Watery Waymaking
Under the 1783 Treaty of Paris, Britain relinquished to the United States of America claim to all land in North America east of the Mississippi River and roughly south of the 49th parallel. That cession made the upstart country one of the world’s largest. For Britain, America had embodied such seemingly endless opportunity that in colonial charters English monarchs granted recipients parcels extending “from sea to sea.” This appetite for land colored the former colonials’ outlook just as, during two-plus centuries of European rule, they had absorbed and modified so many continental institutions and customs to fit their expansive setting.
Consider transportation. In England, conveyance of goods and passengers was often a money-making proposition. Creating roads on so small an island, long inhabited and densely populated, required getting easements and rights of way from property owners, as well as permission from Parliament. Road builders made money charging tolls, a model adapted to waterways in the 1700s, when investors moved from building roads to building canals. Thanks to nascent industrialization, canals, previously unprofitable risks, almost overnight became practical necessities. These conduits—relatively short, narrow, shallow, and plied by capacious boats built for shallow-draft commerce—evolved into a network linking industrial centers in the Midlands to mining districts in the southwest. To tow canal boats, crews worked teams of animals trudging paths alongside waterways. Aqueducts carried canals over rivers and sometimes entire valleys, but British canal builders faced few natural obstacles. A scant change in elevation made it relatively easy to connect the Midlands to the southwest and London. Vertiginous Wales and Scotland got fewer canals.
to canal building underwent an early trial in the New World, where roads were so bad that to get from the Northeast to the Southeast merchandise and passengers went by sea. Rivers navigable at their mouths soon became impassable upstream through a quirk of geology. Hardly a river flowing into the Atlantic did not collide with the fall line, the transition, marked by waterfalls, between the ancient hard rock of the Appalachian Mountains and the young sediment of the coastal plain. At those white-water zones, goods came off the boats to travel by wagon and even teams of porters who
