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Chapter Four Clinton’s Ditch Before we quit the subject of the western waters, we will take a view of their principal connexions [sic] with the Atlantic. These are three; the Hudson’s river, the Patowmac, and the Missisipi itself. Down the last will pass all heavy commodities. But . . . it is thought probable that European merchandize [sic] will not return through that channel. . . . There will therefore a competition between the Hudson and Patowmac rivers for the residue of the commerce of all country westward of Lake Erie, on the waters of the lakes, of the Ohio, and upper parts of the Missisipi. —Thomas Jefferson, 1785 As it had begun to do in Britain, and to a lesser degree in France, the canalbuilding craze in the United States during the 1820s triggered major innovations in theoretical geology. Geological research would prove invaluable as an aid to the industrial and commercial innovations required to complete the Erie Canal project. By turning over a shovelful of central New York turf on 4 July 1817, DeWitt Clinton set into motion a chain of events that would allow the man he’d first met at Newgate Prison, Amos Eaton, to achieve wide recognition for compiling a systematic view of Earth’s geological history. Clinton and Stephen Van Rensselaer had supreme confidence in the relevance of scientific inquiry, and throughout the next decade they would harness their respective aptitudes for public power and private wealth in parallel efforts to advance the cause of natural history. They generously sponsored a wide variety of intellectual and practical activities, including enlisting public support for the construction of the Erie Canal, and thereby made it necessary to cultivate new scientific and engineering capabilities. All of these circumstances helped to reaffirm Clinton’s assumption that the ultimate social purpose of the natural sciences was to render the land’s natural resources accessible, intelligible, and useful. 84 Engineering for a New World’s Geology The Allure of Internal Improvements Early national leaders had long been concerned about the challenges that natural geographic barriers placed upon the health and prospects of a continent-sized republic . No other country in the world had ever attempted to function democratically over such an expanse of territory. According to leading political theorists of the French Enlightenment, who were otherwise generally enthusiastic about the American experiment in independent self-rule, history had warned that the success and stability of representative democracies was confined to localized havens of liberty, whereas larger empires were prone to succumb to despotism.1 By this eighteenth-century conventional wisdom, if the United States wanted to avoid lapsing into the forms of social inequality and political tyranny that had provoked their struggle for independence in the first place, then its best hope lay in letting the states function autonomously as compatible sister republics within a weak confederacy. James Madison had to combat this assumption in his famous essay Federalist No. 10, which argued that a representative democracy could indeed be extended over a large territory, provided that the diversity of circumstances and interests contained within the country were balanced by a cohesion born of common national identity and fraternal affiliation. Federalists imagined that there might be a technical solution to the problem of knitting together a scattered population. George Washington, for example, grasped the potential of an inland network of river transportation. Writing to the Marquis de Chastellux after taking a tour of the Mohawk valley in 1783, Washington confided: “I could not help taking a more contemplative and extensive view of the vast inland navigation of these United States, and could not but be struck with the immense diffusion and importance of it; and with the goodness of that Providence which has dealt his favors to us with so profuse a hand. Would to God we have the wisdom enough to improve them!”2 Historian James Dilts posits that, as early as 1784, “Washington had foreseen the routes that were to become New York’s Erie Canal, Pennsylvania’s Main Line of Internal Improvements, Maryland ’s National Road, and Washington D. C.’s Chesapeake and Ohio Canal.”3 Internal improvements may indeed have been in President Washington’s mind, and they surely came to absorb Thomas Jefferson’s attention when his turn came to serve in that high office. The political obstacles to transcending state boundaries in order to create a national transportation infrastructure were as problematic for the Republican strict constructionist as were the mountain ranges themselves. In April 1808, Jefferson’s...

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