Canals for a Nation: The Canal Era in the United States, 1790-1860 (review)

Abstract

350CIVIL WAR HISTORY as some of her more famous sisters. Grew's life and work mirrors that of other female activists of her generation. Brown does a fine job informing the reader about the details of Grew's career as a reformer. Donna M. DeBlasio Ohio Historical Society Canals for a Nation: The Canal Era in the United States, 1790-1860. By Ronald E. Shaw. (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Pp. x, 284. $28.00.) Canals for a Nation is an ambitious comparative survey of over four thousand miles of canals and their centrality to American life during the early nineteenth century. Ronald E. Shaw begins his study with the founders' recommendations for binding the republic together through systematic internal improvements. In subsequent chapters, he examines how states transferred and adapted European canal technology to the American landscape and how they attempted to preserve republican values amidst the vigorous nationalism that spawned those canals. Shaw argues that canals emerged from the mercantilist tradition of government encouragement of economic development. Popular opposition to federal assistance, however, forced canals to become products of activist states and private enterprise. Shaw divides his study into four distinct regional networks in which he addresses canal developments within each state. He focuses on political sponsorship and opposition, financing, administration, technological innovations, construction, and the commercial impact on each region. He injects a pleasant human perspective by incorporating travel accounts and reports of the social impact of canals on individual communities. Shaw also examines leading families and personalities involved in promoting and creating the canals in their respective states and regions. These individual canal histories often bear great resemblance to each other, indicating the degree to which a canal's success or an individual's leadership inspired projects elsewhere within the republic's interior. Throughout the volume, Shaw emphasizes a "canal era" rather than a "canal system" as envisioned since the 1790s. He concludes that any sense of system was illusory since canals were not cohesive or integrated by a common aim, a point emphasized by the book's regional divisions. Rather, canals evolved to meet local needs and to improve the competitive edge and profit-seeking interests of a specific locality. Many emerged to rival the Erie Canal, seeking to redirect trade from that corridor to cities and ports that best served particular local and regional interests. Central to Shaw's study is the dynamic role of canals in the development of American life. Canals encouraged western settlement and urban growth, transmitted culture and ideas, stimulated the creation of BOOK REVIEWS351 transportation businesses, assisted in industrial development, opened coal and ore fields and agricultural hinterlands, and introduced new technologies , some of which provided for the rapid extension of railroads and the eventual demise of the canals themselves. Canals for a Nation is an important contribution to the transportation literature of the early republic, joining George Roger Taylor's The Transportation Revolution (1951) as a work that transcends the local scene and places canals within the emerging regional and national economies. By drawing on numerous local and regional histories, Shaw illustrates how canals were integral in prompting new public policies, public-private enterprises, and continued debates on the role of government in internal improvements. Shaw's narrative gives thematic unity to numerous canal studies representing political, economic, business, and local history fields. Although he concludes that canals may not have fulfilled their original goals and that they produced economic crises in several states, Shaw provides a clear, concise analysis of how canals evolved, thrived, and contributed to the vitality of life in the early American republic. David G. Vanderstel Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans. By Charles Royster. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. Pp. 523. $30.00.) This is a paradoxical book that requires, and accordingly will receive, a paradoxical review. The first paradox is that it is not a book, at least not in the ordinary sense of being a work that presents either a chronological narrative of events or a systematically developed thesis. Instead it is a collection, almost a potpourri, of essays about various facets and episodes of the Civil...