Bond of Union: Building the Erie Canal and the American Empire (review)

Abstract

Bond of Union: Building the Erie Canal and the American Empire. By Gerard Koeppel. (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2009. Pp. 464. Paper, $18.95.)Reviewed by John Lauritz LarsonHeroic narratives attract leisure readers and therefore the writers of popular history. Centered on visionaries (or crackpots) who are beset with detractors, buffeted by winds of greed and intrigue, and guided by historical inevitability, such stories lend themselves to literary renderings so universal as to be accessible with little or no grounding in specialized academic conversations. The very best of these works - David McCullough's Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 (New York, 1978) comes to mind - manage to gratify the scholars on whom they depend while simultaneously delighting less professional consumers. Gerard Koeppel's new book on the Erie Canal aims for this target with considerable success.Anybody familiar with the story of the Erie Canal knows the literature is uneven and is dominated by works that use the New York example to advance larger arguments about politics, technology, transportation, economics, or the culture of progress. Koeppel deftly recycles the findings of these scholars and works back through the layers of historiography until he approaches the raw material on which it rests. Then he digs into the source material as well, testing earlier claims, filling in neglected details, and painting in color where the specialists contented themselves with black-and-white renderings. The result is a surprisingly new and thorough account of the political, technological, financial, and personal exploits that went into this famous and formative work of internal improvement. Throw Robert G. Albion, E. E. Morison, Nathan Miller, Craig and Mary Hanyan, Ronald Shaw, and Carol Sheriff in a blender, stir until smooth, and you might come up with something like this book.One of the problems with the Erie story - as well as a source of its enduring interest - is the way it comprises so many distinct threads of action and innovation. New York politics in the era offers a bizarre and impenetrable tangle of personal, partisan, technical, and interest-based connections. Civil engineering (scarcely yet worthy of the term) advanced through fits of luck, daring, insight, patronage, and serious science. Financial officers likewise struck innovative poses that served New York fairly well but later plunged neighboring states into bankruptcy. …