Bond of Union: Building the Erie Canal and the American Empire
A historian of an aqueduct crucial to the nineteenth-century growth of New York City (Water for Gotham, 2000), Koeppel adopts infrastructure of comparable significance: the Erie Canal. Its economic impact––vaulting NYC over Philadelphia as the commercial capital of the U.S.––was ably recounted by business historian Peter Bernstein in Wedding of the Waters (2005); Koeppel adds greater emphasis in his narrative to the constellation of promoters and politicians who brought the canal into existence. Naturally, the name of DeWitt Clinton shines brightly, but who was Jesse Hawley? His story typified the mania for canal construction that swept America in the early 1800s: he was a bail-jumping upstate New Yorker with big ideas for improving transportation that he advocated in newspapers, and whose realization he witnessed when Clinton made his celebrated canal-opening voyage from Buffalo to Albany to New York in 1825. Similarly obscure but vital actors (such as legislators and engineers) in the Erie Canal saga populate Koeppel’s lively account, which ought to hook fans of construction-project dramas. --Gilbert Taylor