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The
Transcontinental Railroad, Part I
Brian
Trumbore
President/Editor, StocksandNews.com
Investment banking legend Felix Rohatyn
wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal on June
16 that addressed the issue of government borrowing
for true investments as opposed to borrowing for current
expenditures; a reality missing in today's budget
debates, according to Mr. Rohatyn.
Rohatyn
brings up cases like Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase,
Lincoln's creation of the land grant college system,
FDR's GI Bill and Eisenhower's interstate highway
system as being examples of investments that benefited
the country in numerous ways.
So
I was trying to come up with a topic for this column
when in thumbing through a book on famous newspaper
articles from years past I stumbled on Horace Greeley's
series back in the 1850s on another such federal investment,
the transcontinental railroad. What seems obvious
today wasn't a sure thing in those days.
Greeley
was the famous editor of the New York Tribune, a paper
that reached hundreds of thousands of readers. Among
the many causes that he promoted through his lectures
and books, as well as the newspaper, was westward
expansion. But while he is often credited with the
expression "Go west, young man, go west!" it was first
adopted by John L. B. Soule of the Terre Haute Express
in an 1851 piece on the gold rush. Greeley reprinted
Soule's article and forever after was linked to the
saying.
In
1859, Greeley went West himself and during his three-month
trip wrote 32 dispatches. Once back in New York, he
summarized his arguments for a transcontinental railroad
in a final piece.
---
"Dispatch
33: A Railroad to the Pacific," by Horace Greeley.
New York Tribune, October 20, 1859
I
propose in this letter to present such considerations
as seem to me pertinent and feasible, in favor of
the speedy construction of a railroad, connecting
at some point our Eastern network of railways with
the waters of the Pacific Ocean.
Let
facts be submitted to, and pondered by, considerate,
reflecting men. There are thousands of usually intelligent
citizens who have decided that a Pacific railroad
is a humbug - the fantasy of demagogues and visionaries
- without having ever given an hour's earnest consideration
to the facts in the case.
[Greeley
then charts the number of arrivals and departures
from San Francisco by water over the period 1849-57?.381,000
of the former and 139,000 of the latter.]
Of
course, they were not all from the Atlantic slope,
via the Isthmus, or Nicaragua; but the great mass
of them were. Probably most of those brought by small
vessels from the Pacific ports were not reported to,
or recorded at the customhouse at all. There were
some immigrants to California who did not land at
San Francisco, though the great mass undoubtedly did.
Then there was a heavy, though capricious overland
emigration. Governor Bigler stated the number in 1854
alone at sixty-one thousand four hundred and sixty-two;
and there was a very large migration across the Plains
in 1852. In 1857, the number was estimated at twelve
thousand five hundred. This year, my estimate of the
number, founded on personal observation, is thirty
thousand; but others make it forty thousand to sixty
thousand?.
Can
there be any doubt that nine-tenths of these would
have traveled by railroad, had such a road stretched
from the Missouri or Mississippi to the Pacific, the
fare being moderate, and the passage made within ten
days? I estimate that twice to thrice the number who
actually did go to California would have gone, had
there been such a means of conveyance, and that the
present Anglo-American population of the Pacific slope
would have been little less than two millions - say,
California, one million five hundred thousand; Oregon,
three hundred thousand; Washington, one hundred thousand;
Sonora and Mexican California, one hundred thousand.
Now
as to the gold crop of California?.
The
returns for the last two years and the first three-quarters
of the present are not before me, but they are known
to have varied little from the rate of fifty millions
of dollars per annum, making the total amount entered
at the customhouse of San Francisco, as shipped at
that port up to this date, rather over five hundred
millions of dollars. How many more millions have been
brought away in the trunks or belts of returning emigrants,
or mercantile passengers, I will not attempt to guess,
but the amount is certainly large. On my recent trip
homeward, one of the steerage passengers was currently
reported as having thirty thousand dollars in gold
in his carpetbag which he kept in his hands or under
his head; others were said to have their thousands
each, to a very large aggregate amount. Manifestly,
the export of gold from California, the current produce
of her mines, has exceeded fifty millions of dollars
per annum, while a considerable amount is retained
in the country.
Now
all this gold is sent away to pay for goods - many
of them very costly in proportion to their bulk and
weight - silks and other dear textile fabrics; jewelry;
rare wines; expensive wares; drugs, spices, etc. Experience
has amply proved that all such products take the quickest
rather than the cheapest route. I believe that twenty
million dollars of costly or perishable merchandise
would annually seek California overland if there were
a continuous line of railway from the Atlantic to
the Pacific seaboard; and that this amount would steadily
and rapidly increase?.
Now
let us see how far the government would necessarily
patronize such a road:
The
Post Office Department is now paying at least one
million and a quarter for the conveyance of mails
between the Atlantic and Gulf states and California,
and was recently paying one million and a half. For
this, it gets a semi-monthly mail by way of the Isthmus
(six thousand miles, or more than double the distance
direct), and a semi-weekly mail by the Butterfield
route (also very circuitous), which carries letters
only. There are two or three slow mails on other routes,
but they cannot be said to add anything of moment
to the facilities enjoyed by California and the older
states for the interchange of messages of ideas.
As
to military transportation, I cannot say what is its
amount, nor how far a single line of railway could
reduce its proper cost. I believe, however, that the
government is now paying at least six millions of
dollars for the transportation of men, munitions and
provisions to our various military posts between Kansas
proper and California, and that fully half of this
would necessarily be saved and earned by a railroad
to the Pacific?.
The
social, moral, and intellectual blessings of a Pacific
railroad can hardly be glanced at within the limits
of an article. Suffice it for the present that I merely
suggest them:
1.
Our mails are now carried to and fro California by
steamships, via Panama, in twenty to thirty days,
starting once a fortnight. The average time of transit
from writers throughout the Atlantic states to their
correspondents on the Pacific exceeds thirty days.
With a Pacific railroad, this would be reduced to
ten, for the letters written in Illinois or Michigan
would reach their destinations in the mining counties
of California quicker than letters sent from New York
or Philadelphia would reach San Francisco. With a
daily mail by railroad from each of our Atlantic cities
to and from California, it is hardly possible that
the amount of both letters and printed matter transmitted,
and consequently of postage, should not be speedily
quadrupled.
2.
The first need of California today is a large influx
of intelligent, capable, virtuous women. With a railroad
to the Pacific, avoiding the miseries and perils of
six thousand miles of ocean transportation, and making
the transit a pleasant and interesting overland journey
of ten days, at a reduced cost, the migration of this
class would be immensely accelerated and increased.
With wages for all kinds of women's work at least
thrice as high on the Pacific as in this quarter,
and with larger opportunities for honorable and fit
settlement in life, I cannot doubt that tens of thousands
would annually cross the Plains, to the signal benefit
of California and of the whole country, as well as
the improvement of their own fortunes and the profit
of the railroad.
3.
Thousands now staying in California, expecting to
"go home" so soon as they shall have somewhat improved
their circumstances, would send or come for their
families and settle on the Pacific for life, if a
railroad were opened. Tens of thousands who have been
to California and come back, unwilling either to live
away from their families or to expose them to the
present hardships of migration thither, would return
with all they have, prepared to spend their remaining
days in the land of gold, if there were a Pacific
railroad?.
Men
and brethren! Let us resolve to have a railroad to
the Pacific - to have it soon. It will add more to
the strength and wealth of our country than would
the acquisition of a dozen Cubas. It will prove a
bond of union not easily broken, and a new spring
to our national industry, prosperity and wealth. It
will call new manufactures into existence, and increase
the demand for the products of those already existing.
It will open new vistas to national and individual
aspiration, and crush our filibusterism by giving
a new wholesome direction to the public mind. My long,
fatiguing journey was undertaken in the hope that
I might do something toward the early construction
of the Pacific railroad; and I trust that it has not
been made wholly in vain.
---
On
July 1, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill
incorporating the Union Pacific Company. The company
was subsidized with federal funds to enable it to
construct a line from Nebraska to Utah, where it would
meet the Central Pacific which started out from Sacramento.
Next
week the story continues.
Sources:
"Muckraking!
The Journalism That Changed America," edited by Judith
and William Serrin
"America: A Narrative History," George Brown Tindall,
David E. Shi
"An Empire of Wealth," John Steele Gordon
Brian
Trumbore
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