Kings, Knights & Pawns
By early 1853, approximately 13,000 miles of rail line were in operation in the United States, with nearly 2,000 being added each year, all east of the Mississippi River.[1] Even so, the eyes of the nation were focused on a rail link to the Pacific as cities along the Mississippi River and the western shore of the Great Lakes jockeyed to become the rail line’s eastern terminus. One editorial writer enthused that “a railroad from the Mississippi to California or Oregon is a foregone conclusion! … It has been decided that it must be built (to) render the people of the United States the masters of the inconceivable wealth” flowing from trade across the Pacific Ocean.[2] Still, there were some skeptics. A California editorialist, seeing the challenges as not just of geography, wrote: “This stupendous project (will not be) practicable, nevertheless, for a number of years to come (partly because of) intractable Indians, directly through whose country the route lies.”[3]
The first proposal for a transcontinental rail link had been put before Congress in 1844 when wealthy New York merchant Asa Whitney lobbied for a grant of public land in a 60 mile wide corridor from Milwaukee to Puget Sound which he would use to fund construction of a railroad.[4] Whitney’s scheme, described as “the realization of the desire of almost four hundred years for a direct western passage to Asia” was never accepted by Congress. [5] But his enthusiastic persistence, both in lobbying Washington and in speaking around the country, put the issue of a Pacific railroad on the public agenda and put his suggested far northern route in the public’s mind as the most viable. In response, politicians, land speculators and business interests up and down the Mississippi quickly brought forward competing proposals favoring other routes and other cities.
By midcentury, the country began to realize that more than trade with Asia was at stake. In the brief span of 25 months, more than one million square miles of new territory had been incorporated within the political boundaries of the United States, increasing the defined and recognized territory of the country by nearly 70 percent. With the annexation of Texas in 1845, the Oregon Treaty of 1846 and the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war with Mexico, for the first time since its founding the undisputed borders of United States stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Puget Sound to San Diego Bay. Except for the Gadsden Purchase in 1854 which added a slice of territory in southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico, the boundaries of the Continental United States were set.
Then, on January 24, 1848, everything changed. Nine days before Mexico and the U.S. signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a gold nugget was pulled from the waters at Sutter’s Mill along the south fork of the American River some 40 miles west of present day Sacramento. At the time of the gold strike, an estimated 14,000 non-Indians settlers, more than half of them Spanish speakers, were living around the gold-field regions of northern California. Once word got out, treasure hunters from around the world flocked into the gold fields. An additional 200,000 non-Indians came to the area over the next four years and, by the time the 31st Congress became obsessed with the railroad question, California had become the 31st state.[6] Its lucrative gold fields, prosperous settlements and growing population along the Pacific coast raised concerns back in Washington that without a railroad to move military forces rapidly westward the national government would be hard pressed to defend its newest state against an ambitious and avaricious naval power, Great Britain.[7]
Cities up and down the Mississippi vied for the prize of a generation with boisterous railroad conventions, torchlight parades, impassioned speeches, and messages to Congress touting the obvious advantages of St. Louis, or Cairo, or Springfield, or Memphis or Vicksburg as the logical choice. A Putnam’s Monthly editorialist teased: “As many cities as contended for Homer’s paternity enter the lists in an eager strife for the immense prospective benefits of (the railroad’s) location.”[8] The Missouri legislature, pushed by commercial interests and United States Senator Thomas Hart Benton, funded initial construction of a rail link from St. Louis toward the western border with Kansas, hoping their head start would sway Congressional deliberations. Southern states made the logical argument that a southerly line avoided the high mountains and snows of more northerly routes and the less compelling assertion that it was also more equitable. “It would be more convenient for Missouri, Iowa and Wisconsin to meet the terminus of the railroad at St. Louis, but it would not add so much to their convenience as it would take from the convenience of Texas, Tennessee, Arkansas and other southern States.”[9] But “disastrous disagreements” among various Southern interests, both over funding and over which Southern city to favor, with New Orleans even pushing a trans-Mexican route that would protect its maritime port, undermined any effort to get behind one southern plan.[10] Meanwhile states along the eastern seaboard adamantly opposed any national role in a railroad that would threaten their shipping interests.
[1] . U.S. Bureau of the Census. Historical statistics of the United States, 1780 – 1945. (Washington, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949) 200.
[2] _____,”The Pacific Railroad and How it is to be Built” in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art Volume 0002 Issue 11 (November 1853), 505.
[3] ____, “California Star, May 20, 1848 (II, no. 20), 25.
[4] Whitney, Asa, Memorial of Asa Whitney Praying for a Grant of Land, 30th Cong., 1St Session, Senate Doc. Misc. No 28. (Jan. 17, 1848) and Roberson, Jere W. “The South and the Pacific Railroad, 1845–1855”. The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 2, (Apr. 1974), 165.
[5] Albright, George Leslie, Official Explorations for Pacific Railroads, 1853-1855, (Berkeley, California, University of California Press, 1921), 1 & 13.
[6] Nugent, Walter, Into the West, the Story of its People, (New York, A.A. Knopf, 1999. New York, Vintage Books, 2001), 55.
[7] RES, Vol 1. Ch. 6, 133 – 134.
[8] _____,”The Pacific Railroad and How it is to be Built” in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art Volume 0002 Issue 11 (November 1853), 505.
[9] Stanton, F. P., “Railroad to the Pacific (To accompany bill H. R. No. 368)”, 31st Cong. 1st Session, Rep. No. 439. (August 1, 1850)
[10] Roberson, 185.