1820 western New York presented typically frontier conditions. The
settlers felled and burned the forest, built little towns, and
erected mills, and now, with a surplus of agricultural products,
they were suffering from the lack of a market and were demanding
transportation facilities. Some of their lumber and flour found its
way by the lakes and the St. Lawrence to Montreal, a portion went by
rafts down the Allegheny to the waters of the Ohio, and some
descended the upper tributaries of the Susquehanna and found an
outlet in Baltimore or Philadelphia; but these routes were
unreliable and expensive, and by one of them trade was diverted from
the United States to Canada. There was a growing demand for canals
that should give economic unity to New York and turn the tide of her
interior commerce along the Mohawk and Lake Champlain into the
waters of the Hudson and so to the harbor of New York City. The Erie
and the Champlain canals were the outcome of this demand.

It is the glory of De Witt Clinton that he saw the economic
revolution which the Erie Canal would work, and that he was able to
present clearly and effectively the reasons which made the
undertaking practicable and the financial plan which made it
possible. He persuaded the legislature by the vision of a greater
Hudson River, not only reaching to the western confines of the
state, but even, by its connection with Lake Erie, stretching
through two thousand miles of navigable lakes and rivers to the very
heart of the interior of the United States. To him the Erie Canal
was a political as well as an economic undertaking. "As a bond of
union between the Atlantic and western states," he declared, "it may
prevent the dismemberment of the American empire. As an organ of
communication between the Hudson, the Mississippi, the St. Lawrence,
the great lakes of the north and west, and their tributary rivers,