86 
INTRODUCTION. 
During several years after the western company had commenced its improve¬ 
ments, charters were granted to associations which proposed to remove obstruc¬ 
tions in the St. Lawrence, the Seneca and other rivers; but none of those com¬ 
panies achieved any effective improvement, except the Seneca Lock Navigation 
Company, which made an imperfect navigation between the Oswego river and 
the Cayuga and Seneca lakes. 
To Gouverneur Morris, history will assign the merit of first suggesting a direct 
and continuous communication from Lake Erie to the Hudson. In 1800, he an¬ 
nounced this idea from the shore of the Niagara river to a friend in Europe, in 
the following enthusiastic language : “ Hundreds of large ships will, in no distant 
period, bound on the billows of these inland seas. Shall I lead your astonishment 
to the verge of incredulity l I will. Know then that one-tenth part of the ex¬ 
pense borne by Britain in the last campaign, would enable ships to sail from 
London through the Hudson river into Lake Erie. As yet we only crawl along 
the outer shell of our country. The interior excels the part we inhabit in soil, in 
climate, in every thing. The proudest empire of Europe is but a bauble com¬ 
pared to what America may be, must be.”* The praise awarded to Gouverneur 
Morris must be qualified by the fact, that the scheme he conceived was that of a 
canal with an uniform declination, and without locks, from Lake Erie to the 
Hudson.f Morris communicated his project to Simeon De Witt in 1803, by 
whom it was made known to James Geddes in 1804. It afterwards became the 
subject of conversation between Mr. Geddes and Jesse Hawley, and this commu¬ 
nication is supposed to have given rise to the series of essays written by Mr. 
Hawley, under the signature of Hercules, in the Genesee Messenger, continued 
from October, 1807, until March, 1808, and which first brought the public mind 
into familiarity with the subject.! These essays, written in a jail, were the 
grateful return, by a patriot, to a country which punished him with imprisonment 
for being unable to pay debts owed to another citizen, and displayed deep re- 
* Elkanah W atson’s History of the Canals. 
t Colden’s Memoirs. 
t Letter of Simeon De Witt. 
