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HIST 3480: The History of NYC

Canals, Rails, and Water. HIST 3480: The History of NYC. Canals, Rails, and Water. Post-War of 1812 Concerns The city’s recovery after the War of 1812 ended in 1815 was quick, but not without problems: Britain and France cut off West Indian trade

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HIST 3480: The History of NYC

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  1. Canals, Rails, and Water HIST 3480: The History of NYC

  2. Canals, Rails, and Water Post-War of 1812 Concerns • The city’s recovery after the War of 1812 ended in 1815 was quick, but not without problems: • Britain and France cut off West Indian trade • British merchants “dumped” a surplus of cheap manufactured goods on New York, flooding the market. • One Benefit: Latin American independence revolutions had opened up new markets that had been sealed off by Spanish and Portuguese imperial authorities (the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 made the U.S. the protector of the new republics. • Expansion into the West: Would it bolster or harm New York City’s economy?

  3. Canals, Rails, and Water Post-War of of 1812 Concerns • Settlement of the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys: Expansion into these regions could play into the development of New Orleans as a major rival. • In the early 1790s, New York was establishing ties with its British sister port, Liverpool; the largest flow of transatlantic commerce began to flow between these two cities. • DeWitt Clinton’s argument for the canal was that the city needed to connect to the Great West in order to maintain its dominant position. • Tammany declared it an expensive folly meant to aggrandize Clinton’s ego, labeling the project the “Big Ditch.” • A Canal Commission had been authorized in 1810 to consider possible routes and financing. • The state legislature authorized its building in at adopted a plan in April 1817 as a state-owned, state financed, state-run enterprise, with no federal help. Clinton was elected governor just two months later.

  4. Canals, Rails, and Water “The Wedding of the Waters” • Despite challenging topography, a national financial crisis in 1819 due to plummeting prices for cotton, and the collapse of the overheated Western real estate market., the canal was completed in eight years, two years ahead of schedule; this was especially remarkable since the engineers had no previous experience and had to learn “on the job.” • The finished canal was 363 miles, 40 feet wide, and four feet deep (necessitating flat-bottom boats); it rises 660 feet through 83 massive stone locks and passes over 18 aqueducts. • Oct. 26, 1825: Governor Clinton and his entourage boarded the Seneca Chief, a canal boat, at Buffalo, to head across the canal, to the Hudson at Albany, and then on to New York Harbor.

  5. Canals, Rails, and Water “The Wedding of the Waters” • Ten days later, November 4, 1825, the Seneca Chief arrives in the harbor to great fanfare, with an aquatic procession across the Lower Bay out to the Narrows. In the Upper Bay, Clinton dumps two small barrels of Lake Erie water into the water, symbolically uniting them. • The boat returns to the Battery, and a “Grand Procession” begins that surpasses the “Grand Procession” of 1788 in support of ratifying the Constitution. In the evening, private houses and public buildings are fully illuminated and a massive fireworks display commenced at 10:00 pm. • Oct. 26, 1825: Governor Clinton and his entourage boarded the Seneca Chief, a canal boat, at Buffalo, to head across the canal, to the Hudson at Albany, and then on to New York Harbor.

  6. Canals, Rails, and Water Keg from which Governor Clinton poured water from Lake Erie into New York harbor at the celebration of the opening of the Erie Canal. From the collection of the New-York Historical Society. Locks at Lockport on the Erie Canal.

  7. Canals, Rails, and Water 1903 Map of the Erie Canal System

  8. Canals, Rails, and Water 1832 Elevation Map of the Erie Canal route

  9. Canals, Rails, and Water “The Wedding of the Waters” • At first, goods coming across the canal and down the Hudson were from framing communities along the route, but over time, the canal drew traffic from points further West: Ohio by 1830, Indiana by 1835, and Michigan by 1836. The canal greatly increased the city’s gravitational pull deeper into the interior. • Smaller but important other canals consolidate the city’s position: the Delaware and Hudson Canal (1828), the Morris Canal (1832), and the Delaware and Raritan Canal (1834). These were the so-called “anthracite canals” that brought coal from Pennsylvania into the city that fed industrialization.

  10. Canals, Rails, and Water Steamboats and Packets • Breaking Up the Monopoly: After Fulton’s death in 1815, Aaron Ogden, a former governor of New Jersey, purchased the exclusive right from the New York legislature to run steamboats from Manhattan to Elizabethport, New Jersey. There passengers could continue on a steamboat run by Thomas Gibbons to New Brunswick. But in 1818, Gibbons and Ogden had a falling out, and Gibbons, a hardnosed Southerner, decided to run a competing boat on the N.J./N.Y. link, and to captain it, he had the ferocious and clever Staten Islander, Cornelius Vanderbilt. • Gibbons vs. Ogden (1824): Ogden pursued his right to preserve his monopoly all the way to the Supreme Court, which struck declared that a state government could not grant monopolies on interstate commerce, as that right was held only by Congress.

  11. Canals, Rails, and Water Steamboats and Packets • Many New Yorkers celebrated the break-up of the steamboat monopolies as the destruction of a vestige of “aristocratic privilege,” a common goal of the Jacksonians (Jackson himself would use this argument against the Second BUS). • New York became a major hub of steamboat transportation, drawing a wide area into the city’s economic orbit, just as the Erie Canal did. • Steamboats were good for inland waterways and coastal voyages, but steamers that could brave the open ocean did not make their appearance until the 1830s.

  12. Canals, Rails, and Water Steamboats and Packets • Transatlantic vessels before 1818 did not sail on a regular schedule; they waited until their holds were full of cargo to ensure the most profitable voyage. • In Jan. 1818, a group of merchants launched a service that became known as the Black Ball line which would feature four ships sailing between New York and Liverpool on a regular schedule; they would depart at the appointed time regardless of whether or not their holds were full. • Manchester cotton merchants were particularly impressed by this service and began to employ the line to secure a steady flow of cotton imports for their factories.

  13. Canals, Rails, and Water Steamboats and Packets • Packets started out carrying expensive fine freight and wealthy cabin passengers. • As transatlantic steamship come into service in the 1830s, packets begin to carry less expensive cargo and also steerage passengers, thus contributing the great growth in immigration from Europe in the 1830s and 1840s. • 1820s: National annual average was around 7,000 immigrants from 1822-1824, but hits over 27,000 in 1827 • 1830s: Hits almost 80,000 in 1837, and 60,000 land in the Port of New York • In the 1820s, the city merchants took command of the nation’s China trade, many dealing in opium for tea. • Increased volume leads to an expansion of the waterfront on the Hudson River side. • By the 1830s, large warehouses were constructed in the waterfront district to house the huge volume of goods flowing through the port. Also in the 1830s, Brooklyn starts to compete with the opening of the Atlantic Docks. • In 1827 William Astor and Stephen Whitney raise funds for a new Mercantile Exchange.

  14. Canals, Rails, and Water The Black Ball ship Columbia built in 1846. Steamboats and Packets

  15. Canals, Rails, and Water List of piers for various lines along the East River in 1851. Steamboats and Packets

  16. Canals, Rails, and Water Rail Boom • First U.S. railroad chartered in 1838 and opens in 1830: the Baltimore & Ohio, and its building made New York industrialist Peter Cooper very rich. • Cooper was a tinkering and inventor who opened up a grocery store in 1816. He made big profits after buying a glue factory near Kip’s Bay, and then invested those profits in Manhattan real estate, and also in land in Maryland near where the B&O route. He discovered iron ore on that land, set up a smelter and forge, and then sold rails to the B&O, making a large fortune. • The Mohawk & Hudson is the first New York railroad chartered in 1828 and opens in 1831; it connects Albany and Schenectady. Stephen Van Rensselaer is its president and John Jacob Astor is a big investor. Its success spawns a rail boom: the New York & Harlem is chartered in 1831 the New York & Erie is chartered in 1832, and the Long Island Railroad in 1834. But these lines experienced many delays in construction.

  17. Canals, Rails, and Water The DeWitt Clinton Engine on the Mohawk & Hudson in 1831 Peter Cooper in 1850 Rail Boom

  18. Canals, Rails, and Water Rail Boom • Overall, rail development slows in New York on account of its reliance on account of the Panic of 1837 and the state’s reliance on water transportation. • The “Bank War” of Andrew Jackson and Nicholas Biddle over the renewal of the charter of the Second Bank of the United States ultimately results in its shutting down (1827-1936). Speculative capital markets are dealt a major blow when the charter expires in 1836, leading to the “Panic of 1837.” • Cross-state railways don’t become fully operational until the late 1840s and early 1850s.

  19. Canals, Rails, and Water Cholera • Cholera: Major Outbreaks in 1832, 1849, and 1866 • 1832: Widespread belief that the immoral poor who drank a lot were particularly vulnerable to the disease. Roughly 3,500 New Yorkers were killed in two months. Emerging nativists blamed the Irish, while other’s blamed God’s unknowable will. • 1849: Quarantining immigrants on Staten Island initially stops the spread of the 1848 outbreak in Europe, but several escape and spread the disease to Manhattan. By May into June, it is a full-blown epidemic, killing over 5,000 people. • 1866: The year after the Civil War, a cholera outbreak kills 1,157 people. The number of deaths was relatively limited on account of strict enforcement of sanitation laws.

  20. Canals, Rails, and Water Water • Cholera: Major Outbreaks in 1832, 1849, and 1866 • 1832: The Common Council launched an inquiry into how a new water supply could reach New York. • Opposition to any possible water projects was focused on the high cost building such a system would entail. • The Great Fire of 1835 changes the entire conversation: more reliable access to water might have been helpful (maybe not for this specific fire due to the intense cold) • Construction commences in 1837 and ends in 1842 to great fanfar.

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