Lowndes has almost completely faded away, proving that early promise, even the presence of genius, is not enough to preserve a politician in history if he dies too young.”
“The Eighth Wonder of the World,” Worthy of Ozymandias, King of Kings
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
“Ozymandias,”
1818
1825 Shelley’s famous poem is a paean to Osymandias, the Greek name for the Egyptian king Rameses II, whose statue across the Nile River from Luxor bears this inscription: “King of King am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great am I and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.”
You don’t expect a great idea to come out of a debtors’ prison, but that’s precisely what happened. Jesse Hawley, a merchant from upper New York State, was sentenced to twenty-four-months’ confinement in debtors’ prison. During his stay, he dreamed about a mighty canal that would transform New York’s landscape and commerce. Writing under the rather grand name of “Hercules,” he produced fourteen essays detailing his vision, even recommending a specific route. Several years later, in 1817, the State of New York executed Hawley’s dream and began an ambitious eight-year project to build the world’s longest canal, 363 miles. At the time there were only three canals in the United States longer than two miles. A recent twenty-seven-mile canal project had ended in failure. The federal government—thinking the whole enterprise impossible—refused to have anything to do with it, so the New York State legislature plunged ahead and authorized a bond issue with the grandiloquent sobriquet that the canal would “promote agriculture, manufactures, and commerce, mitigate the calamities of war, enhance the blessings of peace, consolidate the Union, advance the prosperity and elevate the character of the United States.”
Indeed it did. Finished in 1825, the Erie Canal was the engineering feat of the nineteenth century. Some called it the Eighth Wonder of the World. Certainly it was the only such wonder ever built by the labor of free men, and not by slaves or by forced conscription. Paid eighty cents a day, aided by horses, the workers dug up and removed 11.4 million cubic yards of rock and earth—more than three times the volume of the Great Pyramid of Egypt.
Even more remarkable was the engineering. America had no trained civil engineers then. The project was undertaken by two amateurs, one a judge and the other a surveyor. Asked the Albany legislature: “Who is this James Geddes and who is this Benjamin Wright … what canals have they constructed? What great public works have they accomplished?”
Obviously such a project would not attract financing today, but then was then—the age of amateurs—whereas now we live in an era of bureaucracy and professional credentialism. One historian, writing about canals in 1905, identified the key issue when he compared the Erie Canal’s founders to the founders of the nation, Washington, Hamilton, and Jefferson: “These men were working for a cause, for the development of their native land, and not for personal gain and aggrandizement….What they did not understand they conquered by diligent study, unwearied zeal, and sound common sense.”
The parallel was particularly apt, for the Erie Canal was nothing less than the fulfillment of the Founding Fathers’ dream to unify the nation. George Washington’s great fear was that the western United States might splinter off from the original thirteen. “The western settlers,” said Washington in 1775, “stand, as it were, upon a pivot. The touch of a feather would turn them away.” At a time when western America had no choice but to use the rivers running through Spanish, French, and Indian territory, “the whole future of
“The Eighth Wonder of the World,” Worthy of Ozymandias, King of Kings
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
“Ozymandias,”
1818
1825 Shelley’s famous poem is a paean to Osymandias, the Greek name for the Egyptian king Rameses II, whose statue across the Nile River from Luxor bears this inscription: “King of King am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great am I and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.”
You don’t expect a great idea to come out of a debtors’ prison, but that’s precisely what happened. Jesse Hawley, a merchant from upper New York State, was sentenced to twenty-four-months’ confinement in debtors’ prison. During his stay, he dreamed about a mighty canal that would transform New York’s landscape and commerce. Writing under the rather grand name of “Hercules,” he produced fourteen essays detailing his vision, even recommending a specific route. Several years later, in 1817, the State of New York executed Hawley’s dream and began an ambitious eight-year project to build the world’s longest canal, 363 miles. At the time there were only three canals in the United States longer than two miles. A recent twenty-seven-mile canal project had ended in failure. The federal government—thinking the whole enterprise impossible—refused to have anything to do with it, so the New York State legislature plunged ahead and authorized a bond issue with the grandiloquent sobriquet that the canal would “promote agriculture, manufactures, and commerce, mitigate the calamities of war, enhance the blessings of peace, consolidate the Union, advance the prosperity and elevate the character of the United States.”
Indeed it did. Finished in 1825, the Erie Canal was the engineering feat of the nineteenth century. Some called it the Eighth Wonder of the World. Certainly it was the only such wonder ever built by the labor of free men, and not by slaves or by forced conscription. Paid eighty cents a day, aided by horses, the workers dug up and removed 11.4 million cubic yards of rock and earth—more than three times the volume of the Great Pyramid of Egypt.
Even more remarkable was the engineering. America had no trained civil engineers then. The project was undertaken by two amateurs, one a judge and the other a surveyor. Asked the Albany legislature: “Who is this James Geddes and who is this Benjamin Wright … what canals have they constructed? What great public works have they accomplished?”
Obviously such a project would not attract financing today, but then was then—the age of amateurs—whereas now we live in an era of bureaucracy and professional credentialism. One historian, writing about canals in 1905, identified the key issue when he compared the Erie Canal’s founders to the founders of the nation, Washington, Hamilton, and Jefferson: “These men were working for a cause, for the development of their native land, and not for personal gain and aggrandizement….What they did not understand they conquered by diligent study, unwearied zeal, and sound common sense.”
The parallel was particularly apt, for the Erie Canal was nothing less than the fulfillment of the Founding Fathers’ dream to unify the nation. George Washington’s great fear was that the western United States might splinter off from the original thirteen. “The western settlers,” said Washington in 1775, “stand, as it were, upon a pivot. The touch of a feather would turn them away.” At a time when western America had no choice but to use the rivers running through Spanish, French, and Indian territory, “the whole future of
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