The Railroad Builders | Page 6

new Western States were
built as government enterprises, with results which were frequently

disastrous. This mania, with the land speculation accompanying it, was
largely responsible for the panic of 1837 and led to that repudiation of
debts in certain States which for so many years gave American
investments an evil reputation abroad.
In the more settled parts of the country, however, railroad building had
comparatively a more solid foundation. Yet the railroad map of the
forties indicates that railroad building in this early period was
incoherent and haphazard. Practically everywhere the railroad was an
individual enterprise; the builders had no further conception of it than
as a line connecting two given points usually a short distance apart. The
roads of those days began anywhere and ended almost anywhere. A
few miles of iron rail connected Albany and Schenectady. There was a
road from Hartford to New Haven, but there was none from New
Haven to New York. A line connected Philadelphia with Columbia;
Baltimore had a road to Washington; Charleston, South Carolina, had a
similar contact with Hamburg in the same State. By 1842, New York
State, from Albany to Buffalo, possessed several disconnected stretches
of railroad. It was not until 1836, when work was begun on the Erie
Railroad, that a plan was adopted for a single line reaching several
hundred miles from an obvious point, such as New York, to an obvious
destination, such as Lake Erie. Even then a few farsighted men could
foresee the day when the railroad train would cross the plains and the
Rockies and link the Atlantic and the Pacific. Yet, in 1850 nearly all
the railroads in the United States lay east of the Mississippi River, and
all of them, even when they were physically mere extensions of one
another, were separately owned and separately managed.
Successful as many of the railroads were, they had hardly yet
established themselves as the one preeminent means of transportation.
The canal had lost in the struggle for supremacy, but certain of these
constructed waterways, particularly the Erie, were flourishing with
little diminished vigor. The river steamboat had enjoyed a development
in the first few decades of the nineteenth century almost as great as that
of the railroad itself. The Mississippi River was the great natural
highway for the products and the passenger traffic of the South Central
States; it had made New Orleans one of the largest and most flourishing
cities in the country; and certainly the rich cotton planter of the fifties
would have smiled at any suggestion that the "floating palaces" which

plied this mighty stream would ever surrender their preeminence to the
rusty and struggling railroads which wound along its banks.
This period, which may be taken as the first in American railroad
development, ended about the middle of the century. It was an age of
great progress but not of absolutely assured success. A few lines earned
handsome profits, but in the main the railroad business was not
favorably regarded and railroad investments everywhere were held in
suspicion. The condition that prevailed in many railroads is illustrated
by the fact that the directors of the Michigan and Southern, when they
held their annual meeting in 1853, had to borrow chairs from an
adjoining office as the sheriff had walked away with their own for debt.
Even a railroad with such a territory as the Hudson River Valley, and
extending from New York to Albany existed in a state of chronic
dilapidation; and the New York and Harlem, which had an entrance
into New York City as an asset of incalculable value, was looked upon
merely as a vehicle for Wall Street speculation.
Meanwhile the increasing traffic in farm products, mules, and cattle
from the Northwest to the plantations of the South created a demand for
more ample transportation facilities. In the decade before the Civil War
various north and south lines of railway were projected and some of
these were assisted by grants of land from the Federal Government.
The first of these, the Illinois Central, received a huge land-grant in
1850 and ultimately reached the Gulf at Mobile by connecting with the
Mobile and Ohio Railroad which had also been assisted by Federal
grants. But the panic of 1857, followed by the Civil War, halted all
railroad enterprises. In the year 1856 some 3600 miles of railroad had
been constructed; in 1865 only 700 were laid down. The Southern
railroads were prostrated by the war and north and south lines lost all
but local traffic.
After the war a brisk recovery began and brought to the fore the first of
the great railroad magnates and the shrewdest business genius of the
day, Cornelius Vanderbilt. Though he had spent his early life and had
laid the basis of his fortune in steamboats, he