The Cultural Significance of an "Internal Improvement"

As is by now rather widely known, a current trend in historical studies is the focus upon single, small-scale episodes or individual events as a preferred means of illuminating larger historical forces. Such studies characteristically aspire to be particularly “reader-friendly”: they aim to bring readers closer to lived human experiences. Carol Sheriff’s revised doctoral dissertation (one of the very few that Hill and Wang has published) exemplifies this scholarly trend with some variations. It is, essentially, a cultural study of a long-term event—the construction of the Erie Canal (1817–1825). It presents the whole Erie Canal region during this period, and the three decades following, as a “microcosm in which to explore the relationships between some of the antebellum era’s important transformations: widespread geographic mobility; rapid environmental change; government intervention in economic development; market expansion; the reorganization of work; and moral reform” (p. 5). And as is the case with other recent studies, part of its intent in reducing these transformations to individual human terms—to assess the canal’s impact on people—is to appeal to a more general, nonspecialized readership. Rendering complex social and economic changes more easily comprehensible and accessible is, indeed, perhaps the greatest strength of Sheriff’s book, owing in no small measure to the author’s terse and unpretentious writing style.

This is not to say that Sheriff is indifferent to enlightening other scholars of the early-nineteenth-century United States. Herein lies another distinguishing feature of the book—its peculiarly hybrid quality. Within the framework of her more accessible history, Sheriff repeatedly uses her findings to stake out positions on issues that have been matters of interest and debate only among specialists, though she relegates many such discussions to the endnotes. Thus she concludes, with respect to the seemingly endless scholarly debate over the Market Revolution, that “most inhabitants of the Erie Canal region embraced market opportunities with a mixture of impulses; they were neither wholly precapitalist nor wholly capitalist in outlook” (p. 183).

From where specifically does Sheriff draw such conclusions? Much of her “narrative is pieced together from scattered letters, diaries, account books . . . newspaper articles,” and the like (p. 225). But the author’s particular insights, she indicates, largely rest on her unsurpassed use of the extensive records left by the New York Canal Board, a creation of the state legislature. In one of her book’s most revealing passages, Sheriff explains how the Canal Board, quite contrary to the original intentions of its creators, came to emerge as a popular sounding board—that part of the state legal system which was most “accessible to ordinary men and women” (p. 83). On a host of issues, ranging from complaints of property damage to boating disputes and accusations of employee transgressions, the Board members continuously considered, even if they much less frequently honored, thousands of petitions for awards advanced by the Canal corridor’s small freeholding inhabitants. Interspersed in generally “tedious” Board papers is a plethora of personal stories, and it is largely from these that Sheriff has teased out such themes as the often conflicting impulses that people held regarding market expansion and economic progress.

Sheriff’s acknowledged focus here is on “the perceptions of the white middle class” (p. 181). In this she follows other studies of early-nineteenth-century upstate New York communities, including Paul E. Johnson’s A Shopkeeper’s Millennium (1978), Mary Ryan’s Cradle of the Middle-Class (1981), and Nancy Hewitt’s Women’s Activism and Social Change (1984), while offering her own reasons why such a focus is not unduly elitist. The contribution of African Americans and Native Americans to popular attitudes in the region must remain especially elusive, owing to both their marginalized social status and the absence of surviving records revealing of their views. They were greatly outnumbered, in any case, by the white inhabitants who...