Lincoln's Greatest Case: The River, the Bridge, and the Making of America

by Brian McGinty

  In 1828, when Lincoln was nineteen, he and another young man built a flatboat, loaded it with farm products from the area, and floated it twelve hundred miles down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans.30 They found buyers for their goods along the river and sold the flatboat in New Orleans, then returned north as deck passengers on a steamboat, thus qualifying for the lowest available fares.31

  Thomas Lincoln moved his family to central Illinois in 1830, the year that Abraham turned twenty-one and was at last free of the duty to work for his father without compensation.32 After helping his family fence off a ten-acre plot of ground with rails (this was the work that later gave him his nickname of “the Rail-Splitter”), he began his life as a free man by heading down the Sangamon River in a canoe, a “friendless, uneducated, penniless boy.”33 When he met a businessman who proposed that he and two other young men take a flatboat down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans, he gladly took on the job, felling trees with which to build the boat, loading it with farm products and livestock, and acting as pilot of the craft. When, early in the trip, the boat became impaled on a milldam and filled with water, Lincoln showed his enterprise and ingenuity by boring a hole in the hull, draining the water over the face of the dam, then plugging up the hole and getting the boat back on the journey to New Orleans.34

  In 1832, Lincoln took a job helping to clear the Sangamon River of overhanging trees so that a steamboat called the Talisman could come up the river, take on a cargo of local crops, and return downstream to St. Louis and New Orleans. When the boat arrived in New Salem, the village Lincoln then called home, he went on board as pilot. But the water level in the Sangamon quickly dropped, forcing the Talisman to retreat. With Lincoln still at the helm, the boat was ultimately brought to rest on the same milldam that had impaled his flatboat a year earlier.35

  After Lincoln entered politics in the early 1830s, he demonstrated a friendly disposition to river traffic, as well as other developing forms of transportation in Illinois. Most of the people who lived in the southern and central parts of the state were Democrats and supporters of President Andrew Jackson. Many had come to Illinois from Kentucky and Virginia, hoping to recapture on the Illinois prairies the agricultural lifestyle they had enjoyed in their southern homes. Although Lincoln, too, hailed from a southern state, he believed in the idea of progress and embraced the values of enterprise and energy.

  Lincoln’s “beau ideal of a statesman” was Henry Clay, leader of the Whig Party.36 The central plank of Clay’s political philosophy was the so-called American System, which called for tariffs to protect and promote American manufacturing and create a home market for American products, a national bank to provide a sound and uniform currency, and federal support for roads, canals, and river improvements.37 On the other side, the Democrats, heirs to the agrarian philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, believed that the federal government should have only the most minimal involvement in the lives of the people. The Democrats (particularly Jackson) were bitter foes of the Bank of the United States, which they believed to be unconstitutional.38 They opposed federal roads and canals as further violations of the Constitution39 and were quite satisfied for Americans to sell their agricultural products to England and France and, in turn, use the profits to buy European manufactured goods.

  Henry Clay wanted the American economy to grow and become more unified. He believed that roads, canals, and river projects, financed in large part from federal tariff revenues, would bring greater prosperity to the nation. The Bank of the United States would provide the credit needed to finance the improvement projects and, in the process, help to knit the disparate regions of the country together. Taken together, the American System would promote interdependence and, according to Clay’s biographers David and Jeanne Heidler, “make disunion not only unlikely but unthinkable.”40 Lincoln embraced the Whig philosophy, believing that the “legitimate object of government, is ‘to do for the people whatever needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves.’ There are many such things—some of them exist independently of the injustice in the world. Making and maintaining roads, bridges, and the like; providing for the helpless young and afflicted; common schools; and disposing of deceased men’s property are instances.”41

  Seeking to emulate Henry Clay’s American System on the state level, Lincoln urged state support for straightening and deepening river channels, for building roads, and for raising bridges over creeks and rivers. He supported state financing for one of the biggest construction projects then under way in Illinois, the nearly one-hundred-mile-long Illinois and Michigan Canal that linked the Chicago River near Lake Michigan with the Illinois River, which in turned flowed into the Mississippi. Begun in 1836 and not completed until 1848, it was an expensive and time-consuming project, but it was the first great leap forward on Chicago’s road to becoming the principal commercial center of the Middle West. The completion of the canal turned the lakeside city into a major market for the grain products of the Illinois River Valley at the same time that it severely limited St. Louis’s participation in that market.42

  Lincoln was also an enthusiastic supporter of the “General System of Internal Improvements” that was approved by the Illinois legislature on February 27, 1837.43 This was an even more ambitious project than the Illinois and Michigan Canal, and much more expensive, for it aimed to support canals, railroads, and other improvement projects throughout the state. But coming just before the Panic of 1837, which shook the financial foundations of the nation, it proved to be too much. While voters were eager to have the improvements built, they were loath to fund them with increased tax dollars, and without tax increases, the state could not pay for all of the promised improvements.44 Lincoln, who was a Whig leader in the General Assembly at the time, was widely blamed for the extravagance of the internal improvements scheme, but he continued to defend the law and another measure that ordered the removal of the Illinois state capital from Vandalia to Springfield, where he then lived.45 Carried out in 1839, the move proved to be a great boon to Springfield, bringing not only the statehouse to the town but also the governor and the legislature, the state Supreme Court, the state library, the United States courts, and the U.S. Marshal.46 The move also benefited the state generally, for Springfield occupied a more central location in Illinois, making it easier for people from the northern as well as the southern parts of the state to conduct their business there.

  Lincoln continued to support internal improvements after he entered national politics. Shortly before he went to Washington to take his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1847, he spoke at a convention called in Chicago to respond to President James K. Polk’s recent veto of an act of Congress appropriating federal moneys for the improvement of rivers and harbors in New York, Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Polk took the position, originally advanced by Thomas Jefferson, that internal improvements were unconstitutional, since Congress had power to regulate commerce between the states but not within them. Polk also argued that federal aid to internal improvements was an unwarranted drain on the federal treasury, that the improvements favored certain parts of the country at the expense of others, and that the federal government could have nothing to do with them unless the Constitution was first amended.47 Lincoln touched deftly on the constitutional issue, modestly disclaiming any expertise as a constitutional lawyer, but expressing warm approval for federal action. David Dudley Field, a prominent New York lawyer and Democrat, had just spoken before the same convention, arguing that federal aid to internal improvements was unconstitutional. In his own speech, Lincoln acknowledged that Field “loves the Constitution.” Lincoln said he also loved it, although “in a different way.” Field looked upon it “as a network, through which may be sifted the seeds of discord and discussion,” Lincoln said. “I look upon it as a complete protection to the Union. He loves it in his way; I in mine.”48

  When Lincoln got to Congress, he delivered a much longer speech in
favor of federal aid to internal improvements, in which he addressed the whole panoply of the Democratic arguments against them. On the issue of their constitutionality, he quoted from Chancellor James Kent’s Commentaries on American Law, one of the leading legal treatises of the time. Kent thought the arguments in favor of the constitutionality of internal improvements were “vastly superior” to those against it. Lincoln agreed.49

  Both before and after his service in Congress, Lincoln continued his busy law practice. The cases that he handled included a healthy sprinkling of disputes that arose out of rivers, river navigation, and bridges.50 Some of the cases had modest implications; they were disputes about streams that were obstructed by mill or fish dams, or the loss of cargos in flatboat accidents.51 But at least two cases that he participated in before the Effie Afton case were potentially more important.

  One case arose in 1849 when a canal boat carrying a load of wheat struck part of a privately owned wagon bridge that had been built over the Illinois River at Peoria. The canal boat and the wheat were both lost. The boat’s insurance company paid the boat owners’ claim and then brought suit against the stockholders of the bridge company. Under the law of subrogation, an insurance company that pays a claim is entitled to all of the rights and remedies its insured could assert against third parties responsible for the underlying loss.52 An attorney for the insurance company asked Lincoln to join him in prosecuting its claim. The issues to be decided in the case were similar to those that later arose in the Effie Afton trial. First, was the bridge a “material obstruction” to navigation of the river? Second, was the collision caused by negligent operation of the boat? And third, did the fact that the building of the bridge was expressly authorized by law (in this case an act of the Illinois legislature) exempt the bridge owners from responsibility for the collision? Lincoln successfully argued in Columbus Insurance Company v. Peoria Bridge Company that the legislative authorization did not immunize the bridge owners from claims.53 Beyond that, the issues were hotly disputed, and the case was eventually settled.

  A second case arose from the sinking in the Ohio River of a large flat-bottom boat that was transporting sixty very valuable railroad cars to a railroad construction project in 1854. Eads and Nelson, a salvage firm from Missouri that had contractual rights to salvage sunken boats and claim payment from the owners or their insurance companies, raised fifty-two of the cars and turned them over to their owners. Soon a dispute arose among the salvagers, the railroad company, and the insurers as to how they would be compensated. A judgment in favor of Eads and Nelson and against the railroad company was initially obtained in the U.S. District Court in Missouri, but since the company had no assets in Missouri, a second suit in admiralty was begun in the U.S. District Court in Springfield, Illinois. Lincoln joined with two attorneys from St. Louis to represent the railroad and its officers. The resulting case of Eads and Nelson v. The Ohio and Mississippi Railroad raised complicated questions of admiralty jurisdiction, salvage rights, and insurance law. Samuel Treat, the district judge in Springfield, entered a judgment allowing the salvagers to foreclose a lien on the rescued railroad cars. The railroad appealed the judgment to Supreme Court Justice John McLean, sitting as a circuit justice in Springfield, but before McLean could decide the case there was a settlement and the appeal was dismissed.54

  Lincoln’s close involvement with the rivers and riverboats was attested to by an event that occurred in 1848, when he was serving as a Whig congressman from Illinois. The first session of the Thirtieth Congress came to an end on August 14 of that year, and the second session was not due to begin until December. During the intersession, Lincoln came home by way of New York, New England, and the Great Lakes, using some of his time to campaign for General Zachary Taylor, that year’s Whig candidate for president. While a passenger on a steamboat traveling on the Detroit River, he saw another steamboat that had gone aground on an island. The captain ordered the passengers to get out and put loose planks, empty barrels, and boxes under the hull of the stranded craft in an effort to refloat it.55 Lincoln thought about the problem of the stranded boat and, when he got back to Illinois, worked on an invention he thought would help in such a situation. Using his skill at whittling wood (and with the aid of a Springfield mechanic named Walter Davis) he made a model of it and took it back to Washington when he returned to Congress.56 There he hired an attorney to apply for a patent in his behalf.57 In his application, he wrote:

  Be it known that I, Abraham Lincoln, of Springfield, in the county of Sangamon, in the state of Illinois, have invented a new and improved manner of combining adjustable buoyant air chambers with a steam boat or other vessel for the purpose of enabling their draught of water to be readily lessened to enable them to pass over bars, or through shallow water, without discharging their cargoes.58

  The invention was never built, and it is by no means certain that it would have worked if it had. Still, it occupies a unique place in American history, for it was (so far as is known) the first and only patent ever awarded to a president of the United States.59 The inspiration for the patent (no. 6,469) came from a problem frequently experienced on the western rivers—boats running aground on sandbars—and the inventive idea for a solution to it had its birth in the mind of a lawyer from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln.

  TWO

  No Other Improvement

  The earliest railroads in America were short, horse-drawn tramways that hauled building materials from one point to another. The Granite Railway, which opened in Massachusetts in 1826, was one of these roads. Running for a distance of four miles from the town of Quincy to Milton on the Neponset River, it carried granite for the construction of the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown.1

  The first commercially successful, steam-powered railroad in the country was the Baltimore and Ohio, which began building west from the Maryland city in 1828 with the goal of crossing the Appalachians to the Ohio River. The B&O was touted as a faster and cheaper route for moving passengers and freight from the eastern seaboard to the states of the Old Northwest than the Erie Canal, which was built across upper New York State between 1817 and 1825 to connect the Hudson River to Lake Erie. A branch of the B&O was extended to Washington, D.C., in 1835, but the Ohio was not reached until 1852, when the rails were finally brought into Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia).2

  The first rails laid north and west of the Ohio River were short lines designed to connect established waterways—the Ohio River in the south, Lake Erie in the north, and canals in between—with agricultural marketing centers. Ohio’s first line was the Kalamazoo and Erie, which ran a modest thirty-six miles from Toledo to Adrian, Michigan, in 1836.3 Springfield, Ohio, was connected to Cincinnati by the Little Miami Railroad, built between 1837 and 1848. By 1850, thanks in large part to these midwestern roads, the United States led the world with nine thousand total miles of railroads.4

  Although Lincoln was an early and determined proponent of water transportation in Illinois, he recognized that railroads were a marvelous innovation and that the day was not far off when rail transportation would come to his state. In 1832, in his first campaign for election to the Illinois state legislature, he publicly proclaimed his support for railroad construction. “No other improvement that reason will justify us in hoping for,” he said then, “can equal in utility the rail road. It is a never failing source of communication, between places of business remotely situated from each other. Upon the rail road the regular progress of commercial intercourse is not interrupted by either high or low water, or freezing weather, which are the principal difficulties that render our future hopes of water communication precarious and uncertain.”5

  Lincoln did not win his 1832 election, but he was successful in four subsequent elections and held his seat in the legislature until March 1841. He was one of the leaders of the Whigs in the Illinois General Assembly when it passed its “General System of Internal Improvements” in February 1837.6 This ambitious program envisioned state support for rail
road construction as well as continued work on the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which had already begun. Rail lines were to be built from Galena in the far northwestern corner of the state to Cairo at the southern tip; from Alton, an important shipping point on the Mississippi opposite St. Louis, to Mt. Carmel on the Indiana line; from Quincy on the middle Mississippi to Wabash, again on the Indiana line. Other railroads were to be constructed to connect towns and villages in between.7 If taxes adequate to finance these ambitious projects had been raised, they might have been completed, but the voters were as firmly opposed to tax increases as they were in favor of internal improvements. So, by 1840, the legislature called for an end to the railroad projects.8