“Rivers are ungovernable Things, especially in Hilly Countries: Canals are quiet and very manageable,” Benjamin Franklin assured the Mayor of Philadelphia in 1772. Franklin's comment would have been wildly off the mark had he not been writing before there were any canals in North America and referring to finished improvements rather than their construction. The building of the first artificial waterways was anything but easy, being plagued with capital and labour problems that eventually brought most projects to a premature end, evidence of the dangers involved in mounting large-scale industry in an essentially commercial world and a forewarning of what canal construction could expect for years to come.

As some of the earliest ventures in big business, requiring heavy investment, a large workforce and a managerial apparatus to oversee their dispersed construction process, the canals and lockage systems of the late eighteenth century faced numerous problems. For this was an era of merchant not industrial capital.