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This is a scholarly look at American politics from roughly 1818 to 1832.

Maybe a bit too scholarly for me. Many parts of the book are very finely argued, and I tended to lose track of what the argument was. It is obvious in places that he also arguing for a different interpretation on events than has been common, but I’m not at all familiar with what he’s arguing against.

Even with my limitations, it was a very interesting read. One of Forbes’ main contentions is that President Monroe had more control of events than he is credited with. Apparently the usual look at the era was that he was nearly sidelined while events like the Missouri Compromise were going on. Here, the contention is that Monroe was aware that if he stepped into the debate, it would polarize the sides to the point where compromise was impossible, so he worked entirely behind the scenes to maneuver events to a stand down on all sides.

Forbes presents early American politics as a tension between ideological conflicts (generally, the role of the Federal government), and sectional ones (largely slavery). This is an unstable situation, as in the long run most political conflicts are going to want to turn regional, but the goal of several canny politicians of the era was to keep non-regional issues in play and force the parties into national, instead of regional, systems. This breaks down later, with the demise of the Missouri Compromise, and the rise of the Republican Party, which is strongly regional.

There is also a lot of look into the thoughts behind what is going on and being said, particularly, of course, various defenses of slavery. South Carolina comes in the for extra-special snowflake award as the bigger planters there generally felt that any change to their society would bring about utter collapse. This leads South Carolina to being in the lead of defenses of slavery, and more importantly (to them), the lead in making sure the federal government does as little as possible. It was felt that letting the government go around building roads, improving waterways, and just, you know, making commerce better for everyone would inevitably cause the kind of changes that they were desperate to avoid.

So, while it often looks like the subject of slavery had disappeared from politics in the 1820s, the argument over “internal improvements” and tariffs that lead to the Nullification Crisis are powered by a fear of change in the state with the highest proportion of black slaves to free whites in the country.

This book was a bit much for me as it juggled more things than I could entirely keep track of, but it is decidedly a well done scholarly look at the subject, and worth reading (along with other works) by anyone who wants a better understanding how the initial Founding Fathers’ idea that slavery would go away on its own failed.

For a long time, waterways were the only meaningful passages from one place to another. Roads might do in a pinch, but water was much faster and easier. Canals have been used throughout history to get this fact to work for you when nature had been ungenerous. The Erie Canal is one of the more spectacular successes of these projects, and important in the early history of the United States. Bernstein’s Wedding of the Waters is a good popular history of the creation of a 363-mile long canal through upstate New York.

He starts out with lots of background, including the general mechanics of canals, how and why locks work, and various high points in the development of canals, including the Manchester Canal in England, which inspired a lot of further canal building at the time. This section is definitely appreciated, but I wished for more. There’s a good map of the canal, and a side elevation of the canal showing how it goes up and down, and where the locks are, but that is it. No general diagrams of a section, or the locks, or illustrations/photographs of some of the more impressive features. And some of it is really hard to picture on your own.

After the introductory parts, Bernstein starts talking about the idea of a canal linking the East Coast with the interior, namely the area across the Alleghenies. The Founding Fathers, and Washington in particular were aware of a need to tie the economy of the area to the east so that there would not be a drift toward independence, or dependence on whoever held the Mississippi. Washington tried a scheme to clear the Potomac towards such a goal, but did not get far. Meanwhile, the fact that there was a practical route across New York to the Great Lakes was becoming more obvious. An initial attempt was to clear the path of the Mohawk River westwards, but the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company soon found it was spending all the money it could raise on trying to keep a relatively short section of riverbed clear. (There was also a Northern Inland Lock Navigation Company to improve conditions between Albany and Lake Champlain, but I can’t find any mention of its fate.)

These false starts, thanks to a number of influential people, fail to stop all support for such schemes, but instead focus support on the most ambitious option of all: Building a brand new waterway the entire length of modern New York state. One of the nice parts of the book is the earlier sections talk about the evolution of these ideas through colonial times as well as post-Revolution. Bernstein even talks about the initial exploration of the Hudson (which was part of looking for the fabled Northwest Passage). But of course the later parts get more detail and attention, as they focus on the actual subject of the book.

Bernstein also points out that there was no one in America at the time who could be termed a Civil Engineer, even by the standards of the day. Other than the politicians working for budget appropriations, everyone involved in the project is an amateur. A number of different technical problems are discussed, and some of them were solved by workers on site, and we’ll never know who came up with the idea.

There is, of course, a lot of discussion of the politics involved. New York had the most developed political scene of the era in the US, so the infighting was also more developed. First, fighting over the proposal, and if it should be funded, then when things went well, fighting over the credit, and who is in charge. As I have been reading a few other books on the era, there are names who appear elsewhere, especially De Witt Clinton, who was the person who pushed through plans for the canal.

There’s also a good amount of material on travel through the area before the canal, and what travel on the canal was like. Finally, there is discussion of the financial implications. The entire motivation for the canal was of course financial, so a good accounting of its effects is essential. Like the technical side of the canal, this is limited by its broad-market aims, and the relative lack of records of the time. There’s good discussion of the flow of goods along the canal, and the fact that England started importing food from the Midwest in a major post-Napoleonic economic shift.

Overall, it’s an informative book, but I did find it lacking, especially on really showing the physical side of the canal. It left me wanting more, which is often a good thing, but here I really felt I’m wanting things that should have been in the book.