OUR PACIFIC RAILROADS.
TWO thirds of the United States lie west of the Mississippi River. This vast domain has already exercised a tremendous influence over our political destiny. The Territories were the immediate occasion of our civil war. During an entire generation they furnished the arena for the prelusive strife of that war. The Missouri Compromise was to us of the East a flag of truce. But neither nature nor the men who populated the Western Territories recognized this flag. The vexed question of party platforms and sectional debate, the right and the reason of slavery, solved itself in the West with a freedom and rough rapidity natural to the soil and its population. Climatic limitations and prohibitions went hand in hand with the inflow of an emigration mainly from the Northern States,—an emigration fostered by political emotions and fevered by political injustice. While the South was menacing and the North deprecating war, far removed from this tumult of words the conflict was going on, and was being decided. And it was because slavery was doomed in the great West, and therefore in the nation, that rebellion ensued.
It is worthy of note that the same generation which witnessed the growth of the Calhoun school of politics in the South, and of the Free Soil and (afterward), the Republican party in the North, and which followed with intense interest the stages of the Territorial struggle, witnessed also the employment of steam and electricity as agents of human progress. These agents, these organs of velocity, abbreviating time and space, said, Let the West be East; and before the locomotive the West fled from Buffalo to Chicago, across the prairies, the Rocky Mountains, the desert steppes beyond, and down the Pacific slope, until it stared the Orient into a self-contradiction.
It was on the part of our government a sublime recognition of the power of steam, that, while it was struggling for existence, it gave its sanction to the Pacific Railroad enterprise. Curiously enough, it is through Kansas and Nebraska—the Epidaurus of our Peloponnesian war—that the two great rival Pacific Railroad routes are to run.
In the summer of 1861, the project of a trans-continental railway connecting our Pacific communities with the older population of the East first assumed a practical aspect. For nearly three decades the nation had been dreaming of the scheme, but it had done little more than dream. Almost with the earliest track-laying in America, a visionary New-Yorker startled a sceptical generation by proclaiming the age of steam, and pointing at the locomotive as the instrument whereby men should yet penetrate the mysterious depths of the Far West, and secure for our growing commerce the prize of Asiatic wealth. Curious readers will find in the New York Courier and Enquirer of 1837 an article by Dr. Hartley Carver, advocating a Pacific Railroad; and in view of how little was known at this time of the country beyond the Alleghanies,—so little, indeed, that the Territories of the extreme West had no definite outline, but were measured from the crest of the Rocky Mountains,—the audacity of the proposition might justly have inspired suspicions of the sanity of its author. But if Dr. Carver was chimerical, he was at least courageous in his persistence. Ten years later, this lineal descendant of old John Carver transferred the question from the arena of newspaper discussion, and boldly memorialized Congress. Here he found a rival advocate in Asa Whitney, whose brain throbbed with the glowing possibilities of the Chinese trade, while his specious statistics and contagious eloquence arrested public attention.
