A Power in the Land: Union Pacific in the Greater Reconstruction

Railroads have long been subjects of Civil War era studies. Scholars have cast them as promoters of growth before the conflict, agents of capacity and connection during the war itself, and instruments of expansion and empire in its aftermath. Most recently, Richard White has argued that the transcontinentals transformed the postbellum West and built modern America through a chaotic process of “creative destruction” that corrupted the political and economic system and induced a series of social and economic crises during the Gilded Age.[1]

But more than unwieldy machines that heralded the rise of the modern United States, railroads like the Union Pacific were companies committed to a new politics of development in the West. With a network history of the Union Pacific, we can understand how a class of financiers, engineers, politicians, and generals attached to the company attempted to fulfill both personal and national ambitions through the building of railroads and western industries in the spaces of the Interior West. In the post-Civil War era, the rising power elite’s connections between private corporations, the federal government, and the U.S. Army facilitated railroad construction on a grand scale. By tracing this “iron triangle” of interests in the mid-nineteenth century, the history of railroads becomes a case study in the institutional mechanics of corporate-state collusion. A new political system of corporate and state interaction tied western development up in the future of American power.[2]

The history of the Union Pacific in the Civil War era is a case study for what I call the “second American system”: a model of economic development through westward expansion. Unlike the first American system’s effort to coordinate federal government involvement in the antebellum market economy and internal improvements, the second American system was shaped by powerful elites who used a porous postbellum public-private divide to facilitate modern development of the West. A reinforced loop of connections between railroad companies, the federal government, and the U.S. Army helped to initiate the origins of a “politico-military-industrial complex” that we have become all the more familiar with in the era following the Second World War. Elites on boards, committees, and other halls of power each took advantage of their respective institutions to fulfill visions for both personal wealth and national security.[3]

The second American system operates within what Elliot West and others have described as a “Greater Reconstruction.” As West argues, the story of the burgeoning modern state during the Civil War and Reconstruction should be understood as not only taking place between North South but also between East and West. The Greater Reconstruction framework allows historians to look at the conditions of state power in the West as part of a broader reconstitution and redefinition of living in the United States and being an American citizen in the mid-nineteenth century. Viewing Reconstruction in this manner further illuminates how railroad development entangled twin projects of industrial capitalism and settler colonialism in the U.S. West. Putting the nation back together was tied to expanding it into an empire, a process which perhaps did not require but ultimately reignited various forms of corporate-state collusion. Members of the postbellum “power elite” among business, government, and the military operated the railroad as an institution that linked Native dispossession with the construction of profitable extractive industries.[4]

The managers of this flexible political network for the Union Pacific served as businessmen, financers, engineers, politicians, and generals, and their relationships with each other mapped corporate and state power closer than ever before. They maintained their connections by meeting in Wyoming officers’ clubs, New York hotels, and Washington, D.C. offices. Corruption was merely one form of interaction and collusion they developed together in an era where the rules of big business and big government were not yet hammered into place. Businessmen, politicians, and generals relied on each other for their respective strengths. Financiers like Thomas Durant of the Union Pacific needed land grants, bonds, military support, and legislation for rights-of-way that only their contacts in Congress, the Interior Department, and the Army could provide. Politicians like James Harlan of Iowa and generals like William Tecumseh Sherman of Ohio were loyal allies. In exchange for political, financial, and military support, the federal government received an infrastructure that supposedly legitimized the U.S. state’s claim over Native lands. The most agile railroad men were able to facilitate and benefit by serving in multiple capacities at the same time. Grenville Dodge was the railroad’s Chief Engineer, its land agent, a U.S. Army general, and congressman from Iowa all during the initial years of construction between 1865 and 1869. Railroad men’s institutional linkages forged a nation that was being built in real time.[5]

“The Republican Standard,” 1860, Library of Congress.

The railroad power elite attached to the Union Pacific Railroad utilized its connctions among private corporations, the U.S. government, and the U.S. Army to lay western rail and accelerate a new western economy through overlapping stages of development: subsidization, occupation, and commodification. Federal land grants and bonds were the bedrock of the Union Pacific’s initial railroad construction from Nebraska to Utah. The Union Pacific received 12,800 acres of land for every mile of track alone. Grading and tracklaying were accompanied by financial schemes, real estate deals, and a new mapping of space. It was an endeavor of corporate and state collusion developed by Republican politicians like Oakes Amess and railroad financiers like Thomas Durant. Corporate and government elites both received a stake in the profits, and the railroad company paved a way for American government and business to leave its imprints in the contested region of the North American West.[6]

Map of the land grant of the Union Pacific Railroad, 1872, Library of Congress.

At the same time, the Union Pacific maintained ties with the U.S. Army across the Great Plains. Army units protected surveyors and led campaigns against war parties of Lakotas, Cheyennes, and Arapahos fighting to keep their homelands. In case of attack, the ceilings of railroad construction cars held 1,000 army issue rifles for the labor force of mainly Irish immigrants and Union veterans. Even Chief Engineer Grenville Dodge and construction boss Jack Casement had both served in the Civil War. Dodge himself personally knew William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant. Sherman visited construction sites annually, and Grant told Dodge to use the troops to his discretion. Military discipline enforced the regime of construction, and military violence preempted the settler colonial project to turn over Native lands to white settlers and corporations.[7]

Railroad system of the United States in 1890, 1898, Library of Congress.

With the federal state’s financial and military backing, the Union Pacific carried out an additional stage to its mission: establishing commerce. The Union Pacific positioned itself as the arbiter of economic power in the region by linking together old and new hubs of agriculture. As workers pushed westward, the company sold off their “public lands” in a checkerboard, induced migrants to the territories, and developed towns to efficiently transport western crops to eastern cities. Cheyenne and Laramie, Wyoming popped off the map at the point of Grenville Dodge’s pen. Land sales translated into wealth produced from meat, wheat, and lumber. Politicians, financiers, businessmen, and boosters formed a spatial order that relied on a revitalized economy as much as a reshaped ecology.[8]

The Union Pacific network became a vehicle for not only binding the nation together but actually manifesting it through a postwar economy born in a settler colonial regime. The railroad power elite was ultimately in contestation with a series of forces competing in the West: other corporations, governments, Indigenous nations, and the environment itself. To accomplish both corporate and state aims, promoters and financiers aligned state power with the reach of the railroad to impose a new political economy in the West. Federal land grants and bonds, military occupation, real estate sales, town development, and the acceleration of western farming, mining, and cattle driving, were the public-private tools that made railroad-building the primary mechanism for nation-building. The Union Pacific reconstructed the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains into an economic unit that railroads linked together. Railroad men shaped the state to build the nation. In doing so, they operated a second American system of economic development which strengthened a particular form of Union—one which has left tremendous echoes.[9]

Railroads and the West have a unique place in both the study of the Civil War era and the memory of the general public. Many Americans feel the pull of the West with its migrations, trains, and industries, but they are often remembered more as myths than actual stories with real people. The Union Pacific story is a history with crucial implications about the immense possibilities and dangers that public-private infrastructure projects can offer. It also shows how space and development is political. Calls for wealth creation demand considered focus and scrutiny. The history of the Union Pacific’s network among private corporations, the U.S. government, and the U.S. Army underscores how Americans in this period molded the landscapes of modern America—those that they envisioned, and those that we are left with today.

 

[1] Transcontinental railroads have been the subject of diverse scholarship in recent decades, from David Haward Bain and Maury Klein’s masterful volumes to Richard White and Manu Karuka’s excellent books on how railroads were deeply embedded in broader histories of capitalism, empire, labor, and the environment. See David Haward Bain, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (Viking, 1999); Maury Klein, Union Pacific: Volume I, 1862-1893, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (W.W. Norton & Company, 2011); Manu Karuka, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad, 1st ed. (University of California Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvd1c7m4.

[2] Previous studies of railroads and the West, like Richard White’s Railroaded, Manu Karuka’s Empire’s Tracks, and William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis, have all handled their subjects deftly, adding to the literature on the political, environmental, and labor histories of nineteenth-century America. I seek to synthesize them together into a new story about the Union Pacific that foregrounds the significance of an adapted business-government relationship. To do this, I am bringing C. Wright Mills’ insights about the “power elite” to this moment in the Reconstruction and Gilded Age United States. White, Railroaded, xxi-xxxiv, 507-517; Karuka, Empire’s Tracks, xi-xv, 40-45, 66-73; Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 5-19, 25-26, 41-46, 80-81, 92-93; C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford University Press, 1956), 3-29, 269-297.

[3] This dissertation project builds on research from my Senior Independent Study Thesis at the College of Wooster, a version of which was published as “A Power in the Land: The First Transcontinental Railroad and the Second American System,” History Matters: An Undergraduate Journal of Historical Research 22 (2025): 111–154, https://journals.library.appstate.edu/index.php/historymatters/issue/view/HM25. Bain, Empire Express, 106-116, 178-180, 184-192, 549, 711; Klein, Union Pacific, 12-33, 367-377; White, Railroaded, 2-9, 26-36; Mills, The Power Elite, 5-20, 271-272.

[4] Elliott West, Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion (University of Nebraska Press, 2023), 454-455; Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford University Press, 2017), 103-135.

[5] Bain, Empire Express, 106-116, 157-163, 549, 711; Klein, Union Pacific, 12-33, 72-79, 142-151; Douglas Allen, “Establishing Economic Property Rights by Giving Away an Empire,” The Journal of Law and Economics 62, no. 2 (2019): 251-256.

[6] Bain, Empire Express, 106-116, 178-180; Klein, Union Pacific, 14-33; White, Railroaded, 17-36; White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 117-125; Allen, “Establishing Economic Property Rights by Giving Away an Empire,” 251-256.

[7] Bain, Empire Express, 184-192, 227-233, 265-269, 470-471; Karuka, Empire’s Tracks, 40-45, 60-79; Grenville Dodge, How We Built the Union Pacific Railway, and Other Railway Papers and Addresses (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1910), 12-20, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcmassbookdig.howwebuiltunionp00dodg_1/?st=gallery.

[8] White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 103-135; John C. Hudson, Plains Country Towns (Minneapolis, United States: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 5-16, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wooster/detail.action?docID=316613; Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 25-26, 41-46.

[9] Baird, “A Power in the Land,” 111-117, 141-143; White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 117-135; Karuka, Empire’s Tracks, 60-103.