The Twenty-ninth Congress convened. President Polk told the assembled delegates that henceforth the Monroe Doctrine contained a codicil: “the people of this continent alone have the right to decide their own destiny,” he said. “No future European colony or dominion shall with our consent be planted or established on any part of the North American continent.”1 He ended the year by signing up Texas as the flag’s twenty-eighth star. There were few in Washington who observed New Year’s Day 1846 without some speculation about the imminence of war: probably with Mexico, probably with England. The Year of Decision—in Bernard DeVoto’s phrase, defining not only choice but determination, the flowering of a national will—commenced. “Let me live where I will,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, “on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more and withdrawing into the wilderness. I should not lay so much stress on this fact if I did not believe that something like this is the prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe.”2
In late February, as DeVoto has juxtaposed the events, Frémont and his men were glowering in the direction of the Mexican post at Monterey and nearing the point of daring the “greasers” to do their worst; General Zachary Taylor’s men continued to strut on the Rio Grande shore; President Polk briefly entertained the notion of plunking down gold instead of his countrymen’s blood for the Southwest and the Far West; and thousands of persecuted Mormons emptied their Illinois town, Nauvoo, in favor of a westward-tending uncertainty on the trans-Mississippi frontier. The boundaries of the Great American Desert shimmered, expanded, contracted. In Washington, the distinguished senator from Illinois, Sidney Breese, presented Asa Whitney’s new memorial, and it was referred to the Committee on Public Lands.
The document was more than twice the size of Whitney’s effort of the previous year. In it Whitney elaborated his earlier arguments with a detailed description of his findings in the West, the fertile soils, the placement of timber and potential quarries, the probable bridge sites, the necessity of linking Oregon with the States before it decided to go its own way. Additionally, he had now had contact with the “numerous, powerful, and entirely savage” Indians and thought that his railroad would serve as a buffer zone to keep warring tribes from exterminating each other, preserving their race “until mixed and blended with ours.” Thus had Whitney become the first railroad promoter to consider in any way the continent’s first denizens. The Sioux were “ready and willing to sell all that may be desirable” for his project, he reported to Congress, “and for a very small sum.”3
The promoter added one other significant element to his argument: he renounced all profits for the first twenty years of his road’s operation, such money and titles of land which were not converted to railroad construction or maintenance to be held in trust by the government as security for the fulfilment of his contract. Whitney was approaching his forty-ninth birthday. “In all human probability,” he said, he would in twenty years “be past the wants of this life.” If he could be the instrument to accomplish “this great work,” he said, “it will be enough”—he asked no more.4
To his satisfaction, the Senate Committee on Public Lands reported a bill drawn from his memorial on July 30. Much had occurred outside of the committee room in the interim: the Senate had ratified an Anglo-American treaty setting the border between British Canada and American Oregon at the 49th parallel; the much-anticipated war with Mexico had commenced, giving junior officers Grant, Sherman, Meade, Hooker, McClellan, Pope, Lee, Jackson, Beauregard, et al. the sort of military experience they required; Captain Frémont, after kicking sand from a breastworks in the face of the Mexican authorities in California, had retired, then returned to join revolting American settlers under the Flag of the Bear, closely followed by the U.S. Navy’s capture of Monterey, Sonoma, and San Francisco; Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny’s “Army of the West” had paused to peremptorily knock at the New Mexico border, announcing it would enter to ameliorate the conditions of its inhabitants.
Despite these distractions, the Senate ordered the public lands committee report on Whitney’s Oregon railroad to be printed. This was done over the objections of the powerful Senator Thomas Hart Benton from Missouri, who thought Whitney’s memorial “absurd,” “ridiculous,” and “impudent”—and, once he had time to consider the matter, would begin to hold that any Pacific railroad should have its eastern terminus in, well, St. Louis.5
But then, in July 1846, the senator had not yet considered the matter. Nor had he in December 1844, when Whitney first toured the Capitol to proclaim his work. “Old Bullion” Benton, before whose lance even windmills fell, whose foghorn voice in session caused all but a few of his fellow senators to wince and duck their heads, would typically have cut short his visitor’s speech. “Impossible, sir,” he is remembered to have scolded Asa Whitney and his projected Pacific railroad, “You are one hundred years before the time.” Benton commanded his visitor to return when he had canvassed others in the Senate, which Whitney set out to do.6 After this was done, however—when more often than not the merchant found his proposal falling on receptive ears—he had no desire to subject himself to more Bentonian bombast, and stayed away from that office. Habitually he remained in Washington while Congress was in session, so it is more than likely that some nineteen months later, after Senator Sidney Breese rose to advance the memorial, Whitney was sitting above in the visitors’ gallery as the screech of Benton’s chair echoed off the chamber walls, to be followed by a blast. The proposal was “an imposture, a humbug; it could have emanated only from a madman…science was unequal to overcome the Allegheny Mountains—and now Whitney proposed to scale the Rocky Mountains, four or five times as high! Why sir, ’tis madness!”7
Benton notwithstanding, the Senate recessed with the favorable report beginning to circulate around the country. To Breese’s satisfaction, a former colleague from Mississippi, John Henderson, wrote him on September 19. “We shall expend at least $100,000,000 in our contest with Mexico,” Henderson exclaimed. (Indeed, General Taylor’s six thousand troops had already swept expensively southward into Mexico along the San Juan Valley, and the next day would begin their victorious engagement against General Amadia at Monterrey.) Such a sum, the Mississippian said, “would build this road and purchase so much of Upper California, as would fix its terminus in the bay of San Francisco. Who can doubt which would most promote our interest—our glory? I should have been glad to have you meet with Mr. Benton’s support in this measure, but I trust you will not cower under his opposition, but push it with increasing zeal.”8
Of course Whitney had the letter reprinted in the Washington Daily Union. His scrapbook of clippings was growing new leaves. “The project has been ridiculed as visionary, by those classes of persons, unfortunately too numerous, who always denounce as humbug what they do not comprehend,” wrote the editor of the Philadelphia Public Ledger.
But ridicule from such sources is the common lot of all who are tall enough to see over the heads of the deriders…. Rumsey and Fitch and Fulton were ridiculed for dreaming of navigating by steam…. Clinton was ridiculed for undertaking to “cut a big ditch,” an undertaking which has made the State and city of New York what they are. And now Mr. Whitney is ridiculed for undertaking a project, which twenty years hence, will be a “fixed fact,” and thirty years hence, will be the avenue of all the trade between all Western Europe and all China and India…. And thus ever goes the world; fools laughing at what they cannot see, and wise men foreseeing what fools cannot comprehend.9
Now no longer a shy man but an active publicist, Whitney began in October to tour “the western states,” moving from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, Terre Haute, Indianapolis, Dayton, Columbus, Wheeling, Nashville, and back to Philadelphia. He garnered attention wherever he went, especially when he first appeared before an audience. As one newspaper observed, “Mr. Whitney is probably the most correct and striking representation of Napoleon Bonapart in personal appearance, that anyone has ever beheld, since the time of the great original; and has often, when in Paris, been annoyed by spectators on account of it.”10
With hand not buried within his cloak but emphatically waving and grasping a pointing stick, his presentation seldom varied. “All the maps we have heretofore studied,” he would say to the assemblies as he stood before two maps of the world, “have been made with particular regard to the position of Europe—Europe, Asia and Africa placed together, and our continent [to] one side of all, as if of no importance.”
A stirring in those audiences of Americans. Their pride had recently swollen as American territory swelled. Whitney could pause significantly as they took in this cartographic insult.
Meanwhile, Whitney would say after a time, “here you see by this map, that we are in the center of all.”
More stirring. A murmuring.
“Europe on the one side, with 250 million of population,” he would continue, “and all Asia on the other side of us, with 700 million of souls. The Atlantic separating us from Europe, the calm Pacific between us and Asia, and you will see that the population and the commerce of all the world is on this belt of the globe—which makes a straight line across our continent.” Those Ohioans, those western Virginians, Kentuckians, and Missourians, those Hoosiers and Keystoners, but most of all those Americans, would for the first time visualize the world in a new way with themselves at its heart. They would absorb Whitney’s eloquent argument for a railroad, and, regardless of their particular remove from the line he drew between Lake Michigan and the Pacific, they would perceive the certain benefits. Perhaps they imagined themselves riding in comfort and security to a new beginning in Oregon or California.11
Whitney was “said to enlist warm advocates of his project wherever he speaks,” reported the Nashville Triweekly Union, while the American Railroad Journal allowed that “the western community seem well disposed towards this stupendous enterprise.”12 Even the doubters maintained a modicum of respect, such as an editor of the Cincinnati Daily Commercial, who confined himself to a satirical account of Whitney’s program:
Mr. Gullible, the President, took the chair, and after a few remarks, introduced Mr. Monchausen to the meeting. His statement was brief, plain, and business-like, in character with the subject, which, like the creations of genius, needs not the glitter of rhetoric for its embellishment, but shows best in the native, simple, yet awful grandeur and harmony of its proportions. He spoke of the relation of his project to other works, yet unlike any of them, inasmuch as it was to “unite neighboring planets in our solar system, and make them better acquainted with each other”—no capital was required, no stock was to be issued, no dividends to be made—the fruit of nature, it would create settlements, commerce and wealth, and stimulate production.13
Only in New York would Whitney encounter any trouble. There, his public meeting ended in anarchy. A group of National Reformers invaded the assembly and, without realizing how close their position was to Whitney’s (they had neither listened to his speech nor read his proposal) they denounced the merchant as anti-Labor and took over the hall. Much later Whitney received an apology; the outburst, however, did gain him some adherents.14
To expansionists beyond the inner circle in Washington, the Year of Decision closed with a semblance of progress with new territory gained. Kearny’s conquest, New Mexico, was annexed. Monterrey was Zachary Taylor’s, while at year’s end his men camped under a temporary armistice near Buena Vista. Another trans-Mississipi state, Iowa, the flag’s twenty-ninth star, had been admitted—a symbolic advance westward. Before snow blocked the passes some 300 more settlers had arrived in California, and some 1,350 in Oregon, numbers which could be read as disappointing or promising depending on one’s persuasion.
James Knox Polk derived little comfort from these gains—in fact, the president had passed beyond seeing the glass as half empty or half full to not seeing the glass at all. Rebelliousness was abroad; enemies lurked behind every bush. A Pennsylvania representative once thought to be a Polk man had been stricken with Van Burenitis in the Twenty-ninth Congress—by inserting a proviso into legislation, the annoying Mr. Wilmot seemed likely to bar slavery from any lands gained from the war. Of course the Whigs, who were gaining ground by calling Polk’s war an unconstitutional grab for territorial spoils, had rallied behind the measure. The president could not even trust his own commanders of the Mexican campaign, especially Zachary Taylor—who, every time he ignored Polk’s battle directions, emerged victorious over the Mexicans. Worse, Taylor would certainly be the Whigs’ next presidential candidate. At his nomination Polk had pledged himself to only one term, which was now at midpoint; he had little time to simultaneously prosecute a successful war and defeat his own general. Moreover, state and congressional elections in the autumn had given Whigs and antislavery Democrats a troublesome margin. Consequently there was little for Polk to look forward to during the next session.
Members at the second session of the Twenty-ninth Congress, convened in December, were greeted as usual by a battalion of lobbyists, among them the genially persuasive Mr. Asa Whitney, “the Railroad Projector”; his was as dependable a presence as that of any of the legislators. Whitney’s route now publicly divided on the western slope of the Rockies. One line veered to our new Northwest. And one extended to California, where, deep in the Sierra Nevada, the Donner party gazed into a sky that was aswirl with snowflakes and darkened by the horror to come.
Whitney’s was not the only transcontinental memorial laid before that congressional session. The time was becoming more ripe. Dr. Hartwell Carver, of St. Louis, submitted his proposal for a charter to build along Whitney’s route. He wrote that after a trip up the Missouri in 1837 “the propriety and the practicability of running a railroad across the Rocky mountains burst upon my mind with perfect conviction, and has ever since been the idol of my heart.” He claimed to have published numerous articles that year, both in territorial newspapers (none have survived) and in the New York Courier and Inquirer of August 11, 1837 (it is not there), but he received neither “applause or encouragement” then nor any subsequent recognition. Were it not, he said, for the fact that he had been in Europe in 1844 when Asa Whitney began approaching editors and legislators, he likely would be receiving proper credit as the originator of the idea.
“The religious point of view alone, aside from any other, is enough to warrant this undertaking,” Dr. Carver told Congress,
for it will open the way for the conversion of millions and millions to the true faith, and bring them fully under Christian discipline. Instead of the devoted devotees occupying two or three months going to Mecca to worship false gods, the true Christian missionary can go from this country and convert thousands to a saving faith in Christ, the true savior of mankind, in that time.
This enterprise, he promised, “will bring about a kind of earthly millenium, and be the means of uniting the whole world in one great church, a part of whose worship will be to praise God and bless the Oregon Railroad.” And think of the commerce! “The quality of teas would be much better coming to us in a few weeks of gathering,” he said. “I suppose the flavor and quality of our teas now bear no comparison to what it would if brought directly to us, without crossing the equator twice. Methinks I can look forward, through the vista of time, and see countless thousands of our fair country women sitting of an afternoon leisurely sipping and drinking their tea, until they become intoxicated with the sweet flavored aroma of this delicious beverage and cry out, in sweet and musical accents, blessed be God, and the projectors and builders of the Oregon railroad, now and forever, amen.”
Beyond the sweet and musical accents, Dr. Carver proposed to be deeded a transcontinental slice some forty miles wide (as opposed to Whitney’s sixty) to be paid for in railroad stock certificates which Carver would have printed. He thought it would take him no more than six years to build the road at a cost of $60 million. While Mr. Whitney’s proposal was evolving toward a nonprofit enterprise, the doctor would emerge from his deal owning all of the excess land and its timber and minerals, a remuneration estimated at eight million acres.15
It was the prospect of such a reward going to Dr. Carver that agitated a third projector of the Pacific road. Enter that relentless opportunist, Mr. George Wilkes of New York, looking rather more presentable than when he was last encountered—when the whiff of the Tombs still clung to him. Now Wilkes was reestablished; his Oregon-boostering book was selling well to Easterners, and he now presided over a new publication of astounding success, having issued for a year and a half the first numbers of The National Police Gazette. “Our city, and indeed the whole country,” Wilkes had informed the readers of volume 1, number 1, “swarms with hordes of English and other thieves, burglars, pick-pockets and swindlers.” Wilkes proposed to strip them of the advantages of “a personal incognito,” by publishing a minute description of their names, aliases, and persons, together with a succinct history of their criminal acts. Wilkes’s column, “Lives of the Felons,” was particularly popular—except in the eyes of one Robert Sutton (“Bob the Wheeler”), a notorious burglar who so disliked the publicity that when he was released from prison he gathered his cohorts and attacked the Gazette offices.
Wilkes survived that assault and the scores of subsequent ones, both legal and physical, that dogged his National Police Gazette. His railroad memorial was written no less floridly than any of his “lives of the felons,” and promised to place “the trident of the seas” in the grasp of the United States and bring “the proudest nations of the earth as suppliants to our gates.” Wilkes warned the legislators to beware of Dr. Hartwell Carver and Mr. Asa Whitney and their plans. Carver was ingenious, he said, to apply for such an enterprise on credit—and his profit would be considerable even if he failed and paid a million-dollar forfeiture. Whitney, though, was “less moderate.” Wilkes portrayed him as a supreme speculator. This was easily done, first by overlooking his character and second by omitting to mention that Whitney had bid to forgo all profits for twenty years when, “in all probability,” he had said, he “would be past the wants of this life.” Whitney, in Wilkes’s view, was corrupt; he pictured “Poverty leaning on its spade before this Imperial Contractor” who would cynically dispense patronage. “We do not care to dwell upon the picture,” wrote the editor of The National Police Gazette, “but we are free to say that a sordid spirit, possessed of such powers and advantages as these, could calmly reject the exchange of his position for the Presidency of the United States, as an unworthy compensation, and the mere temptation of weak ambition.”16
After such accusations it would have been reflexive for any self-respecting congressman to suspect the memorialist’s own motives—curiously, Wilkes did not specify how his connection with the railroad should be arranged or compensated. A man always with his eye on the main chance, Mr. Wilkes seldom put pen to paper without the expectation of reward. However, even more damning, Wilkes proposed the road to be built from the national treasury “without reference to any special mode of raising means,” and that transportation on it should be free for all. Reading that, a legislator of any era would fling the proposal into the fireplace—where it would at least do some good.
The West and the East waited to be joined, and untold millions languished. China and India wallowed in paganism. Pioneers like the Donners were reduced to savagery in the snows when they could be rolling through mountain passes at ten miles per hour and sipping tea and praising the railroad in sweet and musical accents. Meanwhile, Mr. Whitney suffered in dignified silence while Mr. Wilkes called him a crook. Dr. Carver retreated to the position that he was the “Originator of the Pacific Rail-Road.” Whitney had never said he was first in the procession of dreamers—but the doctor’s claim to primacy spurred a raft of complaints from “Iowaian,” Mr. John Plumbe, the Welshman from Dubuque, whose memorial in 1838 had proposed a railroad from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi, which had been derisively likened to “a railroad to the moon.” Plumbe had become proprietor of a chain of photography studios in at least eight major cities—his “Plumbeotype” gallery had drawn an editorial rhapsody from Mr. Walter Whitman of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.17 Plumbe’s “Iowaian” letters (and those of supporters he prevailed upon to write on his behalf) angrily asserted fathership of the transcontinental idea, a claim both unwarranted and in any case meaningless. To his satisfaction, “a large number” of Dubuquers gathered on March 26, 1847, to pass the following resolution: “Resolved, Unanimously, that the meeting regards John Plumbe, Esq., as the original projector of the great Oregon Railroad.” It proved to be inadequate recognition. Ten years later, the embittered “Iowaian” committed suicide.18
With three memorials already before Congress advocating what would be deemed “the northern route,” it was only natural in those increasingly bitter sectional times that Southerners would come forward proposing their own. Colonel James Gadsden of South Carolina had first made a general call late in 1845, to be answered by one Professor C. J. Forshey of Louisiana, who urged a route running from his home state across Texas and a strip of northern Mexico to the Gulf of California at Mazatlan.19 General Samuel Houston would respond with his own idea later in the Thirtieth Congress, a line from Galveston to San Diego using the Gila Valley. Southerners pointed out that their routes would be a thousand miles shorter than Whitney’s and would traverse countryside less severe in weather and terrain. In reply Whitney maintained that he cared not for sectionalism; the unsettled public lands of the North lying at the base of his scheme could not be moved to suit politicians. Moreover, the Southerners typically overstated the problems posed by snows. In any event, he would add with terse Yankee acumen, with a torrid southern route all perishables being sent to market would, well, perish. And the trade route between Europe and China, from which all America stood to benefit, would be substantially lengthened if the southerly line were plotted, as anyone with a globe and a string could determine for himself.20
Meanwhile, reports trickled back to the States telling that Vera Cruz was secured and that, at a heavy price, troops ascended Cerro Gordo’s blood-slicked trails. Simultaneously, as the snow-blocked high mountain passes leading to California and Oregon’s Elysian Fields began to soften, as John Charles Frémont journeyed eastward across the continent toward a court martial for unlawfully assuming the governorship of California, as more eastern farmers read their Frémont and their Hastings and their Wilkes and looked rebelliously at their stone-choked fields, so did agitation begin to rise for easier transcontinental travel. In April 1846, Brigham Young and his Pioneer Band, 148 in all, descended from their winter quarters on a prominence overlooking Council Bluffs. Putting the Missouri between them and fifteen thousand fellow Mormons who would wait behind for their summons, the pilgrims commenced their long journey to a haven in the valley of the Great Salt Lake. Some miles later at the Platte River, Young was anxious to avoid Gentiles, who habitually moved eastward or westward on the southern bank. So the Pioneer Band blazed its trail on the north bank—and thus left their wagon ruts for the transcontinental railroad to follow.
That year, order books of the Pennsylvania iron mills fattened satisfactorily and the nascent industry of the Iron Horse picked up. In 1847 Irish work gangs began scraping a grade along the Hudson’s eastern bank between New York and Albany. As they labored, perhaps laughing to themselves that their line was marring views and cutting off river access for the patrician estates on the overlooking slopes, elsewhere attorneys drew up charters of incorporation for the Chicago and Rock Island, the Mobile and Ohio, the Pennsylvania, and the Hannibal and St. Joseph. The directors of the latter enterprise included a Hannibalian justice, Mr. John Clemens, whose young son Sam had just become a printer’s apprentice. Justice Clemens and colleagues had lofty aspirations—that the Hannibal and St. Joseph would become the eastern terminus for Mr. Whitney’s Pacific railroad.
For his part, Asa Whitney kept busy. He addressed whoever would gather to hear him out, and his speeches increasingly took on an urgent tone: the empty lands were rapidly filling up with settlers—soon he would be making adjustments in his proposal calling for an eastern terminus not on Lake Michigan but at Prairie du Chien on the Mississippi. To delay much further might delay the railroad indefinitely. His congressional allies continued to prod the memorial along, their cause buoyed as a succession of endorsements arrived in the Capitol. During 1847 and 1848 the state legislatures of New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, Vermont, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan, and even of Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Kentucky—the South was not united against Whitney’s northern route—passed favorable resolutions. Often they were unanimous; his was “the only feasible plan for the accomplishment of the work,” they said.21 “Already,” writes DeVoto of 1847, “Asa Whitney, the dreamer of railroads, was by no means the figure of cloud-cuckoo land which he had been a year before—precisely as the abolitionists had, in that year, somehow ceased to be madmen.”22
There was, however, a quality of madness abroad in the land. Not out of diplomacy and compromise, but out of an “easy” war with Mexico, and out of bellicose saber-rattling against Britain, the nation’s “manifest destiny” had prevailed over barriers both natural and political. With the gain of Texas and New Mexico and California and Oregon, a great semicircle of potential was now bound to the eastern states. The vast emptiness in that embrace—the unknown represented by the Great American Desert, by the mountains and the plains, and by the network of raw, rutted narrow trails traversing it all—would somehow, someday be filled. But what more was possible in that time when, to many, nearly anything seemed possible? In the states, the acquisitive frenzy which followed General Winfield Scott’s appearance in the Valley of Mexico was stupendous: troops swarmed over the mingled bodies of Mexicans and Americans at Contreras and Churubusco to make their slippery assault on the heights of Chapultepec, and, on the night of September 13, they broke through the old Spanish walls of Mexico City. At home, in response to news spread of the capture of the halls of Montezuma, the popular sentiment was “Take California, take the Southwest, yes—and, by gum, take Mexico!” The sentiments which would, in a few years, unleash freelancers like William Walker upon Baja California and Nicaragua were prevalent in the waning months of 1847—until President Peña y Peña and Polk’s clerk Nicholas Trist settled on more moderate terms early the following year. Mexico retained itself below the Rio Grande and the Gila and Colorado Rivers. Like a victorious poker player, the United States raked in the present states of California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico. But beyond the token purchase price of $15 million (and assumption of another $3 million in claims against Mexico), beyond the nearly $100 million spent on the army and navy, lay the grimmer cost. Nearly thirteen thousand Americans were not to return from the war—casualties of combat and, the greater part of them, of cholera and typhoid and sepsis—and another four thousand would return wounded. And of course, because the war had mostly been fought south of the Rio Grande, Mexican casualties were considerably higher.
Arguably, it had been a high price to pay.