The Railroad, part 5

As 1856 progressed so did the laying of the railroad tracks across the Great Plains. A considerable part of that progression was due to the increased efforts of Thomas Durant to persuade folks in the villages and counties along the way between Iowa City and the Missouri River to pledge more railroad bonds.

The length of track wasn’t the only thing that was increasing. The number of territories the young America could claim was also on the rise. Two years earlier, on May 30, 1854, a United States bill was enacted that established Kansas and Nebraska as separate territories. This bill, sponsored by Senator Stephen Douglas, was intended to provide a compromise on the extension of slavery into the big territory that had been acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. Well, it did just that—and more. You see, slavery had been barred from the entire region by the Missouri Compromise back in 1820. Now Douglas came along and introduced the doctrine of Popular Sovereignty—it just didn’t turn out to be too popular with one group of folks and a whole lot more agreeable to some others. What this Popular Sovereignty did was to let all those people in the region in question decide for themselves as to whether or not they wanted to go along with having slaves.

Some of those folks said: “Yes, they would have slaves.” The rest of the residence declared: “Oh, no you won’t. Not over our dead bodies.” Or at least similar strong words, probably stronger, were spoken. But if those words were spouted about they turned out to be quiet true. Eventually those that wanted slaves didn’t get to have them, and it was over a lot of dead bodies—on both sides of the issue. The conflict acquired several names, some of which can’t be mentioned here. For starters the ruckus that came about in Kansas and just over the border in Missouri was termed “Bleeding Kansas.”

Of course we all know that the outcome of the trouble finally came to a head when war was declared between the North and the South, a situation now termed as the American Civil War. But in the mean time, General John Dix made a visit to Washington, in 1858. His little visit paid off when Congress voted an Iowa land-grant act that guaranteed thousands of aces to the railroad builders. It wasn’t long afterwards that the railroad had some 400,000 acres of rich Iowa dirt on their hands.