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Book Reviews
A readable and well-told tale filled with color, sensitivity, humor and plenty of research.
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Fantastic and true
BOND OF UNION:
Building the Erie Canal and the American Empire
By Gerard T. Koeppel
464 pp. Da Capo Press
Reviewed by Sue Ellis
Bond of Union is a detailed account of the construction of New York’s Erie Canal. At the time the canal was conceived, the United States was still a collection of sovereign states with poor roads and communication. Thus the canal formed a “bond of union” that made commerce and communication much easier and effectively opened the way west. The first hundred pages had me yawning over the microscopic look at the political posturing that took place before the actual construction, which began in 1817. While a lot of it was edifying, a whole lot more seemed to exist only to prove that old bits of political trivia can still be gleaned from musty libraries. The long list of names associated with the canal at first threatened to overwhelm my good intention to read something educational.
A funny thing happened though; a quarter of the way through the book I became acquainted with the main characters and the story came to life for me. I’d wake up at night and find myself in New York 183 years ago. I rooted for the canal’s political champions, wondered at the tenacity of the surveyors and engineers who’d never encountered canals and locks, smelled the New York wilderness, and mourned for the laborers who died of malaria. Most of the canal workers were locals. Several of them became famous for their contributions to that vast undertaking, which began when it was promoted in a series of anonymous newspaper essays by a man in debtors’ prison.
I began to understand that the canal would not have been possible without the simultaneous orchestration of all the involved participants, but most especially its political advocates. At a time when the success of our nation may have rested on the completion of the canal, few seemed to realize it. Those who did could not guarantee its success. Early on, Canal Commissioner and later New York Governor DeWitt Clinton was raked over the coals:
Many New York City merchants imagined a canal a bottomless ditch into which their earnings would be tossed by taxation. Tammany forces churned out handbills targeting Clinton as a ditch digger:
“Oh a ditch he would dig from the lakes to the sea, The Eighth of the World’s Matchless wonders to be, Good Land! how absurd! But why should you grin? It will do to bury its mad author in.”
During the course of the nearly ten-year construction, our small nation underwent an economic depression that might have proven more harmful to the populace if not for the government jobs that abounded in Erie Canal work. I couldn’t help but think of our present economic downturn and President Obama’s plan to offer government jobs as a hand up to the thousands of unemployed. The canal served not only to open commerce between Albany and Lake Erie, but saved thousands from certain failure on family farms. It opened the way for further exploration and settlement to the West, inviting immigrants to come and try their luck.
The author skillfully paints a picture of the rough-hewn artificial river system of canals and locks. It’s a wonder the thing held water, let alone provided an avenue for the commerce it later accommodated. Poets and painters of the time were not all enamored of the end result. Some saw the effects of downed timber left to bleach and wither on the banks as depressing and sad remains of our industrial drive. Nathaniel Hawthorne offered a lament:
Often, we beheld the prostrate form of some old sylvan giant, which had fallen, and crushed down smaller trees under its immense ruin. In spots, where destruction had been riotous, the lanterns showed perhaps a hundred Helltrunks, erect, half overthrown, extended along the ground, resting on their shattered limbs, or tossing them desperately into the darkness, but all of one ashy-white, all naked together, in desolate confusion, thus growing out of the night as we drew nigh, and vanishing as we glided on, based on obscurity, and overhung and bounded by it, the scene was ghost-like--the very land of unsubstantial things, whither dreams might betake themselves, when they quit the slumberer’s brain.
It is hard to imagine that 363 miles of canal were dug by hand or by horse-drawn plows. It’s also hard to imagine flat-bottomed cargo boats floating across land that had not previously held water. The sight must have seemed surreal.
Bond of Union is a fantastic tale that happens to be true, recounted by an author who knows how to bring that era back to life. Political history buffs will love every minute detail. The rest of us will be glad we persevered.
Sue Ellis is a retired postmaster who lives and writes in Spokane, Washington. Her short stories have appeared at Flash Me Magazine, Wild Violet, Six Sentences, and Camroc Press Review, all online publications.
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