Industry and Commerce

[00:03.60] The Erie Canal was one of the foundations of what we know of as American capitalism. [00:09.12] The other foundations were the people who learned to bring together capital from a diverse variety of sources, and banks, [00:18.08] the foundations of big industrial enterprises. [00:23.80] It accumulates in a way that creates the transformation of quantity into quality. [00:29.80] So you have so much economic activity that eventually you jump into a different kind of economy. [00:39.75] On the one hand you have Buffalo as this transshipment point and powerhouse and what we would call now a world trade center. [00:49.04] It was sending grain from the Midwest to the East Coast and Europe. [00:54.39] Where that cargo transshipment takes place is where wealth is generated. [01:00.05] You couldn't sail a schooner down the Erie Canal. [01:02.00] So you had to offload your cargoes from schooner or steamboat onto the much smaller canal boats and send them down the waterway to New York. [01:11.01] So we went through stages where we were the leading lumber port in the world, [01:14.97] we did huge shipments of coal, [01:17.20] we did huge shipments of ore. [01:19.52] But the king was grain. [01:21.13] Buffalo was the flour mill and grain storage capital of the world. [01:25.77] You could ship grain in quantity. [01:28.46] And the costs of doing that went way down, 10 percent or less of what they had been beforehand by wagon. [01:35.10] So now you could feed the East Coast, which triggered population growth on the East Coast. [01:41.52] It made New York a preeminent port — passed Charleston, passed Boston, passed Baltimore and Philadelphia — cemented it as the major American port, the major American city. [01:52.56] So that kind of thing became a major transportation route of global importance. [02:15.94] One of the things that developed was this infrastructure of trade. [02:20.30] Imagine, there were a lot of ordinary people who lived along the canal whose quality of life was enhanced in a variety of ways. [02:28.46] Our history is unimaginable without the Erie Canal and I think that there are relatively few things that you can say our history would be unimaginable without. [02:41.67] One of them is the American Revolution. [02:44.00] The Declaration of Independence, [02:47.00] the Constitution, [02:49.05] and the Bill of Rights. [02:52.00] And the Erie Canal in a non-political way, although it sent tentacles out to politics, of course. [03:04.08] The Erie Canal made possible the knitting together of the northern states and a vision of the future of the country. [03:12.80] A country of dense economic activity and economic growth, [03:18.00] the work of economic businesses and industries and institutions that created the modern United States.