Heaven's Ditch Read online

  Geddes carefully threaded a path through the stern landscape. At times, the scope of the work brought Geddes close to despair. He suspected that the canal was merely a dream, a temptation that could only end in a colossal waste of money and effort. Perhaps it might be attempted by future generations, but not by this one.

  A gray sky began to blanket the remote land with snow and deep silence. He pushed on. He contemplated the vast problems and imagined solutions. He was sustained by hope, drawn forward by the seductive whisper of something grand. He wrote his report: yes, an inland canal was feasible.

  A Mighty Baptism

  When Charles Grandison Finney was born in 1792, his parents chose to name him after a character in a popular novel. Like many Americans, they were influenced by the rationalist climate of the late eighteenth century and preferred the name over one drawn from the Bible. “My parents were neither of them professors of religion,” Finney remembered. “I seldom heard a sermon.” They had abandoned Connecticut to move to the New York frontier, settling near the town of Adams at the remote eastern tip of Lake Ontario.

  Although barely educated himself, Finney taught school in his hometown. Six feet two, young and athletic, he was “the idol of his pupils.” He joined in their games, but could bring instant order to his classroom with a glance. Finney soon gave in to a bout of wanderlust. For several years, he lived in different parts of New York and New Jersey, teaching school and trying to find a profession that better suited him. He displayed “manners plain and bordering strongly on the rough and blunt,” an acquaintance said, but his “warm heart” won him friends.

  In 1818, at the age of twenty-six, he returned home and took a job as a law clerk. His imposing physical presence—the prominent forehead, commanding blue eyes, erect posture—suited him to the profession. So did his orderly mind and his gift as a public speaker. He settled into the community. Displaying a “great vivacity of spirit,” he was “self-reliant, but full of kind and tender feelings.” The attractive bachelor spun the ladies around the floor at dances and added to the music with his bass viol.

  Finney noticed that spiritual seeking had become a pressing topic of conversation in Adams. He admitted to being “as ignorant of religion as a heathen.” As a boy, he had on rare occasions listened to the ludicrous sermons of traveling Methodists and to the tedious preaching of Calvinist Congregationalists. The one spoke of a divine light, which made no sense to him, the other of innate human depravity and predestination, which seemed illogical and unfair.

  Now revivals, spates of enthusiastic exhortation by itinerant preachers, were netting new church members. Finney observed one in 1819 that created enough excitement in Adams to inspire more than a hundred residents to offer their lives to Jesus. He became friends with George Gale, a local pastor and choir director with whom he shared a love of music. While Finney found Gale’s Calvinist sermons wearisome, he enjoyed the young man’s company. He also began to court Lydia Andrews, a seventeen-year-old from a nearby town. Her devout Christian faith made him reconsider his own beliefs.

  As part of his legal education, Finney studied Biblical influences on common law. He contemplated references to the Mosaic Code, then read more deeply in the sacred book. He began to formulate his own views. He did not reject the precepts of Calvinism out of hand, but he seriously questioned the notion that all of humanity could be condemned for the sin of Adam, or that free will played no role in salvation, as orthodox Protestants in the Puritan tradition believed. His ideas meshed with a widening mood in the country. As Americans pushed out into the frontier, the old dogma loosened and the sovereignty of the individual took precedence.

  His growing interest in religion troubled rather than soothed Finney’s mind. He searched his soul. He attended his first inquiry meeting. He tried and tried to fit notions of the divine into his broader scheme of things. Analytical by nature, he wanted to categorize manifestations of the spirit, to make sense of them. In vain. Unease preyed on him. He felt a crisis gathering around him.

  The process of transformation led a sinner through recognizable steps, beginning with concern about the fate of his soul. Then came a period of inquiry, a search for a path to salvation. The realization that only God could save him ramped up the person’s anxiety. The mental tension peaked with what was called “conviction,” the awful certainty that without divine intercession he was condemned to eternal suffering. This unbearable trepidation would, through God’s mercy, end in a glorious, life-altering change, the “conversion” that was the essence of the evangelical Christian experience.

  The Bible told Finney he must become as a child in order to enter the kingdom of God, but he found that he could not shed his adult pride. He tried to pray, but he was “ashamed to have a human being see me on my knees before God.”

  On a mild October day in 1821, the air spiced with the aroma of fallen maple leaves, Finney finished an early breakfast and started toward his law office. The weight of the decision suddenly became too much for him. Anxiety swelled to panic. A terrifying conviction of his sinfulness came over him. He found himself walking north, out of town, into the surrounding woods. He needed seclusion. He was sweating. He resolved, then and there, “to give my heart to God.”

  As he plunged through brambles, the lash of a twig left his eye weeping. He lost himself among molten coins of sunlight and shadow. He wanted to understand, to understand. He reached out to take the truth in his arms and clasped nothing. “I was dumb,” he remembered, “that is, I had nothing to say to God.”

  He made a rash vow. If God converted him, he would give up his law career and become a preacher. His agitation gradually left him. He breathed more easily. The forest smiled at him. He returned to the village through the same mild sunshine. It was past noon. His mind was “most wonderfully quiet and peaceful.” An intimation of glory had touched him and now hovered around him.

  The law office was empty. He sat and played a hymn on his viol. The music entered and lifted him. “I began to weep,” he later remembered. “It seemed as if my heart was all liquid.” He was engulfed by a “mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost.” It was “like a wave of electricity,” he said, “like the very breath of God.” He felt he would die if the ecstatic waves continued. He saw Jesus “face to face.”

  A friend from the church choir found him in his office. Finney was no longer embarrassed by his gushing emotion, but the visitor was alarmed and asked if he was sick. “No,” he answered, “but I am so happy that I cannot live.”

  The choir member sought out a church elder. On seeing Finney in the very embrace of conversion, the man gave out a “most spasmodic laugh,” a holy laugh of wonder. Another friend came in as Finney was describing the extraordinary experience to the elder. This man asked for help with his own soul and Finney prayed for him, prayed for another person for the first time in his life. He made up his mind. Yes, he would fulfill his vow.

  The next day, Finney encountered a church deacon who had hired him to handle a case in court. When asked about the legal matter, the young lawyer declared, “Deacon Barney, I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead his cause, and I cannot plead yours.”

  A Perfect Wilderness

  DeWitt Clinton almost missed the boat when he joined the 1810 expedition to consider an inland canal. He had paid a servant a month’s wages in advance to accompany him. When the man did not show, Clinton went looking for him. He had to rush to jump aboard the paddle-wheel steamboat, the novel contraption that would carry him from New York City up the Hudson River to Albany. From there, most of the members of the recently appointed canal commission would ascend the Mohawk River by boat, cross Oneida Lake, and travel down the Seneca River as far as Geneva. Carriages would take them west to Lake Erie.

  James Geddes’s hopeful report had spurred the state to action. The idea of the canal lay at the center of the contentious national issue of internal improvements—what w
e would nowadays call infrastructure investment. What was needed? Who would pay? Who profit? Federalists saw in improvements a path to national prosperity. Republicans, followers of Jefferson (unrelated to today’s GOP), agreed only in part—they were skeptical about big government. Federalists dreamed of national support for markets and commerce; Republicans favored states’ rights and a nation of yeomen farmers.

  The issue was a pressing one. The size of the republic made it difficult to control from Washington. A murky 1805 plot by former vice president Aaron Burr to carve out a new nation in the Southwest emphasized the point. The ambition of southerners to turn the middle of the continent into a slaveholding empire worried northerners. A canal to Lake Erie would provide a convenient link between the coast and the interior. It would also make it easier for antislavery New Englanders to populate the Middle West.

  The New York State legislature voted to form a seven-man commission that included Clinton, a Jeffersonian Republican; Gouverneur Morris, a Federalist; and Stephen Van Rensselaer, a landed Dutch patroon from Albany. James Geddes came along to show the commissioners the details of his 1808 survey. The men were to look over the state of navigation to the west and explore the possibility of some kind of artificial waterway. The state footed the bill for the trip with a grant of $3,000. The travelers brought along wine, cigars, and a trunk full of books, including a well-thumbed edition of Jesse Hawley’s “Hercules” essays.

  DeWitt Clinton had learned politics at the knee of his uncle George Clinton, New York’s first governor. DeWitt had been elected to the U.S. Senate at thirty-one. He had also served several terms as mayor of New York City. He was known for his stature—more than six feet tall and powerfully built—and his “hauteur of manner.” Newspapers called him “Magnus Apollo.”

  Now forty-one, Clinton was no shallow politician. He was rational and curious, highly educated, concerned about the poor, opposed to slavery and to imprisonment for debt. He promoted New York’s schools and libraries and pushed for scientific improvements in agriculture. The canal would become both his obsession and his lasting legacy.

  Gouverneur Morris had lived an event-filled life in his fifty-eight years. Like Clinton a native of New York City, he had served in the Continental Congress during the Revolution. At the Constitutional Convention, he had helped organize the founding document and had penned the famous preamble, “We the People . . .” He had served as minister to France, openly bedded a succession of French women, and witnessed the chaotic revolution there firsthand. The aging bachelor, whom enemies considered “irreligious and profane,” was now starting a new life. He had recently married a thirty-five-year-old Virginia gentlewoman who had fallen on hard times and taken a job as his housekeeper.

  Morris was an enthusiastic canal booster who had dreamed of a New York waterway as far back as the 1790s. Although he had lost his left leg in an accident, he had limped on his awkward wooden replacement to northern and western New York to speculate in frontier land. A canal would benefit his purse, but he had his eye on far grander results. “As yet, my friend, we only crawl along the outer shell of our country,” he had written to a friend in 1800. “The proudest empire in Europe is but a bauble, compared to what America will be.”

  Morris and Van Rensselaer both decided to make the entire journey by carriage, leaving it to the others to explore the existing waterways. Morris brought his bride along—they would enjoy one of the earliest Niagara Falls honeymoons—and, in a separate carriage, his French chef and a hired English painter to record the scenery. All the men wore frock coats and square-crowned beaver hats. Morris sported knee breeches, hopelessly old-fashioned now that pantaloons had become standard for men.

  Clinton and his group started from Albany in early July 1810. Travel in flat-bottomed boats showed them the drawbacks of the Mohawk River, as their crew struggled to pole the vessels upstream. They found that the refinements of New York City did not prevail in the backcountry. At an inn near Canajoharie, Clinton noted that “the swarms of flies which assailed the food, were very disgusting.” The guests were served custards that “exhibited the marks of that insect as a substitute for the grating of nutmeg.” At Little Falls, a settlement of forty houses, gigantic rocks were heaped in piles. Clinton correctly speculated that the formation indicated “a violent rupture of the waters through this place.” He also noted that “we saw on the north side large holes dug, which we were told were made by money-seekers from Stone Arabia.” These rustic treasure hunters—Stone Arabia was the name of a local town—imagined that chests of gold had been buried in the earth by pirates or ancient inhabitants.

  Utica displayed a bit more civilization, with three hundred residences, some of them quite elegant, and two newspapers. At Rome, the commissioners examined a three-foot-deep canal, part of a never-completed, poorly designed system intended to connect the Mohawk with Lake Ontario.

  Accommodations could be primitive. At an inn east of the Salina salt works, “Our ears were invaded by a commingled noise of drunken people in an adjacent room, of crickets in the hearth, of rats in the walls, of dogs under the beds, by the whizzing of musquitoes about our heads, and the flying of bats about the room.” At another hostelry, Clinton was “assailed by an army of bed-bugs, aided by a body of light infantry in the shape of fleas.”

  On July 25, they passed Lyons, east of the Genesee River and near the village of Palmyra. Outside town, they came upon a meeting of Methodist zealots in a clearing. “In one place,” Clinton noted, “a man had a crowd around him, to listen to his psalm singing; in another, a person was vociferating his prayer.” It was a sudden encounter with the religious intensity for which the region was becoming famous. One man had his arm around the neck of another, and was “looking him full in the face, and admonishing him of the necessity of repentance.”

  Two hundred seekers, a huge crowd on the frontier, were called together by a trumpet. Four preachers mounted a central platform. One of them “opened the service with prayer, during which groans followed every part of his orisons, decidedly emphatical.” Afterward, the clergyman began “preaching up the terrors of hell.” The travelers had to depart, but “we met crowds of people going to the sermon. On the margin of the road, we saw persons with cakes, beer, and other refreshments for sale.”

  All along the way, Clinton took delight in the unfamiliar surroundings of the west. He was an experienced ornithologist and noted “wood-ducks, gulls, sheldrakes, bob-linklins, king-birds, crows, kildares, small snipe.” Forbidding forests covered most of the region, save the vast Montezuma Marshes and the scattered wheat fields. In 1810, no regular stagecoach traveled beyond Rome.

  Clinton knew they were traveling through a land that had, in their lifetime, belonged to another people. His father, General James Clinton, had been one of the leaders of a 1779 Revolutionary War expedition to destroy the villages of Iroquois as punishment for the Indians’ raiding of pioneer homes on behalf of the British. The excursion had alerted the white men to the bounty of western New York, where the Indians grew rows of corn ten feet high and peaches in abundance.

  DeWitt Clinton knew and respected the fading culture of the Six Nations. All through his account of the trip, Indians fade in and out like ghosts. He saw a small group of them fishing with spears near Rome, others paddling canoes at Oneida Lake. Their drawings decorated rock walls. He examined the wampum and kettles recovered from burial mounds. He watched an Indian boy hit a coin with a dart from a six-foot-long blowpipe used for hunting birds.

  The Quakers, Clinton wrote, were trying to teach the natives civilized behavior in order to rescue them “from the evils of savage life.” Yet the morals of the Christians in the area were often “worse than those of the Pagans.” Clinton speculated about how native peoples might have arrived in North America via Asia.

  Clinton’s account of the trip rarely mentioned the building of a canal. One exception was at Irondequoit Creek. James Geddes explained
his plan to carry the waterway across the creek’s deep valley, the preglacial outlet of the Genesee River. It was a keystone to the project’s feasibility. “Mr. Geddes proposes a great embankment for his canal,” Clinton recorded. The obstacle would prove to be one of the most daunting along the entire route.

  They moved on to the nearby Genesee Falls, where the village of Rochesterville would soon explode into being. West of the Genesee, the travelers found much of the land “a perfect wilderness.” They reached Buffalo on August 4, having made the 360-mile journey in a month.

  On their way back, canal commissioner Thomas Eddy took a detour to visit the settlement of Jemima Wilkinson. Her religious community near Seneca Lake was known as “the second wonder of the western country” after Niagara Falls. Wilkinson was a radical visionary, her followers among the first white settlers in western New York. Now fifty-seven, Wilkinson had undergone a mystical conversion as a young woman. After a serious illness, her doctor reported, “she Conceived the Idea, that she had been Dead and was raised Up for Extraordinary Purposes.” She felt that “the heavens were open’d.” Having been visited by angels, she said that she was no longer Jemima, that her body had been taken over by the “Public Universal Friend.” She put on a man’s clothes and preached her own version of the Quaker doctrine she had grown up with.

  Her message appealed particularly to women. “I was sincerely a Seeker,” said Ruth Prichard, a school teacher from Wallingford, Connecticut. She heard the Friend preach in a nearby house. “It was the Voice that spake as never Man Spake.” The Friend beckoned her to “that peace that the world can neither give nor take away.” She became a follower and never looked back. The Friend amassed a substantial congregation in New England. In 1790, she set up her settlement thirty miles south of the site of Palmyra, which would sit astride the canal route.