The Psychic Highway | Under Gods

(1850)
THE PSYCHIC HIGHWAY

The Erie Canal was an engineering marvel that carried not only lumber, goods, and passengers, but also religion. SB Rodriguez-Plate describes the infrastructure project that accelerated Adventism, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, abolitionism, and spiritualism.

“Fifteen miles and a mule named Sal.”

That’s the average American’s answer to the question: What do you know about the Erie Canal? A few citizens who did well in their elementary school civics class might summon up the name DeWitt Clinton, the New York Governor whose hard work made the Canal possible; in the early days, the canal was often derisively called “Clinton’s Ditch.” And some might even realize the waterway’s crucial role in economic development, empire building, westward expansion, and its place in making New York City into a major center of the global economy. Indeed, the esteemed British historian Paul Johnson suggests the Canal was “the outstanding example of a human artifact creating wealth rapidly in the whole of history.”

But how many think of religion? How many realize that the Erie Canal, to rephrase Johnson, is the outstanding example of a human artifact creating new religious movements rapidly in the whole of history? How many of us know that within two decades of its opening, this “psychic highway,” as one narrator dubbed it, cultivated extraordinary experimental groups including the Mormons, the Seventh-day Adventists, Spiritualism, a revived Apocalypticism; utopian communal societies such as the Oneida Community, the Amana Colony, and the Shakers; as well as the emotion-laden revivals of the Second Great Awakening? The Canal also engendered the religious-inflected social movements of abolition, women’s suffrage, and temperance. This is the land in which major American figures of social and religious life mingled, worked together, and argued endlessly.

In what follows, we will journey from Albany down to Buffalo, stopping along the canalway to visit a few times and places that served as catalysts for changes which long outlasted their initial importance. Beginning with the rise of the Adventists and apocalypticism in Albany, we’ll move through the fight for the abolition of slavery across the canal, and end up on the eastern edges of the canalway, in Rochester, with the birth of the global phenomenon called Spiritualism.

Erie

John William Hill
Watercolor (1829)

Four feet deep and 40 feet wide, cutting east–west across New York state, the Erie Canal not only established physical links across geographic regions, it also remade the social and religious lives of everyone it touched. Albany newspapers, Syracuse salt, Genesee flour, and Western New York timber traveled on the canal alongside theater groups, formerly enslaved people, tourists, industrialists, and religious revivalists. This “one thronged street, from Buffalo to Albany,” as the great American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne phrased it, exceeded its transportation uses to become an empire builder, a political-economic superpower that was inextricable from a spiritual empire.

The Erie Canal follows the only significant gap in the Appalachian mountain chain that extends from Maine to Georgia, a geographical fact attributed by George Washington and his contemporaries to the goodness of “Providence.” This navigable break, this narrow strip of land in a vast country, was God’s gift to the fledgling nation, inspiring citizens to move west, push the frontier, and glean benefits from the natural riches of the continental interior. Intellectual ideas about Manifest Destiny flowed from the geographical realities of this place.

Still, God’s providence needed improvements, as nature did not offer an immediately accessible ride: too many rapids requiring portage and navigation challenged personal and commercial transport. At first, New York leaders pursued federal funding to construct the canal. But after President Thomas Jefferson vetoed that funding, New York governor DeWitt Clinton began the construction work in 1817 using state funding instead. Completed in 1825, the Erie Canal stretched from Albany, on the banks of the Hudson River, to Buffalo, on the edge of the Great Lakes, with eighty-three locks in between. It was one of the greatest civil technological feats in world history, made all the more amazing since little expertise in engineering for such a grand project existed at the time. From Albany it was a quick 150 miles by steamboat to New York Harbor, and this aquatic connection is what turned New York into a world-class city. Timber, grain, and goods came from Western and Central New York to expand the lively seaport, as markets for New York City’s goods opened up in western regions of the continent, as well as to Europe. New York City’s population increased nearly 700% between 1820 and 1860.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the Erie Canal provided the ability to travel from New York City all the way to Chicago with unheard-of ease: no bumpy wagon or carriage rides, just canal boats gliding over the smooth water surface. People could instead pay attention to their fellow passengers, hearing news about happenings in other parts of the new nation. Although travel could still be bitterly cold and filled with boredom, the Erie Canal was truly the information superhighway of its day.

Postcard

Mohawk Valley
near Fort Plain, New York, (1908)

Albany, 1845. What was known as the “Millerite Movement” coalesced into a conference held in Albany, New York, meant to bring together the ideas and practices of a “true Adventism.” This included an understanding that the end of the world, called the “advent,” was near. The new world became a place of revival, a space in which to relive a new beginning to the world, just as it paradoxically became a place to work toward the end of the world.

The promises of the westward land inspired the Christian-minded to think of this North American continent as a “New Eden.” Beginning in the seventeenth century, clusters of Europeans began crossing the Atlantic, seeking freedom from restrictions on religious and economic practices, and the potential of a newer, freer life ahead. “New” England became a new creation, and an emphasis on personal choice began to arise.

This “New Eden” also transformed into a “New Jerusalem.” The creation mythology of the new world turned into a glorious retelling of the coming end of the world. Many in the early Republic toiled under the impression that their work here on earth was coming to a close. With new technologies and theologies demonstrating the ways one could work out one’s own salvation, Americans realized that they could bring about the Millennium and usher in the second coming of Jesus Christ.

The belief that the end of the world was near was shared among most of the communities of upstate New York in the nineteenth century. How the apocalypse would happen became a point of contention and difference. While many made predictions about the time and place, others set to work on making sure people got their lives in order and were prepared morally and physically.

Joseph Smith and the “Latter-day Saints” began around 1830 in the canaltown of Palmyra, New York. The original, 1500-pound printing press needed to publish the first 5000 copies of the Book of Mormon had been floated up the canal from New York City. Halfway across the canal in Oneida, New York, John Humphrey Noyes founded the Oneida Community in 1848, and used the canalway as transportation for the metal works that economically sustained their community.

Both Smith and Noyes saw the coming end and organized themselves appropriately. Charles Finney’s ideas of free will and human improvement were in the foreground. Finney was riding the circuits up and down the canalway through the late 1820s and 1830s as part of what we now call the Second Great Awakening. Meanwhile the revolutionary technology of the canal linked the world together in the foreground—the perfectible state of earthly life, and hence the new millennium, was within range.

Religious reformers like Smith and Noyes were careful not to be too specific about the timing of the coming end of the world. Others, not so much. Around the same time, up the interconnected Champlain Canal, a wheat-farmer-turned-Baptist minister named William Miller predicted that the Second Coming of Jesus was to occur on March 21, 1843, based on his extensive study of the numerology of the Bible. When the end did not come, he revised his calculations for October 22, 1844.

Miller’s end-of-times predictions would have remained nothing but the rants of a local preacher were it not for the publishing work of Joshua Vaughan Himes and others: over five million Millerite tracts and papers are estimated to have been distributed across the country in the 1840s. Two decades before that, the Christian publishers of the American Tract Society started up in New York City, quickly becoming one of the largest print distributors in the United States, due in part to the market opened up by the Canal.

When the world did not end on October 22, 1844, Miller’s numerous followers quickly dubbed the date as the “Great Disappointment.” Many of them lost faith, or at least faith in his particular cause, and turned to the Shakers and other rapidly growing Christian sects for connection. Others, like Ellen Gould White, a leader of the new Adventist tradition, took up where Miller left off. Adventism was born at the 1845 meeting known as the “Albany Conference.” The Adventist groups that followed from this meeting were concerned, among other things, about healthy bodies—many of them promoted vegetarianism—and an understanding of Jesus’s imminent return. White and some of the other Adventist followers went on to Battle Creek, Michigan, to found the famed Sanatorium there, and ultimately moved on to create what became Loma Linda Medical Center in Southern California.

Since that 1845 meeting in Albany, the Seventh-day Adventist Church has become a global religious movement that, in contrast to the dwindling numbers of many other Christian sects and denominations, continues to grow. Recent Pew Research polls indicate that Seventh-day Adventist churches are the most ethnically diverse Christian group in the United States today. The Great Disappointment turned out to be the beginning—rather than the end—of an Erie Canal-born religious movement.

Autobiography of Jermain Wesley Loguen

Front pages
(1859)

Utica, 1848. In the midst of radical religious reforms going on in the “burned-over district”—in part sparked by the new economic and social structures that the Erie Canal helped put into place—Jermain Wesley Loguen took up the arguments for the abolition of slavery. Loguen had been born into slavery in Tennessee, escaped to Canada in the 1830s, and ended up in his later years as an established minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AME Zion) denomination, working as the “Underground Railroad King,” and using the canalway to harbor of fugitive slaves. Among Loguen’s many projects, he founded Hope Chapel AME Zion in Utica, New York, in 1848; created Underground Railroad stops across central New York; and worked in the abolitionist movement alongside Frederick Douglas, Harriett Tubman, and William Lloyd Garrison, among others.

Some states had already worked toward abolition, if always imperfectly: Vermont had abolished slavery in 1776, Pennsylvania in 1780, and Massachusetts in 1783; while Connecticut and Rhode Island passed gradual emancipation acts in 1784. In New York, by 1777, a majority of delegates in New York’s first Constitutional Convention opposed slavery, but legislation that would build toward emancipation was slow in coming, and at first it only worked toward gradual freedom. New York legislators passed a gradual emancipation act in 1799, and an updated one in 1817, before the final Act of Emancipation took effect in 1827.

Much of the hesitancy to enact total and immediate abolition had to do with the economic importance of New York City’s textile mills, which relied on cotton from the south and, hence, on enslaved labor to supply cheap material. Southern cotton was a raw material that had to be processed by the textile manufacturers in New York City. This connection between north and south bolstered local economies for both regions, making cotton goods a global commodity and elevating New York City as a major player in the world’s cotton market. The cotton industry expanded rapidly with the peace that followed the War of 1812, becoming, as historian Daniel Walker Howe put it, “a driving force in expanding and transforming the economy not only of the South but of the United States as a whole—indeed of the world.” Thus, while many anti-slavery societies and leaders may have been based in New York City, it was by no means a progressive city. Its economic might relied upon enslaved labor from the south.

Anti-slavery sentiments in the cities of upstate New York were also economic in character, with the Erie canalway providing proof that economic success could occur without heavy reliance on enslaved labor. When the canal was completed, cutting through Haudenosaunee and settler lands alike, local farms gained direct access not only to Albany, New York City, and other markets to the east, but to the growing markets of the west like Cleveland and Chicago, with the latter becoming the nation’s key boomtown by the 1870s and 1880s. Thus, farmers who were once living in remote corners of the young nation were instantly transformed into world citizens, embedded within a national, and even international economy that the canal made possible.

Religious arguments about slavery, and eventually about African American suffrage, were deeply pronounced across the Empire State in the first half of the nineteenth century. Churches split over the issue, while new churches formed, including many African American churches, as theological interests intersected with economic interests and political movements. “Religion had given birth to abolitionism in the Burned-over District,” notes historian Milton Sernett, “but now abolitionism pitted Christian and Christian.”

On one hand, many congregations and denominations upheld slavery, or were too meek to take a stand against it. On the other hand many devout Christians worked for African American freedom. People like Loguen, Austin Steward, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Samuel Ward, and Harriet Tubman all worked across upstate New York and called on fellow Christians to rise up against the sinful injustice of slavery.

Moreover, Christian groups, Black and white, worked for the emancipation and education of African Americans. Along the canalway in the first half of the nineteenth century were educational institutes such as the Oneida Institute, where Loguen studied, and also the Whitesboro Seminary and Clinton Seminary, which provided education to white and Black people alike. One of upstate New York’s most distinguished persons of the time, the revivalist preacher Charles Finney, would go on to become President of Oberlin College in Ohio. Founded in 1833 on Christian principles, Oberlin was co-educational from the beginning and started admitting African Americans by 1835. For these religious leaders, it was not enough to abolish slavery, it was essential to create a social structure that sustained free Black people.

Historians have long noted the impact of Finney’s revivalist theology on the consciousness of the age. But ideas that he espoused, such as human perfectibility and free will, would have found no purchase without the canal, the thread that linked people of the cities and farms alike directly to a globally based economic prosperity, a democratic governance made possible through the spread of news and information, and an enthusiastic religious life whose currents traveled far and wide. People of the canalway didn’t just hear Finney speak of perfection, they saw perfection flowing through the streets.

Loguen put this into action by founding Underground Railroad stops, AME Zion churches, and implementing inspiring words for mid nineteenth-century people in Central New York. In 1859, Loguen published The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman, and in 1868 he became Bishop of the AME Zion denomination. From an enslaved childhood in Tennessee to becoming bishop of a Christian denomination, Loguen’s journey tells us much about the changing religious and social implications of new technologies, economies, and theologies at the time.

The Fox Sisters

From the book, The death-blow to spiritualism: being the true story of the Fox sisters, as revealed by authority of Margaret Fox Kane and Catherine Fox Jencken. By Reuben Briggs Davenport. New York: G.W. Dillingham, 1898.

Rochester, 1849. Further up the canal, Rochester also witnessed a religious phenomenon in which the scientific work of the day confronted the rapturous religiosity of life on the frontier. The Fox sisters are often credited with starting the global phenomenon called “Spiritualism” in 1849, when Maggie Fox (age 14) and Kate Fox (age 11) began to hear “rappings,” invisible knocks that, because of the girls’ great imaginations, became connected with spirits of the dead. That they were able to convince so many others of this showed a paradoxical state of affairs in the US at the time: far from the Scientific Revolution occurring in Europe, or even the secularist underpinnings of the US’s founders closer to the Atlantic seaboard, in the far western reaches of the Republic, unexplainable phenomena roamed free.

Later in life, the sisters recanted their original communion with the dead, saying it was all a hoax. But few cared about the Fox sisters’ confessions in 1888. By then, Spiritualism was a global phenomenon. Not far from the Fox sisters’ home in Rochester, the Kodak company made photographic technologies popular, and they became synthesized with spiritualism in a new format called “spirit photography.”

By the late 1840s, much of upstate New York had become a seamless, informational whole. Natural resources from salt to timber to labor to grain became embedded in a national (and international) economy, coupled with a spiritual-technological view of the world. After all, this was the New Eden and the New Jerusalem. European authorities had little to say about what went on in the inland of the Americas: new religious practices and ideas began to arise in various parts of the Erie Canalway, brought on by so many interchanges along the waterway from the East Coast to, eventually, the Midwest.

By this time, new religious and social movements showed the way forward—which is also to say, Westward. For religiously-minded and religiously-bodied people, this was the opportunity to work out the Kingdom of God: from Utopian communities like the Amana and the Shakers; to Apocalyptic groups like the Mormons and Oneida; to champions of women’s suffrage like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, who all grew up and were educated and worked along the canalway; to workers for abolition like Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith, and Sojourner Truth, who lived and worked along the canalway during the mid-nineteenth century. Each of these groups had different perspectives on how to achieve a thorough and pure “end of the world,” and they all continued to work for it in their own ways.

The canal also seemed to remap divisions between religion and science. Just as it became a locus for new religious movements—with their sometimes charismatic approaches to conceiving of the structure of the universe—the canalway was also the home of the Rensselaer School, now RPI, the first technical college in the English-speaking world. Set up just as the canal was finished, the Rensselaer School’s founding had been prompted by what was seen as a need for engineers and “men” of science, who could continue to build the new world. Meanwhile, higher education was being remade as African Americans like Loguen were learning at the Oneida Institute and women like Stanton were getting an education at Troy Seminary.

The canalway was a land of paradox, a land of technological prowess and religious fervor, of secrets and revelations, where hoaxes were privately made and publicly revealed, and where groups like the Masons, as well as the Mormons, created powerful friends and enemies through secret societies and rituals. Ultimately, with the theological rise of “Free Will,” thanks to Finney, and the economic development of “free enterprise,” personal-spiritual lives became disconnected from social practices of established religions. And yet, progressive theological-social values like abolition and women’s rights and secular-scientific views of technology coexisted alongside spirits and special revelations along the Erie Canalway.

When the Fox Sisters heard (or didn’t hear) the rappings of the deceased on that evening in 1849, they were consciously or subconsciously bringing together the hopes and dreams, the scientific enquiries and the rapturous insights, of many of the New Americans who had come to the land.

By the 1860s, the old Erie Canalway became the path for the railroads, beginning the canal’s decline in importance. The railway paths would later transition to interstate highways, which made overland travel, not canal passage, the choice of transportation throughout the twentieth century. Technology was layered on technology, and the canalway is today a geographic palimpsest, a surface on which we can see new stories, but the older histories are still legible between the lines.

The Erie Canal gave birth to religious groups, but few of them stayed put. These groups took various routes out of town: via rail, water, wagon, and foot. Many, like the Mormons, Adventists, and Spiritualists, spread to remote corners of the globe. Others slowly faded into the landscape. But regardless of whether the religions moved, survived, or disappeared, particular beliefs and behaviors continued to flow from this ribbon of water and have remained part of the peculiar mixture of practices across the pluralistic United States.

SOURCES & FURTHER READINGS

Whitney Cross’s The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850 (Cornell University Press, 1950) Roger W. Hecht, ed, The Erie Canal Reader: 1790–1950 (Syracuse University Press, 2003) Peter Bernstein, Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation (Norton, 2005) Milton C. Sernett, North Star Country: Upstate New York and the Crusade for African American Freedom (Syracuse University Press, 2002) S.B. Rodriguez-Plate, “Did the Erie Canal Help Put an End to Slavery?” America magazine (August, 2017) S.B. Rodriguez-Plate, “Watering the Roots of Mormonism,” Sacred Matters (December, 2017)