Heaven's Ditch

by Jack Kelly

  If canal workers fell ill or conditions were unfavorable for work, they received no pay and their dependents were not cared for. An accident that left a man disabled also left him destitute. If wages were higher than in the cities, so were prices. Workers lived in squalor, contending with vermin and inclement weather, sleeping in makeshift hovels. One of the results of their marginal status was violence.

  In 1821, a canal digger was beaten nearly to death by “freeborn Yankees as they are pleased to style themselves.” On other occasions, the immigrant laborers “held the sober Yankees . . . in terrorism.” The workers also fought among themselves. In Lockport, the Christmas Eve celebration of 1822 turned into a brawl. Men spilled from drinking establishments into the street. Citizens were alarmed—no city had a police force at the time. The workers “attempted to raze several buildings.” Missiles flew, two men were killed and several seriously injured. One man ended the evening with a stone imbedded in his skull. It had to be “dug out with a jack-knife.” Lockport, for a brief period, had become the definition of the Wild West.

  The flight of locks was not quite finished in June 1825, when the town received its most famous visitor. Lafayette, one of the last living heroes of the Revolution, was making a grand tour of the nation he had helped to free from British control. He had sailed along Lake Erie by steamboat. Buffalo, which had been burned to the ground in the War of 1812, now had a new harbor and was about to be linked to the Atlantic Ocean. He was able to travel the canal as far as Black Rock, on the Niagara River. He detoured to make the obligatory stop at Niagara Falls before traveling to Lockport by carriage. Workers there filled hundreds of small holes along the Deep Cut with gunpowder and set them off simultaneously. This “extraordinary kind of artillery” delighted Lafayette, the more so when a spray of rock fragments “fell amidst the acclamations of the crowd.” After a brief stay, the old warrior boarded a canal packet boat at the temporary terminal pool that marked the bottom of the flight of locks. He glided away on the long, smooth trip to Albany and beyond.

  Three weeks after he left, workmen finished the stone framework of Roberts’s flight of five locks. The great hydraulic lifting mechanism was, the commissioners bragged, “a work of the first magnitude on the line, and one of the greatest of the kind in the world.”

  Laborers worked feverishly all summer to prepare the locks and the Great Cut for operation. The long trench, with its walls of solid rock and the narrow towpath carved into its side, astounded all who encountered it. Workers had dug several wider basins along the way where boats could pass each other along the narrow channel. The Deep Cut, a tourist said, “staggers belief.” She claimed that it “strikes the traveler with nearly the same awe and admiration he feels at the grandeur of the great falls.” As Great Lakes water finally reached the top of the locks, Judge John Birdsall declared, “The last barrier is past! We have now risen to the level of lake Erie.”

  When the first boat mounted the finished locks, a passenger would describe it as an experience “calculated to bewilder the senses.” Another said, “I was more astonished than I ever was by anything I had ever before witnessed.” On visiting Lockport, Caroline Gilman, a noted children’s book author and poet, marveled, “Here the great Erie Canal has defied nature, and used it like a toy; lock rises upon lock, and miles are cut in the solid stone.”

  After years of conjecture, years of doubt, and years of intense labor, the Erie Canal was ready to open.

  Morgan’s Ghost

  On October 10, 1827, five days after the discovery of the mysterious corpse on Lake Ontario’s rocky shore, the coroner reported it to be the body of a man of around fifty, five feet eight inches tall, with gray hair. Two teeth were missing and an unusual row of double teeth marked the front of the jaw. The dead man’s frock coat pockets held four religious tracts, a scrap of paper with the words “September 24th, 1828, Mr. James Websa,” and two plugs of tobacco. No identifying documents. Death had resulted from “suffocation by drowning.”

  Thurlow Weed was determined to investigate. If it was William Morgan, the discovery would be a sensational news item, the first solid evidence related to the disappearance in more than a year. With state and local elections looming, proof that Morgan had been murdered would boost the chances of candidates allied with the suddenly surging Anti-Masonic political movement.

  Weed set off, accompanied by Dr. Ezra Strong, who had extracted two teeth from Morgan while Morgan was alive. He sent Russell Dyer, who knew Morgan well, to fetch anyone in Batavia who might shed light on the mystery, including Mrs. Morgan. Along the fifty-mile route to the site of the find, Weed spread the word. The case was now a national sensation, and a large crowd of the curious joined the procession.

  The coroner exhumed the corpse. Before opening the crude coffin, he asked each potential witness separately to describe Mason’s identifying features. Lucinda Morgan had saved and brought with her the two teeth that had been taken from her husband’s mouth. She described a scar on his big toe, the result of a surgical operation.

  The malodorous inquest was especially trying for her. With eighty people watching, she had to scrutinize a body that may have been that of the man she loved. Its time in the water and under the earth had left the corpse putrid and grotesque. The face was a mess. “No feature of it was distinguishable,” Weed noted.

  But the teeth fit, the scar was there, the hair, a smallpox inoculation mark, everything matched. Nine witnesses, including the man’s partner David Miller, swore that it was Morgan. Lucinda had “no doubt but that this is the body of my husband.” Only the clothes—the flannel shirt, coat, pants, and relatively new boots—did not match any that Morgan had owned, according to Lucinda.

  The coroner declared the corpse to be the body of William Morgan. The great mystery had been solved.

  But wait. Did it make sense that Morgan’s body could have been drifting around Lake Ontario for a year and still be intact? Weed pointed out that a futile attempt in September to drag the mouth of the Niagara River must have dislodged the body from its weights and set it afloat. He organized a solemn procession to bring the corpse to Batavia. Thousands turned out for the funeral. “People left their busy occupations,” a newspaper reported, “and in wagons, on horseback, and on foot, crowded to the village.” Morgan was buried “amidst the tears of the widow, and the curses of the people.”

  Like Weed, candidates sympathetic to the Anti-Masonic cause saw the discovery of the body as a boon to their chances. Eulogizers spoke of “the majesty of the people,” and the fact that “Morgan’s ghost walks unavenged among us.” Local Freemasons were not cowed. They denounced the parade and funeral as a mockery staged for political effect.

  Enter stage right Mrs. Sarah Munro. She claimed that her husband, Timothy, had drowned in the Niagara River on September 26 or 27 of that year. The corpse could be his remains. She had traveled from her home in Canada to Batavia with her son and a friend of her husband. It was widely asserted that the Freemasons had paid her expenses.

  Again, Masons and Anti-Masons gathered. Again the body was exhumed. The coroner had preserved the clothes taken from the corpse. Mrs. Munro described them perfectly, down to the different color yarn she had used to darn a sock and the buttons she had sewed onto the pantaloons to replace those lost. The timing fit. It was easier to believe that this was a corpse that had been in the water a few weeks rather than a year.

  But not so fast. Timothy Munro had had a heavy black beard, but the corpse had none. Munro’s hair was dark and short, that of the dead man long and chestnut. Munro was four inches shorter than the deceased. This raised what Weed called “the contradiction, if not the absurdity,” that the clothes were Munro’s, the body Morgan’s. Or somebody else’s.

  More questions were raised than answered. How could the body have floated forty miles in only eleven or twelve days? Weather reports were checked: the wind had been from the east. As for the
hair, accusations were now raised that the corpse had been shaved or the hair pulled out after the initial inquest. Fingers were pointed at Weed. And what to make of the comment that Weed had purportedly uttered referring to the corpse: “That is a good enough Morgan until after the election.” He said he had been misunderstood. “My action in reference to the body in question,” he demurred, “was influenced by a sincere and earnest desire for truth.”

  The coroner’s jury was split. Relying on the exactness of Mrs. Munro’s knowledge of the apparel, thirteen of the twenty-four jurors now affirmed the corpse to be that of Munro. Nine were unconvinced that it was either man. Two believed it to be Morgan. It was buried a third time under the name of Timothy Munro.

  Just as the third inquest was winding up, a man named R. H. Hill came forward in Buffalo and confessed to the murder of William Morgan. The “stings of conscience” had prompted him to reveal his role in the crime, but he refused to name the others who had participated because of the “solemn and fearful oaths” that rule the Masonic brotherhood. A grand jury at Batavia listened to his evidence, declared him insane, and released him.

  On October 5, Governor DeWitt Clinton, alarmed by the growing wrath of the citizenry, removed from office Eli Bruce, the sheriff of Niagara County. Called as a witness, Bruce had refused to testify to avoid self-incrimination. Clinton was persuaded that Bruce was a participant in the abduction.

  As voters went to the polls in the autumn of 1827, Weed drove home his message, handing out Anti-Masonic ballots and proclaiming, “There is no blood on these tickets, gentlemen.” To the surprise of everyone, voters in western New York sent seventeen avowed Anti-Masonic legislators to Albany. In March 1828, citizens from around western New York met in Le Roy for the first convention of the new Anti-Masonic Party. If the frontier politicians were looking for a fight, they had come together at the right time. The presidential election that year was destined to be the most extravagent mudslinging contest in American history.

  The Anti-Masonic Party would add something new to American politics. The major parties, Andrew Jackson’s Democrats and John Quincy Adams’s National Republicans, dominated. The Anti-Masons were the nation’s original third party, focused on one issue, pulsing with grassroots energy. The passions of the people, the Anti-Masons held, should be the rudder that steered the ship of state. “Public opinion is the law of this land,” Frederick Whittlesey said at a party convention 1828. Anti-Masons made the most of their populist roots. They attracted support from those unsettled by the rising economic inequality. They led protests against absentee landlords and high rents. They campaigned against imprisonment for debt.

  Anti-Mason zealots also brought religion into politics. Their cause was a crusade. “This Institution,” they declared of Freemasonry, “strikes at the basis of all morality and religion.” One campaigner labeled the Masonic brotherhood “an engine of Satan.” It was, he said, “dark, unfruitful, selfish, demoralizing, blasphemous, murderous, anti-republican and anti-Christian.”

  Anti-Masons did not simply oppose Freemasons, they wanted to convert them. Newspapers listed the names of those who had left the order, some of whom became fervent Anti-Masons. With their knack for organizing popular enthusiasm and their embrace of moral certainty, Anti-Masons established a template for a parade of causes that would march through the 1830s, including temperance, Sabbath observance, opposition to slavery, and support for the rights of women.

  As the election of 1828 loomed, the knives came out. Andrew Jackson had lived with his beloved wife, Rachel, for several years before she could obtain a divorce from her first husband. Such casualness was common on the frontier, but did not sit well with the new age of moral prudery. An Adams paper resurrected the story for the election. Jackson was livid, and his supporters returned fire, accusing Adams of having procured an American girl for the tsar when he was minister to Russia. They attacked the president’s Unitarian religious affiliation, suggesting he was a closet atheist. Adams men dug deeper into the mud, even accusing Jackson’s mother of prostitution.

  Anti-Masons shared Jackson’s regard for the authority of the masses and his antipathy to privilege; they were put off by his Freemasonry and his opposition to internal improvements—they were witnessing the benefits of canal-building firsthand. Thurlow Weed tried to steer them into the Adams camp, but there would be no second term for John Quincy Adams. The people spoke, and Jackson became the nation’s seventh president.

  The investigation of William Morgan’s disappearance had kept the controversy about Freemasonry on a rolling boil in western New York. Twenty grand juries were empaneled in five counties. Some Masons paid a twenty-five-dollar fine for refusing to testify and were let go. The term “stone-walling” was invented to describe their obstruction. Fifty-four Masons were indicted for some connection to the Morgan affair, thirty-nine came to trial, but only ten were convicted.

  Loton Lawson and Nicholas Chesebro, who had abducted Morgan in Canandaigua, denied knowing what became of the apostate after they passed him on to others of the brotherhood. Kidnapping was at the time only a misdemeanor in New York. Lawson received two years in the county jail, Chesebro one year. Another trial convicted the men who had kidnapped David Miller. All spent a year or less in the lockup. The sentences set off howls of protest among Anti-Masons.

  Sheriff Eli Bruce at first escaped charges. After Clinton removed him from office, he was convicted of participating in the abduction and sat grimly behind bars for twenty-eight months. He came out a broken man and died two years later. Masons declared him a martyr to their cause.

  In early 1828, several of the conspirators were sentenced by Judge Enos T. Throop. He acknowledged that a “strong feeling of virtuous indignation” among the people was what had brought the perpetrators to justice. He called it a “blessed spirit,” a term the Anti-Masons took to heart. With the guidance of Thurlow Weed, now editor of the Anti-Masonic Albany Evening Journal, the movement continued to grow.

  If Anti-Masons were charged with fanaticism, their leaders, many of them veterans of the Christian revivals, declared that “excitement is not fanaticism.” Not when you were absolutely sure of your cause. “What great moral benefit, let me ask, was ever conferred upon mankind which was not produced by excitement?” a speaker at an Anti-Masonic convention said. “How was the Christian religion itself propagated but by excitement?”

  Story

  The question of how the Western Hemisphere came to be populated was one that intrigued thinkers of the nineteenth century. Lacking hard evidence, they had to build their theories on the sand of speculation. A common idea was that the indigenous people had descended from the lost tribes of Israel. Following the Assyrians’ conquest of the Israelites in 722 b.c., ten of the tribes, all but those of Judah and Benjamin, were lost to history. Whether they were exiled to wander the world or merely ceased to exist as distinct groups is not known. If it could be shown that they had reached America, two separate mysteries would be solved.

  Religion has its roots in storytelling. The Book of Mormon explained the peopling of America in detail and gave the experience of the continent’s early inhabitants a meaning that made sense to the generation of the 1830s and beyond. The book’s core was a long and intriguing narrative. The writing was layered with flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks. Like the Bible, it also contained sermons and visions, prophecy and poetry.

  According to the book, Lehi was a descendant of Manasseh, a leader of one of the lost tribes. In roughly 600 b.c. God warned him of the coming destruction of Jerusalem and told him to flee the city with his family. The Lord declared that He would lead Lehi’s people to a promised land. They wandered across the Arabian desert, reached the Red Sea, built ships, and departed. They crossed the Indian and Pacific Oceans and reached the Western Hemisphere.

  The families of Lehi’s sons Laman and Nephi divided into two factions. Over the centuries, the Lamanites w
ere given to idolatry, the Nephites to faithfulness, although the groups sometimes switched roles. The more numerous Lamanites waged almost continuous war on the Nephites. At one point the Nephites encountered and subsumed another group of Jewish exiles, the Mulekites.

  After Jesus was crucified, he appeared in resurrected form to the New World inhabitants and established a church among them. Two centuries of peace ensued, but eventually both sides lost touch with Christ. The factions went at each other again. In a.d. 385, a battle near Hill Cumorah in what would later be western New York took the lives of more than two hundred thousand Nephites, leaving only twenty-four alive, including the last Nephite prophets, Mormon and his son Moroni. They had amassed a record of the thousand-year journey of their people. Much of it was a summary of events recorded by earlier prophets on metal plates. Moroni inscribed his testament onto his own plates and buried them on the hill. With the Nephites gone, the Lamanites evolved into American Indians.

  Although Moroni’s narrative stopped in a.d. 400, the saga was starting up again in the 1820s. The prophets in the Book of Mormon had foreseen that great revelations would come forth from a “choice seer” named Joseph. Now all would be fulfilled, including the gathering of believers, the establishment of the true Church, and the preparations for the imminent return of Jesus. These, indeed, were the latter days.

  The stories in the fifteen books that made up the Book of Mormon were told by a variety of narrators. Some were transcriptions from ancient writers like Nephi or his brother Jacob. Some had multiple authors. Some were the direct writings of Mormon and Moroni. Some were Mormon’s abridgements of earlier records. The book of Ether was passed on by Moroni from the records of the Jaredites, who had traveled to America two millennia before Lehi, around 3000 b.c., and who had also succumbed to internecine warfare.