The Raging Erie: Life and Labor Along the Erie Canal

by Mark Ferrara

The completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 was a monumental achievement. Linking the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean, it transformed New York City into a hub of international trade, drove the rise of industrial cities in once sparsely populated areas, and accelerated the westward expansion of the United States. Yet few of the laborers who toiled along the canal shared in the prosperity it brought.Mark S. Ferrara tells the stories of the ordinary people who lived, worked, and died along the banks of the canal, emphasizing the forgotten role of the poor and working class in this epochal transformation. The Raging Erie chronicles the fates of the Native Americans whose land was appropriated for the canal, the European immigrants who bored its route through the wilderness, and the orphan children who drove draft animals that pulled boats around the clock. Ferrara also shows how the canal served as a conduit for the movement of new ideas and religions, a corridor for enslaved people seeking freedom via the Underground Railroad, and a spur for social reform movements that emerged in response to the poverty and suffering along its path.Brimming with vivid characters drawn from the underbelly of antebellum life, The Raging Erie explores the social dislocation and untold hardships at the heart of a major engineering feat, shedding light on the lives of the canallers who toiled on behalf of American expansion.

Genres: Nonfiction

272 pages, Paperback

Published July 2, 2024

Reviews

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Raging Erie is a wide ranging social history focusing on the Native Americans, laborers, common folk, African Americans, and underclass whose lives were impacted by the Canal. Their lands were stolen, they built and died working on the Canal, they lived along its route. Cities had population booms, and with growth came crime and poverty as well as riches fueled by the growth of industrialization.

Social movements were born in this area of New York. There were champions of abolition and women’s rights, the founders of new religions, and the pseudoscience of spiritualism.

Ferrara contends that the working class, poor, women, Native Americans, and African Americans were exploited and suffered while the capitalists thrived. The Canal brought growth to the Midwest; many Michigan cities and place names echo New York State’s, and Detroit’s population boomed.

I was surprised to learn that Tonawanda was the center of a Native American religious revival called the Good Message, based on the Iroquois Handsome Lake’s prophetic visions.

The 200th anniversary of the Erie Canal will be celebrated in 2025. You could read about the ‘great men’ who ‘built’ the canal and became rich and famous, or about the men who actually built the canal and gave their health and lives while doing so.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book.

[Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is well researched and written and presents a different spin from other books that focused on the building of the canal. It encompasses the many different groups that lived and worked along the Erie Canal. It starts with the Native Americans who lost the land upon which the canal was built, the immigrants who worked on and around the canal, the use of the canal as part of the Underground Railroad and the wide range of colorful characters who were in some way connected to the canal. A must read for those interested in the history of New York State.

I received a free Kindle copy of this book courtesy of Net Galley and the publisher with the understanding that I would post a review on Net Galley, Goodreads, Amazon and my nonfiction book review blog. I also posted it to my Facebook page.

[Sierra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everyone who has lived along the Erie Canal should read this book. It doesn't go far beyond what you'll get by visiting every single local historical site, but because normal people don't do that, The Raging Erie is a great substitute and introduction. The only thing missing that I would've liked to see is a discussion of how this history has been portrayed in modern times, because I think we can learn a lot from that.

ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[George Hovis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mark Ferrara’s account of the Erie Canal sprawls beyond the confines of “Clinton’s Ditch,” as the canal was called, to take in the wider culture of America in the nineteenth century and especially as it grows out of or converges with the culture that sprang up around the canal zone. Some of the familiar stories he gives heft—for example, in his visits to Rochester and Seneca Falls, where well known figures such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony began a national women’s movement.

But Dr. Ferrara also tells us about lesser-known women such as Anne Royall, who published serially her Little Black Book, an ongoing travelogue that transgressed gender norms of the period and made her subject to what one biographer called the last witch trial in America. Ferrara tells the story of Paddy Ryan, “King of the Erie Canal and Champion of the World,” who began his career as a world champion boxer by brawling on canal barges. We meet the Fox sisters, whose ghost-story prank of their parents ended in national celebrity and made these two young women among the foremost Spiritualists and mediums of the occult. We meet William “Jerry” Henry, a fugitive from enslavement, whose capture by U.S. Commissioner in Syracuse spurred local abolitionists to use force in their challenge of the scandalous 1850 Fugitive Slave Law.

What makes Raging Erie so compelling is the ways Ferrara connects each of these human stories to the larger story of America. For anyone who has an interest in understanding vividly who we were 200 years ago and how we became who we are now, Raging Erie is a must read—and a really fun one.

[Bradley Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a worthwhile read, although kind of a tough one. The author describes just how tough life was for the folks on the lower end of the socio-economic scale along the Erie Canal in the 19th century. While he acknowledges the great economic impact and engineering accomplishments of the canal, these are not the focus of the book. Each chapter opens with a personal portrait of some individual, then broadens out to examine how people in that general demographic category fared: the native Iroquoian peoples, children (especially those who were all too often forced by orphanhood or poverty into hard labor on the canal), the men who worked on the canal, women, and so on. The last few chapters examine social phenomena of the area: the religious and spiritualistic fervors that periodically swept through what came to be called the "burned over district"; the local experience of free blacks, abolitionists, and the Underground Railroad; and the pervasive presence of vice (alcoholism, prostitution, crime) in the "port towns" of the canal system.

This is a highly informative and atmospheric book if you want to understand "life among the lowly" in this time and place, upstate New York in the heyday of the "big ditch".

[Dave Taylor · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's hard to understand the point of this book by Mark Ferrara, an English professor at SUNY; while it ostensibly offers an exploration of the building and operation of the Erie Canal in the early 1800s, it instead focuses on everyone who was exploited and harmed. It's important to consider the consequences of building and operating major projects like the Canal, but Ferrara lacks a tight focus on the Erie Canal itself, instead bouncing around in American history to make his inevitably negative points about life in the 1800s.

Where he lost me entirely was on the section on the welfare of horses and mules that were used to both build and then drag boats along the canal. In just a few paragraphs he bounces from the 1817 construction to 1860s boat owners to the 1870s lack of adoption of steam power, to the establishment of the ASPCA in 1866 to their 1884 report on animal welfare, then back to 1833, then 1874, 1890, then back to 1828. 1828 marked the enactment of an anti-cruelty law applying to animals in New York state, a critically important event. However, he ends with the mention of the law, rather than starting with it, never just stating "a law was established but was a failure". To me this suggests this is not an attempt to put all of this information in a balanced and logical context but instead to produce a (hard to read) diatribe against animal (or child) cruelty of the era. But how widespread was it? How many animals were beaten until they died and how many were more humanely treated? How many children were rescued from homelessness rather than being exploited or overworked as Canal workers?

Without an overall context and attempt to balance the good and bad of a project, the book fails to offer a fair contextualization of an important historical construction project and its consequences for the indigenous, the local settlers, orphaned children, animals, the 1800s economy, etc. Offering up "it was good for the rich people and terrible for everyone else" is just lazy history, in my opinion.

I stopped reading at about the 25% mark in the book, so please take my criticism with the proverbial grain of salt. While I was hoping for a book that offered a fair and balanced perspective of "life and labor along the Erie Canal", I just didn't find it in the section of the book I read.

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book through NetGalley in return for this candid review.

[Paulette · Rating 3 out of 5]

I could not finish this book. So many deaths of children, horses, mules. Child labor, abandonment, orphans. Chosen by the National Museum of the Great Lakes for the March 2025 book club. It was a very hard read. So I stopped after not even a third of the way into the book. The author was part of the book club discussion. The deaths bothered him greatly. I believe the book club Zoom was recorded.