Empire Express
Building the First Transcontinental Railroad
By David H. Bain
Penguin Books
Copyright © 2000
David H. Bain
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0140084991
Chapter One
"For All the Human Family"
Nine weeks out of New York and bound for Macao, the leaky and overburdened
merchant barque
Oscar struggled to round the Cape of Good
Hope and was becalmed. Its captain cursed and swore at their slackened sails
and abused his crew, while the vessel's sole passenger, a pious and sensitive
man, tried to ignore a tirade made worse because it was the Lord's Day.
As was common on Sundays, he tried to pass the time in prayer and meditation.
But he found himself brooding over his lot in life. It was at such a time
that Asa Whitney, staring over the ship's rail at the bright green sea and
brooding, most strikingly resembled Bonaparte. The similarity in physiognomy
had caused him no end of trouble during business trips to France, when
strangers would stop and annoy him on the street. Nonetheless his admiration
for Napoleon knew no bounds; his empathy over losing one's entire world
had never been stronger than on this poky, Asia-bound barque—there was
nothing but loss behind him, little promise ahead. By forty-five years of age
Whitney had buried two wives and a child and lost all his considerable worldly
possessions, and now he had started life anew. Even if we could have told him
that in a few years he would not only have regained his wealth, and discovered
a cause worth making his life's work, but also would come to be considered a
prophet of a new age, it is unlikely that such a prediction would have allayed
his bitterness. Still, he struggled to retain his perspective. "It certainly is
a great tryal at my time of life," he had written in his diary, "to recommence
the work, too in a strange foreign Land. Yet I hope it is Gods providence that
guides me & I feel that I shall succeed. I hope above all things that I may yet
be enabled to do some good to mankind & in some small degree make amends for
the abuse of all Gods providences to me."
Within days of doubling the cape, Asa Whitney was afflicted with boils.
He was the eldest child born, on March 14, 1797, to Sarah Mitchell and
Shubael Whitney, near Lantern Hill in North Groton, Connecticut. For five
generations in New England, Whitneys had engaged in farming or manufacturing.
(Asa's fifth cousin, when not occupied by patent suits over his invention
of the cotton gin, fabricated arms in New Haven.) Shubael, the son of an
iron manufacturer, chose to coax corn from the rock-choked soil east of the
Thames, raising nine children to help him in this effort. Meanwhile, he and
his neighbors hired Indians from the Pequot reservation to hoe, paying them
with rum. Apparently this arrangement pleased everybody, but as Asa grew
into his teens he showed no interest in agriculture. He was likewise
uninterested in going to sea on the countless whalers and sealers operating from
the Connecticut coast. Before he was twenty he was in New York, engaged in that
other great Yankee occupation, trade.
Beginning as a clerk with one of the city's largest importers of French
goods, Whitney was promoted, and spent most of the decade between 1824
and 1834 in Europe as a purchasing agent. By 1832 he was a well-rewarded
merchant who was about to be made a partner in the firm; that year he also
acquired a wife abroad. Little is known about Herminie Antoinette Pillet
Whitney except that she was French and that she died in New York City
shortly after their marriage, on March 31, 1833, and that she was buried in
the Trinity Churchyard in New Rochelle, close to where Asa had purchased
seventy acres of land for their new home.
Whitney kept a lock of her hair for some years thereafter, but it was not
long before he married again. Sarah Jay Munro was the daughter of a wealthy
landowner and grandniece of the former chief justice and governor of New
York, John Jay. The early years of the Whitneys' marriage were comfortable
ones, for there was a great demand for French goods and Asa prospered. In
1835 he purchased two more tracts of New Rochelle land, and in 1836 he not
only left his firm to begin a new importing partnership but bought a large
commercial plot in Lower Manhattan, upon which he erected five wholesalers'
buildings. Soon he had begun to build an imposing brick house in the
Greek Revival style, in New Rochelle, completed in 1837.
It was around this time that Asa Whitney's upward-tending graph became
a downward spiral, for as the Whitneys settled into their new home and
the merchant saw to his expanded commercial interests, banks were closing,
businesses were failing, crowds were rioting in the streets of New York and
breaking into food warehouses—the beginning of that tribute to rotten banking
and frenetic speculation, the seven-year misery known as the Panic of
1837—not a propitious time to find oneself overextended. Although he was
not immediately affected, Whitney found it increasingly difficult to get by. His
import business naturally required hard capital; moreover, he owed some
$80,000 and interest on his Manhattan real estate, though tenants' rent
came nowhere near his mortgage. Like a juggler whose arms grow weak from
effort despite his skill, Whitney refinanced his commercial mortgage in March
1838 and took out a loan on the New Rochelle property in the December following
but was still unable to make timely payments. In September 1840, he
was faced with foreclosure.
An even greater tragedy struck while the merchant's case was before the
magistrates. On November 12, 1840, Sarah Whitney died—"after a few days
illness," as her obituary notices reported—which, one may surmise from family
papers, occurred either after a miscarriage or following an unsuccessful
childbirth.
Asa Whitney buried her beside his first wife and in his grief turned to face
the courts. After foreclosure, his New York property went to auction, was
bought by his mortgage holder for $80,000 (the amount of principal owed),
and left Whitney holding a bill for over $10,000 in unpaid interest. He sold his
house and remaining land, beginning to be, certainly, in an antipodal frame of
mind, with but one word in his head: China, a place of dawning commercial
promise where one could start anew.
Thus, as the
Oscar was towed from the Pike Slip Wharf out to Sandy
Hook and cast loose on Saturday, June 18, 1842, its heavily disappointed
passenger could not be blamed for keeping his sight on the horizon, not back
toward home. Whitney had put pride away, secured himself an appointment as
purchasing agent for several firms trading in the Orient, and hoped to do a
little business of his own on the side. For the long voyage he had packed a
trunk full of books—including George Tradescant Lay's new guide,
The
Chinese As They Are; the life and writings of John Jay; a biography of
Napoleon; a French grammar; the good Reverend William Wilberforce's
Family
Prayers—and several cases of wines.
But such would provide only limited diversion and small solace on a voyage
whose misery would become memorable in that closing era of snail-paced,
square-bowed, wooden-hulled sailing vessels, for the
Oscar was loaded
down like a coal barge—worse, even, for its cargo consisted mostly of lead
ingots—and it was afflicted by the most adverse weather. Gales, calms, rough
seas, and contrary winds followed the barque across the Atlantic in dreary
procession. Whitney, a seasoned voyager, suffered from seasickness for the
first time in his life, to which was added sleeplessness, rheumatism, his plague
of boils, and growing dismay at the behavior of his only social companion,
Captain Eyre.
The captain filled their quarters with cigar smoke. ("I cannot in anyway
escape it," Whitney confided to his diary. "In consequence I have much of the
head ache. What a vile practice, so useless, yes worse, so injurious to health &
habits, for I have always found it creates a disposition to drink, if not to
drunkenness, & so disagreeable to those who dislike it: that I sometimes think
no real Gentleman can smoak.") The captain was prone to tearing, profane rages
aided by the seaman's astonishing vocabulary. ("Very disagreeable, presumptuous
& wicked.") The captain seemed to take satisfaction from flogging transgressors
in his crew, particularly the Chinese steward who appeared to be
drunk one breakfast. "I did not see it & could not & I cannot bring my mind to
believe in the necessity of such a discipline anywhere," Whitney wrote. "It is
too humiliating, too degrading, too beastly, poor fellow I do feel for him....
these poor Chinese seem to be considered but dogs only fit to be kicked and
flogged; this our Americans have learned from the English." Besides, Whitney
added in afterthought, a steward punished thus could wreak revenge by poisoning
all who dined in the captain's cabin.
Still, being an affable man, Whitney took comfort from his books, from
good weather, from sightings of other ships and of various inhabitants of the
deep. "Thus far on our long voyage," he admitted with relief, "we are without
an accident & all in good health."
From New York to the Cape of Good Hope the sailing distance is eight
thousand miles; from the cape to Dutch Anjier (Java Head), the gate between
the Indian Ocean and the China Sea, another six thousand miles; from Anjier
to the Portuguese colony of Macao on the Chinese coast, some two thousand
more. When Asa Whitney was but a boy, the voyage between New York
and China normally took six months, with runs of 125 days considered good,
and by the 1830s this had been shortened to 100 days or less; in the year
Whitney sailed, fast new China packets made the trip as short as 79 days. On
the drawing tables of naval architects were plans for even speedier clippers,
for a new era dawned.
Nevertheless, a leaky relic with a tyrant for a master and a hopeless case
for a passenger, the barque
Oscar plodded eastward across the Indian
Ocean, making land at Java for provisions after all of 107 days at sea. In port,
Whitney could not bear to watch the Dutch subjugation of Javanese, and it moved
him to philosophize. "Oh how long must the mighty oppress & brutalize the
weaker," he wrote. "When I see human beings in such oppressive ignorance &
servitude, I cannot but feel that they were created for a more noble & exalted
purpose & that the purposes of a wise Creator are turned by the ambition &
lust of Man or preparation of Nations perhaps for their eternal destruction,
look at Spain, look at Portugal, & even Look at England too her time is allmost
come. Her starving millions will not be willing to starve much longer, her
wailing day must come & awful must be that day."
He was relieved when the
Oscar weighed anchor and proceeded northward
into the torrid Java and China Seas, "full of fish and snakes," and "little
wind & excessive heat." Passing Borneo, Palawan, and Luzon, evading reefs
and Malay pirates, sustaining some damage and more delays due to typhoons,
the
Oscar cast anchor at Macao. It was Sunday, November 20, 1842. They
had been at sea for 153 days—perhaps a record for slowness that year.
* * *
Asa Whitney's business in China was to last for a year and four months. He
arrived amid that Sino-British dispute recalled as the Opium Wars—a dispute
characterized for three years by Chinese riots against the barbarians who had
insisted on their imperial right to free trafficking in all commodities,
especially opium, and by retributory British naval attacks upon heathen ports. A
treaty had been signed in Nanking three months earlier, in August. A typically
lopsided document it was—granting the British the island of Hong Kong, a cash
indemnity, access to five ports, and license to profitably addict as many
Chinese as they could manage. Whitney had little sympathy for the British and
their imperial ways. ("Oh England," he wrote in one typical diary entry, "thine
arrogance cannot be endured & thy pride must have a fall.") His sentiments
were hardly improved when, immediately after he arrived in Canton, angry
mobs plundered and torched some British businesses and cornered many
Westerners (including Whitney and a group of fellow Americans) in their
establishments. A tense night passed as the merchants could do little but peer
out at the massed Chinese and at the firestorm raging toward their factory, but
in the morning the Americans (and British posing as Americans, an irony not
lost on Whitney) were allowed to evacuate.
Affairs in China would settle down. As other foreign nations began to
press for similar commercial access, Whitney found himself among a select
few Americans arranging exportation of teas, spices, and other Chinese
goods. There is no evidence that he trafficked in opium, as did many others;
that would seem to have gone against his grain. He was a good businessman,
though, dividing his time between Canton and Macao, and his profits
mounted. Indeed, on April 2, 1844, when he rejoined Captain Eyre on the
deck of the
Oscar for its return voyage, he had assured himself of
enough money to make further labors unnecessary for the rest of his life.
Any sort of idleness was not in his nature, however. Sometime during the
grief-ridden year when Whitney had lost his family, home, business, and
wealth, he had sworn to devote the remainder of his life to a higher purpose.
"I hope above all things," he had confided to his diary, "that I may yet be
enabled to do some good to mankind & in some small degree make amends for
the abuse of all Gods providences to me."
His return trip was tediously long, marred further by his cabin-mate's
"segars" and rages and fondness for flogging seamen, but it gave Whitney all
the time he needed to consider an idea that had been growing inside him for
some time, perhaps encouraged by events at home reported in months-old
newspapers. What began to take shape was a plan he thought would consign
such long and uncomfortable voyages to history, put an end to the sort of
unChristian, colonialist abuses he had witnessed in the Orient, and place his
little nation on a more equal footing with the great powers.
Perhaps fittingly for such world-shaking aspirations, the
Oscar put
in for a few days at the island of St. Helena, where Whitney was outraged to
discover that the British had allowed the quarters of his departed,
"misunderstood," illustrious doppelganger to be used as a stable. It is not
recorded whether Bonaparte's living double excited any comment on St. Helena
when he strode about the island, probably muttering under his breath at "English
pride English Tyranny & oppression" as he committed those fulminations to his
diary—"the settling day must, will come," he added, "& awful must be that day."
Staring from the heights beyond Jamestown to the sea, he thought that "the
imagination almost pictures a Napoleon on every ridge, on every peak, a kind of
awful supernatural sensation ... different from any thing before experienced,
like the child in the dark expecting any moment to meet a Spectre." But any
ghosts Whitney may have encountered belonged, instead, to his own time and his
own world—a world to which he was returning with a steadily developing
agenda.
Five months and nine days after departing Canton, Whitney stepped
ashore at New York with joy and purpose. He tarried in the city for some
weeks—probably disposing of a shipful of Chinese imports and counting his
money—before moving onward to another Canton, some fifteen miles from
the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York. It was there, as winter began its
descent, that Asa Whitney put away his diary in favor of another document.
It was a memorial addressed to the United States Congress. As he began working
on it, his travel-stained little account book, consigned to history in his
trunk, offered a hint and a caution about "the great purpose" to which he
would devote himself. He had taken a steamboat to Albany, his diary recorded,
from where he boarded a westward-bound railroad. "I was anxious to see the
towns & villages through which we passed," he continued,
but, alas, in vain, time & space are annihilated by steam, we pass
through a City a town, yea a country, like an arrow from Jupiters Bow.
Schenectady, I can only say I passed through it because it is on the rout....
At Utica we stopped to dine, had only time to pass from the Cars to the Hotel
& dined on the high pressure plan, they told me it was Utica but I have no
memorial, I know nothing of it....
Oh, this constant locomotion, my body & everything in motion, Steam
Boats, Cars, & hotels all cramed & crowded full the whole population seems
in motion & in fact as I pass along with Lightning speed & cast my eye on the
distant objects, they all seem in a whirl nothing appearing permanent even
the trees are waltzing, the mind too goes with all this, it speculates,
theorizes, & measures all things by locomotive speed, where will it end.
"Can it be happy," that diary entry had concluded in late 1844, "I fear
not." Fatigued and out of sorts the merchant might have been, and not in step
with the American pace after two years abroad. But if Whitney was truly fearful
of an unhappy end he showed no other evidence of it—only industry and
the most intense single-mindedness—in setting forth to harness the very
contrivance that had set his head to spinning, in a plan he hoped would at once
bring the world down to manageable size and make it a better place to inhabit.
Asa Whitney, with no previous experience and having nothing but his faith
and self-assurance to tell him he was not pursuing a chimera, began to outline
how he would get a railroad across the vast, uninhabited middle of the American
continent to the Pacific shores, where the lure of Asia beckoned, within
reach. He would annihilate distance, yes—and with it, ignorance, want, and
barbarism—through the ineffably promising devices of American trade and
American Christianity.
Whitney's attention was first called to the importance of railroads as a
means for the transportation of commerce as well as of passengers as early as
1830, he recalled later. It was only a year after British crowds had beheld the
world's first steam-powered locomotive, George Stephenson's
Rocket, draw
a train of cars faster than a horse could haul a carriage. The
Rocket
trials in 1829 attained a top speed of twenty-nine miles an hour; a year later,
when Asa Whitney paused during a buying trip to ride the newly formed Liverpool
and Manchester Railroad, the locomotive sped them over a distance of thirty-four
miles of solid English roadbed in forty-two minutes—a little over forty-eight
miles an hour, he thought, though he may have been exaggerating. The
merchant saw clearly, he said later, "their present importance and predicted
their future importance to us as a means of communication with the Pacific."
During his sojourn in the Orient, as the British secured commercial rights in
China and it seemed that America would soon follow (as it did in July 1844),
he foresaw "the importance to us if we could have a more ready, frequent, and
cheap communication than the present long and dangerous voyage around
either of the capes."
In China Whitney had gathered much commercial information on "that
ancient, numerous, and most extraordinary people," he would write. The
principal object of inquiry was how to increase Sino-American commerce, for
Whitney had chafed at the time and expense involved and at how limited the
return was in comparison to the "almost boundless" possibilities. He also
considered "the vast commerce of all India, of all Asia, which has been the
source and foundation of all commerce from the earliest ages to the present day,
possessed and controlled by one nation after the other, each fattening upon its
golden crop, till proud England at last holds it in her iron grasp." This did
not have to continue, Whitney noted. "She holds on, and will hold on until our
turn comes, which will be different, and produce different results from all. We
do not seek conquest, or desire to subjugate. Ours is and will be a commerce of
reciprocity—an exchange of commodities."
Whitney had much more in mind than mercantile matters—his plan
fairly shone with global promise. His argument would grow fervent, a
near-religious preoccupation for him as time passed, for the Pacific railroad
idea, he would write, would not merely hold benefits for its projectors but for
every American and a multitude beyond:
for the destitute overpopulation of Europe, without food and without
homes—for the heathen, the barbarian, and the savage, on whom the blessings
and lights of civilization and Christianity have never shone—for the
Chinese, who, for want of food, must destroy their offspring—for the aged
and infirm, who deliberately go out and die, because custom, education, and
duty, will not permit them to consume the food required to sustain the more
youthful, vigorous, and useful—and for all the human family.
For a merchant with no engineering ability, no political contacts, no
experience in mounting any campaigns, especially of such national scope,
Whitney had embarked on a project that seemed ambitious, quixotic, chimerical.
However, in his absence from the United States—even before, when
Whitney's whole energy had been directed at salvaging his business from
creditors—the nation had begun a monumental transformation. "The mind
too goes with all this," he had written, addressing not only his project but
also the strange new American pace to which he had returned, "it speculates,
theorizes, & measures all things by locomotive speed."
As he set forth to make his congressional memorial for a railroad to the
Pacific as comprehensive as possible, a nation stirred.
* * *
It was a nation which, in 1844, some mossbacks believed had grown as far as
nature and man's treaties would allow, and beyond which lay a dangerous
overextension that threatened dissolution of the Union itself.
The stage of North America: Thirteen free and thirteen slave states extended
westward from the Atlantic seaboard to the Missouri River—the sum
of the United States. The two free territories of Iowa and Wisconsin waited in
the wings for admittance, as did Florida. Another great chunk of the
continent—Mexico, her medieval promise long faded—stretched improbably from
the Gulf of Tehuantepec and Guatemala away to the Oregon border, all scattered,
desultory rancheros and huddled mission settlements. There were the
disputatious Oregon and Texas. The former extended from the Pacific to the
Rocky Mountains and from Mexico to well north of Vancouver Island, being
sparsely settled and occupied jointly by Britain and America; the latter had
been for some eight years the independent Republic of Texas. If both were
understudies, their parts awaited them.
The United States, British Canada, Oregon Country, Mexico, the Texas
Republic—all encircled a vast and mysterious land, the subject of much
speculation and not much careful thought. Call it Indian Territory for now,
for it contained survivors of the displaced, decimated eastern tribes and the
great unmolested, unsuspecting Plains Indians. As limitations to American
growth, man's treaties had already proved to be the expedient instruments
that they were intended to be by the enforcing party. But nature, the other
great limitation, was not as malleable to national destiny, or so at least it
seemed in 1844 as America stood on the eastern bank of the Missouri River
and looked across to a hallucination known for thirty years as the Great
American Desert.
Thomas Jefferson, who knew much, was ignorant about most of the territory
he purchased unseen in 1803 at a bargain-basement price. The few settlements
of the Louisiana Territory, he reported to Congress, "were separated
from each other by immense and trackless deserts." Three years after this
hearsay, William Clark and Meriwether Lewis returned from their examination
of the country; they had found the plains to be simply dry and barren,
though not desertlike. In that year, however, young Lieutenant Zeb Pike traveled
the Far West and returned with the most fanciful impressions. "This area
in time might become as celebrated as the African deserts," he wrote of the
territory sitting between the meridian of the great bend of the Missouri and
the Rockies. "In various places [there were] tracts of many leagues, where the
wind had thrown up the sand in all the fanciful forms of the ocean's rolling
wave, and on which not a spear of vegetable matter existed." Pike's visions of
sand dunes, pathless wastes, and sterile soils were reported, widely read, and
faithfully believed by geographers. The myth became innocently embellished
by subsequent visitors, especially those in the party of Major Stephen H. Long,
who traversed the whole area in 1820. It was reported to be "an unfit residence
for any but a nomad population ... forever [to] remain the unmolested
haunt of the native hunter, the bison, and the jackall."
Twenty-four years later the Santa Fe trader Josiah Gregg issued his
Commerce on the Prairies, a book based on extensive experience on the
plains. "These steppes," he wrote, "seem only fitted for the haunts of the
mustang, the buffalo, the antelope, and their migratory lord, the Prairie
Indian." Soon young Francis Parkman would see sand dunes along the Platte River,
in his imagination extending this "bare, trackless waste" for hundreds of miles.
Thus the future states of Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, the Dakotas, Montana,
Wyoming, and Colorado existed in the American minds of 1844 in
hopelessness and sterility—fitting continental leavings for the aborigines.
Little as the Great American Desert interested politicians and pioneers
alike, temptations lay on its western and southern frontiers. As Asa Whitney
composed his Pacific railroad memorial in the closing months of 1844, the
upstate New York countryside rumbled with political activity, as was true all
over the nation, with much attention being paid to the issue of expansion. Six
months earlier in Baltimore the convened national Democratic Party plodded
through seven deadlocked ballots before finally rejecting its obvious choice,
Martin Van Buren. As former senator, governor, secretary of state, vice
president, and president, Van Buren had, by 1844, served his country perhaps too
well, but his failure this time around had less to do with his shopworn self
than with his disinclination to invite war by annexing new territory—a position
that was then at distinct variance with prevailing sentiments. Two canvasses
later the Democrats acclaimed a dark horse, James Knox Polk. He had
twice failed to be re-elected governor of Tennessee, but when he appeared in
Baltimore, his proprietary urges toward hitherto disputed lands plainly in
sight, Polk prevailed. In the ensuing presidential contest the opposing Whig
party could muster little more than the slogan "Who is James K. Polk?" for
their own candidate, Henry Clay, who was otherwise silent on the great issue
of the day. That issue lay at the heart of the Democratic platform, but more
important, it had already been accepted as a fait accompli by most Americans:
the annexation of those title-clouded expanses known as Texas and Oregon—Mexico
and England be damned.
Exactly a decade had passed since our neighbor to the south had reopened
its Texas lands to American immigration after some years of nervous border
restriction. Likewise, it had been ten years since the first Methodist
missionaries had drifted to the bank of the Willamette River in Oregon Country,
seeking Flatheads with a hankering for the Good Book (there were none). The
latter territory had an agreeable climate and an excess of lush farmlands, and
though it was jointly occupied with Britain there were relatively few British.
Oregon's emptiness beckoned. So did the equally virginal lands of Texas.
By 1836, the number of American settlers in Texas had grown to nearly
thirty thousand—ten times the resident Mexican population and more than
enough to enforce a nascent Republic of Texas only weeks after the tragedies
at the Alamo and at Goliad. President Andrew Jackson, in formally recognizing
Texas sovereignty in March 1837, had less influence on encouraging further
settlement than did the other great event of that season, which overshadowed it.
The Panic of 1837 sent thousands of bankrupt and debt-ridden
farmers of the Mississippi River valley flooding into Texas to join those
who had preceded them. Others, their hopes dashed no less by the deepening
depression, began to weigh the odds of the longer, more hazardous route to
Oregon, across the Great American Desert. By 1839 some five hundred Americans
had sunk their plow blades in the Willamette bottomland and a new destination
had entered the dreams of would-be migrants: Mexican California.
* * *
Texas fever! Oregon fever! California fever! Rare was the American newspaper
or magazine that did not carry a rhapsodic letter from a newly arrived settler
in those and subsequent years. Farmers seemed to be spending as much time
urging their fellow Americans to join them in paradise as they did in raising
crops—that is, when they were not deluging Washington with petitions urging
annexation.
If for many the lure of a new purchase on life was balanced by the numerous
threats to life during the overland journey, news from those who had
survived the ordeal was persuasive. Especially so were reports of the
Bidwell-Bartleson party, which in the summer of 1841 followed the West's lure
from Missouri, eventually splitting into two groups which attained Oregon and
California after much hardship. Then, in 1843, young Lieutenant John Charles
Frémont issued a report on his army exploration of the Oregon Trail from the
Mississippi River through the South Pass and into the Wind River range of the
Rockies. Published obligingly by the government, the path-follower's book
was an instant success, with its descriptions and maps both a Bible and a
Baedeker for thousands of potential migrants. And when the Democrats rallied
behind James Knox Polk, with Texas and Oregon (and—who knows—California)
at the forefront of their minds, the expansionist party prevailed, albeit
narrowly, in the electoral college. Those faraway settlements seemed at once
closer and more alluring. Meanwhile, an obscure merchant, recently returned
from China, signed his name to a document which was handed to an
upstate New York legislator, the Honorable Zadock Pratt of Prattsville, who
packed it away for his trip to Washington and the second session of the
Twenty-eighth Congress.
* * *
The subject of railroads seemed remote in the opening weeks of the congressional
session. Only the prospect of admitting the Republic of Texas to the
Union held any interest. But three days after the House passed a joint
annexation resolution and a month before it joined the Senate in approving an
amended measure, Zadock Pratt rose in the chamber. The title of the document
he presented for consideration was
Railroad From Lake Michigan to the
Pacific: Memorial of Asa Whitney, of New York City, relative to The construction
of a railroad from lake Michigan to the Pacific ocean.
All of the states east and north of the Potomac River, Whitney had written,
were or soon would be connected with the waters of the Great Lakes by
rivers, railroads, and canals. At that moment a chain of railroads was
projected—in some places, already under construction—along the 840-mile
route between New York and the southern shores of Lake Michigan. It was entirely
practicable to extend the railroad from there across the unsettled lands
of the West, through the Rocky Mountains, to the Pacific Ocean, some 2,160
miles. "To the interior of our vast and widely-spread country," he said, "it
would be as the heart to the human body; it would, when all completed, cross
all the mighty rivers and streams which wend their way to the ocean through
our vast and rich valleys from Oregon to Maine, a distance of more than three
thousand miles."
The importance of such a route was incalculable, he said. Military forces
could be concentrated at any point east or west in eight days or less. A naval
station near the mouth of the Columbia River in Oregon, "with a comparatively
small navy, would command the Pacific, the South Atlantic, and Indian
oceans, and the China seas." Using a combined rail and steamship route between
New York and China, which would require only thirty days, the products
of American factories could be exchanged for Asia's rarities. Compare
this to the round-trip sailing distance between New York and China (nearly
thirty-four thousand miles, requiring up to three hundred days). World commerce
would be revolutionized, with Whitney's Pacific route its channel. Each
state and every town "would receive its just proportion of influence and
benefits," he wrote, "compared with its vicinity to, or facility to communicate
with, any of the rivers, canals, or railroads crossed by this great road."
Such easy and rapid communication, he argued, "would bring all our immensely
wide-spread population together as one vast city; the moral and social
effects of which must harmonize all together as one family, with but one
interest—the general good of all." Moreover, because the destitute overflow
population of Europe was beginning to clog the cities of eastern America, the
railroad would attract throngs of hopeful farmers and workers to settle along
its route,
where they will escape the tempting vices of our cities, and where they
will have a home with their associates, and where their labor from their own
soil will not only produce their daily bread, but, in time, an affluence of
which they could never have dreamed in their native land.... Their energies
will kindle into a flame of ambition and desire, and we shall be enabled
to educate them to our system, to industry, prosperity, and virtue.
All that was required to set this in motion, Whitney reasoned, was an
elementary exchange. He asked that the United States set aside out of its public
lands a strip of land some sixty miles wide and the length of his proposed
route. Beginning at Lake Michigan, Whitney would sell this land—which
would be settled and the proceeds of which would finance construction of his
railroad. Section by section, the rails and their supporting population would
leapfrog westward "so far as the lands may be found suited to cultivation." The
cost of planting the railroad he estimated at $50 million, with a further $15
million for maintenance of the road until completion. The cost of building
across uninhabitable terrain would be offset by this maintenance fund and by
sale of the public lands—all proceeds to be "strictly and faithfully" applied
to railroad construction, subject to whatever checks and guarantees Congress
required. To determine the route he asked the legislators to order a survey
between the forty-second and forty-fifth degree of north latitude from lake to
ocean.
Only when the route was finished, when the travelers and commerce of
the world crossed the nation in comfort and security, would the New York
merchant collect his compensation. Whatever unsold land remained in that
sixty-mile-wide belt would be deeded to Asa Whitney. It was that simple.
Finally, tolls along the road should be kept low, to a level just above what was
required for maintenance. The excess would "make a handsome distribution,"
he reasoned, "for public education."
Thus set forth before the House of Representatives, Asa Whitney's remarkable
railroad proposal was referred to the Committee on Roads and
Canals.
Continues...
Excerpted from Empire Express
by David H. Bain
Copyright © 2000 by David H. Bain.
Excerpted by permission.
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