History of the United States I / Unit 9 USH1 1231 review, 2 to 3 minutes
The Erie Canal
The idea
The Erie Canal was chartered in eighteen seventeen, took seven years to complete, and opened in eighteen twenty-five. It ran three hundred sixty-three miles. It joined the Hudson River, and therefore New York City and the Atlantic seaboard, to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River Valley. Soon fifteen million dollars worth of goods was being transported on the waterway every year. Before the canal, moving bulk freight overland from the interior to the coast cost more than the freight was worth, which is why western farmers shipped down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans instead. The canal reversed that geography in a single stroke, and made New York the port through which the American interior reached the Atlantic.
In practice
A city of thirty-three thousand in seventeen ninety, two hundred seventy thousand by the year the canal opened, and the largest in the country thereafter.
Where people slip
Three cautions. First, the anchor gives the canal's annual traffic in present-day dollars as well, and that conversion is stale by construction, so this course teaches the fifteen million dollar figure and the tonnage rather than a modern equivalent. Second, the Erie is not the longest canal in North America, and entry 1232 covers the one that is. Third, the canal is the reason the Old Northwest became commercially northern rather than southern. Grain that would have floated to New Orleans now moved east, and the economic alignment that produced the Civil War's free-state bloc was laid down by a ditch. Fourth, note the timing against entry 1233. The first American steam railroad ran six years after the canal opened, on a track beside it, and railroads would eventually take the traffic the canal had captured. The Erie's dominance was total and it was brief, which is the ordinary fate of a transport monopoly.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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