Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  But it revitalized Lincoln’s career. In 1858 he challenged Stephen Douglas for the Senate seat Douglas held. In a series of debates that summer, the two tramped up and down Illinois, with Lincoln on the attack against the Dred Scott decision, as well as the Kansas-Nebraska Act and other parts of the Douglas record. Lincoln didn’t win the election; Douglas was returned to office. But the effort gained Lincoln a name among Republicans. He was thoughtful and articulate. He was determined to keep slavery out of the West. And at a time of rising voices all across the country, he understood how to make his points without making a fuss. He was moderate not merely in views but in temperament and manner. The experienced political hands among the Republicans took note especially of this. Their reading of the electoral college convinced them that the Republican nominee in 1860, if he didn’t scare away moderates in the North, had an excellent chance of becoming the next president. Lincoln might be their man.

  The value of moderation increased in 1859, when the slavery debate took another violent turn, once more the work of John Brown. Though wanted for murder in Kansas, Brown traveled freely around the North, albeit under assumed names. Abolitionists shielded him and gave him money, and he plotted a blow against slavery more telling than the murder of a handful of slavery men. He projected an insurrection of slaves in Virginia that would spread across the South and lead to the overthrow of the slave system.

  His first step was the seizure of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Brown and his followers entered the town at night in October 1859. Meeting little resistance, they occupied the arsenal and made prisoners of its guards. Meanwhile other Brown men moved quietly about the neighborhood spreading word to slaves that freedom was at hand. The slaves should come to Harpers Ferry, where they would receive weapons and instructions for their war of liberation.

  The slaves rejected Brown’s plan. They wanted nothing to do with him or his war. Some were less unhappy with their lot than Brown had supposed; others simply reckoned that his plan was crazy and would only get them killed.

  Awaiting reinforcements that never appeared, Brown and his men became trapped in the arsenal by local authorities who quickly summoned militia. Regular marines arrived from Washington by train, commanded by U.S. army colonel Robert E. Lee. After Brown refused to surrender, Lee ordered the storming of the engine house where Brown and the others were holed up. Several of Brown’s men were killed; Brown himself was wounded but taken alive.

  Virginia prosecutors charged him with treason against the commonwealth. Brown was tried, convicted and sentenced to hang. But before his execution he was allowed to speak, and his eloquence in indicting the slave system seared the consciences of Northern abolitionists who asked themselves why they hadn’t had the courage to put their lives on the line for their beliefs, as Brown had done. Brown’s death was observed by the tolling of church bells in the North and his canonization by many Northerners as a martyr to liberty.

  The South was appalled by every part of this. A race war had been the nightmare of the white South for decades; Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry rendered the nightmare chillingly plausible. And then, when the North made a saint of this terrorist, Southerners despaired that they could ever be safe within the Union.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN DISTANCED HIMSELF FROM JOHN BROWN. He sincerely disagreed with Brown’s violent approach. But Lincoln also recognized that the path to the presidency for a moderate Republican required keeping clear of a militant like Brown. John Brown was no Republican, Lincoln told all who would listen, including a crowd at the Cooper Institute in New York, to which Lincoln had been invited by fellow Republican moderates. The crowd sized up Lincoln as a possible nominee for president, and most liked what they saw and heard. Lincoln passed subsequent tests on his way to the Republican national convention, where he got the nod of the party.

  The election was divisive but the outcome foreordained. Lincoln didn’t have to win a single electoral vote in the South in order to carry the election. He didn’t, and he did.

  Even before his inauguration, Southern states began to secede: first South Carolina, then six more. The last two of the seven—Louisiana and Texas—were crucial. Had secession been limited to states east of the Mississippi, many Northerners, conceivably including Lincoln, might have been tempted to let them go. They would never be more than a rump country on the wrong side of history, weighed down by slavery while the rest of the civilized world, under the double inspiration of democracy and industrialization, was abandoning the feudal institution.

  But when secession leaped the Mississippi, it put Lincoln in the position Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson had been in when they rejected the idea that any part of the great river could be in foreign hands. Most goods and cargoes continued to travel by water; the Mississippi still held the key to the American West. Franklin hadn’t been willing for Britain or Spain to threaten access to the West; Jefferson wouldn’t suffer France to do the same thing. Now Lincoln refused to let the Confederacy endanger the West and jeopardize America’s future.

  34

  FREE SOIL

  THE WAR CAME. AND THOUGH IT BROUGHT TREMENDOUS trials to the North and the South, it conferred great good fortune on the West. Westerners fought in the war: most Texans on the Confederate side, and nearly all other Westerners with the Union. But very little fighting took place in the West. And the politics of the Civil War served Western interests quite well.

  More precisely, the politics of the war served particular Western interests. Secession and the war enabled a revolution in American policy toward the ownership of Western land. What emerged as the Homestead Act had its roots in the audacious land grab by settlers in the Willamette Valley in the 1840s, the one they hoped to legitimize by the Linn bill that had inspired Peter Burnett to strike out for Oregon. The Linn bill caught the coattails of the Free Soil movement, which started as a wing of abolitionism but evolved into a program championing the rights of ordinary people to the possession of land. “Free soil” meant soil free of slavery, but also soil given for free to free farmers, in family-sized homesteads. The idea was that family farms would preempt large plantations and form a bulwark against slavery. They would also allow the creation of new free states that would eventually crack the Southern veto of restrictive legislation on slavery. The concept drew adherents among antislavery groups in the East, but it was most passionately supported in the West, where the great majority of federal land was located.

  The Free Soil party didn’t last, but its philosophy was adopted by the Republican party. Meanwhile the homestead idea gave the Linn proposal the boost it needed to win congressional assent. In September 1850 the federal legislature approved the Donation Land Claim Act, granting 320 acres to each unmarried male and 640 acres to each married couple resident in Oregon before December 1, 1850. Smaller plots of land were allowed to those who arrived later, up to the time the law expired in 1855. The Oregon squatters had won.

  They might not have if the South had cared more about Oregon. Slavery advocates disliked the homestead concept for the same reason slavery opponents liked it. Southerners let the Oregon bill pass because Oregon was far away and unsuited to slavery, and because the Oregon bill was largely retrospective and time-limited. Southerners refused to countenance anything like a general homestead bill, which reached the national platform of the Republicans but advanced no farther by the end of the 1850s.

  The breakthrough came amid the Civil War. Southern secession made the Republicans the dominant force in national affairs, and in 1862 the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Homestead Act. Modeled after the Oregon land law but temporally open-ended, the Homestead Act authorized every head of family or single adult to receive 160 acres of federal land for free, providing that he or she—women were included—lived on the land for five years and improved it. Transferrable title could be acquired sooner, after one year, by the payment of $1.25 per acre. The law applied to American citizens and to immigrants who had declared an intention to become citiz
ens.

  The effective date of the Homestead Act was January 1, 1863, which not coincidentally was the day the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. The twin measures affirmed the ideology of freedom the Republicans had inherited from the Free Soilers. And just as the Emancipation Proclamation promised to revolutionize life in the South, the Homestead Act appeared certain to revolutionize life in the West. “We cannot but feel that the passage of the Homestead Bill will form a new era in Western emigration,” declared the Kansas Junction Union, in a sentiment echoed in a hundred Western papers. “The field is now fully open to the honest and energetic farmer, who wishes to secure himself a home on easy terms.”

  From colonial days the cost of land had acted as a filter on the westward movement. Land was cheaper on the frontier, to be sure, but it wasn’t free. It had to be purchased, often from speculators who had negotiated deals with Indian tribes or the government. People of modest means could move west, but those of lesser resources frequently could not. This was why Texas, where the Mexican government had offered its own homestead policy, had been such a magnet for American settlers. The Homestead Act held out the promise that anyone, of whatever means, could take part in the American dream of land ownership.

  THE REPUBLICANS HAD MORE TO GIVE THE WEST. THOUGH a Pacific railroad had been the congressional brainchild of Democrat Stephen Douglas, it got nowhere so long as the South wielded a veto in the Senate. The eastern end of the projected railroad would lie in the North, funneling the gold of California into the Northern economy, to the comparative detriment of the South. The departure of the South suddenly made the railroad possible, and the Republicans moved at once. In the same session that adopted the Homestead Act, Congress approved the Pacific Railway Act, which decreed federal support for the construction of a line from the Missouri River to California. Participating rail companies would receive land grants from the federal domain and loans from the federal treasury. The loans would cover the cost of construction; they would be repaid with revenues from the sale of the granted lands and from the operating revenues of the railroads.

  The Pacific railroad would accomplish the unifying purpose of Stephen Douglas, who was unable to appreciate even the irony of its signing by his archrival, Abraham Lincoln, since Douglas had died in 1861. Indeed, unification was a more pressing issue than ever upon the outbreak of the Civil War. Southern sympathies were strong in California, and that state’s gold would have been a godsend to the Confederacy. Lincoln was prepared to move heaven and earth to keep California in the Union, and while he couldn’t relocate California, he could bring it effectively closer by means of a railroad. As soon as the railroad bill was passed, the secessionist rumblings in California ceased, as they did in neighboring Nevada, where the silver mines of the Comstock Lode had lately made that territory a rival to California in production of precious metals. No one doubted that the Pacific railroad would be expensive, but Lincoln would have paid thrice the price if necessary to secure the Far West and its glittering wealth.

  35

  HELL ON WHEELS

  THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE PACIFIC RAILWAY WAS THE grandest project of its kind in American history until then. It was certainly the greatest thing the West had ever seen. Two companies took charge of the building. The Union Pacific Railroad Company started in Omaha, Nebraska, and worked west; the Central Pacific started in Sacramento and worked east. Though separated at first by fifteen hundred miles, they were in competition with each other, for the federal funding was keyed to the miles of track laid. Differentials were devised to account for the greater difficulty of building in the Sierra Nevada as compared with the Great Plains, but from the moment the initial grading began, the race was on to see which company could cover more ground and thereby win more of the public subsidy.

  In the 1860s railroads were the largest enterprises in America by far. At a time when a big mine might employ several hundred workers, and a big factory about the same, the Pennsylvania Railroad employed many thousands. The Union Pacific and the Central Pacific didn’t operate on that scale at first, but they were engines of economic development nonetheless. They pulled in workers by the trainload, including immigrants willing to do hard and dangerous labor for modest pay.

  The Union Pacific favored Irish immigrants, who had been fleeing their birth land for America since the potato famine of the 1840s. The Irish were greeted with curses and brickbats by many Easterners, who despised them for being Catholic and for depressing the wage scale. When the Union Pacific advertised for laborers on its great Western project, thousands of Irish took up the offer.

  The Central Pacific expected to rely on Irish workers as well. James Strobridge, construction chief for the Central Pacific, had dealt with the Irish before and intended to do so again. But there weren’t enough Irish in California to keep them complaisant. “Four or five of the Irishmen on pay day got to talking together,” recalled Charles Crocker, one of the four principals in the Central Pacific. “And I said to Mr. Strobridge there is some little trouble ahead.” The trouble took the form of a demand for higher wages. “I told Mr. Strobridge then to go over to Auburn”—a town in the gold country—“and get some Chinamen and put them to work,” Crocker continued. Strobridge was skeptical. He didn’t doubt that Chinese would work cheap. But what did they know about construction? Crocker retorted, “Did they not build the Chinese Wall?”

  The Chinese soon displaced the Irish on the Central Pacific, and they became the unsung heroes of the construction assault on the Sierra Nevada. Collis Huntington, another of the Central Pacific partners, had argued for avoiding fanfare at the groundbreaking ceremony; looking east from Sacramento, Huntington explained, “Those mountains over there look too ugly, and I see too much work ahead of us. We may fail, and if we do, I want to have as few people know it as we can.”

  The mountains looked even uglier up close. Their passes were higher than those on any railroad in America; the approaches to the passes were forbiddingly steep. The surveyors and engineers did their best to wind the route along rivers and make looping curves that eased the grade. But some stretches required brute force, and no little courage. One section rounded a cliff face called Cape Horn for its resemblance to that daunting South American landmark. Try as they might, the engineers could not find an alternative to cutting a roadbed out of the thousand-foot-tall, solid granite face. No one in America had ever accomplished such a feat. James Strobridge stared at the cliff and wondered if it could be done. The head man of one of the Chinese crews approached him and said it could. He said his people had done similar work in the gorges of the Yangtze River at home. They could crack this nut. Strobridge told him to have at it.

  The Chinese said they’d need reeds from the Sacramento delta. From these they wove baskets big enough to hold a man. Ropes anchored at the top of the cliff dangled the baskets and the men inside them to the level of the proposed rail grade. The basket men swung hammers that drove steel drills into the granite, making holes into which they tamped black powder. Upon lighting the fuses, they signaled up the ropes to be hauled out of the way before the powder went off. The powder roared and the loosened rock thundered down into the valley below, and the aerial sappers inched their way around Cape Horn.

  Crocker, Huntington and the other two Central Pacific partners—Leland Stanford and Mark Hopkins—came to appreciate the value of the Chinese crews. “Without them it would be impossible to go on with the work,” Hopkins declared.

  Even so, the Central Pacific foursome demurred when the Chinese demanded a wage hike. They wanted a raise to $40 per month, more than the Irish had been making, and a reduction in the workday from eleven hours to ten. They put down their tools and said they wouldn’t pick them up until their terms were met.

  The partners refused, judging that this demand would be followed by others. They said that if the Chinese wouldn’t work, neither would they eat. Deep in the mountains, the construction crews depended on the company for provisions. The partners halted food shipments. Th
e workers felt the pinch. “They really began to suffer,” said Edwin Crocker, brother of Charles, and a lawyer and member of the Central Pacific board of directors. “None of us went near them for a week—did not want to exhibit anxiety. Then Charles went up, and they gathered around him, and he told them that he would not be dictated to, that he made the rules for them and not they for him.” Some of the strikers said they wanted to go back to work but feared retribution from their fellows. “Charley told them that he would protect them, and his men would shoot down any man that attempted to do the laborers any injury. He had the sheriff and posse come up to see that there was no fighting.”

  The strikers’ hunger and the threat of violence drove them back to the job. The construction resumed.

  THE UNION PACIFIC, PLOWING ACROSS THE PLAINS OF NEBRASKA and Wyoming, had labor issues of its own. During the first phase of construction, while the Civil War continued, the Union Pacific had to compete with the Union army for manpower. Irish immigrants sometimes deemed labor on the railroad preferable to service in the military, but not always. The end of the war freed up soldiers to become track layers, yet by making the alternative to railroad work less onerous, it made that work comparatively less attractive. The construction never stopped for lack of workers, but it sometimes slowed.

  The Union Pacific crews, on the Great Plains, covered ground much faster than the Central Pacific crews in the Sierra Nevada. As the westbound line extended from Nebraska into Wyoming and on toward the mountains, it dragged in its wake a rolling construction camp that looked much like the mining camps of the California gold country, only mobile. “Hell on wheels” was what the wide-eyed press called the gaggle of saloons, brothels and gambling halls that did their best to relieve the workers of their hard-earned money, typically with the workers’ enthusiastic cooperation. The first permanent towns along the Union Pacific route included pieces of the caravan that dropped off as the construction passed on.