Antiques - Governor De Witt Clinton's prophecy that the completion of the Erie Canal would be the foundation of New York City's cultural achievement - Editorial

Magazine Antiques, April, 1999 by Wendell Garrett

[New York] City will in the course of time become the Granary of the western world, the emporium of commerce, the seat of manufacture, the focus of great moneyed operations, and the concentrating point of vast, disposable and accumulating capital which will stimulate, enliven, extend, reward the exertions of human labor and ingenuity.

De Witt Clinton speaking before a committee of a meeting of citizens of New York, 1824

Governor De Witt Clinton (1769-1828) of New York prophesied that the completion of the Erie Canal from the Hudson River at Albany to Lake Erie at Buffalo would solidify New York City's economic dominance and constitute the foundation for cultural achievement. He was right on both counts.

The 363-mile canal, known as "Clinton's Ditch," was completed in 1825. It was directly responsible for the transcendence of Harper and Brothers, publishers, by the 1850s, enabling them to undercut regional competitors, especially in the lucrative textbook and religious book markets. In 1823 the artist Samuel F. B. Morse moved to New York City anticipating that the canal would result in increased patronage of the arts and the development of an artistic community in the city.

With the new canal emptying the agricultural produce of the West into the port of New York, even the least visionary New Yorkers could imagine a day not far off when the city would be the economic and financial center of an integrated national economy. The progress of commerce inspired the ambition to make New York City the capital of American culture as well. On the assumption that the proper means of organizing culture within the city was to establish a university, a group of civic leaders proposed to establish a University of the City of New York. They had the example of London, where the present University of London was organized in 1826. New York followed suit in 1831, with the foundation of what is today New York University.

Clinton felt that the stewardship of culture was the domain of the social elite, whose responsibility it was to offer its blessings to everyone else. "The more elevated the tree of knowledge," he told the state legislature in 1827, "the more expanded its branches, and the greater will be the trunk and the deeper the roots." He himself had a hand in founding, among other organizations, the American Academy of the Fine Arts (1802), the New-York Historical Society (1804), and the Literary and Philosophical Society (1816), and he served as president of all three.

Clinton felt that art and intellect flourished in cities, drawing on the complexities of urban life for inspiration. He felt that well-to-do merchants might find satisfaction in promoting institutions to further education and the patronage of the arts and sciences, and he believed that agencies of the government themselves had a responsibility to support these endeavors.

The city commissioned portraits of leading citizens and war heroes from such prominent artists as John Wesley Jarvis, Thomas Sully, Samuel L. Waldo, John Vanderlyn, and Samuel F. B. Morse. In 1827 the Common Council authorized the purchase of a portrait of Clinton by George Carlin. Such municipal patronage was accepted at the time as a proper use of public funds. However, as the working class became politicized, this use of public funds was seen to be largely for private ends and was deemed unsuitable. Concurrently, Clinton, and other champions of the eighteenth-century enlightenment tradition, were dying out.

A generation later, Nathaniel Hawthorne, in The Marble Faun (1860), deplored the absence of class, caste, and tradition. How, he asked, could a novelist practice his trade in a land with "no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a common-place prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land."