This is an important and a timely book. Jessica Lepler’s second monograph tells the story of the canal mania that captivated British, United States, and Central American visionaries, investors, engineers, politicians, and adventurers during the fraught decade of the 1820s. As an economic and cartographic historian of the financial world of the Early American Republic, Lepler’s research moved seamlessly from the study of financial panics to unearthing the schemes and dreams that sought to revolutionize not just the political order but the actual terrestrial earth itself. Canal Dreamers connects the dozens of projects proposed for various waterway sites, mainly focusing on the Central American routes, but also linking their personnel and underlying ideology to the British canal system, the Erie Canal, the Oswego Canal, Florida proposals, and the Tehuantepec Isthmus in Mexico. During the course of her previous research, Lepler chanced upon a “Plano Ideal,” an illustrated map suggesting a scheme for Central American isthmian transit that was copied and sent to the British Foreign Office in 1825 by its agent G. A. Thompson. It was that document that led her to uncover the canal boom that predated the more famous railroad boom.
The book has a relatively unusual structure for a scholarly monograph but one that is well suited for the breathless plans, schemes, and occasional hucksters to which it introduces the readers; the fifteen rather short chapters of 10–20 pages each bounce around the Atlantic and across concerns such as weather, water, (political) recognition, technology, corrupt bargains, and specific dreamers and their projects. Chapter 1 has a title of wonderfully evocative meaning—“Fluid Sovereignty”—offering up a concept upon which other historians and debates could usefully build. There is a list of abbreviations, which encompasses both acronyms for commercial entities discussed in the text and also the names of archival sources used. Lamentably, there are extensive endnotes but no stand-alone bibliography—a publishing feature that is becoming more common. Lepler’s archival research is extraordinarily extensive, across more than fifty repositories in ten countries, using sources in at least three languages. Her work is part of a historiographical trend that seeks to blur the borders of US history by situating its issues and persons in a more true-to-reality, globally connected, transnational context that, by its very nature, tamps down early generations’ claims of exceptionalism.
Canal Dreamers is an excellent, provocative, agenda-setting book for the comprehensive and skilled way that its author connects a disparate set of people, places, and agendas, including Jeremy Bentham, Oregon settlement, bull shark nurseries, the London loan failures of 1825, and more. This review highlights two examples of the lines of research into which this book could lead. First, a constant, intentional feature of Lepler’s research into the canal dreamers is her excavation of the Indigenous experience that is intertwined with that of the moguls and land speculators. The pace of forced resettlement picked up over the course of the 1820s, not only in the continental United States, but throughout the Americas. As land grants and gold rushes drew settlers westward, northward, and southward, they overrode or ignored Indigenous people’s treaty rights. Lepler’s study ranges across the experiences of the Meskwaki/Fox, Oneida, Seneca, Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), Sauk, Miskitú, Rama, and Maya groups. She consistently includes Indigenous voices such as King George Frederick and Keokuk, pointing out not only that the canal dreamers typically silenced them or denied their sovereignty but also that some of them, too, were speculators and profiteers themselves.
Second, although she takes their schemes seriously, Lepler does capture some of the manic energy, hyperbolic claims, false geographies, and enormous pots of cash sloshing around the canal dreams. Not unlike their twenty-first century counterparts, operating with gregarious overconfidence built on shaky factual knowledge of real-world conditions, Lepler’s canal dreamers draw lines and dots on maps on which they name invented places such as Washingtonia, Hindostan (in Indiana), and the infamous humbug Poyais. They change their names. They hoodwink politicians. They lobby for patronage and government jobs to add prestige to their schemes. The general frothy tone of the canal boom rhetoric, coupled with the strategies private investors pursued to ensure their dreams were made less risky by securing a public funding or legal backstop, introduces new characters to the canonical halls of corrupt bargains.
Lepler notes that most of the canal dreams of the 1820s remained unbuilt, but she asks historians to reconsider “the false binary of success and failure,” arguing that there is something valuable to be found in the study of “undoable dreams” and not just in the “definitively done.” Workaday citizens of the 2020s will recognize the sentiment with which Lepler closes her book, reminding us that “sometimes the world is better off when the powerful prove incapable of achieving their goals.” Better off, indeed.
