America Aflame (74 page)

The Republican governments elected under the new southern state constitutions seemed to herald the fulfillment of such prophecy. The new regimes promoted an activist government that raised taxes, built infrastructure, established charitable institutions, funded public school systems for both races, and reduced the power of local elites by transferring appointment responsibilities to the state. This last policy tilted the local law enforcement system to a more evenhanded dispensation of justice. Republican governments in the South also embarked on extensive programs of economic development. Between 1868 and 1872, Republicans rebuilt the South's railroads and constructed an additional thirty-three hundred miles of track.

There were many smaller, symbolic moments that did not escape the attention of blacks or whites. There was the scene in the statehouse in Columbia, South Carolina, where black lawmakers sat at the very desks of those who had passed the secession ordinance in November 1860. There was Robert Smalls, who had commandeered a Confederate vessel and delivered it to Union troops, and who now took his oath of office as a United States congressman from South Carolina. And there was Hiram Revels, born a free black in Fayetteville, North Carolina, who became a minister, then a Union army chaplain, and, after the war, a pastor at a church in Natchez, Mississippi. In 1870, he became the first black person to become a U.S. senator, taking the seat once occupied by Jefferson Davis. Indeed, the South had turned upside down.

For many blacks, the new regimes were almost a second emancipation. A Freedmen's Bureau official in the Virginia Piedmont noted in late 1868 that three years earlier, the freedmen were “abject and fearful in the presence of the master class.” Now they were “much less abject and more settled, ambitious and industrious.” They will “generally resist if attacked.” It was, as W. E. B. DuBois would note at a later time, “a Golden Moment,” for African Americans, and for America generally.
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It would only be a moment. The South could not long remain a region teetering on its “Apex.” White and black southerners would not follow the northern script. The transforming national economy held increasing public attention, not only for its promise but also soon for its excesses. Immigrants and urban workers in the North did not share either the profits or the buoyant optimism of the middle and entrepreneurial classes. New scientific theories reinforced racial prejudices and questioned the role of an activist government. Northerners did not become indifferent about the South or about the freedmen. They came to feel that disengagement was best for both and for the nation. It was more important to follow one's own dreams than to protect those of others. A new era was at hand. The war was over, and so was Reconstruction. Stephen Douglas finally got his railroad built, a sure sign that the old issues no longer mattered. Only the Indians now remained in the way, the last obstacle to fulfilling the destiny of the indivisible nation.

CHAPTER 19

THE GOLDEN SPIKE

THE TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD
seemed to live a charmed, if precarious, life. After surviving blizzards, subzero temperatures, deadly Indian raids, financing fiascos, and attacks by grizzlies and cougars, workers readied the last rails. Dignitaries were converging on Promontory Point, Utah, for a grand celebration uniting East and West. As the appointed day grew closer, however, luck seemed to have run dry. The Central Pacific Railroad steamed out of Sacramento on May 5, 1869, with California governor Leland Stanford aboard. He planned to link up with a Union Pacific train heading west from Omaha. The trip from Sacramento to Promontory Point would take two days and allow Governor Stanford to preside over the celebration scheduled for Saturday, May 8.
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The locomotive carrying Stanford's party from Sacramento carefully climbed to the crest of the Sierra Nevada, providing magnificent vistas over canyons and pine forests. The notables enjoyed a lavish lunch at Donner Lake, near where more than two decades earlier, less appealing fare had been on the menu. Their appetites sated, the group resumed their travel. In the Truckee Valley ahead, Chinese lumbermen felled trees along the tracks. They had not been informed about the unscheduled train about to disrupt their work. A gigantic felled pine lay across the tracks, and though the engineer was able to slow the locomotive sufficiently to avoid injuring his passengers, the log disabled the engine.

Stanford and his party waited for another locomotive, which arrived in due course, and the journey continued. As they crossed the forty-mile desert between the Truckee River and the Sink of the Humboldt, the old forty-niners among the group pointed out the places where their livestock had died and the numerous poisonous streams that killed man and beast. Thus enlightened, the dignitaries retired to their comfortable beds as the train lumbered across Nevada.

Things were not so peaceful at Promontory Point. While the inbound VIPs slept, the Chinese laborers rioted, not against management but against each other. The workers belonged to one of two companies that had brought them from China to work on America's railroads. A dispute erupted over the purported default of a fifteen-dollar payment from one company to another. The partisans of each group, “armed with every conceivable weapon,” went at each other, threatening to turn the impending celebration into a civil war.

The warring Chinese laborers belonged to different companies representing distinctive dialects and districts. These groups first appeared in San Francisco in 1851. Like European immigrant mutual benefit societies, the companies provided an array of services for their members such as job placement, housing, welfare and burial services, and facilitated connections with homeland families. Relations were often frosty between the companies. The immigrants exhibited fierce loyalties to their associations. The Central Pacific Railroad hired more than ten thousand Chinese laborers, who brought their affiliations to the construction site. The laborers generally worked out differences peacefully, even banding together in a successful strike for higher wages. But the stress of finishing the road in time for the celebration frayed tempers and now jeopardized the party.

Things were also not peaceful for the Union Pacific heading west. Thomas C. Durant, vice president of the road, had an uneventful journey from Omaha until he reached Piedmont, Wyoming. Hundreds of workers surrounded his railroad car demanding their wages. They had not received their pay in months and, accordingly, were holding Durant and other executives hostage. The disgruntled laborers detached the locomotive, which went on to Utah, leaving Durant stationary in southwestern Wyoming. The strikers told the telegrapher they would hang him if he wired for assistance. They ordered Durant to telegraph for their wages.

As the delayed Central Pacific party rolled into Promontory Point early on May 8 ready to stage the ceremony, their counterparts remained under siege in Wyoming. San Francisco and Sacramento had planned mammoth celebrations on May 8, complete with brass bands, steam whistles, fire bells, and a grand parade. In San Francisco, soldiers would fire cannon from Alcatraz, presumably not in the direction of the city. Not wishing to spoil the party, the two cities carried off the celebrations on May 8 for an event that had not yet occurred, if it would occur at all.

It was a frustrating lead-in to an event that would, Americans believed, reverberate around the world. The project was a tribute to the engineering skills and creativity of the railroad builders who organized the construction of the road, coordinating supplies and labor over a thousand miles of continent, often under hostile conditions. And it came in ahead of schedule, at least until now.

Building a transcontinental railroad had become an obsession in the North during the Civil War. With the future of the Union in doubt, the Pacific railroad symbolized hope for a reunited nation. As much as the war's outcome, the railroad would render the nation indivisible, binding Americans together. The transcontinental railroad would hasten the settlement of the West by northerners. Their hard work, skills, and ingenuity would transform the western wilderness into a region dotted with productive towns and farms to make America “the greatest nation of the earth.” The future of the nation depended on sealing the relationship between East and West. “Unless the relations between the East and the West shall be the most perfect and most intimate which can be established,” the nation would “break on the crest of the Rocky Mountains.”
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More accurately, the railroad would connect the West to the North. This was a pact for the future, for economic development and settlement. The South's rebellion, and the insistence of its majority white population to reestablish a past the rest of the nation had discredited, would fix the region as the American outlier for nearly a century: poor in a nation of plenty; ignorant in an enlightened country; and mired in a one-party political system and a biracial society in a diverse, competitive America. The South became the nation's place to leave. After the turn of the twentieth century, the greatest internal migration in American history occurred as more than twenty-eight million southerners donated their ambitions and their children to the rest of the nation.
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The construction of the railroad was a wonder in itself. In the public mind, the Rocky Mountains represented a nearly impenetrable barrier to transcontinental travel. The road's engineers and surveyors crossed the summit of the mountains at 8,262 feet above sea level without any grade greater than ninety feet to a mile, and that only for a short distance. The construction also put to rest any lingering assumptions that the territory between the Mississippi and the Rockies was a “Great American Desert.” The Plains would soon sprout abundant fields of wheat and corn to be shipped to the great cities of the East and to markets all over the world. The road also employed a workforce that far exceeded the numbers of workers on any other enterprise in American history. More than twenty thousand workers built the railroad, a small army that managers had to house, feed, and (hopefully) pay, accomplishing much of this during a civil war. The “medley of Irishmen and Chinamen” who built the road brought “Europe and Asia face to face, grasping hands across the American Continent.”
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The managers of the Union Pacific finally won their release, and the strikers received their wages. On Monday, May 10, 1869, two days late, workers laid the two last rails simultaneously, one opposite the other. Nevada provided a silver spike for the next-to-last rail, and California donated a golden spike to secure the union of East and West. Even then, the ceremony went awry as the first strikes hit the rail and not the silver spike. Governor Stanford was more accurate with his hammer. A telegraph wire connected to the golden spike told the world that the deed of spanning a continent was done. Bells pealed all over the North, and, in New York a celebratory service was held in Trinity Church near Wall Street. The minister there called the ceremony at Promontory Point “a great event of the world … one of the victories of peace.… It is a triumph of commerce.… It will preserve the union of these States.” The
New York Times
echoed the theme of Union. The railroad “binds the States of the Atlantic and Pacific into one nation.”
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A few days after the ceremony, a telegram arrived at the Post Office Department in Washington, D.C., informing the postmaster general that the new railroad had delivered mail from New York to San Francisco. Transmitting mail across the country by stagecoach or Pony Express cost $1,100 per mile annually. By the railroad, it was only $200 per mile. The same savings would accrue to private passengers, military personnel, and crops, livestock, and precious metals.
Harper's
expressed the prevailing opinion in the North: “No work of this century can compare in the grandeur both of the undertaking and of its probable results with the Pacific Railroad.” Soon, middle-class Americans on the East Coast could glide across the continent, sleep in spring beds in a Pullman Palace Car, eat meals with fine cutlery and china, enjoy the stunning landscapes, and arrive refreshed in San Francisco a mere ten days after leaving. Before the railroad, the fastest journey to the West took four weeks.
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Joining the tracks at Promontory Point, Utah Territory, for the first transcontinental railroad. May 1869. (National Archives and Records Administration)

Naysayers predicted the railroad would burden the national treasury and never live up to its expectations. They were wrong. Within a year of its completion, the railroad had $100 million in capital from the sale of stock and government bonds and turned a profit of $4 million that doubled the following year. The savings to the nation in terms of cheaper freight rates and military and private passenger fares were incalculable. The road was both a consumer and a shipper of lumber, steel, coal, and oil, thereby stimulating those industries as well.

By the 1880s, the United States contained nearly one third of the world's railroad mileage, blotting out distance and even altering the concept of time. On November 18, 1883, the American Railway Association reduced the number of time zones in America from fifty to four. The change helped the trains run on time, or at least according to a schedule that shippers and passengers anywhere in the country could understand. A standard gauge for all railroads followed three years later. Cities constructed “Union” terminals, often their most imposing structures, to consolidate the various rail lines heading into and out of town. The railroad became the symbol for an age enamored of science, technology, and innovation. The golden spike cemented the Union materially as the war had done politically. Like God, the iron rails would bring peace and harmony to all mankind, as Walt Whitman wrote in his tribute to the ceremony at Promontory Point, “Passage to India” (1870):

SINGING my days,

Singing the great achievements of the present,

Singing the strong, light works of engineers,…

The New by its mighty railroad spann'd,

The seas inlaid with eloquent, gentle wires;…

The earth to be spann'd, connected by net-work,

The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,

The oceans to be cross'd, the distant brought near,

The lands to be welded together.…

I see over my own continent the Pacific Railroad, surmounting every barrier;…

Bridging the three or four thousand miles of land travel,

Tying the Eastern to the Western sea,

The road between Europe and Asia.
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Not everyone sang along with Whitman. The transcontinental railroad traveled through Indian territory, bringing more settlers who established homesteads, prospected for gold or silver, and threatened the buffalo as well as the Indians themselves. Most white Americans viewed the Indian in the same manner as they saw the Mexican or the slaveholder: an obstacle to progress. Indians were yesterday's people; primitive, savage, and content to live with rather than over nature.

The transcontinental railroad was viewed as the “final solution” to ending the Native American threat to white settlement in the West. The road would facilitate transforming the region's environment and rendering it immensely prosperous. Four months before the golden spike joined East and West, the Committee on the Pacific Railroad in the U.S. Senate cited the military application of the new road. “As the thorough and final solution of the Indian question,” the committee's report stated, “by taking the buffalo range out from under the savage, and putting a vast stock and grain farm in its place, the railroads to the Pacific surely are a military necessity.”
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