Irish Slaves Built the Erie Canal

If it were not for white “slave” labor, Clinton’s big ditch—the Erie Canal—would not have been realized and the Hudson River and Lake Erie never connected. Irish immigrants would become the Northern slave of Hamiltonian “internal improvements” in the early 19th century.

Between 1817 and 1825, one of the most ambitious internal improvements would be constructed-the Erie Canal. Carving the landscape for 363 miles from the Hudson River to Lake Erie, New York Governor De Witt Clinton would initiate an engineering marvel, which would connect the American people in ways never before seen. Just like the Egyptian wonders, the pyramids, Clinton relied on Irish “slaves” to build his canal. 

After the American Revolutionary War, European immigration would slow down some due to world events and American politics between the 1790s and mid-1810s. After the War of 1812 and Napoleon’s Waterloo, immigration to America would recommence. Soon thousands of immigrants would flock to New York in search of work. Unfortunately, these men and women coming to the New World were lacking in skill, which left them only with jobs that required unskilled labor. Men who were not suited for the skilled work in the cities quickly moved out to the rural areas of the back country looking for financial opportunities. These men would be well suited for working on the construction of railroads, highways, and canals.

Contractors for the Erie Canal were would advertise in Irish newspapers looking for men interested in bettering their situations. The Irish were attracted to the work on the Erie Canal through deceptive advertising. They were promised “meat three times a day, plenty of bread and vegetables, with a reasonable allowance of liquor, and eight, ten, or twelve dollars a month for wages.”¹ Due to their financial situations, the Irish could not afford to pay for transportation to America. The contractors would pay for their passage to the construction sites, which indebted them to the contractor even before their shovel hit the dirt. The Irish had become “indentured servants” or slaves of the contractors.

Living conditions for the Irish canal worker could be considered worse than that of the American slaves. The only consolation for the poor over-worked Irishman was that they were free from the literal chains of slavery. Slaves were costly property and were needed to increase the owner’s crop yields, so they were cared for much better than the free wage workers. The ever increasing flow of poor immigrants looking for work in the industrialized north was hurting the Irish laborer. The canal contractors knew that even with the injury or death of one worker, another poor and needy soul would eagerly step up to take his place. Especially since these contractors were deliberately trying to flood the market by making a “call for more men than they actually needed.”² A surplus of capable labor willing to work for any price would keep wages low for the canal worker.

Wages of $8 to $12 per month equated to 30 to 46 cents a day, if the canal worker labored six days a week. In 1817, a farm laborer in Massachusetts would earn on average 82 cents a day, considerable more money than the Irish canal worker.³ Besides cash payment, the canal builders were issued a daily ration of alcohol. Clearly alcohol was intended to increase morale of the men laboring in such horrible work conditions; but intoxicated poor Irishmen would lead to other alcohol-related problems. Unlike the working conditions of the farmer, the working conditions for the canal worker were far worse.

The Irishmen in the trenches would work long hours-12 to 15 hours a day-and “frequently continued into the night, with nothing more than bonfires to light the canal’s progress.”⁴ Rarely did extreme weather stop the work on the canal. Suffering from the elements and sleep deprivation was only part of the hardships the Irish would face.

Building the canal was dangerous work. Laborers were consistently working in water up to the knees or higher. Canal walls had a tendency to collapse suddenly and trap men under the mud as they suffocated to death. When they came upon rocky terrain, high explosives were used to blast their way through. Men were frequently injured from these blasts or from the shrapnel created by the explosions. There were also microscopic dangers to fear in this work environment.

Illness was a constant concern for the contractors and the laborers. Swampy stagnant waters brought with it malaria infested mosquitoes. Poor hygiene habits would contribute to the spread of cholera throughout the canal project and the surrounding populated areas. An observer to the canal construction in 1839 wrote: “Laboring from day to day in low lands and stagnant water, human life has proved to be very short. Out of 1500 laboring men employed on the canal, 1000 died during this past year of over-exertion and the diseases incident to the climate, fever and ague and bilious weather.” ⁵

Disease and death were costly matters. Contractors found themselves paying physicians for the medical care of the workers. When the workers died, the contractors would have to purchase coffins, grave clothes, and contract their workers to be grave diggers.⁶ Fortunate for the sick and dying canal workers, these horrible conditions would drive up their wages from “twelve to fourteen and some as high as seventeen dollars per month.”⁷ Even with these pay raises, the Irishmen were still treated like second-hand citizens by the permanent settlers near the construction sites.

The canal workers lived in temporary shanty towns along the path of the canal. They lived in squalor and were looked down upon by the locals as animals roosting in barns. This mistreatment and low wages fueled by alcohol rations, would lead to immoral behavior in and outside of the shanty towns. Assaults, robbery, and murders would also be common place among the world of the canal workers. Once employed on the canal project, the Irish were enslaved by their circumstances and the economy.

The modern world today praises the building of the Erie Canal as “the most decisive single event in the history of American transportation,”⁸ but they often forget the human cost of that internal improvement. Irish-American newspapers of the time would warn their people of the Hamiltonian agenda and “urged them to shun canal and railroad work because they were ‘the ruin of thousands of our poor people’ who were considered ‘like slaves.’”⁹ Thirty-six years after the completion of the Erie Canal, these Irishmen would be converted from slaves to pawns; they would be forced to fight in Abraham Lincoln’s war for stronger central government and more internal improvements.

Works Cited

1.       Svejda, Dr. George J. "Irish Immigrant Participation in the Construction of the Erie Canal." National Park Service. May 19, 1969. http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/ohio/labor.pdf (accessed November 8, 2013).

2.       Ibid.

3.       Cooper, Thomas P. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Statistics-Bulletin 88. Government Report, Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1911.

4.       Bernstein, Peter L. "Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation." 269. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2005.

5.       Redd, Jim. "The Illinois and Michigan Canal: A Contemporary Perspective in Essays and Photographs." 55. Chicago: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993.

6.       Sheriff, Carol. "The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862." 44. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996.

7.       Ibid.

8.       Burner, David. "Firsthand America: A History of the United States, Volume I, 4th ed." 251. St. James: Brandywine Press, 1996.

9.       Svejda, Ibid.