There were two opinions as to the wisdom of Mr. Thomas’s project, and these were the opinions of the North and of the South; for again the South was to be the pioneer into the West, and again the North was to follow. The cities of the North made loud outcry against the Baltimore prophet, and said that this railroad, if built, would divert from them forever the traffic that was then coming to them from the West. This was ever the typical attitude of the upper East toward the West.
None the less the enterprise went on, and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company was duly organized, an act for its incorporation being passed on February twenty-seventh, 1827. The stamp of success was upon the idea before the ink had dried on the records. By April twenty-fourth of the same year stock was subscribed to the figure of four million one hundred and seventy-eight thousand dollars. The first railway planned for the West—planned because there was a West and because that West was wanted as a part of the East—was promptly elevated into one of the most important commercial enterprises of the time. The stock was coveted by all, and the struggle was for first place in the line of purchasers.
It can not be within the present purpose to particularize as to the railroad development of the West, nor to attempt the unimportant chronological record of first one and then another of the multiplying railways that early began to crowd out into the West from the Eastern centers. The important thing is the tremendous expansion of population that now ensued for the Western states, the blackening of the census maps in spaces once barren, the crossing and interweaving of the Northern and Southern populations, which now occurred as both sections pressed out into the West. There were grandfathers in Virginia now, grandfathers in New England. The subdivided farms were not so large. There were more shops in the villages. There was demand for expansion of the commerce of that day. The little products must find their market, and that market might still be American. The raw stuff might still be American, the producer of it might still be American. So these busy, thrifty, ambitious men came up and stood back of the vanguard that held the flexible frontier. Silently men stole out yet farther into what West there was left; but they always looked back over the shoulder at this new thing that had come upon the land.
Thinking men knew, half a century ago, that there must be an iron way across the United States, though they knew this only in general terms, and were only guessing at the changes that such a road must bring to the country at large. Some of these guesses make interesting reading to-day. Thus, in 1855 it was announced as a settled thing that the continental route could not lie across the Northern Rockies, because in that region the heavy snowfall would block all railway travel. It was concluded that there were only four points on the Pacific coast to which the railway might address itself: San Diego, San Francisco, “some spot to be chosen on the navigable waters of the Columbia,” and another “on the borders of the Strait of De Fuca, in the new Territory of Washington.”
The government of the country was so slow in developing this railway project that some capitalists were for building at once a road of their own, and they chose the route from Charleston to San Diego. What would it have meant to this country had this been the first and only railway across the continent? As to the route up the Platte valley and over the mid-Rockies, that was dismissed as quite impracticable. “The absence of timber on most of this route would prove an insuperable objection to its selection, even were it not ineligible from other considerations,” comments one writer of the day. The same writer[[51]] says that the route from San Francisco to St. Louis would be geographically preferable, but admits that the “formation of the intermediate country, and the character of the mountain-ranges to be crossed, are deemed to present insuperable difficulties to its construction.”
The bearing of these reflections upon the purpose in hand is not so much one of mere literary curiousness as one of commercial comparison. The logic of that time carried a large non sequitur. “The country intervening between the most western limits of civilization and the recently settled territories of the Pacific,” says the same early historian, “is confessedly little known.” The empire of the Middle West was not dreamed of. This is what the new road was to do:
“Instead of weary months of travel around the capes of Africa and South America, less than a month will suffice to transport the teas and silks of China, the coffee and the spices of Java and Ceylon, to the great Atlantic cities, thence to be distributed as from the world’s depot to the nations of Europe. But not only will this new mode of transit take to itself the best and most remunerative part of the traffic now existing between eastern Asia and Christendom, but it will also create a new traffic, compared with which the trade now existing will bear almost no comparison.
“Instead of here and there a seaport in China holding commercial relations with America, this nearness of access to the best markets of the world will stimulate into an unprecedented activity the raising of all agricultural products, the manufacture of all goods and wares, and the disinterring of all the mineral resources which the three hundred millions of China can furnish us, at a cheaper rate than we can obtain them elsewhere. Japan, with a population almost double our own, now shut out from all intercourse with the rest of the world, must soon be forced by the strength of circumstances to welcome to her ports the merchant fleets of other nations, anxious and eager to distribute to the wide world the rich products of her soil, her climate, and her domestic industry. The tropical fruitfulness of the over-populated islands of the Eastern Archipelago will also pour, in increased abundance, the rich spices of their balmy breezes through this new and rapid conduit.”
Not so bad was this flowery prophecy, though its fulfilment was to run over into another century, and to fall subsequent to a still greater industrial phenomenon, the gourd-like maturing of the trans-Missouri region.[[52]] This rapid development of the interior region of America was not foreseen by the wisest of the prophets of fifty years ago. Yet unspeakably swift and startling as it has been, it was, after all, the product of an arrested growth, of an advancement upon lines substantially different from those on which it was originally and naturally projected.
As once the West had sought to secede, now at length the South, foster-mother of the West, bethought herself to set up a separate land, even at the very time when there was in progress a great transcontinental project that was to make all this country one, forever and inseparable. It was the Civil War that delayed the construction of the Pacific railway. Had that road been built, had the roads from the North into the South been built half a generation earlier, there could never have been any Civil War. The indissoluble brotherhood of the North and the South would have been established a generation before, and at what untold saving of splendid human life! This war, fatally and fatefully early—early by a quarter of a century, since after that quarter-century it could never have attained importance, or could never have been at all—changed history in America more than any written history has ever shown. Still curiously and intimately connected, it was the South and the West that were to suffer most in that war, cruel as this may sound to that splendid East that poured its blood like water and its treasure with a freedom the West might not equal.