TRANSPORTATION CHANGES IN THE ST. LAWRENCE - GREAT LAKES REGION 1828-1860
Gerald Tulchinsky
Transportation has always been vital to Canadian economic life and was, in fact, the key to the movement of goods and people and to the expansion of various economic frontiers. The Canadian nation itself was realized when modern transportation systems joined scattered regions. In the short period from 1828-1860 creative and revolutionary transportation developments in the St. Lawrence-Great Lakes region laid the basis for the transportation system that eventually linked East and West. Steamboats came into general use; rivers were dredged; channels were marked; and major canals, docks, and lighthouses were built. There were early experiments in aerial transport by balloon, and the first railway networks were laid down.
These new and dramatic transportation developments in Canada during the mid-nineteenth century were stimulated by the ancient and continuing pattern of exploiting the country's agricultural and forest resources, a process which H.A. Innis called "staple economy". Another economic historian, H.G.J. Aitken, sees in these transportation developments an example of another long-standing Canadian tradition which he calls "defensive expansionism", or government-assisted growth of facilities which would prevent the United States from dominating British North America. Both themes are highly important in understanding the connections between improved transportation facilities and Canada's place as an under-developed economy in the international trading system. They explain, too, the strategy of continental expansion in which government played a crucial role. Resource exploitation and "defensive expansionism" were carried out by the business class which promoted transportation innovations and also profited from them. The relationship between these businessmen and the politicians whose legislative measures largely shaped the climate of business enterprise is interesting and complex. Transportation developments touched other sectors of the economy as well. Perhaps the most profound effects were felt by the Canadian people in the course of their daily lives.
Canals
One of the major problems which arose during the settlement of Upper Canada was the high cost of transportation for goods coming from Montreal, the principal port of entry on the St. Lawrence River. These difficulties were more than just financial; there were very long delays and serious hazards in the movement of commercial goods and vital military supplies. In the aftermath of the War of 1812-14, the British government feared that these problems would hamper troops guarding the posts along the Upper Canadian frontier. It was this combination of commercial and military concern which prompted the construction of the earliest major canals built along the St. Lawrence-Great Lakes system in the 1820's and 1830's. These were the Lachine Canal, the Welland Canal (the first stage of which was completed in 1829 to by-pass Niagara Falls), and the Rideau Canal between Bytown and Kingston. The latter two were major feats of engineering, labour mobilization, and capital investment. Certainly these projects could not have been completed without the direct involvement of government.
After a weak and inadequate start under the auspices of a private company, the legislature of Lower Canada, despite a reputation for being anti-commercial, undertook financial responsibility for the construction of the Lachine Canal around the dangerous Lachine rapids above Montreal. The British government accepted a similar responsibility for the extremely costly (almost one million pounds) Rideau Canal which, in their view, would serve both military and economic strategies. Indeed, the Rideau was built under the supervision of British army engineers who employed local contractors to construct various portions of the work. Like the Lachine Canal, the Rideau was built mainly by Irish immigrants assisted by Scottish and French-Canadian artisans. A different engineering and financial influence can be seen in the earliest of the Welland canals where New York State had supplied capital, technical experts, and even a substantial number of the same working men who had only recently finished the Erie Canal. Yet, even here, large sums of Upper Canadian and smaller amounts of Lower Canadian government funds were invested, and when the first WeIland Canal proved to be flimsy and inadequate, it was quickly taken over as a public work. This was a very common pattern throughout North America; in the neighbouring United States most of the major canal systems, including the immensely successful Erie, were state or local projects. Although entrepreneurs were not lacking, local capital was scarce; and there was no easy mechanism in Canada until later in the nineteenth century for drawing upon foreign, chiefly British, capital.
The importance to Canada of these canals of the 1820's and early 1830's was incalculable. Even though the canals did not succeed in drawing the vast trade of the entire mid-continental interior, they were highly important parts of a more efficient Canadian transportation system. Together with the competing Erie Canal, they perhaps aided in the extension of Upper Canada's agricultural frontier by greatly lessening transportation costs for imports, exports, and passengers. At the same time they opened up regions like the Rideau Lakes area which had been inaccessible. These projects provided brief employment for thousands of immigrants who often worked under hazardous conditions for low wages. Employers often used the truck system of payment by which men were paid in commodities, such as liquor, rather than in money. Canal labourers who organized to fight this situation (for example, the Lachine Canal strike of 1843) were among the first labour union agitators in Canada. Canal construction brought huge sums of money into the country and generally stimulated economic activity even though the funds filtered unevenly through the various regions and segments of the population. The demands for labour, food, supplies, hardware, and horses created expansion throughout the primitive economy of Canada.
Following the dramatic and significant burst of canal activity during the 1820's and early 1830's, nearly ten years intervened before a new era of significant waterway improvement was undertaken in the Canadas. Exhaustion of financial resources (the British government was furious at the huge cost of the Rideau Canal), economic stagnation, and political conflict deterred further activity until the union of the Canadas in 1840 introduced a new era of stability and optimism.
A vast and comprehensive new program was begun as a Canadian government public works project with the assistance of the British government who guaranteed the interest on the funds borrowed to build the canals. Planners aimed at improving the navigability of the St. Lawrence waterway between Montreal and Prescott where rapids and shallows had always impeded shipping. Canals were cut at Beauharnois, Cornwall, and Williamsburg; and the Lachine and Welland canals were widened. When completed, at the huge expense of nearly two million pounds which the Province of Canada had borrowed in London, these canals provided an integrated, through-waterway from Montreal to Lake Erie for large vessels.
Although the canals succeeded only moderately as an outlet for the produce from the Canadian and United States regions bordering the Great Lakes, they constituted another important addition to the Canadian transportation network. It was cheaper to ship goods to the interior from Montreal than from New York City, but New York long continued to hold its advantage over Montreal as an ocean port because it did not freeze in winter. Furthermore at least one of the canals provided an important source of power for industrial use; during the late 1840's the Lachine Canal in Montreal became the site of dozens of new factories which manufactured flour, sugar, tools, lumber, clothing, steam engines, boats, and a substantial range of other goods. To encourage such industrialization, the government leased industrial sites at low rates. Consequently, manufacturers and speculators seized the opportunity to establish in Montreal and hence created a new aspect of economic life. Montreal had hitherto been principally a commercial city. By 1854, some twenty new factories employing approximately two thousand people had made Montreal the largest manufacturing centre in Canada. Steamboats
The major canal building programs of the 1820's and 1830's as well as the several minor programs along the lower Ottawa, the Richelieu, and the St. Lawrence Rivers were accompanied by a rapidly increased use of steamboats on Canadian waterways. While steamboats did not completely replace the bateaux, Durham boats, sloops, schooners, or rafts that were used to carry cargo and passengers, they were used increasingly for premium (high value) freight and passenger services. Starting in 1809, steamboats ran on the lower St. Lawrence River, and became common on the Great Lakes by the end of the following decade. During the next several years the `puffing billies', almost all of them built in Montreal shipyards, were to be found on inland waterways throughout the settled areas of British North America.
The building of steam engines for marine and stationary use developed into a major industry after the introduction of steamships. As early as 1818, a small foundry was set up by Americans in Montreal to build engines to meet the growing demand. This and similar factories established in Montreal and, later, in Kingston and Toronto formed the basis of the early Canadian engineering industry. A key link between the era of simple staple economy and the period known as the "age of steam and iron", they initiated Canada's transportation revolution. Both transportation and industrial activity were concentrated at the major commercial centres, and urban growth during these years was directly related to the growing connection between the two. This relationship became even clearer during the 1850's when railways encouraged the rapid growth and expansion of iron foundries and other industries.
Railroads
The age of steam and iron, which was foreshadowed in Canada by the launching of John Molson's steamship Accommodation in 1809, was to become an established fact of economic, social, and political life during the 1850's. Successful experiments in the use of steam engines on railroads in England during the l820's inspired a flurry of railway construction in Britain and the United States during the next two decades. The enthusiasm for railways was at an extremely high pitch during the 1840's and, quite naturally, Canadians interested in improved transportation and profits readily took up the idea. In his famous pamphlet, The Philosophy of Railroads, published in 1850, Thomas Keefer, a distinguished Canadian engineer, extolled the virtues of railways in the following grandiloquent terms:
The civilizing tendency of the locomotive is one of the modern anomalies, which, however inexplicable it may appear to some, is yet so fortunately patent to all, that it is admitted as readily as the action of steam, though the substance be invisible and its secret ways unknown to man. Poverty, indifference, the bigotry or jealousy of religious denominations, local dissensions or political demagoguism, may stifle or neutralize the best intended efforts of an educational system; but that invisible power which has waged successful war with the material elements, will assuredly overcome the prejudices and mental weaknesses or the design of mental tyrants ... it waits for no convenient season, but with a restless rushing, roaring assiduity, it keeps up a constant and unavoidable spirit of enquiry or comparison; and while ministering to the material wants, and appealing to the covetousness of the multitude, it unconsciously, irresistibly, impels them to a more intimate union with their fellow men.
Since the 1830's there lay strong interest in the possibility of building railways. Railways were discussed in the newspapers and in the Legislative Assemblies which would supply financial assistance to these projects; and the country's first railway, a fourteen mile portage line from Laprairie, near Montreal, to St. Jean, on the Richelieu River was completed in 1836. By the mid-forties, with general prosperity and the example of successful railway projects in Britain and the United States, lines were being planned to run between many Canadian towns and cities and there were visionary schemes of extending railways east to the other British North American provinces and west to the Pacific. At this relatively early date, the "philosophy of railroads" included estimates of social and economic benefits, and conceived of railways as instruments of policy, as means of better communications between existing communities and distant frontiers, and as aids to the strategy of British North American defense. Toronto and Montreal became the two major centres of Canadian railway promotion. Montreal entrepreneurs planned lines to winter ports on the Atlantic coast, and Toronto businessmen projected rail routes into new hinterlands to the north and west of the city.
It soon became apparent, however, that without strong government assistance, only a few short portage-type railways could be built; and, in 1849, the Canadian Legislature passed the Guarantee Act by which the payment of interest (up to 6%) on bonds issued by railways over 75 miles long would be guaranteed by the government once the railway was at least half-completed. This legislation was designed for big railway projects such as the Northern which was to connect Toronto and Georgian Bay, the St. Lawrence and Atlantic between Montreal and Portland, Maine, and the Great Western from Toronto to Windsor. Behind the protective skirts of this act, these projects went forward very rapidly and all were completed by 1854. There was a huge inflow of capital from Britain and the United States, but a considerable proportion was raised by private Canadian investors. More important, the granting of charters to these railways and many others (most of which were never built) reflected the rise of new groups of businessmen. There were the promoters of these lines, the speculators in railway stock issues or in land, the suppliers of building and operating equipment, the contractors, and a host of others. And there emerged, also, the entrepreneurs who often combined a number of these interests and who, by especially adroit manipulation, sometimes garnered huge profits. Although their actions are often extremely difficult to trace, those entrepreneurs who became wealthy through their railway interests often had close connections with politicians who sponsored and supported railway legislation. Sir Allan MacNab, leader of the Conservative party in Upper Canada, declared without hesitation, "my politics are railways". Few dissented and there are indications that huge numbers of politicians were obligated to the entrepreneur, Samuel Zimmerman, the key figure in the Great Western Railway.
The greatest railway project of this era was the Grand Trunk Railway, a Montreal to Toronto line begun in 1853, which was intended to be the Canadian section of an inter-colonial railway that would run through British North America from Halifax to Windsor. When Canadian railway promoters and politicians got through with this project, some had pocketed huge profits; and the public was saddled with a staggering debt of $26 million. This debt absorbed a large portion of government revenue just to pay the interest on the loans (really outright gifts) that the government had extended to the company. The generous "legacy" the government allowed the Grand Trunk has been overshadowed by the even more generous grants of land, cash, railway lines, and other valuable benefits which were given to the Canadian Pacific Railway Company during the 1880's. Nevertheless, the Grand Trunk scheme was beset by waste, mismanagement, and some very dextrous sleight-of-hand. By 1853 the Grand Trunk company struggled under the ailing St. Lawrence and Atlantic Railway, the Quebec and Richmond line, a commitment to build the Victoria Bridge across the St. Lawrence River at Montreal, and the cost of constructing some two hundred additional and unnecessary miles of line from Toronto to Guelph and Sarnia, a region already served by the Great Western. Promoters A.T. Galt, Luther Holton, Casimir Gzowski and David L. Macpherson, were among the principal beneficiaries. British stock and bondholders and the Canadian people were left with an overly elaborate, expensive, debt-ridden, and unprofitable railway built on a gauge different from the western United States railways it was intended to join.
There were, however, some benefits to this extensive construction. The most substantial of them was probably the rapid acceleration of economic growth during the 1850's when capital formation, much of it for railway construction, ran up to a staggering $100 million. With the exception of a brief, but serious business depression in 1857, this was a decade of significant economic expansion. Yet, it would be unwise to attribute all or even most of that expansion to the spin-off of railway construction. The rapid rise in the price of wheat during the Crimean War 1853-1856, the expansion of the American market for sawn lumber and other commodities, and the continuing expansion of Upper Canada were, in fact, the crucial elements in this prosperity. It is arguable, also, that the railways did not alone create the high rate of immigration or the general wide-spread industrial expansion in this era. Certainly some of the basic framework for the latter was clearly laid by 1850, before the railway age began in earnest. Nor can it be proven that railways were almost indispensable to the movement of commodities and to the expansion of the agricultural and lumbering frontier. For these, the lake, river, and canal systems were increasingly effective and, along with improvements to the road network, probably could have been extended with less cost than the amounts expended on railways. What the railways did accomplish, however, was to open the country to year-round transportation.
This did not mean, however, that commerce went on evenly twelve months of the year. The bulky cargoes of wheat, lumber, and timber moved mainly by water, still a far cheaper form of transportation than rail, and, railways notwithstanding, these staple industries remained seasonal. Even though the completion of the Victoria Bridge in 1859 made it possible to run trains from Sarnia and Windsor to Portland, Maine (Montreal's winter port), a very small proportion of the staples went over that route. Indeed, very large quantities of Canadian exports were still carried to tide-water on American canals or railways. Still, it was the age of railways, and a healthy scepticism about the benefits commonly attributed to them should not blind one to the fact that practically everyone believed that railways were bound to bring prosperity in their wake.
Despite their questionable economic necessity, the railways became almost a sign of the times. Rail lines crossed the peaceful countryside and pushed into most of the major towns and cities; tracks were laid in the middle of streets; and locomotives spewed out smoke and noise, enraging concerned citizens. Railways considerably altered the areas in which they were built and deeply affected the lives of ordinary citizens by making relatively rapid transit available. Railway passage was cheap and fast. By reaching into the back townships where a less expensive right of way could be purchased, rail transportation served a broader segment of the population than steamboats had readily done. Although initially problem-ridden by derailments and other accidents, the railways soon became a very popular form of travel. Those who could afford it enjoyed comfortable sleeping and dining accommodations; there were upholstered chairs in second class and simple wooden benches in third class.
Railways gave rise to a whole new segment of the Canadian working class within a relatively short period. The railways were built by large gangs of labourers, among them immigrants who, not yet settled, were more mobile than earlier settlers. After the road beds were constructed, the tracks laid, and the bridges erected, the railroad still required regular maintenance. Often the road bed needed improvement, and large sections of most railways required a reduction in the grades. Men were needed to operate trains and repair equipment. The demand for locomotives and other railway stock created a broader market and stimulated expansion in the engine foundries and other metal working shops of Montreal. Railway-related factories arose in Kingston, Toronto, Hamilton, and London. The railway companies, in particular the Grand Trunk and the Great Western, erected what were, in those days, huge shops at their rail yards in Montreal and Hamilton. By 1860, Canadian railways employed a total of 6.600 men on their combined payrolls, and many more men worked in the factories that arose in several towns and cities to supply equipment.
Although one must concede that railways were just one part of the continuing transportation revolution, one should not underestimate their impact. The railways were a powerful engine of rapid change in the commercial and social fabric of the country. The railway was destined to expand. By 1860 the railway network in Ontario and Quebec extended along the more settled St. Lawrence-Great Lakes Valley, but promoters were now planning to build lines up the Ottawa Valley, east to Quebec, and on into the Maritimes. There was the recurrent idea of building an east-west line to span the continent. Elsewhere in British North America, notably in the Maritime colonies where a highly-ambitious, separate railway development program had been underway during the 1850's, there were several plans to connect cities and open new regions. Many of these schemes took decades to realize; yet with massive federal, provincial, and municipal government assistance, together with huge sums of foreign capital, many major railways were built. Indeed, one of the most important features of the railway era was the extent of government involvement in these schemes, many of them of questionable general utility. Growing sophistication in the ability to manipulate the financial structure of railway companies and to influence all levels of government created vast profits for an increasingly aggressive group of entrepreneurs. Notwithstanding the St. Lawrence-Great Lakes region had entered the railway age, it must be emphasized that the region still depended heavily on is maritime strength which, through canal developments, river improvements, and such important technological innovations as the screw propeller, grain loader, and iron hull, continued to grow during this period of rapid transition and diversification.
