I thought DoDo had a great diary up about the railroads, but I wanted to add to it. He only mentions Lincoln briefly, and I do not believe that does justice to Lincoln’s influence in this area. I think it connects to what I think is the most successful conspiracy in American history, one that is NEVER spoken about.
Virtually everyone is aware the Lincoln was a lawyer. But what most don’t know is that he was a hugely successful railroad attorney. He argued many cases before the Supreme Court of the US, and argued literally hundreds before State Supreme Courts. He was probably the most famous railroad attorney in American, and in one single case was paid near 5,000.00 dollars, in 1850 dollars.
http://www.indianahistory.org/our-services/books-publications/railroad-symposia-essays-1/Abe%20Linco
ln%20as%20a%20Railroad%20Attorney.pdf
Many of his cases dealt with railroad rights of way.
Lincoln was a huge proponent of railroad expansion, and was a main advocate of a transcontinental railroad.
And so the story thickens;
With the advancement in railroad technology the building of a trans railroad became economically feasible. With California joining the Union in 1850, such a railroad became both imperative and inevitable. There had to be a cheap and reliable method of transporting goods and people across the relatively empty and inhospitable middle part of the country. At the time, it was either by stage or ship. Stage took a lot of time, and in winter was extremely difficult, and was not at all comfortable. Shipping was done two ways. The first method was around the tip of South America and up to San Francisco, which was expensive, time consuming, and dangerous in winter. Or you went by ship to Panama, shipped everything over the isthmus of Panama, and then caught another ship on to San Francisco. Not the most pleasant or easy of journeys. Think malaria and yellow fever.
A railroad had to be build.
There were several proposed routes;
http://www.geographicus.com/blog/rare-and-antique-maps/the-proposed-routes-of-the-pacific-railroad/
But it basically was a `Northern Route’ and a `Southern Route’. The southern route was advocated by the southern states, whom held large sway in Congress, and southerners dominated the Presidency for many years. They believed it would lead to expansion of slavery. It would originate in slave states, and travel through slave Texas. Also, the economic benefits of a southern route would strengthen the southern states position in Congress, and its position in America as a whole. Add strength to the threat of succession, in other words. While the southern route had benefits (no mountains, good weather year round) it was not acceptable to northern politicians, beyond the slave expansion reasons. There was little water for steam engines, and any land appropriated would have little value. It would also connect to San Diego, which like today, was a hick town in a jerk water part of the country. It was no San Francisco.
But the southern states would never support the northern route. Economically and politically it would strengthen the northern states. It would originate in slave free states, and pretty much isolate the slave states, because there would be no more slave state expansion. As the territories the railroad went through joined the Union as states, they would be slave free, and eventually out vote the southern states. For the southern states, voting for the northern route would be voting for their own oblivion.
So an impasse developed. A railroad was needed. There were vast sums of money to be made. But no progress was being made. Several times it seemed the southern route was inevitable, simply because it seemed the only one able to get votes (if the northern politicians acceded).
A solution had to be found, and the Baron’s found it.
In Lincoln the railroad barons had a reliable supporter of their goals. As most of the northern elite, he was a true believer in the economic benefits of railroads. For that reason, they gave him money and support throughout his career. He had one more very important benefit… he was completely unacceptable to southern states as a presidential candidate. Threats of succession were very common in the years before 1860.
http://www.historynet.com/secession
It was not a secret what would happen if a POTUS was elected that was unacceptable to the south.
Once Lincoln was elected, southern opposition to the northern route was gone, and even though American was in the middle of a devastating war, the trans railroad was started in 1863, and completed in 1868.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Transcontinental_Railroad
But also, railroads were expanded EVERYWHERE. Rail was needed for the war effort. Also, as the southern infrastructure was destroyed, it had to be rebuild, and that was done by the railroad barons (and standardized rail gauge along the way).
So Lincoln was not a minor influence in railroad development in American. His position as a railroad supporter, and unacceptability to southern states as POTUS, directly led to the greatest expansion of railroads in American. This expansion lasted for all the later half of the 19th century.
History looks at Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.
But within two years of being elected, the Pacific Railroad Act had been passed. Within weeks of taking office, all southern opposition to the more profitable northern route had been removed. The war made certain that there was virtually no oversight to the building of the trans route. Millions and millions were made because of his being elected. You simply cannot overstate the impact of his presidency on America, and by that I mean the railroads.
But the true cost of that expansion might have been 650,000 lives.
http://www.civilwar.org/education/civil-war-casualties.html
In America, it’s almost always about the money.
nalbar
I note that my brief mention of Lincoln contained a link to a rather long comment on Lincoln and the railways, posted in a rather long diary on Lincoln.
I’ll repeat some points from the above linked comment and diary of mine as direct counters to some aspects of the diarist’s take. I do this because the Lincoln as capitalist tool narrative was born not as a leftist argument but as an element of the Southern revisionist “Lost Cause” myth, which sought to deny that slavery was truly central of conflict, and the points I want to address unfortunately go in that direction.
First, the central North-South conflict regarding the Western expansion wasn’t about a transcontinental railroad (something utopian for most people even at the end of the 1850s, as shown by Grenville Dodge’s failure to get East Coast funders), but on the point of whether future new States forming in the West will be slaver states or not.
This had more import than one may think at first: not only did the expansion of the competing plantation and manufacturing business elites depend on it, but majorities in Congress, and thus the future of federal-level legislation on slavery (which up to then couldn’t be changed radically because of the stalemate between the Northern-dominated House and the Southern-dominated Senate). Thus this conflict over slavery in the Western expansion didn’t just re-ignite the North-South conflict but made it unresolvable and existential. In fact, recognising that in 1854 (“I tell you, Dickey, this nation cannot exist half-slave and half-free”) is what brought Lincoln back into politics.
Furthermore, Lincoln wasn’t a lawyer working exclusively for the railroads, he was a case lawyer who represented both railroads and complainants against railroads. (In fact it was the same about slavery: he did represent Southern slaveowners demanding their escaped slaves back.) So I think he was more a lawyer who viewed his job as one to be done with amoral professionalism than a committed dog of specific special interests.
Third, Lincoln’s unacceptability to the South was due to the South’s utter paranoid self-delusion, rather than anything Lincoln and his backers plotted. We are talking about people who seriously believed that their slaves would rather die with their masters than be freed by the North, and read newspapers that manufactured quotes when a critic of slavery didn’t seem evil enough, and foamed about Northern aggression and saw themselves as knights of justice while celebrating aggressors who beat up or lynched critics of slavery (think of such “chivalric” acts as Preston Brooks bashing Charles Sumner’s head in on the Senate floor). By 1860, the South would have seen any Northerner as an abolitionist, as can be seen from the split of the Democratic Party upon the nomination of Stephen A. Douglas, a proponent of total appeasement of the South who was nevertheless accused of being an abolitionist agent. In fact, Lincoln’s actual election platform was moderate by Republican standards and included appeasement of the South, too.
Great reminder of how our first Republican president, even when he wasn’t messing with plantation owners’ “property” rights or fighting nullificationist state governments, was always a classic big-government centralized-planning liberal and it is that consistent point of view that makes him our greatest president ever.
I have always been fascinated by this period in our history. People don’t realize the technological advancement that railroads were. The Internet? Railroads were bigger for their time. During their development in England, it was a common belief that going over 30 mph would be fatal!
Virtually all of history is build around the compression of time. Think Roman roads, that was a compression of distance, which saved time. The Mediterranean sea was a time compression device. If you compress time/distance, you improve the movement of other technologies.
It’s very easy to criticize the ‘barons’ for their greed, and shout about the damage of shipping monopolies. But even with monopolies, the railroads were better than without. They connect states, moved people, and had effects far beyond the shipment of goods. Once again, think Internet. We all pay through various monopolies to get online. We pay too much, far more than Europe (they get better faster service, for less!). But who would say it’s not worth it? Railroads were the Internet of their day. Whatever the price, it was worth it.
It’s interesting you define Lincoln as a ‘big government liberal’. But he was also a money grubbing capitalist, who was doing the bidding of robber barons. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
I think the main change is our present money grubbers don’t actually make anything. The Barons left rail.
Not heroes, but builders.
Lincoln understood, as Marx did (and the “Marxists” in Russia and China didn’t), that capitalism is necessary for industrial development. He also understood that it needs to be controlled and guided. I think the barons were doing his bidding rather than the other way around (and of course stealing whatever they could while they were at it). Our money grubbers since the 1980s do whatever yields the quickest profit in a laisser-faire atmosphere where government is too timid to influence them.
It’s worth a diary explaining that. : )
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Do it, and then I’ll ‘add’ to it!
: )
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Yipes, that sounds like real work!
Many analogies between the railroads and the internet. The Barons are one of those.
But he was also a money grubbing capitalist, who was doing the bidding of robber barons.
I think that’s a rather strong exaggeration. Lincoln never got rich to the point of being much of a capitalist (his biggest investment was into land that stayed undeveloped until years after his death) and his pre-election income came from constant work as case lawyer. The Robber Barons have still just at the beginning of their get-rich-quick schemes during his lifetime, and it is far from a given that he would have let them go unchecked to the extent his unfit successor did.
That’s a very good extension of the analogy you draw there. Let me extend it further by claiming that, while whatever the price it is worth it, a lower price would have to be paid had there been more direct public involvement (as we have had in Europe).