The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (23 page)

As Walker’s troubles mounted, he received help from Pierre Soulé, whom he probably knew from having lived in New Orleans. In April 1856, at a New Orleans fund-raiser, Soulé sang Walker’s praises and pledged $25,000. In August, Soulé went to Nicaragua, the first and only Southerner of his standing to do so. He helped Walker establish procedures for issuing bonds redeemable at the end of twenty years in gold and silver at the Bank of Louisiana.
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Soulé also probably had a hand in getting Walker to reinstitute slavery in Nicaragua. Realizing that men like Soulé represented his only hope, Walker decided “to bind the Southern States to Nicaragua as if she were one of themselves.”
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On September 22, 1856, he revoked Nicaragua’s 1824 emancipation decree. That decision sparked an enthusiastic response throughout the Deep South. Gulf States journals now portrayed Walker as the “grey-eyed man of destiny.” Several boatloads of troops soon left New Orleans to bolster Walker’s cause.

But neither fresh troops nor Southern support saved him from Vanderbilt’s revenge. By late 1856, the Commodore had gained a stranglehold over the Accessory Transit Company, and Costa Rican battalions were wreaking havoc on Walker’s army. Always outnumbered, his troops suffered casualty rates approaching 20 percent. Then, to make matters worse, cholera ravaged one company after another. Forced to abandon Granada, Walker ordered the ancient capital city burned to the ground. In May 1857, having suffered heavy losses, he surrendered to the U.S. Navy. Brought to New Orleans, he was hailed as a hero. Tried there in June 1858 for violating neutrality laws, he again was quickly acquitted.

Walker then toured the South seeking men and financial support for another invasion. Soulé and other leading New Orleans enthusiasts formed a Nicaraguan committee to sell bonds and rally public support for the cause. The plan now was to invade Nicaragua via Honduras. The first attempt barely got off the ground. In November 1857 Walker sailed from Mobile. The U.S. Navy ran him down and hauled him and his invading army back to the states. The naval action, in turn, enraged several dozen Southern congressmen. Led by Representative Alexander Stephens of Georgia, they demanded that the Commodore who had detained Walker be court-martialed.

Still treated as a hero in the Deep South, Walker easily raised support for yet another invasion. Sailing from Mobile in December 1858, he and his troops got past the U.S. Navy but ran into trouble sixty miles from the Central American coast. The ship hit a reef and sank. A British ship rescued Walker and his men and returned them to Mobile.

Persistent, Walker launched a third attempt a year later. The spark, however, was now fading. Only ninety-seven men, almost all Southern youths, answered the call to battle. Traveling in small groups to a rendezvous point in Honduras, they hoped to find additional recruits for a new invasion of Nicaragua. Instead, while marching along the Honduran coast in August 1860, they ran into trouble and had to surrender to a British naval captain. Walker expected to be returned once again to the United States. The British, however, now regarded him as a threat to their interests on the Mosquito Coast and turned him over to the Honduras government. The Hondurans executed him by firing squad, at Trujillo, on September 12, 1860. He died, as he had lived, with no apparent emotion.

Meanwhile, Cornelius Vanderbilt came out smiling. Not only did he get his revenge. He soon received an offer from his two Panama rivals, William Aspinwall and George Law, the owners of Pacific Mail and U.S. Mail lines. They were tired of fighting a price war with him. They offered him money not to compete, first $40,000 a month in 1857, then $56,000 a month in 1858. He took the deal, pocketing $480,000 the first year and $672,000 the next year for doing nothing. These payments ended in 1859. By then the Panama Railroad was well established and Aspinwall’s worries were history. No longer did he have to fret about the Nicaraguan route having a competitive advantage over his Panama route. Nor did he have to worry about Vanderbilt building a canal to cover the last twelve-mile leg in Nicaragua. Vanderbilt never did.

6

JAMES GADSDEN, EVEN THOUGH HE WAS SEVERAL STEPS BEHIND
William Aspinwall and Cornelius Vanderbilt, still had reason to hope. Despite their success, nearly every pundit agreed with him. Going through Central America was dangerous. It exposed Americans to the whims of foreign rulers and warlords as well as dozens of deadly diseases. It was just a temporary expedient. The best solution was still a transcontinental railroad within the United States.

Especially adamant were California’s newly elected legislators. Two-thirds had come by way of Panama. Every one, regardless of his political affiliation, clamored for a transcontinental railroad. In 1850 they called on Congress to finance its construction. A few months later Senator Gwin presented the legislature’s resolution to the Senate. The resolution then went to the Committee on Roads and Canals. There it died. The next year a bill calling for land grants for the indigent insane came before the Senate. To that bill Gwin added an amendment calling for two railroad routes to the Pacific. The amendment passed, but the bill itself failed.

Later that same year, Gwin offered a detailed plan that would have made California an appendage of the South. With San Francisco as the western terminus (with a later extension up to Oregon), the plan called for a railroad that went south around the southern end of the Sierras to Albuquerque. There, it split into four branches, one line to Texas, another to New Orleans, another to Memphis, another to Missouri. As soon as Gwin made this proposal, Lewis Cass of Michigan jumped on it. The plan, said the former Democratic candidate for president, was “too grandiose.” It necessitated 5,115 miles of track, and the estimated cost was $121,920,000.
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Right after Cass’s objection, Senator Walker Brooke, a newly elected Mississippi Whig, offered a substitute bill. It was the scheme of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad Company of New York. Nicknamed the “moonshine” railroad, because it had been chartered at $100 million with only “pennies” in its coffers, the Atlantic and Pacific was headed by Gwin’s old friend the ex–treasury secretary Robert J. Walker and his partner, Levi S. Chatfield, the attorney general of New York. Walker and Chatfield also contemplated building a southern railroad, beginning on the Mississippi River or on the Gulf west of the river, but with regards to the exact route they wanted to be able to pick and choose. They also wanted the federal government to grant them land, lend them $30 million, and pay the interest on all the bonds they issued until the project was completed.
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It quickly became clear that neither proposal had the votes to pass. The Senate then referred Gwin’s bill to a special committee headed by Senator Thomas Jefferson Rusk of Texas. A South Carolinian by birth and a onetime follower of John C. Calhoun, the forty-seven-year-old Rusk had moved to Texas in the winter of 1834 and become its secretary of war in the revolt against Mexico. Since then, he had gained a reputation for always looking out for his constituents, the people of north Texas.
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Hence, even though he proposed leaving the choice of the route and terminals to President Pierce and called for competitive bidding by contractors, Northern senators immediately assumed that Rusk expected the railroad to be Southern-based and to go through north Texas.

To stop that from happening, Senator James Shields of Illinois slipped in a poison pill. After conferring with Illinois’s other senator, Stephen A. Douglas, and Henry S. Geyer of Missouri, he offered an amendment to Rusk’s proposal specifying that none of the $20 million appropriated for a railroad could be spent within the limits of “any existing state.” The wording put Southern Democrats in a bind. Not only was it impossible to build a southern railroad without going through hundreds of miles of Texas, but the amendment was in keeping with their well-known “principles.” For decades, many of them had championed “strict construction” of the Constitution and insisted that spending federal money within a state violated strict-construction doctrine. Would they abide by their principles? Some did, others did not. The amendment passed by a narrow vote, and once it did, Southern senators lost interest in supporting Rusk’s proposal. It had become, moaned Rusk, “a useless piece of paper.”
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At the same time that Thomas Jefferson Rusk watched his bill go down to defeat in the Senate, William A. Richardson of Illinois introduced a bill in the House to organize the Nebraska country. The forty-one-year-old Democrat was Douglas’s chief spokesman in the House. He held, in fact, the same seat in the House that Douglas had held before being elected to the Senate. Leaving no doubt where he stood, Richardson said his bill was to facilitate the building of a railroad westward. “Why, everybody is talking about a railroad to the Pacific Ocean. In the name of God, how is the railroad to be made if you will never let people on the lands through which the road passes?”

To kill Richardson’s proposal, some of Rusk’s fellow Texans brought up the need to terminate Indian titles in the Nebraska country. The costs, they contended, would be prohibitive. Bribes and military force would be necessary. Nonetheless, the bill easily passed the House, 107 to 49.

Richardson’s bill then went to the Senate, to the chairman of the Committee on Territories, Stephen A. Douglas himself. Rusk and other Southerners, however, had more political muscle in the Senate than they did in the House. Douglas thus had difficulty getting the Senate to even consider the bill. Finally, two days before Congress adjourned in March 1853, he succeeded. Then, to his dismay, a motion to table the bill passed, 23 to 17, largely by Southern votes. Only two slave-state senators (both from Missouri) supported the bill.
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The message was thus clear. Getting any railroad measure through Congress was going to be an uphill struggle. No proposal could please everyone. Was California to become an appendage of the South? Or of the North? Was the railroad’s eastern terminus to be in New Orleans? Or Chicago? Or somewhere in between? What city, and what section of the country, was to gain the upper hand? The stakes were high.

One measure, however, got through. On March 3, 1853, Congress appropriated $150,000 for the secretary of war, Jefferson Davis, to survey possible routes. This was a victory for James Gadsden and the South. A huge victory. For Davis was anything but an unbiased observer.

Davis never admitted his bias. Instead, he attributed his enthusiastic support of a southern railroad to two other factors. One was his job as secretary of war. The other was “science.” As he saw it, he was just doing his job, and the dictates of his job and “science” happened to coincide with the best interests of the South.

Jefferson Davis, secretary of war. Reprinted from Ben: Perley Poore,
Perley’s Reminiscences,
2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1886), 1:476.

As secretary of war, Davis insisted that he had no choice but to support a southern railroad to the Pacific. The war with Mexico had added millions of square miles to the United States. On top of that, millions of dollars in gold had been discovered. How was the vast new national domain and its wealth to be defended? That, said Davis, was the single most pressing issue facing the War Department. And it mandated building a transcontinental railroad. For, in times of crisis, getting troops to the Pacific by sea not only took too long. It also would not be feasible against powerful foreign nations, namely Great Britain and France, as the U.S. Navy had only forty serviceable ships, whereas Great Britain and France had four hundred or more.

This argument, in turn, let Davis run roughshod over his “strict constructionist” past. As a strict constructionist, he had repeatedly argued that the Constitution limited what Congress could do to what was spelled out in the document itself. Where, then, was the clause in the Constitution giving Congress the power to build a transcontinental railroad? There was no such clause. Then didn’t laying millions of tracks and ties across the West at federal expense violate strict-construction doctrine? No, argued Davis. The Constitution gave the federal government responsibility for national defense, and the railroad would be constructed largely for military purposes.
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Would such a railroad benefit the South? It obviously would. But that, contended Davis, was immaterial. As he saw it, he was a man of “science,” and “science” dictated a southern route. The Corps of Topographical Engineers had already spent much time and money surveying and mapping the Southwest. They had been at it since the war with Mexico. The results, contended Davis, “proved” that the best path was from San Antonio to El Paso and then along the 32nd parallel to the Pacific. It had the fewest mountains, the least snow. The only major problem was the lack of water. But that could be remedied by digging artesian wells.

To preclude the appearance of sectional bias, however, Davis decided that it might be prudent to send out three survey parties to check other routes, from the far north to the 35th parallel. Then, after realizing that there were gaps in the original Southwest study, he decided that it might also be prudent to dispatch still another survey team to study the 32nd parallel route once again. He had no fear. He trusted the surveyors to do their job, to measure the depth of snow and report on the availability of water and timber and the habits of Indians. He was also certain that their reports would “prove” once again that only the 32nd parallel route was feasible.
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With that in mind, as soon as Congress appropriated the money, Davis leaped at the opportunity. On March 3, 1853, he ordered the chief of the Corps of Topographical Engineers to “make such explorations and surveys as he may deem advisable, to ascertain the most practicable and economical route for a railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean.”
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The chief of the Corps of Topographical Engineers, William H. Emory, had been a classmate of Davis’s at West Point. The son of a wealthy Tidewater family on Maryland’s Eastern Shore with strong military and political connections, Emory had been appointed to the academy by none other than John C. Calhoun. He was only eleven or twelve years old at the time. Upon graduating, he had married Benjamin Franklin’s great-granddaughter. Now fifty, he still stood out at any social gathering because of his ostentatious red whiskers. He also liked to dress and act like a dashing cavalry officer, even though he had long been a scientist and astronomer by trade.

Like Davis, Emory was anything but an unbiased observer. Part of General Stephen Watts Kearny’s invasion of California in 1846, he had become convinced at that time that the Gila River route was the best way to the Pacific. He had sung its praises many times, and he had even bought real estate in San Diego, its likely Pacific terminus. He was also the brother-in-law of Robert J. Walker, the head of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, who was pushing for a southern route. On Davis’s orders, however, Emory carefully picked men to head the research teams who at least appeared to be impartial. Science, after all, was to prove that Davis was right.
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If everything had gone as Davis had anticipated, the four survey parties that Emory sent out would have come back with conclusive evidence “proving” that only the southern route was practicable. That didn’t happen. The surveyors found instead that several routes were feasible, not just the 32nd line. They dismissed the 38th parallel route from St. Louis to San Francisco as “impractical,” spoke highly of the 41st parallel route from Omaha, also touted the 35th parallel route from Fort Smith, Arkansas, and especially showered praise on Davis’s favorite, the 32nd. Their work, overall, was impressive. It was published in eleven large volumes with elaborate drawings and maps, and the faults were well hidden. No one seemed to realize at the time that they underestimated the distance of the 32nd by 102 miles and overestimated the distance of all the others by 50 to 257 miles.
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Even though the surveys indicated that several routes were viable, Davis forged ahead with his original plan. He told Congress that the 32nd line was by far the best choice, downplaying its negative features, emphasizing them in all the rest.