Watson tried to convince Schuyler that a lack of vision and imagination—rather than actual capabilities or capacities—was hindering state legislators from demanding more ambitious plans of petitioners seeking to form canal companies. The two proposals recently approved by lawmakers to create the Northern and Western Inland Lock Navigation companies had been passed after considerable lobbying by Schuyler, but to Watson they represented only “half the business” of canal building in New York State. “The charter[s] should stretch,” he said, “to admit the commerce of the great lakes into the Hudson River, and vice versa.” Legislators had instead settled for too meager a set of proposals, and Watson felt that Schuyler agreed with his sentiments. “No one of that body,” Watson wrote, referring to the legislature, and “not even the Governor,” he continued, “appears to soar beyond Fort Stanwix [present day Rome, New York] except yourself.”13
For Watson, visionary ambition in canal building had patriotic connotations. He later explained that much of his inspiration was drawn from a two-day visit he had made to George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon in 1785. Four years before becoming the first U.S. president, Washington organized and became president of a canal company called the Patowmack Company, a venture jointly supported by the governors of Maryland and Virginia to improve the channels of the Potomac River, dig smaller branch canals, and build locks to traverse its waterfalls. Watson pronounced the project “worthy of the comprehensive mind of Washington” because it was to link the Atlantic Ocean with the Mississippi River and reach as far as Detroit. “Hearing little else for two days from the persuasive tongue of this great man,” Watson recalled, “I confess completely infected me with the canal mania, and enkindled all my enthusiasm.” It lit, Watson said, “the canal flame in my mind.”14
Recalling this visit and seeing a need to act as boldly as the hero of the Revolution, Watson pressed Schuyler in the spring of 1792 to use his influence in the state house to block passage of the two pieces of canal legislation—bills Schuyler had lobbied to pass—on the grounds that the proposed projects would be too small to sufficiently develop the state’s resources. Watson boasted that, unlike most state legislators, he had traveled through both western New York and Europe. He had seen firsthand how “luxuriance of soil, mildness of climate, and easy access to market” could be brought together with a canal, telling Schuyler,
Perhaps no part of the world, so distant from the sea as our western country, presents such irresistible allurements to emigrants, as well from the eastern hive as from Europe…. Nothing will tend with so much certainty to accelerate the progress of these great events, and to open a door to the happiness of unborn millions, as to render a water communication at once cheap and easy of access. Exclusive of continuing an intercourse with the greatest chain of lakes in the known world, it will give a powerful stimulus to a new creation in the very heart of this State.15
Watson therefore did not believe that a larger canal would simply emulate European exemplars; he predicted it would spark transformative economic development.
From his perspective as a traveled observer, a vantage point he considered superior to that of legislators mired in institutional habits and precedents, Watson thought he had the credibility to put forth a new way of thinking about American political economy. His argument drew on the writings of two of the most prominent European political-economy theorists of the period: Emmerich de Vattel and Adam Smith. Both viewed turnpike, bridge, and canal building as a way to build links among existing commercial centers. Connecting markets in cities and towns provided opportunities for producers and consumers to engage in commercial exchanges; therefore, the cost of building a channel of commerce—a canal or road—paled in comparison to its usefulness.16
Some American canal promoters like Elkanah Watson—and, later, De-Witt Clinton—readily imbibed European political economists’ arguments in favor of transportation-infrastructure investments while discarding part of their underlying analysis. The glaring difference between a New York canal and a British turnpike was that the former would not link a chain of already established marketplaces—it would instead plow through unsettled territory. Watson acknowledged and embraced this difference by suggesting that European ideas had to be adapted on an “enlarged American scale,” writing, “If we proceed on the European mode of calculation, waiting in the first instance to find the country through which canals are to pass, to be in a state of maturity and improvement, the answer is at hand—No! But calculating on the more enlarged American scale, and considering the physical circumstances of the country in question, should the canals precede the settlements, it will be justified on the principles of sound policy.” To begin building out-of-doors support for this “sound policy,” Watson decided to start writing essays and sending them to newspapers in New York City under the pen names “A Citizen” and “An Inland Navigator.”17
In those articles, Watson expanded on his idea that canal development should be seen as a catalyst to encourage territorial settlement. Building existing towns with active commerce could not be a precondition for public infrastructure investment in America; instead, that had to be the goal of such policies. To this end, constructing “channel[s] of commerce,” ones more bold than the two corporate proposals before the legislature, would soon inspire transformative development. “A vast wilderness will, as if were by magic, rise into instant cultivation,” Watson predicted. Canal building represented an opportunity to actively instigate commercial growth and shape the state’s destiny, both to satisfy its own internal needs and to raise its profile as a state that was both a partner and a competitor with other states. Therefore, although Watson’s reasons for wanting to see a New York canal reach the nation’s western territories might have seemed more self-consciously cosmopolitan than Governor Clinton’s professed desires to settle the interior of the state, it was grounded in a realpolitik, state-centric conception of interstate commerce in the federal union.18
In his written appeals to both the public and Philip Schuyler, Watson took pains to lay out his concerns that New York might lose out to competing states’ commercial-development policies. By 1792 Watson looked at George Washington’s Patowmack Company and saw it as well on its way toward breaching the Mississippi River, diverting the profits of western commercial expansion to Virginia. As admirable as Watson thought that ambition to be, he also feared it would deliver a devastating and permanent blow to New York’s long-term commercial prospects. “[A] channel of commerce,” he explained, “may receive an early bias to a different point,” but “when once established in any particular direction, it is generally found difficult to divert it.”
To give Washington’s concern “a fair competition” and to avoid losing out on western development altogether, Watson therefore wanted New York legislators to think more boldly and imaginatively about their project. Moreover, as a political entrepreneur himself, Watson perceptively recognized that the scale of the project would forever be tethered to the sources and structure of its financing. The proposals before the legislature were to build canals by creating two corporations. Lawmakers were becoming more familiar with and supportive of the corporate form; corporations were also useful tools for attracting investors with private capital and managing their interests.
Yet Watson believed that the larger canal he wished to see built could not be financed by a corporation. To be clear: Watson was not suggesting that private interests would fail to build a sound canal or would constrict the settlement of the state, nor did he think that toll rates might become so heavy as to render the canal empty. Rather, he thought that if the canal were to ever truly be a public good, where the public reaped the benefits of the project in full, that outcome could not be delivered by a private venture.
To Watson, the proposed canal’s path and utility were so self-evident that he believed it should be treated as a natural channel of commerce—similar to a waterway or river—instead of being subject to the same political-economy practices that gave protections of monopolistic exclusivity, special regulations, and private privileges to other artificially built bridges and turnpikes. He recognized that even thinking about internal-improvement projects in this way would require a theoretical and an intellectual pivot among lawmakers before it could be institutionally