The railroad era in California history marked a significant departure from the prior mule caravans, stage lines, and pony express modes of overland travel and communication. In 1857 Congress passed the Overland California Mail Act, resulting in a federal contract let to the Butterfield Overland Express Company to transport mail some 2,800 miles between St. Louis and San Francisco. The 24-day trip was shortened time-wise by the pony express, which was made obsolete by completion of the first transcontinental telegraph line in 1861. The Pacific Mail Steamship carrying service, on the other hand, was supplemented rather than supplanted by the coming of rails to California.
For two decades before construction on America’s first transcontinental railroad began in the 1860s, businesspeople and federal officials conceived, refined, and publicized the bold idea of such a project - tying it to America’s, particularly California’s, role in capturing maritime trade with Asia. The leading spokespersons for the idea included Asa Whitney, Thomas Hart Benton, and William Henry Seward.
China merchant Asa Whitney may have been the first to develop and articulate the idea of a coast-to-coast rail network and to link that notion to expanding America’s presence in the Orient. As a maritime trader Whitney made a fortune from his transactions in China in 1842-4, in the aftermath of the first Opium War that resulted in the opening of five Chinese ports to American shippers. On his return he conceived of the possibility of a transcontinental railroad connecting America’s Atlantic coast, via Chicago, with northern California. When completed, such a transportation project would provide an “iron path” to the nation’s far western markets and capture the China trade. “The vast commerce of all India, of all Asia, which has been the source and foundation of all commerce from the earliest ages,” would be wrested from England and transferred peacefully to the United States. Whitney converted the nationally prominent politician John C. Fremont, who
Eloquently stated: “The golden vein [of commerce] which runs through the history of the world will follow the track to San Francisco, and the Asiatic trade will finally fall into its last and permanent road.” In 1845 Whitney moved beyond conceptualizing and, at his expense, conducted a survey expedition that explored a possible transcontinental route from the Missouri River to the Pacific Coast. He would build the railroad himself, he said, if the federal government would give him a land grant 60 miles wide along his proposed route. Sections of the grant could be sold to cover construction costs. Whitney’s northern route aroused the fears of Southerners in Congress, who saw the project as benefiting the industrial North, and they rejected it for that reason.
Unlike Whitney, Senator Thomas Hart Benton had not traveled to Asia. Still, Benton took a large, Pacific worldview of a prospective transcontinental railroad and was influential in the nation’s capital. In a Senate speech on January 16, 1855, he called for federal sponsorship of a rail line from Missouri to California. Such would be “the true and good route for the road which is to unite the Atlantic and the Pacific, and to give a new channel to the commerce of Asia.” Europe, too, figured in Benton’s grand scheme. Goods exported from Europe would be shipped across the Atlantic and reach “Asia through America” via rails and sails.
Among the advocates of a transcontinental railroad, William Henry Seward, secretary of state under President Abraham Lincoln, developed the most profound geopolitical understanding of the enterprise in all of its Pacific world implications for U. S. foreign policy. More than any policymaker of his time, he conceived a blueprint for America’s acquisition of a Pacific empire in the late nineteenth century. A transcontinental railroad was integral to his view of world history and his plan for the United States to emerge as the dominant global power. He stated in 1850 that “the commercial, social, [and] political movements of the world” were “in the direction of California, which bounds at once the [American] empire and the Continent.” Several years later he affirmed that a transcontinental railroad would become the major carrier of the world’s goods from Europe to the Far East. The prospective line would constitute “the shortest route for merchandise from England and the [European] continent to China, India, Australia and South America by way of New York and San Francisco.” To him the trade of the Pacific would be the most contested prize in international affairs in the coming decades. California and its ports would provide the necessary launch sites for acquiring Hawai’i and Alaska, and eventually building a canal across Central America - all for the purpose of controlling the northern Pacific sea lanes to the markets of Asia. In 1869 Seward dubbed San Francisco, envisioned as the western terminus of a transcontinental railroad and telegraph network, “the Constantinople of American empire.”
Such ambitious thinking picked up considerable support in the Northern states in the 1850s. In the South, however, it ran into strong planter opposition to large-scale, federally subsidized internal improvements projects - especially ones that seemed to offer few benefits to the slow-to-industrialize slave states. The fact that the proposed routes had been decidedly northern ones further antagonized the South’s ruling class. Not until Southern states began seceding from the Union in 1861 could supporters of a Pacific railroad begin to muster the votes necessary in Congress to advance their grand ideas.
World History
