Heaven's Ditch

by Jack Kelly

  Brittin had become ill and died over the winter. In the spring of 1822, a new contractor, Alfred Hovey, adopted Bates’s more rigorous building plan. Great booms shook the town as workers used blasting powder to carve out squares in the river bedrock the same shape as the piers. They fit heavier foundation stones into these spaces and secured them with larger bolts than Brittin had used. They fixed iron rods and clamps inside the stonework as it rose.

  Bates, as was his habit, watched the progress patiently. Maybe it was his early theological training, but somehow Bates could be thorough without fretting. “In conversation,” somebody noted of him, “he was cheerful, witty, and often brilliant.” The enormous arches rose slowly. Like his predecessor, Hovey found there were not enough stonemasons and laborers to keep the work going at the pace he wanted. He ordered more Irish immigrants to be recruited from New York City. Townspeople wrinkled their noses at these filthy and smelly vassals, some of whom spoke no English, only a guttural Gaelic.

  The immigrants knew how to work, though. By the end of 1822, all the arches stood fourteen feet above the river. They survived the ice. The next season workers built up the canal channel and lined it with layers of clay. On October 6, 1823, residents cheered as decorated canal boats went gliding across the longest stone bridge in the world. Seventy-one-year-old Nathaniel Rochester mounted the dais and called the aqueduct “the most stupendous and strongest work in America.” The town band played the Masonic hymn, “The Temple’s Completed.” Freemasons, always eager to enliven occasions of civic pride, conducted an opening ritual and hosted a banquet for the city’s notable citizens.

  One of those on hand for the aqueduct celebration was Jesse Hawley. The bankrupt visionary had climbed back from ruin to become a postmaster, then a customs collector at the port where the Genesee River joined Lake Ontario. He would later be elected to the state assembly. His identity as “Hercules,” the man whose plan for the great work had inspired the canal, remained a secret known to only a few. His thick dark eyebrows bouncing, he gave a toast at the banquet, praising canals as “the modern monuments of national glory.”

  The aqueduct, “the grandest single feature of the Canal,” was an object of pride for engineers as well as for the enthusiastic populace of the town. Rochesterians, almost all of them young, had come west seeking opportunity. Now they were watching it arrive.

  But the aqueduct reflected amateurism as much as achievement. Too narrow for boats to pass each other, it became a bottleneck to canal traffic. The sharp turn at its eastern end, almost a right angle, further hampered movement and was the scene of many brawls among canal boatmen waiting to get across. As Bates and Wright had foreseen, the sandstone was too soft. Water seeped in and froze, the stone eroded, leaks developed in the canal. Barely a decade after it was completed, the bridge would have to be rebuilt.

  No one at the 1823 celebration was looking that far ahead. With the canal open all the way to the Hudson, Rochester was about to become the greatest flour-milling city in the world. “Hercules” was vindicated. Opportunity beckoned.

  Whiskey

  During the 1820s, thousands of folks along the Erie Canal corridor were becoming intoxicated with religion. Many more were succumbing to the mind-blasting effects of raw alcohol. America was reeling through the most phenomenal drinking binge in its history. Hordes of citizens were living their lives in the woozy, dislocated haze of permanent inebriation.

  Western farmers who grew barley, corn, and rye found it more profitable to ferment and distill their crops into strong liquor than to ship the grain to market. Whiskey was plentiful and cheap. Each man older than fifteen was drinking on average fourteen gallons of hundred-proof whiskey every year. By the middle of the decade, more than a thousand distillers were operating in New York State. Whiskey was cheaper than wine or beer, more readily available than imported luxuries like tea and coffee, safer to drink than water.

  Whiskey was considered “so conducive to health,” a journalist wrote in 1830, “that no sex, and scarcely any age, were deemed exempt from its application.” Children drank. Adults deemed it more patriotic to drink whiskey than French wine or Dutch gin. Liquor filled the role that coffee would later assume as a morning bracer. A glass of whiskey with breakfast was commonplace.

  A man need not go to a tavern: he could stop for a glass of whiskey at a grocery or candy store. He could down a shot at a barber shop. Theaters served strong drink. Millers provided the refreshment to waiting farmers. Militia musters always ended with heroic drinking. Casual sellers of grog set up bars in their basements.

  Men during this period habitually drank at work. Before the spread of factories, artisans typically operated workshops that employed a dozen or so journeymen and apprentices. The master was expected to provide ale or whiskey for his employees’ dinner and breaks. He often drank with them. He tolerated a degree of absenteeism on what was known as Saint Monday, as workers recovered from Sunday binges.

  Drinking on the job peaked among canal workers. With whiskey cheap and cash in short supply, contractors favored pay in kind—bed, board, and ample drink. The typical canal worker drank at least a pint, often a quart, of whiskey daily. Whiskey “was provided bountifully and in true western style.” Thirsty from a salty diet and abundant sweating, the men drank and drank.

  “Along the line of the canal,” one observer noted, “at convenient distances, was to be found a barrel of whiskey, pure old rye, with part of the head cut out and a tin dipper laying by and all were expected to help themselves.”

  Some contractors assigned boys, known as “jigger bosses,” to portion out the rations along the line. All this in spite of the fact that alcohol accelerated dehydration in warm weather and increased the danger that tipsy workers would maim their fellows while swinging picks and operating cranes.

  Irish workmen were increasingly filling the canal workforce as the project moved westward into sparsely settled regions. Scorned as aliens and Catholics, they found solace in uisce beatha, the Gaelic “water of life.”

  But workers of any nationality, exposed to the harsh conditions of canal labor and the easy availability of alcohol, would have done the same. As one former worker said, “You wouldn’t expect them to work on the canal if they were sober, would you?”

  When drunk, laborers sometimes passed out and lay exposed for hours to the sun or chill night dew. “Fever, and death,” a physician noted, “were but too often the melancholy results.”

  A traveler from England observed that Americans “quarrel in their drink, and they make up with drink. They drink because it is hot; they drink because it is cold. . . . They drink early in the morning, they leave off at night; they commence it early in life, and they continue it until they soon drop into the grave.” Although dangerous and debilitating, booze could be a shortcut to heaven, a way to bring one’s mind, however briefly, into tune with the mind of God.

  Drinking frequently initiated violence. Drunks fought each other with tedious regularity. They went home and assaulted their wives and children. They squandered their money, committed petty crimes, and shamed themselves in innumerable ways. The intense drinking of the 1820s was corrosive to both individuals and society.

  The pattern was about to change. The casual, paternalistic approach to drinking at work was doomed. There would be no room for a midmorning glass of whiskey as the factory became the workplace for more and more wage earners. Bosses ceased to tolerate tipsy employees. When the machines chugged into operation on Monday morning, workers had to be in their places or lose their jobs.

  An even stronger reaction to heavy drinking was looming. It would burst on the American scene in the 1830s and become one of the nation’s most enduring social movements. The country that English visitor Frances Trollope called the “alcoholic republic” would undergo a dramatic transformation. The building of the Erie Canal marked the peak of American intoxication. The idea of temperan
ce hardly existed in 1825. Five years later it was a middle-class obsession. Those whom one newspaper editor called the “cold-water, pale-faced, money-making men” soon pledged a “war of extermination” on whiskey, America’s first drug war.

  Methods

  Even in our time, religion has retained its power to generate deep controversy. In the 1820s, belief was a far more potent source of dispute, the central concern of a significant portion of the population. The more Charles Finney’s wildly successful revivals spread, the more the established men of the cloth grumbled. They talked of the “animal feelings” that Finney was letting loose in his congregants.

  The most prominent of the conventional clergymen was the New England Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher. He had been trying to steer a gradual, limited course away from the more severe dictates of Calvinism. Presiding at churches first in western Connecticut and then in Boston, Beecher toned down the doctrines of human depravity and predestination. But he loathed the unrestrained enthusiasm that had erupted at Cane Ridge, the exhibitionism that made Christians seem like lunatics. The success of Finney’s unorthodox “methods” threatened to infect New England, the bastion of Puritan piety, with a similar mania.

  Photographs show Beecher with the vinegary face of a farmer swallowing medicine, but the preacher was no mossback. In 1818, when Connecticut stopped supporting religion with state tax funds, he thought the damage was “irreparable.” Soon he admitted that disestablishing the churches was the “best thing that ever happened,” that the change had injected a new spiritual vitality into religion.

  Beecher pushed for religious unity and was on guard against any idea that might set Christians at war with each other. He prized social order. “The importance of truth in religion,” he stated, “is perhaps more frequently admitted than the importance of order.” A loose cannon like Finney, who allegedly advocated falling, groaning, and dancing in church, could “throw us back in civilization, science and religion, at least a whole century.”

  Beecher had sired several accomplished daughters, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, who would become the most famous novelist of her day; Catherine Beecher, a prominent education reformer; and the early suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker. Yet the prominent roles that women played in Finney’s revivals disturbed their father. Beecher saw in females “a softness and delicacy of feelings which shrinks from the notoriety of a public performance.” He resented Finney’s attempts “to disrobe the female mind” and dress it in coarse masculine garments.

  Repelled by men like Lorenzo Dow, Beecher insisted on the importance of an educated clergy. “Illiterate men,” he declared, “have never been the chosen instruments of God to build up his case.” Another orthodox churchman pointed out the foolishness of those who demanded a seven-year apprenticeship for a shoemaker but assumed that the skill of saving souls could be “comprehended without learning, labour, or time.”

  In the autumn of 1826, Charles Finney was feeling the wrath of Beecher’s New England colleagues. They circulated a caustic booklet taking him to task for “his shocking blasphemies, his novel and repulsive sentiments, and his theatrical and frantic gesticulations.” The controversy came to a head in July 1827. Beecher, hoping to calm the waters, invited Finney and some of his supporters to a meeting with leading clerics. He was willing to cross the Berkshire Mountains and hold the conclave at New Lebanon, in eastern New York. Finney agreed.

  At fifty-two, Beecher arrived brimming with energy and authority. He brought with him prominent ministers from Andover, Hartford, and Amherst, the cream of New England’s religious establishment. Finney’s entourage included pastors from Troy, Utica, and Auburn. It was to be a contest of West versus East, innovation versus tradition, youth versus age. Finney was not technically on trial, but his methods were to be judged.

  The men met in the parlor of a local doctor’s home. The suffocating summer heat chafed their already testy nerves. The first point of contention was the question: Should a man of God permit a woman to participate in mixed prayer services and to speak publicly? The two groups were immediately at loggerheads. “Let your women keep silence in the churches,” St. Paul had commanded. For traditionalists, it was also a matter of good taste. Surely Finney and his colleagues could see that simple decency would dictate the exclusion of females.

  Finney, the lawyer, demanded proof that he had ever allowed women to speak in his assemblies. Beecher was insulted. What need was there for documentation of something everyone knew to be true? “Our spiritual dignity forbids us to answer any such questions,” he blustered. Finney kept his cool, requiring his opponents to reveal the source of the accusation.

  As antediluvian as the arguments sound today, Finney’s refusal to back down at the New Lebanon meeting opened a crack in the long tradition of patriarchy in mainline American religion. The trend Finney started would have important consequences down the decades.

  After much sweating and debate, the churchmen could not reach a clear agreement about the issue of women in the church. For an oppressive week, they continued to discuss a laundry list of complaints about the methods propagated by Finney and his followers. The New England clerics lambasted the westerners for their colloquial language and their praying for sinners by name. Finney’s alleged practice of invading a town without an invitation from a local clergyman incensed them. The revivalists, they said, blackmailed pastors into accepting their presence “only by ‘crushing’ or ‘breaking them down.’”

  The New Englanders could not countenance Finney’s excessive familiarity with the Almighty in public prayers, “talking to God as a man talks to his neighbor.” They said that pressuring congregants by inducing them to come to the front of the church was inappropriate. Hours of discussion were devoted to a motion declaring that “audible groaning in prayer is, in all ordinary cases, to be discouraged.”

  In spite of his relative newness to the ministry, Finney counterpunched effectively. He argued that the supporters of orthodoxy were themselves in the wrong when they published diatribes critical of him and his followers. Late in the meeting, he proposed a resolution condemning “lukewarmness in religion.” Beecher was flabbergasted at the implied criticism. He threatened Finney that if the younger man tried to bring his methods to New England he would “meet you at the State line, and call out the artillery-men, and fight every inch of the way to Boston, and I’ll fight you there.”

  When the meeting ended, Finney stood unscathed; Beecher went home rattled. He reportedly told a follower, “We crossed the mountains expecting to meet a company of boys, but we found them to be full-grown men.”

  Abyss

  On November 13, 1829, ten thousand pairs of eyes stared at a man dressed completely in white standing on a platform above the High Falls of the Genesee River in the middle of Rochester. Like Joe Smith, the man bore a prosaic name. Like Smith, he was no stranger to poverty. And he was, in his own right, a visionary.

  Much of the population of Rochester had turned out to watch. Folks had traveled for days over bad roads. They had come in from the country, down from Canada. They had journeyed the canal on packet boats. This was Sam Patch, the famous daredevil. They had to see him.

  Like the Smiths, the Patch family had dwelt on the margins of society. Sam was born in 1799 to a father who had worked as a tenant farmer and a sometime shoemaker around their home just north of Boston. In 1807, the family moved to Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The elder Patch put his children to work in the nation’s first textile factory.

  Samuel Slater, an English cotton worker, had brought the secrets of mechanized spinning to America in the 1790s. His water-powered mill cracked the British monopoly and speeded the process of making cloth. Slater had an idea of integrating his mill into the existing agricultural economy of America. Men would farm the fields around Pawtucket, their wives and children would earn cash working in the mill. But industry trumped agriculture; Slater hired whole famil
ies at low wages. Sam Patch, eight years old, became one of the nation’s first factory hands. His father took to drink, abandoned his family, and later went to prison for counterfeiting.

  Spinning thread on cog-driven machinery was an intricate task. Skilled “mule spinners” operated the complicated machines in the Slater Mill, while children climbed through the contraptions to tie broken threads and perform other routine tasks. Head-pounding noise filled the buildings, heat baked the workers in summer, cold made fingers numb in winter, and lint clogged the air year round. Painful accidents were common: hands were crushed, limbs broken. The work day typically lasted twelve hours, sometimes more. Children who lagged were slapped by impatient foremen.

  Sam’s mother joined a church when they moved to Pawtucket. Calvinist doctrine, which dripped with resignation, gave solace to the downtrodden. All was God’s will. Mill owners encouraged churchgoing. In the Puritan way of thinking, depraved humans had no control of their spiritual destiny. Dependency and degradation were God-given.

  Sam lost his childhood to the mills. Work limited his time for playing ball or chasing cows or romping in the wildflower fields of imagination. Farm children worked hard, too, but in the country the pace was not set by the relentless pulse of machinery. In later life, friends described Sam as melancholic. Like his father, he drank.

  On rare breaks, young factory workers found fun in jumping from bridges into Pawtucket’s Seekonk River near the falls. The drop was fifty feet, and they had to leap out over rocks. The most daring—Sam Patch was among them—jumped from the six-story stone mill that Slater erected in 1813. This dizzying, hundred-foot plunge gave Sam an electric thrill and the pride of showmanship. Watchers marveled at his audacity. Every jump was a small four-act drama: the tense anticipation, the thrilling leap, the heart-stopping disappearance, and the joyful restoration. He stayed under for as long as he could to prolong the suspense.