Untitled - Clpdigital.org

BETWEEN THE OCEAN AND THE LAKES
son, DeWitt Clinton, was firm in the belief of his
father, and his faith in its ultimate triumph was
abiding. But when DeWitt Clinton came to the
control of the political and economic affairs of New
York, times had changed. The War of 1812 had
been fought and won, and the counties bordering on
Lake Ontario, and those of the central and eastern
portions of the State, were its centres of political
and commercial preponderance. Public and private
interests demanded a better means of communication
between tidewater and the lakes. The Southern
Tier had its great rivers—capricious and uncertain
though the}' were—as channels to transport its
products to market, while its northern neighbors
had for their dependence only tedious, slow, and
incomplete post roads. In 1817, recognizing the
justice of this demand, DeWitt Clinton, as Governor,
called to the attention of the Legislature that
great and long-cherished project, the construction of
a canal to unite Lake Erie with the Hudson River.
It is one of the remarkable facts connected with
the history of internal improvements in this country
that five years before Governor Clinton had submitted
his message advocating the construction of
such a canal, but whose ideas on that subject were
widely known, Col. John Stevens of New Jersey,
then an old man, but still a wonderful one, wrote
that he would undertake to build a line of railway,
on which traffic in freight and passengers could be
by means of steam locomotive power transported
much more effectively and cheaply than it could be
carried on the proposed canal. In company with
the greater part of the world, DeWitt Clinton ridiculed
the old engineer's ideas, and feared that age
had unseated his great mind; but Stevens was simply
a generation ahead of his time.
Governor Clinton's message to the New York
State Legislature on the subject of the Erie Canal
greatly alarmed the people of the Southern Tier and
Delaware River counties. The construction of a
canal from the lakes to the Hudson River, over the
proposed route, they insisted wouftl divert the course
of emigration from their valleys, turn elsewhere the
profitable trade of a wide region then tributary to
them, and forever be a bar to a public thoroughfare
for them between the East and the West, and to the
securing of markets other than the hazardous ones
of Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh.
The
members of the Legislature from all these counties
were instructed to oppose the canal project in every
way.
DeWitt Clinton, however, had not abandoned the
interests of those portions of the State, the enhancing
of which his father had in view in his project of
a highway between the East and the West, and he
allayed the fears of the people, and won their support
for the Erie Canal, by a pledge—to which the
canal party assented—to secure the co-operation of
the representatives of the canal counties with those
of the opposing counties in the construction through
the latter of an avenue best adapted to the topography
of those localities, at the expense, or with
the substantial aid, of the State.
But for the giving
of that pledge there would have been no Erie Canal
for years to come.
In 1825 the Erie Canal was completed and opened.
The year before that, DeWitt Clinton brought the
subject of a Southern Tier avenue before the Legislature,
and recommended
that some provision be
made for a survey for a State road from the Hudson
to Lake Erie through that part of the State.
The
survey was made, and with it began that persistent
policy of chicanery and duplicity with which politics,
selfishness, and ingratitude made fruitless for many
a year the efforts of the Delaware, Susquehanna,
and Alleghany valleys to escape from the bondage
of commercial isolation.
The route surveyed for this State road extended
almost in a straight line, via Bath, to Ithaca, and
from that place southerly through the interiors of
Delaware, Sullivan, Orange, and Rockland counties
to Nyack, on the LIudson, with a branch to Kingston,
Ulster County. It avoided all the valleys,
and passed through only high, unbroken, and uncultivated
lands the entire distance. The building of a
road over that route would have been a task greater
than that which confronted Napoleon at the base of
the frowning Alps, for this one was utterly impracticable.
The survey was made under the influence
of the politicians of the canal counties, and in spite
of the palpable absurdity of the survey and the
transparency of the scheme that prompted it and