The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862.

By Carol Sheriff (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996. xvii plus 251pp. $21.00).

Two decades ago, Paul E. Johnson's landmark book A Shopkeeper's Millennium explored the social context of religious revivalism in the booming Erie Canal town of Rochester, New York, linking it to the residential separation and mutual antagonism of the emerging class relations of early industrial capitalism. Carol Sheriff, in this striking and well-argued study, examines some of the same issues, but from a different perspective. In doing so she captures some of the ways in which nineteenth century social history has evolved since Johnson's book was written.

Focusing on the Erie Canal itself, rather than studying a community in depth, Sheriff regards it both as a system with social and economic implications and as an emblem for broader changes in American society. Both for the changes it wrought in the economy and for its status as a political and organizational achievement, the canal served as a symbol of "progress" and of the potential the American republic contained. But in several ways also, Sheriff argues, the Erie Canal helped destroy the world that had created it. As a transportation system prone to interruptions and delays, and despite extensive rebuilding, it fueled demands for capacity, speed, and reliability that only railroads could fulfil. As the product of a certain kind of republican political culture it helped usher in a transformation that altered the character of American society and politics.

In separate chapters Sheriff traces the changes in practice and perception that the canal helped crystallize. "Progress" entailed new relationships with a "nature" that had both been tamed and made more accessible. Shortening time and distance, the canal fostered new commercial relationships and consumption patterns, new modes of travel and experience. But these shifts were sources of anxiety as well as opportunity. "Progress" was not unalloyed or unambiguous. The canal itself and its economic consequences altered conceptions of property rights and the political assumptions that were linked to them. Farmers struggled to protect their property from encroachments, citing "common interest" to bolster their cases, and found themselves engaged in a commercial system whose business practices they often questioned. Increasingly they found the state championing commercial, not agricultural interests, and claims on behalf of "common interest" were thrown back at them by businessmen keen to take care of themselves on the way to providing benefits to society.

Speeches and memorials associated with the Erie Canal's construction referred to the politicians, engineers, and contractors who "built" the canal; they overlooked thousands of men who labored on it and the many, including children, who kept it working. But the greatest anxieties inspired by the canal, Sheriff argues, arose precisely from the unruly wage-earning labor force that built, maintained, and operated it. Unlike Paul Johnson's skilled Rochester working class which had moved out from its employers' houses in the 1820s, this was composed of migrants and strangers, "unskilled" workers who were outside the scope of early nineteenth century republicanism. For Sheriff, as for Johnson, class formation helped to power the evangelical revivals that shook the Erie Canal corridor, but whereas Johnson located the connection in guilt at the fragmentation of a harmonious social order, she stresses middle-class fear of social disruption from below.

As denizens of a "rough" culture with its taverns, violence, and irreverence, workers on the canal became the targets of moral reformers. However, like Johnson, Sheriff points out that this encounter was not simply one of social control. Evangelists and sabbatarians provided material assistance, and campaigns to prevent Sunday work and travel found support from overworked boat-crews, porters and lock-tenders. All the same, organizations like the American Bethel Society which became active among canal workers sought financial support from the businessmen who controlled commerce and transport. Reform efforts were directed not at reversing the market revolution but at tempering its worst effects so as to preserve social order.

Sheriff is mainly concerned with middle-class perspectives. This partly reflects the preponderance of available sources - much richer for the communicative than for the people historians once mistakenly called "the inarticulate." Most attention here goes to property-owners' and professionals' concepts of progress and their anxieties about its effects. But the political transformation that drew adult white men into full citizenship, and the ideological shift from republicanism to free labor that economic expansion helped foster, still left working people the subjects of others' cultural assumptions. The emerging rhetoric of "free" labor once more elided working people from the picture simply by enfolding them in bourgeois aspirations for self-advancement and mobility. Giving comforting assurance of social stability at home, Sheriff implies, free labor ideology enabled the northern middle class to square up to the impending struggle with the South. The Erie Canal itself also slipped from prominence in peoples' consciousness. By the time its rebuilding was complete in 1862 it was taken for granted, and what had once been a dramatic intrusion on the "natural" landscape had itself become "second nature."

Broader in its focus and range than Paul Johnson's, this book nevertheless lacks some of Johnson's critical edge. If social history now embraces rhetoric and emblematic themes as well as social structures and material relations, it has also retreated somewhat from the rigorous focus on relationships that was the hallmark of Johnson's work. His argument resolved around how social relationships might have influenced behavior. Sheriff's canal carries a caravan of characters and anxieties, but as with boats floating freely of one another the links between them are less precisely delineated.

Christopher Clark University of Warwick