Thomas Hart Benton
To the St. Louis Railroad Convention
October 16, 1849
On the second day of the National Railroad Convention held in St. Louis in 1849, Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri delivered a stirring call for development of a railroad to the Pacific Coast.
In 1849 the idea of a railroad stretching to the Pacific Ocean was capturing the imagination of Americans. The pressure for a reliable land transportation route was fueled not only by the discovery of gold and the prospect that California would soon be a state, but also by the possibility of trade with Asia after China opened its ports to foreign trade earlier in the decade. Since it was apparent that a railroad would eventually be developed, there was considerable competition to be the eastern terminus of such a route.
Four cities were jockeying for the prize—St. Louis, New Orleans, Memphis, and Chicago. Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois favored a route starting in Chicago and heading west via Council Bluffs, Iowa. St. Louis, a metropolis of 78,000 people, had an equally powerful champion in his fellow Democrat Thomas Hart Benton, who strongly opposed both Douglas' support for a Chicago terminus and his presidential ambitions. The Missouri strategy involved inviting partisans of the various routes to attend a convention in St. Louis to discuss the need for a railroad to the Pacific. The convention, which convened in October 1849, attracted more than a thousand participants, about half of them from Missouri, a quarter from Illinois, and the others divided among a dozen other interested states. The convention chose Stephen Douglas as its president, a move Douglas thought might be designed to prevent him from speaking.
Thomas Hart Benton had been serving in the U.S. Senate since 1821. He had been a strong supporter of President Andrew Jackson, as well as a long-time advocate of the country's westward expansion. A colorful figure with a powerful, fiery personality, who had engaged in brawls and a duel in his younger years, Benton had for the past five months been touring the state, speaking against proslavery resolutions adopted by the Missouri legislature. Although he had once supported developing waterways to the West, Benton was now enthusiastic about the idea of a railroad from St. Louis to San Francisco.
As an orator, Benton relied heavily on extensive research and an endless succession of facts. A specialist in rhetoric has written that "in the analysis of a question Benton used intellectual power of a high order to resolve complex subjects into their relatively simple components." In preparing a speech, Benton consulted primary sources, including "treaties, geographies, maps, annals of explorers, government reports and statistical tables, legislative records, diplomatic correspondence, official journals and minutes, speeches, letters, memoirs, constitutions, laws, and judicial opinions." His rhetorical fault was to add fact upon fact, often including material that if not totally irrelevant at least tended to muddy his point. Yet, "at his best he was tough, lively, and pungent."
The only extant copy of the railroad convention speech appears in The Missouri Republican of October 18, 1849, which reported it chiefly in the third person, including only the final paragraph verbatim. That last paragraph is thus the only portion of the speech reprinted here. In the early part of the address, Benton read portions of letters from his son-in-law, the explorer John Charles Fremont, who had led an expedition to identify an overland route from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean. Fremont reported that he had identified several mountain passes suitable for a railroad and that the country traversed would be appropriate for settlement. Although Benton stated that the convention should not attempt to pick a route but should concentrate on convincing Congress of the need for such a railroad, he could not resist mentioning St. Louis as the terminus that would connect with eastern rail lines and shipping on the Mississippi. He thought the greatest benefit to the nation could be achieved by taking a central route west, between the 38th and 39th latitudes. Such a railroad, Benton declared, would be "a band of iron, hooping and binding the States together east and west, from the Atlantic to the Pacific." He then launched into the peroration that is reproduced here.
When Benton finished, the audience applauded wildly. Later in the convention, however, Stephen Douglas spoke, bitterly attacking the idea of St. Louis as a terminus. After considerable wrangling, the body eventually adopted a resolution urging Congress to support a railroad to the Pacific that would connect to St. Louis, Memphis, and Chicago. Although this was not the clear-cut endorsement of St. Louis that Benton had sought from the convention, Missourians appreciated his effort. Almost twenty years later, in 1868, when a statue of Benton was erected in St. Louis, the words of the peroration were inscribed on its base. Meanwhile, the speech built some support in Missouri for Benton's reelection campaign the following year.
The rivalry for western rail routes continued, but the growing country found it needed more than one railroad to the West. When the golden spike driven in Promontory, Utah, in May 1869 joined the Central Pacific Railroad from California with the Union Pacific, the eastern portion of the route was largely the one envisioned by Douglas, reaching west from Chicago via Council Bluffs. St. Louis, however, was soon connected to the Union Pacific by a branch line through Kansas City to Denver and Cheyenne, Wyoming. The Southern Pacific and the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe soon followed on a more southerly route, while the Northern Pacific traversed the northern tier of states to Oregon and Washington.
______________________________________
Reprinted from Robert C. Byrd, The Senate, 1789-1989: Classic Speeches, 1830-1993 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1994.).
