The Great Railroad Revolution (29 page)

The railroad, therefore, made all the difference, enabling a journey that would have taken six months to be completed in just a few days. But settlement
remained a slow process and did not really intensify until a couple of decades after Stanford and Durant's brief moment of collaboration. It was not until other railroads followed the first transcontinental, blessed with land grants that helped them attract investors who now felt a little more confident about the potential for making money out of western railroads, that the population of the West began to expand rapidly. As a result, it would be many years before the first transcontinental and its various successors were intensively used. And, oddly, they would hardly ever be used to carry passengers from ocean to ocean. Technically, the coast-to-coast journey by railroad was not possible until the bridge over the Missouri was completed in 1872, finally relieving passengers of the need to transfer to a rickety old ferry. But even then Chicago would remain a break for most travelers, for which they were grateful, given the primitive conditions on the trains. The very name
transcontinental
, therefore, is a misnomer—despite its widespread use and the celebration its construction engendered—as there has never been a single railroad company stretching from East Coast to West.
³⁰
Richard White brilliantly encapsulates the contradictions within the transcontinental project: “The very term ‘transcontinental' communicated the hubris and power of a new technology that wrapped the continent in iron and steel bands . . . for the transcontinentals did not really span the continent.”
³¹

None of this is to deny the amazing achievement of the construction of the first transcontinental. Sure, there was corruption, cheating, purloining of government funds, reckless building practices, and astonishing greed— in short, a total lack of principles and scruples shown by the majority of the key players. The result, however, was to enable America to be governable as a single nation and to realize the dream of a single country stretching from coast to coast, unlike in South America, where history and geography were so different and resulted in a patchwork of nation-states that were weaker both politically and economically than their northern counterpart. The United States would not have become a united nation without the railroad in general and the transcontinental in particular. That is why the story of the building of the transcontinental and the ceremony at Promontory Point have assumed such a prominent place in American history, spawning countless books and articles and, in a way, skewing the history of American railroads by placing too much emphasis on the building of this one line.

The initial legacy of the first transcontinental, however, was a rather less happy one. Long before the last spike had been hammered in, the allegations of corrupt practices began to emerge, but their extent only really came to the fore after the euphoria of the celebrations had abated. Mostly, attention focused on the Union Pacific, probably because its greater proximity to the East gave journalists easier access as well as making it more newsworthy. Not that the business practices of the owners of the Central Pacific were any less scandalous. According to a government commission, the four Associates on the Central were reckoned to have pocketed $63 million and obtained 9 million acres of land between them, hardly trivial sums. Maybe it was the sheer nakedness of the Crédit Mobilier scam that led to its arrangements with the Union Pacific being the prime focus of public scrutiny. Perhaps, too, it was the fact that a none too mysterious fire destroyed the Central's financial records soon after the completion of the railroad, making it difficult to work out precisely how the money had been purloined. More likely, it was because the shares in the Central's construction company were held by a very small group consisting of the four Associates and a few colleagues, whereas Crédit Mobilier shares had been distributed widely to politicians and to prominent businessmen as bribes. The anger felt by many Americans at the extent of the corruption of the railroad magnates was mitigated by a feeling that however scurrilous these rascals were, they had completed a Herculean enterprise that was to have a tremendously beneficial impact on the nation. Stanford, Durant, and their cronies may have been in it for the money, but they did get the railroad built when it would, at numerous points, have been all too easy to have abandoned the enterprise. Giving up, though, would not have been an attractive option. Not only would there no longer have been the prospect of fortunes to be made, but it would, too, have attracted the wrath of politicians and most likely the attentions of the justice system, with the distinct possibility of jail sentences for the miscreants. Their motives, therefore, were hardly altruistic. Indeed, most historians concur with George H. Douglas, who wrote in his account of the American railroads that after the Civil War, “Men of the better sort were crowded from the stage, while crude, unprincipled robber barons came into the ascendancy. If such men had also been men of vision or men of superlative technical skill, there
might have been sufficient justification for them, but with few exceptions, although bold and audacious, they were inept and unsuited to the task that lay before them.”
³²

If the four Associates of the Central really did cream off $63 million from their enterprise, on the face of it they seemed to have done better than the good Doctor Durant. However, Crédit Mobilier was not his only scam. Reputedly, Durant took 10 percent of every contract and received kickbacks from subcontractors who undertook excess work on his instructions in order to earn extra and then paid him a percentage. As far as Crédit Mobilier was concerned, it would have taken no great investigative skill to spot that something was amiss when, in December 1867, the company paid out the equivalent of 100 percent dividends to its small coterie of investors, as the Union Pacific was stumbling from crisis to crisis. Yet despite the occasional story in the newspapers, the plundering continued unabated. During 1868, Crédit Mobilier paid out no fewer than five sets of dividends, by which time it had disbursed a total of three times the amount investors had contributed, whereas the Union Pacific struggled to pay its bills and was $6 million in debt. Indeed, the Union Pacific was in such a bad state during the final year before completion of the railroad that a notorious financial speculator, Jim Fisk, tried repeatedly but unsuccessfully to wrest control of the company from Durant, probably in the hope that he would be able to get his hands on some of the ill-gotten gains. Had Fisk enjoyed a more honest reputation, his efforts might have led to more attention being paid to the financial irregularities at the heart of the relationship between Crédit Mobilier and the Union Pacific, but the affair evaporated in the heady atmosphere of the run-up to the Promontory Point ceremony. It was not until 1872, an election year, that the Crédit Mobilier scandal hit the headlines, starting with a story in the
New York Sun
under the bold headline “The King of Frauds: How the Crédit Mobilier Bought Its Way Through Congress.” The six months of congressional hearings that ensued focused more on the involvement of politicians than on the likes of Durant and Dodge. Their principal target was the shovel manufacturer Congressman Oakes Ames, who had distributed shares to some of his fellow members of Congress. Even Vice President Schuyler Colfax and future president James A. Garfield were caught up in the scandal. Colfax was replaced on the Republican ticket for
the 1872 election by another, cleaner, candidate, but Garfield denied the charges and went on to be elected president in 1880. The Crédit Mobilier scandal would rumble on for many years and was one of the main catalysts for the antipathy toward the railroads that grew in the postwar period and would do them so much damage. In the words of Keith L. Bryant Jr., “The financing of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads produced scandals that rocked the industry for 50 years.”
³³

The first transcontinental stimulated a rapid growth of railroads in the West that was part of a wider nationwide expansion in the network far beyond the scale of anything that had gone before. After the war, there was no brake on the growth of the railroads in the newly reunited nation, which, during the 1870s and 1880s, a period dubbed the Gilded Age by Mark Twain, grew faster than at any other time in its history. The route mileage of the railroads doubled between 1865 and 1873 and, after a brief lull caused by the financial panic that year, would double again by 1887, reaching nearly 164,000 miles by the end of the decade. These impressive figures do not take into account the large amount of reconstruction work on the wrecked railroads of the South or the improvements carried out on older parts of the network.

To put this achievement into perspective, the British railroad network in its heyday before the First World War had just under 20,000 route miles. Even the whole of western Europe had fewer miles of railroad than America. Or to express it another way, on average the Americans built an additional 15 miles of railroad every day in the two decades up to 1890. The labor force required for such a massive scale of construction can only be guessed at, as there is no reliable source of figures, but clearly would have numbered tens of thousands. Sure, fewer men were required than before because of technical developments. The invention of dynamite and the gradual adoption of steam-powered pile drivers and shovels improved the efficiency with which railroads were built, but there was still a considerable need for sheer muscle
power, and the workforce employed by the railroads represented a substantial proportion of manpower in a country whose population reached only 50 million in the middle of this period. Railroad labor mostly consisted of recent immigrants, especially Irish, and later Italians, though on several of the western projects large numbers of Chinese were hired. As with the Union Pacific, there were, too, many veterans of the Civil War who, inculcated with military discipline and sometimes even engineering skills, made ideal rail construction workers, as they had also proved on the Union Pacific.

There was a symbiotic relationship between the exceptionally rapid expansion of the railroads and the wider changes occurring in American society. The nation was industrializing rapidly, with the railroads as the catalyst. However, the pattern of growth contrasted markedly between the regions, as they were in different stages of economic development. The East already boasted a well-developed network. In the West with its vast expanses served only, in the early years of this period, by the transcontinental line, the promotion of railroads was principally designed to encourage settlement. In the South, for the first decade or so after the Civil War, most effort was focused on the postwar Reconstruction, and it was not until the withdrawal of the last Union troops in 1877 that business really picked up and the South began the process of connecting its local lines with the major systems of the North and West. Various new lines began to be added to the network in the 1880s, the peak decade for railroad construction in the South, as in the rest of the United States.

The Southern railroad network had been devastated by the war: “With ruined cities, and a much poorer and smaller population than the North, the South found it difficult to rebuild railroads.”
¹
In the early postwar years, numerous short lines were rebuilt, financed by the bonds being issued freely by the new administrations of the states, which were now run by a combination of Northern whites and some freed blacks who briefly dominated local government in the South. But, as before the war, the rail network still consisted mainly of short lines with few connections. Although by the end of the 1860s every state in the South had some railroad track in working condition, and on the map the South appeared to have something resembling a coherent network, in practice it was still a patchy, disconnected system offering a primitive level of service likened by experienced
travelers to a journey in the North on the early railroads of the 1840s. Longer journeys in the South required numerous changes of train, and on most lines there was only one scheduled passenger train a day, with perhaps an additional one carrying mail.

Indeed, the postal and rail services throughout the United States had long been intertwined. The first trains to carry letters had been on the Camden & Amboy in New Jersey as early as 1832, and six years later Congress designated all railroads as “post roads,” which qualified them for the carriage of mail. After the war, railroad post offices—specially designed coaches in which postal workers sorted mail—became commonplace. These coaches were equipped with ingenious openings and chutes that allowed mail to be collected from hooks by the side of the track without the train having to stop. To drop off mail, there was the rather less sophisticated method of throwing the bag out of the train. Letters and parcels developed into an important part of the economics of many railroad companies, nowhere more so than in the South, where few people could afford to travel by train. The southern railroads remained much more expensive than those in the North due to the paucity of passengers, with travelers in the South paying around six cents per mile, twice the rate of average fares in the North. Mail carriage was thus particularly important in maintaining the solvency of many southern railroads and was often carried in wagons attached to passenger trains, which made for infuriatingly slow journeys because the mail trains, unlike the railroad post offices, stopped at every station. As there was no food service on these trains, a passenger could go all day without a meal, and, worse, trains would not infrequently break down for lengthy periods, far from any hotel.