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Show LAND GRANTS FOR RAILROADS AND INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS 359 of both government and railroad lands within the primary grant area. Walker had in mind the bitter experience of residents along the line of the Milwaukee and Rock River Canal route in his state, who had refused to buy either the granted or the reserved sections because of the 100 percent increase in price. He declared that the double-minimum price would in effect make the settlers who purchased the land pay for the cost of constructing the railroad. "You ought not to tax [the settlers] to make this great thoroughfare" he declared, and moved to strike the double-minimum price from the bill. Douglas, himself an advocate of free lands, in rebuttal to Walker, held that the double-minimum was no tax for the value of the land was much enhanced by construction. Walker's move was then defeated.55 With considerable aid from the Northeast (where support was gained as investors came to assess the benefits railroad construction in the West might bring), this first important railroad land grant measure was then passed.56 Scramble for Grants The State of Illinois, being barred by its constitution from building the railroad, turned the right-of-way, land grant, and a liberal charter over to a group of New York and Boston capitalists incorporated as the Illinois Central Railroad; Mississippi and Alabama conveyed their rights to the Mobile and Ohio Railroad. Solid capital backing enabled the Illinois Central to complete its 700 miles in 1856. Early sales of its lands, amounting to 1,200,232 acres for $14,211,854 by 1857, and a growing volume of traffic, despite the fact that much of its mileage was built through relatively undeveloped territory, seemed to make the company a spectacularly successful venture. True, pressing short-term loans after the Panic of 1857 hiCong. Globe, 31st Cong., 1st sess., April 29. 1850, pp. 852-53. 56 Act of Sept. 20, 1850, 9 Stat. 466. forced it to assign all property to trustees and to suspend payments for a short time, but with the exception of this brief period of stress the company was a financial success, recovering from its lands the full cost of construction. Its achievement stimulated other groups to seek the same land bounty for enterprises they were promoting.57 There was thus set in motion a grand scramble for land grants to states to aid them, or the companies to which they might turn over the grants, in building railroads. The Mobile and Ohio Railroad was somewhat slower to select its land; it ran afoul of the Land Office in its efforts to find compensation for the Chickasaw allotments within the primary grant, and for that part of the line which it was required to build in Kentucky and Tennessee where there were no public lands. The Land Office held that the Chickasaw allotments were not public lands at the time of the adoption of the grant and therefore lieu lands could not be selected in their place, but it was overruled by the Attorney General. As for compensation for the mileage in Kentucky and Tennessee, Senators Douglas, John Bell, and William King, who had been influential in pushing the grant through Congress, declared that Congress had intended to have the grant apply to the mileage in these two states. Attorney General Crittenden, when asked to pass upon the question, held that the Mobile and Ohio was required to build through the two landless states but that the act stipulated no grant for that mileage. Although this left the railroad to build costly mileage (164 miles) for which it would receive no aid from the government, its situation was not altogether unique. Probably no railroad, with the possible exception of the Burlington in Nebraska, received all the land which its mileage called for and some received very 57 Howard Gray Brownson, History of the Illinois Central Railroad to 1870 (University of Illinois "Studies in the Social Sciences," Vol. IV, No. 3 [Urbana, 111., 1915]); Gates, The Illinois Central Railroad and its Colonization Work (Cambridge, Mass., 1934), passim. |