Canals

Canals

Sources

Canal Fever. Even before its completion in 1825 the Erie Canal was making money for its owner, the state of New York. This made state governments all over the nation take notice. Excitement over the Erie prompted several Eastern states to start canal projects in the 1820s, but it was in the new states between the Appalachians and the Mississippi that “canal fever” took particularly virulent form. Between 1810 and 1840 canal mileage in the United States increased from 100 to over 3, 300 miles, a building boom paralleled only by the rapidity of railroad construction in the following decades and the building of the interstate highway system in the 1950s and 1960s.

Need. Before the canals some Western farmers and storekeepers made annual trips to the Eastern cities to sell their produce and cattle or to stock up on dry goods for the coming year. Traveling in caravans over the mountains along the National Road bound for Baltimore and Philadelphia, their transportation costs ate up a large percentage of their revenue. By the 1830s flatboats and steamboats had alleviated some of these problems by carrying an ever-widening stream of grain and meat from cities such as Cincinnati downriver to New Orleans and beyond. Still, legislators in the Old Northwest concluded that a significant profit might be made if riverborne commerce could be supplemented by a network of canals linking every area of the region with Lake Erie and the Erie Canal. Moreover, canals would help speed the immigration of new settlers into the still lightly populated Northern prairie areas of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Thus, in 1825 the Ohio legislature authorized a canal construction program, and by 1833 a 308-mile canal did indeed join the Lake Erie port of Cleveland with Portsmouth on the Ohio while feeder channels with connections to navigable rivers touched almost every major region of the state. Like the Erie Canal, the Ohio system was initially a great success. Ohio’s experience was so favorable that it prompted Indiana and Illinois to launch their own state building programs, with nearly disastrous results.

Wabash and Erie Canal. Canals seemed like a good idea to Hoosiers who looked at the success of the Erie Canal and the Ohio system. In 1836, in the midst of economic boom times, the Indiana legislature enthusiastically adopted the Mammoth Internal Improvement Bill authorizing loans and state bonds to finance an ambitious program of canals, railroads, and turnpikes. Unfortunately, a year later the nation plunged into a deep economic depression, and by 1841 Indiana was near bankruptcy with a state debt of over $13 million, mostly attributable to the investment in internal improvements (by comparison, the state debt in 1827 had amounted to only $18, 700). Incompetence and corruption in canal finance and construction soured the state on the continued expense of internal improvements, and much of the ambitious 1836 plan was abandoned. Still, construction on the Wabash and Erie Canal continued slowly, reaching Terre Haute in 1849 and ending at Evansville on the Ohio in 1853. Upon completion the Wabash and Erie,

with its 450-mile network, became the longest canal in the United States, but within two decades railroad competition made the system obsolete. The Wabash and Erie helped promote settlement in northern Indiana, but its total receipts of $5.5 million never even matched its cost, which exceeded $8 million.

Traveling. Canals were built primarily for the shipment of commodities and dry goods, but somewhat to their owners’ surprise they quickly became popular passenger routes as well, prompting canal companies to build new accommodations for the traveling public. Canal passenger service came in two classes: the cheaper regular or line boats (which carried freight as well) and the more-elegant luxury or packet boats. Packets were brightly decorated and averaged about three and one-half miles per hour (forty to fifty miles a day) as opposed to the two or two and one-half common in the line boats. Both were pulled by horses, mules, or oxen walking along the towpath by the side of the canal. The standard passenger canal boat was fifty to sixty feet long (short enough to fit into the locks along the way) and was divided into four or five cabins: a small forward space for the six crew members, a ladies’ cabin and room also forward, the cook’s quarters, and a larger middle or rear cabin that served as a sleeping parlor for the men and a dining room for all. Passengers slept on bunks or narrow shelves fitted to the walls. When the boats were overcrowded, which was often, passengers slept on the floors, tables, and anywhere else they could find room. Such accommodations were not always secure, as one Swedish traveler found in the 1830s when “another craft coming too close to ours,” scraped his canal boat and “precipitated … about a dozen sleeping individuals from the second and third tier” onto the “unfortunate beings who were lying on the floor.” Traveling on these placid watercourses bored many passengers and led as well to attacks by mosquitoes, as one young woman en route across Indiana in 1851 found out when her “hot and stuffy little room” filled one evening with “all the mosquitos ever hatched in the mud puddles of Indiana.” When canal passenger service gave way to the greater speed and excitement of steamboat and railroad service, few mourned its passing.

Decline. Canals were expensive. The average turnpike in early national America cost $5, 000 to $10, 000 per mile to build, whereas canal construction averaged about $20, 000 to $30, 000 per mile. They proved equally expensive to repair. Floods were a constant threat to canals, washing out retaining walls and filling in channels. Furthermore, canals were most successful when used near capacity (maximizing toll revenues per mile) and when they could accommodate bulky and heavy loads that other carriers could not profitably handle, such as coal or lumber. But light usage in isolated areas, frequent locks, narrow channels, and of course winter freezes reduced the efficiency and profitability of canals. The reckless legislative authorization of large sums of public money for canal construction often led to cost overruns, political favoritism in the granting of contracts, and outright theft and mismanagement. All of these problems aside, it was the advent of the railroad that sounded the death knell for canals. Railroads were almost as expensive as canals to construct, but they were cheaper to repair and did not require huge supplies of water. Moreover, unlike canals, railroads could provide dependable all-weather transport for a full range of dry goods, not to mention people. Nonetheless, many canals did continue to compete successfully with railroads in the shipment of bulky commodities, even after the Civil War.

Sources

Harry N. Scheiber, Ohio Canal Era: A Case Study of Government and the Economy, 1820–1861 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969);

Ronald E. Shaw, Canals for a Nation: The Canal Era in the United States, 1790–1860 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990);

George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution: 1815–1860, Economic History of the United States, volume 4 (New York: Holt, 1951).