Heaven's Ditch Read online

  Navigable

  In 1815, DeWitt Clinton’s fortunes had reached a low ebb. He had audaciously challenged incumbent James Madison for the presidency in the 1812 election and lost. During the war that broke out that year, Clinton’s canal commission had been stripped of its spending authority. Many thought the idea itself had run out of steam.

  With peace restored, commissioner Thomas Eddy tried to breathe new life into the project. He helped organize a public meeting to demand that state lawmakers reconsider an inland canal. Clinton threw his influence behind the effort. An assembly of influential New Yorkers met at the plush City Hotel on Broadway in New York City just before the end of 1815. Clinton was the author and lead proponent of a petition to the legislature. He pointed out that a canal would forge a permanent link through New York between the Atlantic and the west.

  Clinton let his rhetoric soar. The project was “without parallel in the history of mankind.” The legislature must act now—“delays are the refuge of weak minds.” Tens of thousands of citizens across the state agreed and rushed to sign the petition. This quasi-referendum revived the canal concept and turned Clinton into its champion. Enthusiasm began to percolate from Albany to Buffalo.

  by Joy Taylor

  The renewed call brought a vocal response from critics. Folks in the Hudson Valley, Long Island, and the southern tier of the state saw nothing in the project but cost, risk, and increased competition for their own farm produce. The project was just too big. The technical challenges were beyond the abilities of inexperienced engineers. As for Clinton, an opponent said, he was “determined to seize on the canal project as a ladder to climb into power.” The accusation was true.

  The representatives in Albany could not, however, ignore the tidal wave of support for the project. The issue of the canal had to be addressed. Lobbyists from around the state descended on the legislature for its 1816 session.

  Clinton “had a delicate and difficult game to play” as he tried to navigate the opposition. He focused on creating a detailed study of the route, one that would win over legislators by making the project seem less fanciful. He supported a compromise bill to appoint a new commission, with himself as president, and to authorize money for a thorough survey of the proposed route.

  The bill passed on the last day of the legislative session in April 1816. The next step was to lay out an exact, not an approximate, plan for the canal’s path. This was a grueling task that foreshadowed the enormous challenges of the actual construction. James Geddes led the team that plotted the route through the most remote section of the waterway, from east of Palmyra to Lake Erie. The commissioners assigned the middle section to Benjamin Wright, a plump, round-faced judge from Rome, New York, who knew the local terrain well. Charles Broadhead, another surveyor, would cover most of the upper Mohawk Valley, from Utica eastward.

  The forty-six-year-old Wright had more experience with canals than most Americans, but he was no expert. Having settled on the western frontier, he had helped the English canal planner William Weston with the largely unsuccessful improvements to navigation along the Mohawk River. Wright was now taking on a far more daunting challenge. Heading west from Rome, the canal would pass through deep forest, scrubland, and swamp. Unlike the Mohawk Valley, little of this territory had been cleared or settled. With a covered wagon to carry their gear and supplies, Wright’s team of a dozen men plunged into the wilderness.

  The goal was to find a path west that was as level as possible and as straight as could be managed. Hills and valleys were both to be avoided. Once Wright determined a likely direction, his surveyor sighted on a distant object, took a compass reading, and walked toward the landmark. An axman accompanied him, notching trees along the trail. Two additional woodcutters hacked down brush and trees to clear a four-foot-wide path. Men carrying sixty-six-foot-long chains measured a section almost the length of a football field. They marked each end with two stakes, one extending above the ground, the other flush with the soil.

  An assistant engineer next set a level on a tripod halfway between these points. Two rodmen rested graduated poles upright on each of the flush stakes. The engineer put the crosshairs of his device on each pole. He noted the difference in elevation, if any, between the stakes. His reading had to be precise to the fraction of an inch. Any errors would accumulate, throwing off the final calculation.

  Meanwhile, Wright would be examining the terrain: streams, property lines, rocks, knolls, drainage. The survey and investigation would eventually be translated into a detailed map of the route. Cost was always on the engineer’s mind. Aqueducts to cross streams, locks to navigate elevation changes, embankments to carry the canal over low stretches, all would be expensive. Periodically, Wright directed his men to dig ten-foot-deep holes in order to examine the nature of the soil. He was always on the lookout for sources of water. Would the local streams, lakes, and ponds provide enough water to keep the ditch filled?

  The men pushed into increasingly dismal terrain. At first, they negotiated forests and hacked through underbrush and “woods of hemlock, cedar, alder bushes and weeds.” Here and there they encountered the Oneida Indians who still lived in the area. The crews traded with them for game to supplement their regular diet of smoked pork and stale bread.

  Canal route

  by Joy Taylor

  Later they moved into “swamp and swale,” areas that Indians avoided. Here thick brush and brambles had to be cleared, along with cattails and reeds nine feet high. They dodged the occasional hiss of a rattlesnake, swatted mosquitoes day and night. Conducting the survey at the height of summer, they sweated in the thick air and drank stagnant swamp water to slake their thirst.

  The men were learning as they went. Except for West Point, which taught military engineers, no school in America offered courses in engineering. A young farmer named John Jervis was hired by Benjamin Wright as an axman to clear brush and trees. “The mystery of the level,” he said, “the taking of sights, its adjustment, and the computations of these observations were all dark to me.” Little by little Jervis learned by doing. In time, he would become a supervisor on the canal, then one of the premier civil engineers in American history.

  While the survey teams did their work, Clinton and the commissioners were drawing up a plan for building the canal. They arrived at a design: the profile of the ditch would be an inverted trapezoid forty feet across at the top, twenty-eight at the bottom, and four feet deep. Locks would be ninety feet long and twelve feet deep, allowing them to raise or lower a boat eight feet.

  Clinton ranged along the route, examining the work of the surveyors as it unfolded. “The mind is lost in wonder,” he recorded, “and perplexed and confounded with the immensity of the ideas which press upon it.”

  The commissioners had proposed a series of taxes and fees to pay for the canal, including an increase in the duty on salt, a tax on steamboat tickets, and imposts on sales at auction. They would collect reasonable tolls for cargo shipped along the canal, although Clinton wanted to keep these as low as possible in order to encourage commerce. They would borrow money, perhaps finding willing lenders in Europe.

  But the highest hope of New Yorkers was for federal financing. Clinton went to Washington and found an ally in South Carolina representative John C. Calhoun. Although he would later embrace sectional interests with a passion, Calhoun, at thirty-four, shared the fear that the vast distances of North America would strain the union. “Let us conquer space,” he declared.

  In February 1817, Congress passed the Bonus Bill, which allotted the charter fee and royalties from the Second Bank of the United States to internal improvements, with the Erie Canal the main beneficiary. On March 1, three days before he was to hand over his office to James Monroe, President Madison vetoed the measure. Neither he nor Congress, he declared, had the constitutional authority to allot public money for such purposes. So said the “Father of the Constituti
on.”

  Madison, a New York newspaper wrote, had “suddenly become wonderfully delicate and squeamish upon the provisions of the constitution.” DeWitt Clinton called his action reprehensible and “totally indefensible.” Like many, he suspected that Madison’s devotion to the interests of Virginia, his home state, played as big a role in his decision as his concern for the fine points of the Constitution. But the decision was final. Federal financing was out. New Yorkers would have to go it alone, or not at all.

  The canal commissioners had estimated the cost of the project at six million dollars, not far from the figure Jesse Hawley had suggested in his “Hercules” essays. This amounted to more than a quarter of the budget of the entire federal government and a huge chunk of all the capital in the state. It would be a desperate gamble. Critics were sure that in the “big ditch would be buried the treasure of the State, to be watered by the tears of posterity.”

  New York City representatives generally opposed the canal. The city would sink under canal debt, they said. The cost was “too great for the state,” the magnitude of the project was “beyond what has ever been accomplished by any nation.” Peter Livingston, whose family owned tracts of land in the Hudson Valley, had become a fierce Clinton antagonist. “The man who will enter into this project,” he declared, “must be a madman, a fool, or a knave.” The levels of taxation would be oppressive. “It will make paupers of the state.”

  “Who is this James Geddes, and who is this Benjamin Wright?” another assemblyman asked. “What canals have they ever constructed?” The engineers sent a message to reassure the legislators, expressing “their confidence in their ability to locate and construct the canal.”

  Popular support made the difference. On April 10, 1817, the state assembly took the plunge. The representatives passed An Act respecting Navigable Communications, between the great western and northern lakes, and the Atlantic ocean. In May, DeWitt Clinton capped his political rebound by winning the governorship of New York. Construction on the greatest engineering project in the nation’s history was set to begin July 4.

  Abduction

  The master stonemason Hiram Abiff supervised the construction of the temple of King Solomon in Jerusalem ten centuries before the birth of Christ. Accounts of the sacred geometry of Solomon’s fabulous house of worship would be sung down the ages, fascinating thinkers like Isaac Newton. The precisely proportioned temple was lined with cedar overlaid with gold.

  During its construction, a group of journeyman masons approached Hiram. They knew that if they completed their tasks well, they might, at the end of the project, be given the Master’s Word. This was the sign by which an unknown workman could signify his ability when seeking a job on a distant project; it was the key that would unlock a master’s wages. The three dissidents wanted the word now.

  When Hiram refused to divulge the secret, one of the disgruntled workers struck him with a 24-inch ruler. Hiram survived and stumbled away. A second journeyman demanded the word. Again a refusal, a blow with a mason’s square. When the master would not reveal the arcane knowledge to the third worker, the man hit him with a setting maul, this time killing him. A search party found Hiram’s hastily buried body. Solomon himself raised the corpse from the makeshift grave for proper burial.

  Any nineteenth-century candidate for entry into the third degree of Freemasonry was required to learn and act out Hiram Abiff’s story. The drama drove home the tradition of faithfulness to the brotherhood, even unto death. It suggested that the modern order of Free and Accepted Masons drew sustenance from ancient roots.

  William Morgan knew the story well. During the early 1820s, he had joined the Freemasons in Le Roy, New York, thirty miles southwest of Rochester. Like Joseph and Lucy Smith, William and his young wife, Lucinda, had tried for the main chance and failed. Like the Smiths, they had migrated to western New York, where the canal shouted opportunity.

  A native of Culpeper County, Virginia, William had spent his early life as a vagabond. Rather than sticking to his trade as a bricklayer, he had traveled the world. He had tried the pirate’s life, a rumor had it, crewing with the celebrated Jean Lafitte. Captured, Morgan had been dragooned into the U.S. Army. He claimed that during the War of 1812 he had fought under General Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, rising to the rank of captain.

  In 1819, at forty-five, he was ready to settle down and start a family. He returned to his home turf, set up as a merchant in Richmond, and courted a comely young lady named Lucinda Pendleton. She was only eighteen and her father, a planter and Methodist minister, opposed the match. Lucinda, strong-willed and perhaps moved by Morgan’s war stories, married him anyway. After two years of settled life in Virginia, William’s restlessness returned. He and Lucinda moved to Canada.

  The Morgans invested their capital in a brewery in the town of York (now Toronto). A fire soon ruined their plans and left the couple destitute. By 1823, they had relocated to New York State, settling near the town on the Genesee River that had just changed its name from Rochesterville to Rochester. William worked as a clerk and may have returned to his original trade. It’s likely that the construction of the canal offered him the promise of work as a stonemason. Lucinda gave birth to their first child, named Lucinda Wesley, the next year.

  Like many of their generation, the Morgans strove to climb the slippery slope of economic opportunity. For William, joining the Freemasons seemed a smart move. In the brotherhood, he would rub elbows with a better sort—the lawyers, merchants, judges and politicians who might provide an entrée into some lucrative business. He was initiated soon after arriving in Le Roy and ascended through the first three degrees of the order.

  The origins of Freemasonry are obscure, but the brotherhood probably began in the Middle Ages, when itinerant masons roamed Europe building cathedrals. A master mason combined the professions of architect, engineer, and builder. Masons developed guilds to set wages and regulate the trade. Skilled “free masons” worked on “free stones,” completing fine ornamental carving. “Rough masons” shaped ordinary building blocks. As in the legend of Hiram Abiff, masters on a particular site needed a convenient way to distinguish the expertise of unknown applicants. Signs and passwords, kept secret from the general public, served as credentials.

  The guilds maintained hostelries and clubhouses, offering aid and conviviality to traveling members. Townspeople who had never hefted a trowel or a chisel petitioned for inclusion as well. The guild officers allowed respectable gentlemen to become honorary or “accepted” masons. Some of the new members were clients or benefactors of the lodges. A distinction developed in the seventeenth century between “operative” masons with calloused hands and “speculative” Masons, drawn by the guilds’ rituals and bonhomie. The society appealed to traveling merchants, who could be assured of congenial companions in a distant city.

  Over time, speculative Masons took over the guilds entirely. Working with stone and mortar became largely a symbolic aspect of the brotherhood. The lodges became clubs. Freemasonry attracted forward-thinking individuals imbued with the ideals of the Enlightenment. In America, many of the founding statesmen, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, were Freemasons. Besides offering social connections, the fraternity constituted a kind of secular religion. It satisfied a hunger for ritual, mystery, and dress-up.

  Secrecy, which had once had a practical purpose, appealed to speculative Masons fascinated by mystery and arcane knowledge. The special handshakes and cryptic rituals added to a sense of exclusiveness and fun. Elaborate oaths were part of Masonic rites. Initiates like William Morgan were required to swear not to reveal the brotherhood’s esoterica “under no less Penalty than to have my Throat cut, my Tongue taken from the Roof of my Mouth, my Heart pluck’d from under my Left Breast, then to be buried in the Sands of the Sea at the low-water mark.”

  A sophisticate like Ben Franklin would have dismissed this rig
marole as part of the Masons’ boyish histrionics. A worldly striver like William Morgan probably thought nothing of it. But to the naive and literal rustics of western New York, such an oath was serious business.

  At twenty-five, Lucinda Morgan was strikingly pretty, light of hair, small of stature, and possessed of an iron will. She had been drawn to a man who did not wallow in the humdrum, who dared. She did not regret her marriage, even though it had made her intimate with the anxiety of poverty and the uncertainty of a rootless existence.

  Captain Morgan, she knew, was determined to prosper. Wage labor had barely earned him enough to keep ahead of his creditors. In 1825, they had moved to Batavia, a village sixteen miles from the canal. A Masonic brother had hired William to help construct a building there.

  Morgan had added his signature to a petition to start a new Masonic lodge in Batavia. For some reason, his brothers had dropped his name from the list. Was he, at fifty-two, out of sync with the younger members? Did he possess a cantankerous personality? Was he, even in an age of heavy drinking, an annoying lush? An obvious social climber? A bombastic braggart among the more sedate locals? The rejection rankled. Bad blood flowed. He stopped attending lodge meetings altogether.

  Having fallen out of favor with the brotherhood, Morgan hit on a new idea. If money was not to be had by cozying up to respectable gentlemen, perhaps he could find it by indulging the public’s curiosity about the Masons. Some outsiders suspected them of depravity. Why else would they shroud their doings in secrecy? Some imagined that they were plotting to subvert republican values.