The Illinois and Michigan Canal is completed…
April 1848 CE
In Illinois, it runs ninety-six miles (one hundred and fifty-four kilometers) from the Chicago River in Bridgeport, Chicago to the Illinois River at LaSalle-Peru.
The canal crosses the Chicago Portage, and will help establish Chicago as the transportation hub of the United States, before the railroad era.
Canals are the highways of the day.
The Erie Canal and the Illinois and Michigan Canal cement cultural and trade ties to the Northeast rather than the South.
Before the canal, farming in the region was limited to subsistence farming.
The canal will make agriculture in northern Illinois profitable, opening up connections to eastern markets.
With the expansion of agriculture, the canal creates the city of Chicago.
Without the initial stimulus of the canal, Chicago would not have attracted the populations, railroads and the industry that it will.
The canal also influences Illinois's north border.
The first known Europeans to travel the area, Father Marquette and Louis Joliet, had gone through the Chicago Portage on their return trip.
Joliet had remarked that with a canal they could remove the need to portage and the French could create an empire spanning the continent.
The first quantitative survey of the portage had been performed in 1816 by Stephen H. Long.
It was on the basis of these measurements that he was able to make a specific proposal for a canal.
With several slave states recently admitted to the Union, Nathaniel Pope and Ninian Edwards had seen the opportunity to make Illinois a state.
They had proposed moving the border northward from the southern tip of Lake Michigan to allow the canal to be within a single state.
They believed that the canal would firmly align Illinois with the free states and so Congress granted them statehood even though Illinois did not meet the population requirements.
In 1824, Samuel D. Lockwood, one of the first commissioners of the canal, had been given the authorization to hire contractors to survey a route for the canal to follow.
Construction on the canal had begun in 1836, although it was stopped for several years due to an Illinois state financial crisis related to the Panic of 1837.
The Canal Commission had a grant of two hundred and eighty-four thousand acres (one hundred and fifteen thousand hectares) of federal land which it sold at one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre (three hundred and nine dollars per square kilometer) to finance the construction.
Still, money had to be borrowed from eastern U.S. and British investors to finish the canal.
Most of the canal work has been done by Irish immigrants who previously worked on the Erie Canal.
The work is considered dangerous and many workers have died, although no official records exist to indicate how many.
The Irish immigrants who toiled to build the canal are often derided as a sub-class and are treated very poorly by other citizens of the city.
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