The “long looked-for moment” and its aftermath
In May 1869, Americans prepared to celebrate a great national achievement.
Work crews from the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific converged at an otherwise unremarkable spot in the Utah desert known as Promontory Summit. When the tracks joined, the United States would have a railroad system that spanned the continent without interruption.
Last-minute glitches delayed the ceremonial completion by a couple of days. But Americans were ready to celebrate, even if the railroads were not.
In Springfield, Mass., workers at a railroad car factory paraded through the streets carrying signs telling the world “our cars unite the Atlantic and Pacific.” Jubilant westerners fired 100-gun salutes in San Francisco and flocked to Sacramento to celebrate.
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The Jupiter, the Central Pacific train that carried Leland Stanford and other railway officials to the Golden Spike Ceremony in 1869. Library of Congress photo.
On May 10, the lines were joined. After years of war, assassination and impeachment, the completion of the transcontinental railroad marked an extraordinary national accomplishment. “The long looked-for moment has arrived,” the New York Times reported. “The inhabitants of the Atlantic seaboard and the dwellers on the Pacific slopes are emphatically one people.”
While the ceremonies at Promontory represented a triumphant national achievement, they also proved to be a watershed moment in the mid-19th century’s romance with the railroads.
The transcontinental railroad project was born in the 1840s when politicians, merchants and visionaries were enraptured by the promise of a form of transportation that could send products and people hurtling across the far-flung United States at unheard-of speeds.
In 1860, as the United States stood on the brink of civil war, Republicans and the Douglas and Breckinridge Democrats each endorsed government support for construction of a transcontinental railroad. In July 1862, the Republican Congress made good on the party’s commitment with passage of the Pacific Railroad Act.
But as the decade progressed, the passion faded. Long-simmering doubts and fears about the economic behemoth driving the transformation of the American economy began to move to center stage.
As early as the 1850s, farmers from the mid-Atlantic to Illinois protested against railroad freight rates. “We believe,” Illinois farmers declared in 1856, “that the producer of a commodity and the purchaser of it should, together, have more voice in fixing its price than he who simply carries it from one to the other.” Legislators in Iowa, another state where politicians embraced railroad construction, debated regulating freight rates.
Less than a decade later, these concerns were amplified by growing worries about the influence of railroads in the halls of government. Railroads dominated state legislatures from New York to California. Critics warned they were beginning to exercise undue influence on Capitol Hill as well.
In 1864, as Congress debated amendments to the Pacific Railroad Act, Representative Elihu B. Washburne issued a stinging denunciation of railroad lobbyists “scheming and plotting to fill their own pockets while the nation is verging toward bankruptcy.” Five years later, drawing on events in Albany, New York Republican Charles Van Wyck warned his colleagues against blithely acceding to every demand made by the Union Pacific on Capitol Hill.
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Elihu B. Washburne in 1859. Library of Congress photo.
“The Central railroad in New York controls that state and buys up its Legislature year after year, so as to increase its tariff on passengers,” Van Wyck warned. “You ask us to wait until we get both our hands within the jaws of this lion, when we shall be powerless to control it.”
This was the undercurrent tapped into by the revelations of the New York Sun on Sept. 4, 1872, when it published its blockbuster scoop detailing the operation of the Union Pacific’s construction subsidiary, Credit Mobilier.
The story revealed that a handful of lawmakers – including the sitting vice president and his successor – had obtained Credit Mobilier shares from a Massachusetts congressman on highly advantageous terms. Representative Oakes Ames asked for nothing in return – but he believed he didn’t need to.
The stock sales, Ames confided to a rival investor named Henry McComb, would promote the interests of the Union Pacific in Congress by giving lawmakers an ownership interest in the highly lucrative construction business. “We want more friends in this Congress,” Ames advised McComb, “& if a man will look into the law, (& it is difficult to get them to do so unless they have an interest to do so,) he cannot help being convinced that we should not be interfered with.”
The Sun, it turned out, got some basic facts wrong – not the least of which was grossly overestimating the amount of stock by Ames’s colleagues. But the explosive story touched on something beyond the relatively small amounts of money involved.
The Sun called its revelations “the most damaging exhibition of official and private villainy and corruption ever laid bare to the gaze of the world.” There was more than a grain of truth under the hyperbole. As Americans would come to learn, the insidious influence of what was then called “money power” on Capitol Hill was widespread and seemingly unstoppable.
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Coming in October from Edinborough Press: Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age by Robert B. Mitchell.
