Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (4 page)

Something else distinguished the American railway from its English
parent. In America it was common practice to get the road open for traffic in the cheapest manner possible, and in the least possible time. The attitude was, It can be fixed up and improved later, and paid for with the earnings.

The wooden bridge and wooden trestle were invented by Leonardo da Vinci in the sixteenth century and put to use for railways by American engineers beginning in 1840. The Howe truss, invented by an American, used bolts, washers, nuts, and rods so that the shrinkage of new timber could be taken up. It had its parts connected in such a way that they were able to bear the heavy, concentrated weight of locomotives without crushing. Had the Howe truss bridges not tended to decay or burn up, they would still be in use today.

The railways made America. Everyone knew that. But there was much left to do. Henry V. Poor, editor of the
American Railroad Journal,
wrote a year before the Lincoln-Dodge meeting, “In a railroad to the Pacific we have a great national work, transcending, in its magnitude, and in its results, anything yet attempted by man. By its execution, we are to accomplish our appropriate mission, and a greater one than any yet fulfilled by any nation.” The mission was, he summed up, to establish “our empire on the Pacific, where our civilization can take possession of the New Continent and confront the Old.”
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O
BVIOUSLY
Dodge wasn't the only engineer who did surveying on the west side of the Missouri River. But he envisioned and convinced Lincoln that the transcontinental railroad should be on a road running almost straight out the forty-second parallel from Omaha, alongside the Platte Valley until it reached the Rocky Mountains and then over the mountains to meet the railroad coming east from California. With help from many others, Dodge and Lincoln inaugurated the greatest building project of the nineteenth century.

L
INCOLN'S
first query to Dodge—the best route for a Pacific railroad—was, next to slavery, the foremost question in his mind. He was one of the great railroad lawyers in the West. Born on February 12, 1809, to frontier parents, Lincoln had grown up poor. He educated himself and became a lawyer—a “self-made man,” in the words of his political hero, Senator
Henry Clay of Kentucky. At age twenty-three, he had entered politics as a candidate for the Illinois state legislature over an issue that would remain with him for the rest of his life, railroads. There was a plan in the legislature to build a railroad from the Illinois River to Springfield. In a campaign speech Lincoln declared that “no other improvement … can equal in utility the rail road.” It was a “never failing source of communication” that was not interrupted by freezing weather, or high or low water. He admitted that there was a “heart-stopping cost” to building a railroad, however.
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Lincoln lost the election, running eighth in a field of thirteen candidates. But his campaign speech was remarkable. The
Rocket,
built in Britain by George Stephenson, had undergone its first successful trial at Rainhill in 1829, only two years earlier. The first American train,
The Best Friend of Charleston,
made its initial run in 1830, the second,
The Mohawk & Hudson,
in 1831. But that year the twenty-two-year-old Lincoln, with less than a year of formal education, was contemplating a railroad in Illinois and was right on the mark about the advantages and disadvantages it would bring, even though, like most Americans and all those living west of the Appalachian Mountains, he had never seen one. He had read about trains in the Eastern newspapers, but his travels had been limited to horseback or buggy, raft or boat.

The American future was hitched to this new thing, to conquer the distance across the continent which was so vast. There were bountiful farm lands that were waiting for immigrants to turn the soil. But without railroads or rivers there was no way to move products of any size from the territories in the West to markets on the East Coast or in Europe. As early as 1830, William Redfield (eighteen years later elected the first president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science), who maintained a lifelong interest in railroads, published a pamphlet in New York City proposing a railroad to cross the country to the Mississippi, with extensions going on to the Pacific.
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In 1832, the
Ann Arbor Emigrant
in Michigan called for a railroad from New York City to the Great Lakes, then over the Mississippi River and on to the Missouri River, then up the Platte, over the mountains, and on to Oregon. Lincoln and nearly every person in the United States wanted it done. The agitation grew over the nearly three decades between 1830 and Lincoln's meeting with Dodge in Council Bluffs. The 1830 population was 12.8 million. By 1840, it was up to seventeen million. By 1850,
it had grown to twenty-three million, putting the United States ahead of Great Britain. Then it jumped up to thirty-one million by 1860.
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Lincoln was a gifted pilot on Western rivers and eager to build canals—in 1836, when he was in the legislature, he cast the deciding vote for a bill to authorize the state to loan $500,000 to support the bonds of the Illinois and Michigan Canal. But even more, he wanted those railroads, which had so many advantages over canals, and he wanted the federal government to let the state use the sale of public lands to raise the money to promote railroads.

Lincoln was ahead of but still in touch with his fellow citizens. By 1835, “railroad fever” had swept America. It was inevitable in a country that was so big, with so many immigrants coming in, creating a desperate need for transportation. Despite the limitations of the first trains—their cost, their unproved capabilities, their dangers—everyone wanted one. Railroads were planned, financed, laid throughout the East and over the mountains. Even though the Panic of 1837 slowed building considerably, by 1840 nearly three thousand miles of track had been laid in the United States, already more than in all of Europe.

So many people and so much land. And the locomotive was improving year by year, along with the track and passenger and freight cars—trains were getting faster, safer, easier to build. By 1850, the lantern, cowcatcher, T-rail, brakes, skill of the engineers, and more improvements made a transcontinental railroad feasible. Pennsylvania, with enormous deposits of both coal and iron, had more rail manufactures than all of England.

A
S
one observer noted, “The key to the evolution of the American railway is the contempt for authority displayed by our engineers.”
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The engineers were there to build a transcontinental railroad, as they had built so many tracks, curves, and bridges by the beginning of 1850. The country owned so much land that paying for a railroad was no problem—just create a corporation and give it so much land for every mile of track it laid. Lincoln was a strong proponent; in 1847, just before beginning his only term in Congress, he wrote a letter to the
IL Journal
that supported the Alton and Sangamon Railroad and called it “a link in a great chain of rail road communication which shall unite Boston and New York with the Mississippi.” He also strongly urged the United States to give 2,595,000
acres of land adjacent to the proposed road to Illinois, to enable the state to grant that land to the IC.
10

In a complicated case for the Alton and Sangamon, Lincoln won a decision before the Illinois Supreme Court that was later cited as precedent in twenty-five other cases throughout the United States.
11
With seven hundred miles north and south through the state, with a branch to Chicago, the IC was the longest line in the world. The following year, 1852, he defended the yet-unfinished Illinois Central in a case involving the right of the state legislature to exempt the railroad company from county taxes. Not until January 1856 (the year the IC was completed) did the Illinois Supreme Court deliver a decision that accepted Lincoln's argument that the railroad was exempt. Lincoln handed the IC a bill for $2,000. The railroad rejected it, claiming, “This is as much as Daniel Webster himself would have charged.” Lincoln submitted a revised bill for $5,000. When the corporation refused to pay, he brought suit and won.
12

Lincoln was at the forefront of the burst of energy created by the combination of free lands, European immigration, capitalists ready to risk all, and the growth of railroads. As a lawyer who had to ride the circuit on horseback or in a buggy, he knew how great was the demand for passenger trains. This was true everywhere, as the nation created railroads east of the Mississippi River at a tremendous pace, with Illinois one of the leaders. In the 1850s, Illinois constructed 2,867 miles of track, more than any other state except Ohio. This transformed the state's economic and social order and presented new challenges for the Illinois legal system.

Lincoln was a leader in the fray over how to establish the first state railroad regulations: What was the responsibility of a railroad to occupants of lands adjoining the track? What was a railroad's relationship with passengers and shippers? Who should regulate the affairs between stockholders and directors? These and many other questions kept Lincoln involved as he became what an eminent scholar has called “one of the foremost railroad lawyers in the West.”
13
He was the main lawyer for the IC in tax cases, in what has been characterized as “Lincoln's greatest legal achievement, … the most important of Lincoln's legal services.” His cases have been pronounced by scholar Charles Leroy Brown “of extreme delicacy,” which Lincoln worked on “quietly, following a program of strategy, maneuver and conciliation,” saving the IC millions of dollars in taxes.
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In 1857, he was thus the natural choice to argue one of the most important cases about railroads. The Rock Island Bridge Company had built the first bridge across the Mississippi River for the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. This was an innovation of immeasurable proportions, for it meant the country would be able to cross its north-south rivers with railroad tracks, the essential step to building the first transcontinental railroad. But when a steamboat ran into one of the Rock Island's piers, the boat was set on fire and burned up. The owner sued the bridge company. The city of St. Louis and other river interests supported the principle of free navigation for boats, whereas Chicago and the railroad interests stood by the right of railway users to build a bridge.

Lincoln represented the Rock Island Bridge Company in the landmark case. He went to the river and examined the rebuilt bridge, measured the currents in the river, and interviewed river men, all based on his experience as a pilot. At the trial he argued that the steamboat had crashed into the bridge because of pilot error, but he also put the case into a broader context, nothing less than national economic development. He pointed out that there was a need for “travel from East to West, whose demands are not less important than that of the river.” He said the east-west railroad connection was responsible for “the astonishing growth of Illinois,” which had developed within his lifetime to a population of a million and a half, along with Iowa and the other “young and rising communities of the Northwest.”

The jury deadlocked, and the court dismissed the case. It was thus a victory for the railroad.
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When an Iowa court later found against the builders and ordered the bridge removed, the Supreme Court over-ruled and declared that railroads could bridge rivers. Had Lincoln never done another thing for the railroads, he had earned their gratitude on this one.

When Lincoln met Dodge in Council Bluffs in 1859, the IC was the largest rail system in the world. The Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad was running trains to the Missouri River and laying tracks on the other side. In January 1860, it ran a small engine on tracks spiked to telegraph poles and laid on the ice over the Missouri. Thus the train came to Kansas and the Great Plains. This was not unexpected. With the improvement of train technology plus the discovery of gold in California, and because of the extreme difficulty of getting to California, there was an overwhelming demand for a transcontinental railroad.

•   •   •

I
N
1853, Congress had called for a survey of possible routes. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, sent out four teams of surveyors to explore alternatives from the north, near the Canadian border, to the south, near the Mexican, from the forty-ninth parallel on the north to the thirty-second on the south. They did path-breaking work, and eventually a railroad would be built over each route. Their work was published in eleven large volumes by the government, with stunning drawings and maps. They did not explore the forty-second parallel.
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The Pacific railroad surveys did the opposite of what Congress said it wanted. They presented a much more favorable picture of Western climate and resources than had previously been assumed. What was thought of as “The Great American Desert,” they reported, turned out to be ready for settlement, or at least much of it, with fine agricultural lands and a wealth of minerals. Further, the surveys showed that not one but several practical routes for railroads existed.
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The explorers could not settle the question of where to build. Slavery made it impossible. Davis wanted the thirty-second-parallel line. He maintained that a route from New Orleans through southern Texas, across the southern parts of the New Mexico and Arizona Territories, and on to San Diego was the obvious one, because it would cross the fewest mountains and encounter the least snow. That was true. But no free-state politician was ready to provide a charter or funds for a railroad that would help extend slavery. The Free-Soilers wanted Chicago or St. Louis or Minneapolis as the eastern terminus, but no slave-state politician was willing to give it to them.