Asa Whitney came home from China with a number in his head, and the number was thirty.
He was a New York dry-goods merchant, born in North Groton, Connecticut, in 1797, and he had made his money in the China trade. He knew what distance cost. The voyage out, in 1842 and 1844, ran the long way, around the Cape or by way of Europe, a hundred to a hundred and fifty days under sail. Somewhere in all that water the arithmetic turned over. Run a railroad to the Pacific, put steam on the far side, and the trip shrinks to about a month. He had seen an early British locomotive in 1830, and now the old impression had a purpose.
He was not an engineer, and the plan shows it. It was simple, almost serene. A line of about 2,160 miles from Lake Michigan to the mouth of the Columbia, somewhere between the 42nd and 45th parallels. Add the roads already built or planned east of the lakes and New York to the Pacific came to roughly 3,000 miles and eight days. He put the cost at $65 million, fifty to build and fifteen to run the road until it could pay its own way, and he admitted the figure was made without a real survey.
On January 28, 1845, his memorial reached the House and was sent to the Committee on Roads and Canals. He spent the next several years revising it, and in 1849 he published it as A Project for a Railroad to the Pacific.
The financing is where Whitney becomes strange. He wanted no cash from Congress. He asked for a belt of public land sixty miles wide, which he would sell as settlers moved west, putting the proceeds, “strictly and faithfully,” into the next stretch of track. Across country too poor to farm, a maintenance fund and later land sales would carry the work. He would be paid last, and only if the road was finished: whatever land remained unsold would be deeded to him. Tolls would stay just above the cost of upkeep. Any surplus, he said, should go to public education.
A man asks the federal government for the means to build a railroad across a continent, and arranges the terms so that he is the last person to profit.
What drove him was less commerce than something nearer to preaching. He talked about annihilating distance and, with it, “ignorance, want, and barbarism,” through American trade and American Christianity. He paid for the memorials, the lobbying, and the trips into what was still called Indian Territory out of his own pocket. David Haward Bain, in Empire Express, catches the tone exactly. Whitney was not asking for bonds, or a construction company, or a seat at the Crédit Mobilier table.
The men who eventually built the railroad understood what he did not. Philanthropy does not lay track. Federal cash, land, and spoils do.
It wasn’t naivety that killed his proposal, though. It was geography, which in 1845 meant slavery. A northern route favored free-soil and Great Lakes interests. Southern members wanted a line that would bind the Southwest and the slave states to the Pacific. Nothing could pass while that fight stayed open, and the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850 only sharpened it. By about 1851 his proposals had been rejected for the last time, and he dropped out of public life.
He lived long enough to read the news from Promontory Summit on May 10, 1869. He died three years later. The Pacific Railroad Acts of 1862 and 1864 did use a cousin of his idea, enormous land grants plus government bonds for every mile of track, but they handed the work to chartered companies, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, rather than to a single merchant with a conscience. The man who carried the practical dream into those acts was Theodore Judah, an engineer.
Whitney had priced the road wildly low and trusted Congress to let one man build it for the human family. He had asked to be paid last.