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Working Americans Vol. 9: From the Revolutionary War to the Civil War

1829 Profile

Ian Llewellyn was working as a horse driver on the Erie Canal in New York and telling tall tales of his past to the tourists and cabin girls riding on the boats.

Life at Home

  • For the last six years, 19-year-old Welchman Ian Llewellyn had been telling curious tourists on the Erie Canal in New York that he was an orphan left to find his own way at the age of six.

  • The tale kept the meddling city women from trying to send him home and earned him considerable sympathy from the cabin girls who worked along the canal.

  • But after a night of drinking and thinking, Ian had decided to be a convict.

  • A sordid past would make for better stories in the course of a long day pushing horses up and down the canal, often 10 hours at a time; a past that included prison could start fights or prevent them—Ian wasn't sure which and didn't care.

  • Now all he had to do was decide what he'd been in prison for: murder was too much, but robbery sounded like too little.

  • In truth he had grown up, largely homeless, amidst the construction of the Erie Canal; his immigrant father began as a ditch digger in 1817 when Ian was seven years old.

    Ian Llewellyn was a horse driver in the Erie Canal.

    WA9_p267_002.jpg

  • His mother left soon after the family arrived in America.

  • “The land of opportunity,” his father would say sarcastically; “I could have starved like this at home.”

  • Then came the Erie Canal's promise to pay workers a dollar a day.

  • According to the newspapers, New York Governor DeWitt Clinton intended to spend $7 million for the canal's construction, and Ian's father figured some of that money would rub off on him.

    Governor Clinton of New York approved the plan to connect the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean.

    WA9_p268_001.jpg

  • First proposed in 1699, the Erie Canal was designed to link the eastern seaboard, especially New York City, with the interior of the United States as far west as Buffalo.

  • Plans called for the canal to connect the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean by running from Albany, New York, on the Hudson to Buffalo, New York, on Lake Erie, a distance of 363 miles.

  • Even though the Dutch-owned Holland Land Company had invested in roads and turnpikes in upstate New York, better transportation was needed to link the farmers and their products to the New York ports.

  • Although former President Thomas Jefferson called initial plans for the Erie Canal “a little short of madness,” Governor Clinton envisioned the transportation link as essential to the continued expansion of western New York and cutting transportation costs by 95 percent.

  • When construction began on July 4, 1817, in Rome, New York, Ian and his father were there.

  • His father had been hired as one of a legion of ditch diggers, an occupation previously handled by slaves or convicts; Ian was a waterboy, a job that paid poorly but allowed him to ignore schooling.

  • It was quite a celebration; the Utica Gazette even made special mention of how the ceremony unified employer and labor in the joy it brought them all.

  • After the cheering stopped, the men went to work—blacksmiths, stonemasons and carpenters, along with laborers who shoveled and cut their way through New York's landscape, from rock-infested soil to water-soaked swampland.

  • Many Americans believed that the four-foot-deep and 40-foot-wide, 363-mile-long canal was part of God's plan for Americans to reshape the human and physical world.

  • Using gunpowder, ox carts and ingenuity, America was challenging the best intentions of nature to make life better for its people.

  • Some scorned the entire plan, branding it Clinton's Folly, and predicted failure.

  • Ian and his father worked 10- to 12-hour shifts and slept together in the nearest barn; Ian also learned to keep his food satchel under his body while he slept to protect it from the field mice.

  • He also learned before the age of 10 that a visit to the grog shop with his father would take away the pain of a day's work.

  • The first 15 miles, from Rome to Utica, took two years.

  • The problem was not the digging of the ditch but the felling of trees to clear a path through the virgin forest.

  • That's when Ian's father switched jobs and learned to pull tree stumps out of the ground with a huge, tripod-mounted winch.

  • A three-man team with mules could then build a mile of canal a year.

  • Ian's father worked the trees for four years before one of the massive chains broke unexpectedly and dropped the tree on him and two other men.

  • In all, seven men died that week in accidents, explosions and cave-ins; newly arrived Irish immigrants eager for work took their place.

  • Ian's father had hated the Irish immigrants and blamed them for keeping wages down; they were an ever-present plague on this opportunity to be prosperous.

  • The promised dollar a day had turned out to be far less once housing, clothes washing and company-supplied liquor were deducted.

  • Before he was crushed by the tree, Ian's father was making $14 a month.

  • Ian made a dollar a week as a waterboy.

  • At his father's funeral, the canal foreman expressed his regrets and offered Ian a job as a driver, as a favor to his father.

  • Ian had just turned 13.

Life at Work

  • Success came quickly to the Erie Canal, providing Ian Llewellyn with considerable job security.

  • Day after day he guided the horse-drawn boats stacked high with wheat, barrels of oats or piles of logs up and down the Erie Canal.

  • A shift could last 10 hours or more, depending on the distance to be traveled, which left plenty of time to chat with the steady flow of tourists, businessmen and settlers who flocked to the canal.

  • Even though the boats only traveled at a rate of two miles per hour, the travel time between Albany and Buffalo was cut from six days to three.

  • Luxurious packet boats carried tourists from the northern tour, a travel circuit that ultimately led to Niagara Falls; locals used the canal to visit relatives or conduct business.

  • Anyone in upstate New York who had not voyaged on the tranquil waters at least once was considered a homebody.

  • Riding the canal was an adventure—something to record in one's journal.

  • Often passengers would step out of the canal boat and walk along with Ian asking questions about the horses he drove, the canal and sometimes about Ian himself.

  • He was careful to cut back on his cussing during these times, having chased away more than one pretty girl prematurely.

  • He loved the attention and especially the chance to talk to people from far away and hear their accents and smell their clothes.

  • Canal packet boats were approximately 78 feet in length and 14.5 feet across and were designed to accommodate up to 40 passengers at night and more than a hundred in the daytime.

  • During waking hours, the packet's central cabin served as a sitting room and could be transformed into a dining room for meals.

  • Dinners were sometimes elegant with delicacies like roast beef, ham, plum pudding, and liqueurs to add enjoyment to the sightseeing.

  • In addition to the waterway's locks, aqueducts, deep cuts and massive embankments, the canal carried passengers through deep forest and seemingly endless swamps.

  • The canal also encouraged families to move farther west, comforted in the knowledge that they could still get supplies, mail, and visits from relatives.

  • The bane of a canal traveler's existence was low bridges, constructed for farmers after their land was cut in two by the canal.

  • Virtually every tourist carried home tales of fellow passengers forced to fling themselves against the deck or scramble into the cabin whenever a bridge was seen.

  • The bane of Ian's existence as a driver was malfunctioning locks that lengthened his workday and frustrated previously pleasant passengers.

  • Some businessmen, pressed for time, would transfer from canal boats to stagecoaches to avoid sections of the canal particularly laden with locks.

  • Ian's biggest problem was working year-round; the frigid temperatures of upstate New York often shut down the Erie Canal for up to five months each year.

  • This meant that the U.S. mail was often not delivered promptly to upstate New Yorkers, accustomed to speedy communications; crops did not get to market; and Ian went unpaid.

  • At other times of the year, Ian was never able to get dry; it was the driver's job to keep the horses moving, pulling the freight-laden boat up the canal in the middle of the summer heat or during torrential rains: captains, merchants and passengers had schedules to keep.

  • Rarely did Ian get a full night's sleep; bugles would sound in the middle of the night to alert him to the arrival of a boat needing a change of horses.

  • Depending on the news of the canal, one shift could end at midnight and start again at 5:30 a.m.

  • Then, after a 12-mile pull requiring seven hours’ work, Ian might sleep on the floor of another barn for three hours before starting another 10-hour trip.

  • He knew from experience that falling asleep while driving the horses would enrage the captain or tease death at one of the locks.

  • Both were to be avoided.

  • Approximately 3,000 boats used the canal, carrying four times that many cabin girls—all interested, he told himself, in getting to know him better, so, making the captain mad was not a good thing.

Life in the Community: Upstate New York

  • In 1817 freight required several weeks to move from the ports of New York City to the interior of the state.

  • By 1827 the Erie Canal had dramatically influenced the lifestyle of people within the canal corridor—the distance a wagon could travel in one day, about 20 miles, on either side of the man-made ditch.

  • Ready access to markets in New York City gave farmers a greater sense of independence, whether they were selling wheat, apples, or cloth woven from their own sheeps’ wool.

  • Improved transportation also encouraged city merchants to sell their wares in the hinterlands—dramatically expanding the availability of farm tools, clothing and luxuries such as oysters.

  • At the same time, the canal gave rise to towns composed of the very rich and the very poor.

  • Swamps drained of water destroyed once vibrant forests, while changes to canal technology challenged the laws of nature, serving as a threat to America's special geographic and moral destiny by encouraging too much civilization.

  • State funding for the Erie Canal was approved following President James Madison's veto of a federal funding bill, symbolizing the national debate concerning economic development.

  • The Federalists supported a strong central government that was capable of sponsoring and funding commercial expansion, including roads and international trade.

  • The Democratic-Republicans placed most of the power in the hands of the various states and promoted a limited role for the federal government.

  • To finance the canal, New York planned to use toll revenue, the proceeds of land sales near the canal, lotteries, taxes on the improved land near the ditch and the payment of levies on products that moved through the canal, such as salt, or steamboat travel.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
"1829 Profile." Working Americans Vol. 9: From the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, edited by Scott Derks, Salem Press, 2016. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=WA9_0054.
APA 7th
1829 Profile. Working Americans Vol. 9: From the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, In S. Derks (Ed.), Salem Press, 2016. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=WA9_0054.
CMOS 17th
"1829 Profile." Working Americans Vol. 9: From the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, Edited by Scott Derks. Salem Press, 2016. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=WA9_0054.