Aware that trouble was brewing on Rock Island, Congressman John Cook of Iowa went to the War Department in Washington and asked for copies of the order ejecting “trespassers.” He spoke personally with Secretary Davis, who refused to give him any copies. Referring to the planned bridge, Davis said he would “order the first pier removed that may be placed in the channel, as an obstruction to navigation.” Cook reported to an Iowa newspaper that Davis wanted “to put a stop to the work on the Island, thinking thereby to cut off the only chance to build the bridge.” “I think you will agree with me,” Cook said, “that the order of the War Department was ‘intended to obstruct the grading of the railroad across the island,’ and to prevent ‘the erection of a Railroad Bridge at this point.’”44 The congressman said that a bill had been introduced in the Senate to give the bridge company the right-of-way across the island, but it had been defeated by Davis. “Now, Sir,” the congressman added, “a person not fully posted up might ask the question, ‘Why should Jeff. Davis oppose the bridging of the Mississippi at Rock Island?’ I answer—because he is opposed to the progress of a Northern railroad to the Pacific.”45
Cook’s assertion was supported by some good evidence. In a letter written as recently as December 7, 1853, Davis had expressed his desire for a southern railroad to the Pacific, stating that “if we had a good railroad and other roads making it convenient to go through Texas into Mexico, and through New Mexico into Southern California, our people with their servants [slaves], their horses and their cows would gradually pass westward over fertile lands into mining districts, and in the latter, especially the advantage of their associated labor [slaves] would impress itself upon others about them and the prejudice which now shuts us out of that country would yield to the persuasion of personal interest. This border once established from East to West, future acquisitions to the South would insure [sic] to our benefit, thus the equality might be regained and preserved which is incumbent [?] to a fair construction of the Constitution and the fulfillment of the great purpose for which our Union was established.”46
After Davis’s encounter with Congressman Cook, he asked U.S. Attorney General Caleb Cushing to issue an opinion on the controversy. Cushing was a Democrat from Massachusetts who sympathized with the southerners in Franklin Pierce’s cabinet (the New York Herald dubbed him “a Boston man, with Texas principles”),47 and he promptly set to work on the issue. On August 21, 1854, Cushing issued his opinion agreeing with Davis that Rock Island was still a military reservation and that existing laws did not grant a right of way through it.48 Nevertheless, construction work still continued on the island.
On September 1, 1854, crowds gathered at Rock Island for a ceremony celebrating the beginning of work on the bridge piers. John Warner, the contractor in charge of the masonry work, took a large group of citizens into the river on his steamboat Lightfoot to witness the laying of the first stone for the first pier.49 The American Railroad Journal reported on the “baptism of the first stone of the first pier of the first railroad bridge across the first of rivers—‘the Father of Waters!’”50 But that same railroad-friendly publication reported just eight days later that the War Department was trying to prevent the bridge’s construction. It referred to the Pierce administration’s recent purchase of the Gadsden Territory as “a worthless strip of Mexican Territory for a Southern route to the Pacific” and suggested that this created “a private interest adverse to any bridging of the Mississippi, unless coincident with the ‘Gadsden’ route.”51
Davis wrote Franklin Pierce a long letter on October 20, informing the president that the marshal had been unable to eject the construction company, advising him that Attorney General Cushing had agreed that the railroad had no right of way across the island, and urging that “the matter be placed in charge of the proper law officers with instructions to resist the pretensions set up, and if necessary to obtain the decision of the highest judicial authority upon them.”52 Was another Supreme Court confrontation like that involving the Wheeling Bridge in the offing?
The matter was referred to Thomas Hoyne, Pierce’s United States attorney for Illinois, who visited Rock Island and in November filed suit in the U.S. District Court in Springfield seeking an injunction to halt the bridge construction. Hoyne’s bill of complaint alleged that, if the construction was allowed to proceed, “great and permanent injury” would be done to the “navigation of the Mississippi river, a common highway declared forever free to all of the inhabitants of the said Northwestern Territory and citizens of the United States.” Further, the bridge would “inflict great and irreparable mischiefs upon the commerce of the section of the country, and a proportionate damage to the eligibility of Rock Island as a site for military purposes.”53 The initial hearing came up on January 3, 1855, before District Judge Thomas Drummond. The U.S. government was represented by Hoyne and a Peoria-based lawyer named Julius Manning. The railroad was represented by Norman B. Judd, Joseph Knox, and Norman H. Purple. The importance of the case was immediately recognized, and Judge Drummond referred it to his senior colleague, Supreme Court Justice John McLean, to be heard at a special term of the U.S. Circuit Court in Washington.54
If Jefferson Davis had expected McLean to show the same hostility to the Rock Island Bridge he had earlier showed to the Wheeling Bridge, he was disappointed. The justice was, after all, a member of a collegial court and bound to respect its precedents, including the final decision in Pennsylvania v. Wheeling and Belmont Bridge Company allowing the Ohio River span to stand. McLean carefully reviewed the history of Rock Island, Fort Armstrong, and the proposed bridge across the Mississippi. He found that Rock Island had been reserved for military purposes in 1825 but abandoned as a military post in 1836. “The abandonment,” he said “was as complete as its reservation had been.”55 The Illinois legislature had authorized the Railroad Bridge Company to build a railroad and a bridge across Rock Island, but only if they did not “materially obstruct or interfere” with the free navigation of the river. The evidence was conflicting, but McLean believed that the railroad and the bridge would “add greatly to the value of the island.”56
But was the bridge a “material obstruction” to traffic on the river?” McLean noted that many witnesses had been examined on both sides of the question, “and while those called by the plaintiffs say the bridge will, in a great degree, destroy the commerce of the river, those called by the defendants think it will be no material obstruction.” The plaintiffs wanted McLean to halt the construction of the bridge. The justice did not think that would be justified. “Having considered this great case,” he wrote, “in regard to the legal principles involved under the Federal and State Governments, the magnitude of the enterprise, the interest of the public in the road and in the commerce of the Mississippi river, I am brought to the conclusion that the complainants are not entitled to the relief asked; and, therefore, the motion for an injunction is overruled.57 Nevertheless, he issued a warning: “If any injury should result to boats from any want of attention by the bridge company, or the structure of the draw, they being managed with reasonable care, an action at law may be resorted to, as in other cases of wrong.”58
The message was clear enough. McLean would not order the bridge construction to stop; he would not issue an injunction, as he had once done in the Wheeling Bridge case. But if the bridge caused injuries or damages, a lawsuit might follow.
FIVE
A Collision of Interests
Despite the legal obstacles that were put in its way, construction of the Rock Island Bridge proceeded. Benjamin B. Brayton was the chief engineer of the project,1 though he had the advice of Henry Farnam to back him up.2 Brayton had worked some twenty years as a civil engineer in and around New York, where he was an assistant engineer on the Erie and Chenango Canals (the Chenango connected the Erie Canal to the Susquehanna River) and on the Hudson River Railroad. He lived with his family in Davenport while he discharged his duties as resident engineer of the Rock Island Bridge.3 Two contracto
rs carried out the actual construction work. John Warner and Company erected the stone abutments and piers, while the firm of Stone and Boomer built and raised the timber spans.4 Warner was a German-born master mason who lived in Iowa.5 Stone and Boomer owned the patent rights to the Howe truss, which was widely used in the construction of bridges in the Middle West.6 They worked out of Chicago, where they had lots adjoining the Union Car Works.
Construction of the Rock Island Bridge was often regarded as a single undertaking, but it was in reality three related projects.7 The first was the erection of a bridge across the slough that separated the Illinois mainland from Rock Island. This consisted of three spans of 150 feet each, which, with their connections and approaches, totaled 474 feet.8 Since the slough was not a navigable stream, this bridge did not have to allow for the passage of steamboats. The second was the construction of the railroad across Rock Island from the bridge over the slough to the river’s edge. The third was the construction of the great bridge itself.
The bridge that crossed the river was a timber span composed of Howe trusses to which timber arches were added for additional strength. The span was 1,581 feet long and rested on six stone piers that rose 37 feet above the low water level of the river. Three fixed spans, each 250 feet long, were on the Iowa side of the river, and two were on the Illinois side. Between the fixed spans, a draw span 286 feet wide revolved on a turntable supported by twenty bearing wheels. The turntable was supported by a stone pier (called the “long pier”) 32 feet wide and 350 feet long. When in the open position, the draw had two openings, one on the Illinois side measuring 116 feet across and the other on the Iowa side measuring 110 feet.9 The river’s regular steamboat channel ran through the opening on the Illinois side. The draw was designed to remain open at all times unless a train was approaching.10 A single railroad track extended the full length of the bridge. The piers that supported the timber span were built by first placing wooden coffer dams in the bed of the river, then pumping the water out with Archimedes screws and erecting the stone piers in them.11 The bridge timbers were covered with two coats of white lead paint so approaching steamboats could see them clearly—particularly at night. Lights were mounted on either end of the long pier: a green lantern suspended from a pole on the downstream end and a white light on the upper end. A small house was built on the upstream end of the long pier and furnished with beds that would accommodate the bridge superintendent and watchmen who would staff the bridge at all hours of the day and night. A smaller building on the downstream end provided space in which the men could sleep in hot weather.12
The construction work began on July 16, 1853, and was finished just over two years and eight months later. On April 1, 1856, a locomotive crept over the Rock Island abutment and onto the bridge in a test run arranged by Farnam and John F. Tracy, superintendent of the Rock Island Railroad. Farnam and Tracy watched the locomotive closely and, after it had returned to Rock Island, carefully checked the bridge and its trusses to determine how they had borne up under its weight.13 They were, by all accounts, pleased with what they saw, but the official opening was not made until Monday, April 21. On that date, a locomotive named the Des Moines crossed from Rock Island to Davenport, where it was “welcomed by the huzzas of those who had assembled there to witness the event.”14 The following day, three locomotives drawing passenger cars crossed the bridge to a welcoming crowd.15 A band of about fifty Sauk and Fox Indians was camped on the Iowa side of the river, watching the event.16 The Rock Island Argus reported that church bells in Rock Island and Davenport “rang out their joyous notes in honor of the achievement, and cheer upon cheer went up from the crowds along the line.”17 The Davenport Gazette exulted that “the last link is now forged in the chain that connects Iowa and the great west with the states of the Atlantic Seaboard. The iron band that will span our hemisphere has been welded at Davenport; one mighty barrier has been overcome; the Missouri is yet to be crossed and then the locomotive will speed onward to the Pacific.”18
The construction of the Rock Island Bridge had not gone unnoticed in Chicago, where businessmen were delighted with the quick and dependable transportation it promised across the Mississippi. The Great Lakes were now linked by rails with the most important river in the country, and that river was tied by rails not only to Chicago but, through it, to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. At the same time, however, the bridge had also been watched closely by steamboat owners and operators on the river who regarded it as a threat to their dominance of the western waterways. Since steamboats first came to the Mississippi and its tributaries, their business had grown steadily. Now, with the opening of the first bridge across the great river, that growth was threatened.
New Orleans, of course, was a great steamboat center, but so was St. Louis, and because the Missouri city was located on the Upper Mississippi, its business was most directly imperiled by the new bridge. The St. Louis waterfront was so crowded with steamboats in 1856 that a watchman reported that he was able to walk along the shore for twenty city blocks, going from deck to deck and never once touching land.19 The waterfront then was lined with warehouses, machine shops, construction sheds, wood lots, taverns, inns, and stores, all of which partook in some way in the prosperity that the steamboats brought to the city.
Immigrants, most from Germany and Ireland, had flocked to St. Louis in the late 1840s and early 1850s, brought there by steamboats from the Ohio.20 In the 1850 census, St. Louis became the first city west of the Mississippi to rank among the ten largest in the country. It became the eighth-largest city in 1860, with a population of 160,733, while Chicago lagged 50,000 behind.21 But it was clear to observers that Chicago was growing faster than St. Louis, and that it would continue to grow faster because of its rail links with the East and the promise of connections with the vast western country beyond the Mississippi.
Even before the Rock Island Bridge was opened, commercial interests in St. Louis had begun to grumble. In January 1853, the St. Louis Missouri Republican told its readers that the bridge at Rock Island should “open the eyes of our citizens to what is going on elsewhere, to divert trade from us.” The bridge was part of an ongoing plan to link the East and the West by rails, and after the span was opened, the railroad would “take up its race westward.” The Republican admired the “spirit of enterprise which can engage in such noble works,” but it warned that the bridge was “likely in its construction to form an obstruction to the free navigation of the Mississippi.” Regardless of where a bridge over the river was built, the newspaper said, “this consideration must always be kept in view. . . . The free navigation of the Mississippi is solemnly guaranteed, and every Legislature will, if it acts with ordinary prudence, provide against any obstruction to such navigation.”22
Jefferson Davis’s efforts to block construction of the bridge at Rock Island had favored the steamboat interests, not because the Mississippian himself favored steamboats over railroads, but because he favored a southern route over a northern line for the Pacific railroad. The injunction that the Franklin Pierce administration sought against the bridge had the same aim, and most likely the same purpose—for Pierce’s purchase of the Gadsden Territory had clearly indicated his preference for a southern to a northern railroad.23
While St. Louis was one of the busiest steamboat ports on the Mississippi, Cincinnati had since the 1830s maintained its position as the leading shipbuilding center on all of the western rivers. The streams that fed into the Ohio were lined with forests that provided good timber for shipbuilding: oak for the construction of hulls, and poplar for decks and cabins. Jacob Sampson Hurd was an Ohioan in his late thirties when he made preparations for the construction of a large steamboat at Cincinnati in 1855.24 Born in New Hampshire in 1816 and brought to Ohio’s Scioto County while still a boy, Hurd had married there and for several years worked in the iron furnaces of the Hanging Rock region east of Cincinnati.25 He had been involved in the steamboat business for about a decade before he and two other Ohio
River men, Joseph W. Smith and Alexander W. Kidwell, commissioned the Marine Railway and Dry Dock Company and the Niles Works, both of Cincinnati, to build a new boat in July 1855.26 Marine Railway was one of Cincinnati’s premier boat-building yards. Niles was a foundry and machine company that built steam engines.
The boat the two companies were asked to create was a first-class steamboat capable of carrying large numbers of passengers and cargo over both the Ohio and the Mississippi. It was to be 230 feet long, with a 35-foot beam and a 6-foot hold, and powered by two sidewheels, each 38 feet in diameter. It was to have four boilers, 38 inches in diameter and 26 feet long, and two engines with 21-inch cylinders and 7-foot strokes. The main cabin would be equipped with fifty staterooms, each with its own wardrobe, closet, and washstand. Hot water would be piped to the saloon where guests gathered for meals, and cold water to the outhouses. Two iron chimneys would rise 46 feet above the hurricane deck. An officers’ dining saloon would crown the texas, or very top deck of the boat. When finished, the boat would have a capacity of 700 tons and, unladen, draw only 26 inches of water. The outside would be decorated with colorful landscapes painted on the paddle boxes. In all, the cost was estimated at $40,000. Launched in September, it was not finally completed until early November 1855, when it set out on its maiden voyage. Hurd was the captain, Smith the clerk, and Kidwell the engineer.27 Joseph McCammant of Cincinnati was hired as the pilot.28
Lincoln's Greatest Case: The River, the Bridge, and the Making of America Page 8