The Artificial River

Carol Sheriff. The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862.
Hill and Wang, 1996.

Sheriff's study isn't another look at the role the Erie Canal played in the transportation or market revolutions, or in westward expansion. Instead, she studies the people who lived and worked on the canal itself. The time frame extends from the beginning of construction to the completion of the Enlargement project (during which the canal was made deeper and wider, and numerous "feeder" extension canals were added to the original route), which she notes almost exactly coincides with the years between the end of the War of 1812 and the Civil War.

While each of the six chapters has a different focus, the overall theme is the way in which the idea of "progress" evolved over the period even as its meaning and utility was challenged by different social groups and economic interests. The different meanings of "progress"--economic, social, cultural, and even religious--meant different things at different times to different people. Initial expectations that the canal would create a harmony of social and economic interests would be increasingly dashed even as the canal created the conditions which led to unprecedented economic growth and a rapid increase in market-oriented activity. The tension between republican ideology and the realities of liberal capitalism paralleled larger conflicts in antebellum society. Democrats and Whigs both contended with the rise of the new market economy and the ideology of improvement--neither party opposed it but rather argued over the ramifications of the fraying of older social mores and the increase in class competition (which, many middle-class Whigs believed, did not necessarily have to translate into class conflict).

In the end, the canal changed the world of upstate New York so fundamentally that most people in 1862 took those changes for granted; the "artificial river" now seemed "second nature" in a dual sense; it was not only an organic part of the social and economic world they lived in, but it seemed less artificial and more natural than it had a generation or more prior.