The bureaucratic machinery for western expansion—including the Department of Agriculture, the Morrill Land-Grant Act, the Pacific Railroad Act, and the Homestead Act—was put in place even before the Civil War had ended. In fact, the ability of the Union to win the war, historians Boyd Cothran and Ari Kelman write, was based on a trade-off. Men could “enlist to fight for Lincoln and liberty, and receive, as fair recompense for their patriotic sacrifices, higher education and Western land connected by rail to markets. It seemed possible that liberty and empire might advance in lock step.”22
