"One corner of the great American panorama enlarged to highlight starry-eyed visionaries, political machinations, indefatigable ingenuity, and cockeyed optimism."—Kirkus Reviews

A sweeping work of history by Peter L. Bernstein, Wedding of the Waters recounts the revolutionary conception, construction, and completion of the Erie Canal, one of the greatest engineering projects ever undertaken and the crucial link between the Atlantic states and the bounties of the western lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains. This stupendous project was a daunting challenge at every turn, for the financiers and politicians as well as the would-be engineers. With its emphasis on technological ingenuity, global economics, financial skills, and America's changing role in the world, Wedding of the Waters is a story for our own times. 20 illustrations.
Begun in 1817 and completed in 1825, the Erie Canal stretches 363 miles across upstate New York from Buffalo on Lake Erie to Albany on the Hudson River. A stunning achievement, the canal was hacked through a densely forested pass in the Appalachian Mountains using only axes, shovels, low-grade explosive power, beasts of burden, and some ingenious devices. The engineers and workers created locks, bypassed rapids and waterfalls, and adjusted to countless changes in elevation. When the canal was completed it became one of the wonders of the world. But the canal was much more than a spectacular construction project; it also served to bind a young United States to itself and the rest of the world in one bold stroke. In this thoroughly absorbing book, Peter Bernstein describes in vivid detail how the Erie Canal helped to shape the United States into a great nation by connecting the eastern seaboard and western expanses of America, as well as propel the Industrial Revolution and stimulate global trade, economics, and immigration. It was so important to the development of the U.S., argues Bernstein, that without the canal the detached western territories "would in all likelihood have broken away" and created another, if not several, separate countries. Manifest Destiny would have been denied.

In telling this gripping tale, the author offers a brief history of canals through the ages, explains the foresight exhibited by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson regarding the need for a waterway to the west, and outlines the political wars, financing challenges, and seemingly endless delays and false starts to the project. He also reveals much about the political landscape of early America through his profiles of the personalities and visionaries who devoted their lives to the project, along with the engineers and surveyors, most of whom had little experience designing or constructing a canal of any kind, much less such a massive undertaking. Wedding of the Waters succeeds brilliantly in bringing this rich story to life. --Shawn Carkonen

Customer Rating:
Summary: Fascinating topic, tedious telling
Comment: 300 mile canal, ties the young nation together, opens the tremendous flow of commerce, further pushing New York to the economic forefront, keeps the nation from being divided by the Appalachians, out of the hands of European nations. All this, and much more, make this an important, fascinating topic.
But...
Buy your own map so you can picture the location of key towns along the route. Make it a topographic map so you can understand the ups and downs of the canal route.
Fast forward through all the players who had first claim to the idea. Does that really matter?
Buy a book on Tammany Hall to gain the proper perspective on this bastion of neighborhood support, and corruption.
Google the references to precedent-setting canals...this book provides concise, but light, explanations.
In a nutshell...this telling could have been condensed into about 80 pages.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A garbage scow on the canal
Comment: The Erie Canal was the first really big engineering project in the United States and its impact can hardly be overstated. However, Peter Bernstein manages to do so in this ill-informed, ax-grinding attempt at political and business history.

"The Making of a Great Nation" in the subtitle stakes the claim: that if the canal had not been built early in the fractious republic's young history, thereby both opening the west and tying it to the east with bands of commerce, the United States west of the Appalachians would have spun off as an independent nation, and the original 13 states would never have been more than a small, coastal nation of no great significance,

It's true that George Washington and others worried about this, but we can now see that -- like the people who worry about global warming -- there was nothing to worry about.

There was no water passage over the Appalachians possible, except the route the canal took, but the Cumberland Mountains did not deter the Virginians from settling Tennessee a generation before western New York was entered, and by the time Gov. De Witt Clinton poured the keg of Erie water into the Atlantic in 1825 (the wedding of the title), the Tennesseans were already at Memphis and notably loyal to the republic.

We can speculate that if the canal had not been made, the west would have been opened both more slowly and more southerly, and in 1861, instead of an industrial north facing an agricultural south with one-third the population, the two sections would have been nearly equal in power, and the north-south split would indeed have become permanent. But Bernstein's speculations about an east-west split are silly.

For a book that claims to be about one of the greatest engineering achievements of all time -- another overstatement -- "Wedding of the Waters" contains almost nothing about engineering.. There is a little about earlier canals, but nothing about how they were made, and nothing -- nil, zip, nada, zero -- about the engineering of the Erie Canal.

The book often mentions obstacles the builders had to deal with, rivers, mountains, lakes, swamps, but there is no map locating them. There is a locator map -- with about 1% of the information on an oil company's highway map -- but no contours or hachures to show the terrain, which is the first consideration if you are going to attempt a canal.

There is nothing about soils, nothing about water sources, nothing, nothing and still more nothing.

Bernstein is a windy and repetitive writer, and the information in his 380 pages of text could easily be condensed into 50. Most of it is about the dreamers and surveyors and politicians who projected a canal for a hundred years. They were an interesting crew, with many characters such as we don't produce any more, like Elkanah Watson, but we don't learn much about them here.

Aside from the engineering challenge, there was the financial and political challenge of finding the money, creating the perception of a demand and organizing a vehicle for doing the deed. This is Bernstein's interest, not engineering, but he is no better on this aspect.

He presents himself as an expert on transportation and finance, but he knows little about either. Many turgid pages are spent explaining the obvious -- that cheaper transportation means lower expenses -- but it certainly is not true that cheapest is best. If you've ever paid to ship a package by FedEx, DHL or UPS Air, you understand that. Bernstein doesn't.

And he gets completely bollixed up in the financing, which had to be accomplished, at least at the outset, during the Panic of 1819. In "Wedding of the Waters," the money magically appears.

It wasn't magic. The canal was made possible by a truly significant innovation in transportation, which Bernstein mentions without any indication that he understands what it meant. In fact, he gets it all backwards.

That was the formation of the Black Ball Line, the first :"packet" service across the Atlantic, with regular sailings. This was not a technical fix, no piece of equipment changed, just an organizational novelty.

What it did was create a sailing-era just-in-time inventory system, so that Manhattan mercantile establishments, which had theretofore had to tie up their capital for a year at a time with English manufacturers, could turn goods around in a few months. The velocity of capital (in which the United States was then short) multiplied, and it went into canal bonds.

There's not a word about this from Bernstein, who devotes several paragraphs to resales on the London exchange, which meant nothing to the financing of the canal.

There's much, much more wrong with "Wedding of the Waters," but I will list just one more, because it is so egregious that it surpasses belief.

First, some background. In the 19th century and earlier, a byword for riches beyond calculation was the mines at Potosi. They show up several times in quotations by Bernstein about projectors who promised that the opening of the canal would create wealth to rival the mines of Potosi. (They were right, too.)

Each time, since 21st century people no longer think of Potosi as a symbol of untold riches, Bernstein tells his readers that this recondite word refers to gold mines.

But the mines of Potosi, which are still operating, are and always were silver mines. This is the kind of slip that any careless writer might make, but Bernstein cannot claim that as an excuse, since he is the author of two previous books with "gold" in the title, including one called "A Primer on Money, Banking and Gold."

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Don't be turned off by the negative reviews. Whaddaya mean no map?
Comment: I was hesitant to buy this after reading negative reviews. However, it's compelling enough that I've read about 100 pages a day. I can only assume that the paperback has no map or the reviewers failed to find it in the beginning. My hardback edition has a useful map in the front which I turned to many times.
The book emphasizes the political, economic, organizational, and engineering facets of the project. People interested in local color or something that reads like a novel will be disappointed I suppose.
In short, I felt it more than adequately met my needs on the subject, much in the manner of McCullough's book on the Panama Canal.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Disappointed
Comment: Overall, I was disappointed by this book. I live in Syracuse and wanted a history of the canal that made this city.

It begins with a selective history of important canals and early efforts in North America to get a canal through the Appalachians. It then moves on to specific efforts to get the Erie Canal started. Parts three and four are a history of the politics involved in getting the canal actually built.

The book trough this point is fair. It is almost entirely a political history. The writing is good, not great, but it did keep me going. There is very little `nuts and bolts' about building the canal itself. One major flaw I found is the lack of a map.

The final section, part five, is the major disappointment. Here is the discussion of the impact of the canal. The canal is talked about in superlative terms with little supporting evidence. Most of the effects claimed by the author could easily have other explanations. The claims may not be wrong; it is just that there is no evidence in this book supporting those claims.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: More political history than canal building
Comment: I really looked forward to reading this book. As I would drive along the New York Thruway, I always thought the Erie Canal was beautiful, and often dreamed of taking a boat trip along it. I am an engineer and a sailor, and looked forward to a detailed explanation of how the canal was built.

When I got to the end of the book, I was quite disappointed. Although it is a worthwhile read, to me this book is more of a political history of New York State from 1810 to 1830 than a book on the building of the Erie Canal. I now know a lot about De Witt Clinton, Martin Van Buren, and Tammany Hall politics, but I really don't know all that much about the building of the canal itself.

I also felt that the author explained the basic economic impact of the canal a few dozen too many times. By page 100, I had it memorized that cutting transportation costs by a factor of 10 would revolutionize how farm commodities and manufactured goods were bought and sold. By page 200, I had the feeling that I was reading a high school essay that was being stretched from 1 page to meet the 5 page requirement.

Overall, I am still glad I bought the book and invested the time to read it. I'm just still looking for a book that explains how the canal was built.

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