Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,882

This is the grave of Elkanah Watson.

Born in 1758 in Plymouth, Massachusetts, Watson was apprenticed to the firm of John Brown in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1774. That was a huge firm because Brown was a big time slave trader, in addition to other products in the maritime Atlantic trading world. Watson rose in the company and Brown’s trust personally. In 1778, Brown sent Watson on a mission to deliver $50,000 in cash to his traders in Charleston, which was sown into his clothes. Big responsibility! He made it and then spent some time exploring the South, all the way into Florida, leading to him starting a journal that he maintained for his long life and is an important primary source for historians.

Watson completed his indentureship in 1779 but kept working for the Brown family. Brown sent him to Paris shortly after to deliver messages to Benjamin Franklin and then he stayed over there, starting a business in Nantes and London. The business didn’t go that well, but he was clearly looking for some successful operations of his own. He became an actually important guy in London, even meeting the future King George IV. He came back to the U.S. after the Revolution with his European business partner. They tried to open a business in Edenton, North Carolina, but it didn’t do well either. So Watson ended up taking a shot in New York. He was involved in the stealing of Iroquois Confederacy land, or perhaps more accurately, the selling and development of that land after it was stolen.

Where Watson would make his money was in canals. He was pushing this idea as early as the mid 1780s, including pitching the idea to George Washington during a visit to the future president at Mount Vernon in 1805. He long claimed to have been the first major proponent of the Erie Canal and later, he and DeWitt Clinton would publicly spar over who really deserved credit for the idea. I don’t have a ship in this levee, so I don’t really care, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Watson really does deserve more credit for this than he usually gets since we focus on the political dimensions of getting the thing funded and built versus who really thought of the idea and made a compelling argument that it was realistic. Or maybe historians of the topic actually do that, but I’d have to look at that literature again, some of which is in my office, but let’s be honest, who really cares for the purposes of this ridiculous series. But more importantly, we have evidence of how Watson saw that canals would transform the economy of upstate New York and pushed for that from the very beginning of the nation. Of course this all required the violent stripping of land rights from the Iroquois Confederacy tribes, which Watson was all-in on no matter which side of the American Revolution those tribes had favored, a position held by nearly all Americans. What’s more American than genocide after all. In fact, Watson said that to educate an Indian was as stupid as educating a bear. They both should be eliminated.

Moreover, Watson was working with Philip Schuyler, the New York power broker and supposed friend of the Oneida but very much not an actual friend, to promote his canal ideas by scheming the Oneida out of their land. They were involved in all sorts of schemes together, though they eventually broke and their friendship ended for reasons that aren’t totally clear to me.

Anyway, in the early 19th century, Watson went all in on scientific agriculture, as it was at the time. He started a Menino sheep farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1807. In doing so, and to promote his broader ideas about agriculture, he started the nation’s first county fair, also near Pittsfield, in 1810. And today, this idea has truly fulfilled Watson’s vision–cotton candy and washed up country stars from two decades ago. And also big sheep that kids like to see. In fact, Watson actually did push for specifically kids’ activities at his fairs so that they would want to come. I imagine most of the kids who went in 1810 were used to seeing sheep and pigs though, unlike kids today. He also created competitions for women, such as sewing lace, creating hats, and things of this nature. But also, while I don’t know if he was the first person to import Menino sheep to the United States, he was among them, and the idea was to get other farmers interested in his sheep and other productive animals. He wasn’t selling them, not yet. This was a “first one’s free” scenario, where he sought to pull in these farmers to his ideas and then profit from them later.

Now, in all of this, and in all his activities, Watson was looking to make a buck. In his book Empire of Liberty, the esteemed historian Gordon Wood called Watson an “artisan and representative of a new breed of hustlers springing up everywhere,” a symbol of the new class of American who seemed to dominate the nation instead of the Founding Father types. Rather some harsh words from a historian. But what I think Wood was getting at–and which is fair enough–is what he wrote after this shot, which is that Watson understood the people much better than the elites and knew that you had to engage them as the people they were, not as some high minded bunch of Roman republicans that Jefferson and Washington and Adams dreamed they were. And fair enough, it would be useful for Democrats to remember this point today. After all, he claimed that the only way to get Americans to pay attention to things such as scientific agriculture and domestic improvements was to engage them in their own cultural norms and not try to implement them from the top down on a hostile public. Boy can I think of lots of modern left-liberalism that could use this lesson……

Watson died in 1842, at the age of 84.

Elkanah Watson is buried in Port Kent Cemetery, Port Kent, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other American agricultural figures, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. George Washington Parke Custis is buried in Arlington and John Deere is in Moline, Illinois. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.