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But
the country was already in motion and the forces, which unresistingly pushed
westwards, would soon set the stage for the transcontinental railroad to
become reality. In 1856, the new Republican Party nominated the meanwhile
famous John Charles Freemont (1813-1890), explorer and pacificator of the
West, for the presidency on a frontier ticket. Freemont failed to get
elected and the Republican Party focused on the more acute anti-slavery
policy thereafter, but the conquest of the West remained on its tickets and
so did the Transcontinental railroad. In 1860, the Republican Abraham
Lincoln was brought to the White House on an anti-slavery ticket thanks to
the division of the Democrats, between Stephen Arnold Douglas and John
Cabell Breckinridge. His election almost immediately caused the decade long
rift between the North and South to outburst and one after the other, the
Southern states followed South Carolina into secession. The country was
drawn into the violent conflict that would be later known as the Secession
War or the American Civil War.
With
the Southern states gone, the major antagonism to the Transcontinental
railroad died out and both the Senate and House of Representatives approved
the bill which resulted from scores of lobbyist pushes to build the railroad
along the 42nd parallel in latitude from the Missouri river to San
Francisco.
In 1862, ten years after Asa Whitney retired, President Lincoln signed the
Pacific Railroad Act and thereby launched the largest railroad enterprise
undertaken until then in America. The Act of 1862 provided the charter for
the Union Pacific Railroad, to be built from the 100th meridian in the
Platte river valley Nebraska to the border between Nevada and California,
with two feeder lines from Omaha and Sioux City to the 100th meridian. It
also provided the charter for the Central Pacific Railroad, as a feeder line
to be built from Sacramento over the Sierra Nevada and through to meet the
Union Pacific eastwards and to San Francisco in the West. Another feeder
line was the Leavenworth, Pawnee & Western, later to be known as the Union
Pacific Eastern Division, which was to link the 100th meridian Southeast
with Kansas City.
The
Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 provided for the Transcontinental railroad and
its feeder lines to be built by private entrepreneurs, but the government
generously endowed the project to create an incentive for private enterprise
to invest. The charters of the related railroads provided rights of way and
use of stone and timber to build the roadbed, granted 6'400 acres of land
for each mile of railroad built and gave a government guarantee on 6%-30
year bonds to the extent of 16'000 $ per mile built in the plains, 32'000 $
in the high plateaus within the Rocky Mountain ranges and 48'000 $ for the
mountain tracks. Based on the estimates made after the surveys, the land
grants (totaling some 20 million acres) and the government warranted bonds
with a face value of $ 60 million were to provide about half the needed
capital for the project. More than 50'000'000 $ were to be raised from
private investors.
Railroad
Barons
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