up to the military and naval legacy of his Delaware family. He had won wide plaudits for his bravery while serving under Stephen Decatur in the expedition against Tripoli’s pirates (the American republic’s first military encounter with the Moslem world).

But his truly formative pre-war experience was in 1810, when he was captured by a British “press gang” and taken aboard a frigate. That night, after securing the clothes of a British seaman, he requested and was granted permission to “overhaul a cutter carrying rum.” Once in the water, instead of going to the cutter, he made for the vessel from which he’d been seized, dodging constant fire sent his way after his ruse had been discovered.

Macdonough’s cunning, daring escape was one of the few acts of American defiance against Britain’s odious impressment policy. Particularly during the all-consuming struggle against Napoleon, the low pay, poor conditions, and near certainty of deadly action led to a severe manpower shortage aboard British vessels. So from 1793 to 1812, British “press gangs” had stopped American ships at sea, taking with them approximately 15,000 sailors. The British government might have been desperate, but even the pretext of plausibility they might have had (e.g., taking men who had deserted the Royal Navy for the American merchant marine) vanished in the case of Macdonough, a native-born American.

As the 23-year-old Theodore Roosevelt described it in his pioneering account, The Naval War of 1812, MacDonough had achieved his victory at Plattsburgh by leaving virtually nothing to chance:

“Not only were his vessels provided with springs, but also with anchors to be used astern in any emergency. The Saratoga was further prepared for a change of wind, or for the necessity of winding ship, by having a kedge planted broad off on each of her bows, with a hawser and preventer hawser (hanging in bights under water) leading from each quarter to the kedge on that side. There had not been time to train the men thoroughly at the guns; and to make these produce their full effect the constant supervision of the officers had to be exerted.”

Having taken all human precautions, he then turned his attention to an otherworldly source. On the morning of battle, he knelt on his ship, the Saratoga, and led his men in prayer.

The battle, completed in under three hours that afternoon, was decisive. The name “Saratoga” proved a good omen, as Plattsburgh, like that earlier American Revolution battle, marked the end of further British designs on the American interior. Sir George Prevost, governor-general of Canada, beat a hasty retreat back to his homebase.

Revenge was doubly sweet for this commander, then. It also represented a stinging comeuppance to British political and military authorities who had expected a cakewalk down Lake Champlain into the Empire State. 

When the news was received in London in mid-October, it arrived at the same time as the British failure to take Baltimore and their defeat at Fort Erie. This “lamentable event to the civilized world,” in the words of the Times of London, undercut the British stance of holding out for status uti possidetis (state of possession) at the bargaining table in Ghent. The American delegation (which included future Secretary of State and President John Quincy Adams) could not move the impressment issue that had been one of the causes of the conflict, but it avoided losing half of Maine, one of the British delegation's demands only a couple of weeks before they heard the news about the military reverses.