Reviews for The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862

The average rating for The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862 based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-02-28 00:00:00 Marthanyal Markwardt I enjoyed getting lost in this dive into an arguably underappreciated chapter of westward expansion. The Erie Canal today is diminished, memorialized as an antiquated song and a bike path, a relic confined to just one state. But for much of the 19th Century it was the biggest transit engine in the country, a major driver for the port of New York and the growth of New York State, overtaken in consequence by railroads only after multiple generations had already witnessed its terrific influence. Sheriff's book is less about the engineering feats and more about the social and political motivations and consequences of the canal. This book of history is mostly a book about social forces, and a compelling, if dry, account. The young nation depicted here will seem very familiar to contemporary Americans. Even New Yorkers who agreed that the canal was an essential economic development disagreed wildly about who should benefit. The state-run, state-funded enterprise tinkered with market forces by necessity, favoring towns on the main line over those just off, creating patronage positions and boards with immense authority, favoring merchants over landowners, and having to make choices about how to handle inequalities that resulted. Subsequent expansions of the canal, and the occasional rerouting or funding of tributaries, meant that the power battles were drawn out over decades, not just confined to the era of construction. Jacksonians argued in favor of getting the government out of markets. Populations relied on the state to resolve inequities, or grew distrustful of governing forces, or both. Lives and perspectives both shaped and were shaped by the canal. But the canal was a huge success, reshaping the fortunes of New York State, creating a whole economy for commercial development, agricultural development, tourism. Runaway slaves. Confidence men. Religious movements. Nathaniel Hawthorne bemoaned the encroachment of civilization on the wilderness, but the canal really connected east and west in a way that hadn't happened before and wouldn't happen in the rest of the country for several decades. I believe Sheriff's "paradox" of progress is really about the fact that the canal moved the country into the future, for better or ill, and while it meant that fresh oysters could now reach Buffalo, people both got used to the luxuries of being better connected and had to live with the social and moral consequences of that advancement. Many proponents wanted to build a commercial and moral utopia but the canal was built on the back of a labor underclass with little consciousness and even less recognition. The country has been grappling with its complicated relationship with immigrants and manual labor for a long time. ("The Boys who Drive the horses I think I may safely say that they these boys are the most profain beings that now exist on the face of this hole erth without exception.") The personal accounts Sheriff was able to draw from provide the colorful detail for these themes.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-08-04 00:00:00 Andrew James The Artificial River: the Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1867 © 1997 Carol Sheriff 272 pages At the dawn of a new century, the two-decade old American republic stood hemmed in between storm-tossed Atlantic ocean and the towering Appalachian mountains. Beyond them lay the west, sparsely settled but full of potential, stifled only by the dangers and isolation of the wilderness. But then the state of New York summoned the will and resources to create a river where there had been none before, to turn the woods and rolling hills to an avenue for expansion. The Erie Canal opened the west to development and changed the nation's history, but how did it effect the lives of the people who used it and lived along its course? Such is the question Carol Sheriff attempts to answer in The Artificial River: the Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress. The Erie Canal was the first major infrastructure project in the early Republic, and changed the relationship between the state government and the people in a variety of ways. First, Sheriff demonstrates, it led to a stronger governmental hand in economic affairs, but the Canal Board allowed people a more direct voice in government than the House of Representatives. "The people" included farmers who were annoyed that access to their land had been limited or the land itself diminished by flooding and the actions of laborers, but the phrase also covered businessmen who were beginning to link their own prosperity with 'the nation's" and eager to enlist government financial support in matters that would - quite coincidentally, of course! - improve their own business prospect while furthering the nation's interests. It didn't include so much the laborers who made the canal possible - the men who dug the 'ditch' by hand an in era without mechanized tools, and the boys who helped run the boats up and down the canal, seven days a week, finding their pleasures in the taverns and brothels when they could, and constantly under attack by the wealthy as the scourge of society or viewed as a band of sinners who needed to be saved from themselves by the burgeoning Temperance movement. Aside from the government becoming more involved in the affairs of life, the canal's presence in people's lives drove home the idea of what was possible. The 19th century would be one dominated by the ever-forward March of Technology. A century earlier, a given technological triumph might be enjoyed only by a particularly wealthy lord or merchant, but in the 19th century progress became a democratic institution. The Erie Canal's swiftness was not limited to the the wealthy: the locks opened and the river flowed for all, and it became an active link to "civilization" for the initial settlers even as it served as the agent of the west's own civilization. Indeed, so quickly did the area along the canal become civilized that it was soon taken for granted and its annual winter closings were greeted not with stoic understanding, but annoyance -- like that which cell phone users experience when experiencing choppiness. The fact that they have their personal phone which is operating by sending signals into space is utterly lost on them in comparison to the impression that they have been inconvenienced. So when the railroads followed the canal down the paths it blazed through wilderness and rendered the marvelous waterway obsolete within only a few decades, no one thought it strange When Thomas Jefferson first heard the proposal to build the canal, he snorted that it would make a fine project in a century. He could have never imagined how much change would be wrought before then. The Artificial River differs from most Erie histories in that its focus is not on the politics and history of the canal's construction and operation but on the people whose lives it touched. There it demonstrates what a transitional period the United States was in, shifting from an agrarian republic run by a relative elite to a bustling, noisy commercial democracy where property qualifications were increasingly passe, and the future of the country was in the now very noticeable working class. It's very fine history as far as its focus goes, but for a fuller appreciation of the canal I would probably read it along with other books. Related: Bond of Union: Building the Erie Canal and American Empire, Gerared Koeppel