The Transcontinental Railroad Essay Research Paper On

The Transcontinental Railroad Essay, Research Paper

On May 10, 1869, one of the most important achievements in the history of transportation was born. In Promontory, Utah, the completion of the transcontinental railroad marked the beginning of a new era in moving the nation. Two rival railroad companies, Union Pacific and Central Pacific, with the help of the government, worked together and completed the famous route in just less than seven years. The development of the transcontinental railroad that connected the United States significantly supported the urbanization and development of the West.

In 1818, Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, then editor of the St. Louis Enquirer, wrote a series of editorials proposing a network of roads and canals to connect the Missouri and Columbia Rivers. This was the first idea of a transcontinental transportation system. Besides the economic benefit to the coast and the states in between, promoters hoped to capture European and Asian trades, especially China and Japan. What the U.S. government was more interested in, however, was final confinement of the Indians. It figured the railroad would hasten this along. The government also wanted to reduce the cost of sending mail and supplies to the west.

It wasn t until 1853, that Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War, authorized army engineers to explore the five best routes to the Pacific. No one could agree on an eastern starting point because whatever state it was would most likely gain an economic and political advantage. They also couldn t agree on a route. The Southerners didn t want the route to go through the north, and vice-versa. All routes were viable, but the southern route on the 32nd parallel would be the cheapest.

Instead Theodore H. Judah, an engineer in the Sacramento Valley, surveyed the final route. The Bidwell-Bartleson party that traveled through Utah and Nevada in 1841 used part of this route. Judah was obsessed with building a transcontinental railroad and convinced merchants Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, and Collis P. Huntington, forever known as The Big Four, to invest in a railroad. The Big Four incorporated the Central Pacific Railroad Company of California, on June 28, 1861.

Jefferson Davis was the 10th and last child of Samuel Emory Davis, a Georgia-born planter of Welsh ancestry. When he was three his family settled on a plantation called Rosemont at Woodville, Miss. At seven he was sent for three years to a Dominican boys’ school in Kentucky, and at 13 he entered Transylvania College, Lexington, Ky. He later spent four years at the United States Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 1828. Davis served as a lieutenant in the Wisconsin Territory and afterward in the Black Hawk War under the future president, then Colonel Zachary Taylor, whose daughter Sarah Knox he married in 1835. According to a contemporary description, Davis in his mid-20s was handsome, witty, sportful, and altogether captivating. In 1835 Davis resigned his commission and became a planter near Vicksburg, Miss., on land given him by his rich eldest brother, Joseph. Within three months his bride died of malarial fever. Grief-stricken, Davis stayed in virtual seclusion for seven years, creating a plantation out of a wilderness and reading prodigiously in constitutional law and world literature.

In 1845 Davis was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and, in the same year, married Varina Howell, a Natchez aristocrat who was 18 years his junior. In 1846 he resigned his seat in Congress to serve in the war with Mexico as colonel in command of the First Mississippi volunteers, and he became a national hero for winning the Battle of Buena Vista (1847) with tactics that won fame even in the European press. After returning, severely wounded, he entered the Senate and soon became chairman of the Military Affairs Committee. President Franklin Pierce made him secretary of war in 1853. Davis enlarged the army, strengthened coastal defenses, and directed three surveys for railroads to the Pacific, one of them being the transcontinental railroad.

During the period of mounting intersectional strife, Davis spoke widely in both North and South, urging harmony between the sections. When South Carolina withdrew from the Union in December 1860, Davis still opposed secession, though he believed that the Constitution gave a state the right to withdraw from the original compact of states. He was among those who believed that the newly elected president, Abraham Lincoln, would pressure the South and that the result would be disastrous.

President Abraham Lincoln signed the “Act to Aid in the Construction of a Railroad and Telegraph Line from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean. The Union Pacific Railroad Company established and authorized to construct a single line of railroad and telegraph from a point on the western boundary of the State of Iowa to be fixed by the President of the United States. Upon completion of forty consecutive miles of any part of the railroad, the company would receive title to five alternate sections of land on each side of the line and “bonds of the United States of one thousand dollars each, payable in thirty years after date, bearing six per centum per annum interest … to the amount of 16 said bonds per mile.” The Central Pacific was authorized to construct a railroad from the Pacific coast to the eas