Erie Canal what role did state governments play in the economy? *

The Erie Canal was the greatest American engineering project of the first half of the nineteenth century, though it was completed only a quarter of the way through it. It was the single most important factor in the emergence of New York as the "Empire State" and New York City as the economic center of the new nation. The canal sent settlers and manufactured goods through New York to the frontier and funneled grain, salt, lumber, and other raw materials to New York City for sale to the nation and the world. The canal cut the cost of freight transportation through its territory by up to 90 percent and reduced delivery times from uncertain weeks to scheduled days. By channeling overland through western New York, the canal bypassed traditional trade routes centered on Lake Ontario, limiting Canada's share of economic growth. By reaching westward before the American southern states, especially Virginia, which had tried for decades to canalize the Potomac, New York's canal delivered national economic dominance to the North. As the first human-made artery communicating with the continental interior, the canal provided an early bond of national unity, soon strengthened by other canals, railroads, and eventually highways. The Erie Canal began the process of both tying the nation together and dividing it: the canal helped establish a national free-market industrial economy, but its locus in New York sowed division between the slave-based agrarian economy of the South and the rest of the country that eventually helped undermine the Union.

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