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

  LINCOLN’S

  GREATEST CASE

  The River, the Bridge, and

  the Making of America

  Brian McGinty

  LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

  a division of W. W. Norton & Company • NEW YORK • LONDON

  To the memory of my grandfather

  Lucius Frank McGinty Jr.,

  a Southerner who revered Lincoln, and encouraged

  my earliest efforts at writing

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1. A Great Highway of Nature

  2. No Other Improvement

  3. His Peculiar Ambition

  4. The First Bridge over the First River

  5. A Collision of Interests

  6. The Suit Is Filed

  7. Preparing the Ground

  8. A Very Serious Obstruction

  9. A Chorus of Protests

  10. The Bridge Itself on the Stand

  11. A Virtual Triumph

  12. The Bridge Stands

  13. The Great and Durable Question

  14. History’s Verdict

  Illustrations

  Acknowledgments

  Timeline

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  LINCOLN’S

  GREATEST CASE

  INTRODUCTION

  On September 8, 1857, a tall and eerily thin lawyer from the prairies of central Illinois rose in the crowded courtroom of the United States Circuit Court in Chicago to address the judge and jury. Abraham Lincoln, already a well-known courtroom attorney in the lakeside city, had come north from his home in downstate Springfield because of an incident that occurred in the spring of the previous year on the Mississippi River between Rock Island, Illinois, and Davenport, Iowa. On May 6, 1856, a steamboat known as the Effie Afton had crashed into the first railroad bridge ever built across the Mississippi River, erupted in flames, and sunk in the river waters. No one was killed in the crash, but the steamboat was a total loss, and the bridge itself—called the Rock Island Bridge—was badly damaged. The owners of the steamboat had filed suit against the owners of the bridge to recover damages sustained in the collision. Lincoln had been retained as one of the lawyers for the defense of the suit, and the trial was now about to begin.

  Officially titled Hurd et al. v. The Railroad Bridge Company,1 but better known to newspaper reporters as the Effie Afton case, the trial in the United States Circuit Court was recognized from the outset as one of the most important ever heard in Illinois, for the transportation future of the state, of the Middle West, and of the nation depended in large measure on its outcome. Could a railroad bridge be built across the greatest river in North America without violating the navigation rights of steamboats? Could the Rock Island Bridge remain standing in the face of a great lawsuit for damages, or would the decision of the jury force it to be torn down? Historians of Lincoln and America’s transportation history have called the trial the most significant in Lincoln’s nearly twenty-five-year career at the Illinois bar. His participation in the trial was, they have said, his “finest hour” as a lawyer.2 Of the thousands of cases he handled in his legal career, “none was more important.”3 It showed him “at his most forward-looking and innovative as a legal practitioner.”4 It had “transcendent importance in the rivalry between the railroads and the river interests.”5

  This book tells the story of the Effie Afton case, the dramatic series of events that led up to it, Lincoln’s key role in it, and the equally dramatic events that followed. It traces the history of steamboat traffic on the Mississippi in the first half of the nineteenth century, follows the progress of railroads west of the Appalachians in the middle of the century, and describes the epochal clash of the railroads and the steamboats at the river’s edge. It explains how the Rock Island Bridge carried the first iron rails across the great river and details the determined efforts of the steamboat owners and their supporters to bring it down. It tells how the Effie Afton trial and Lincoln’s participation in it saved the bridge from destruction, how the trial contributed to Lincoln’s meteoric rise to the presidency only four years later, and how the bridge helped Union military forces achieve victory over Confederate armies in the Civil War.

  Lincoln had a close relationship with the western rivers and riverboats when he was a young man, and as an adult he was never far from the railroads, which came into Illinois as he was beginning his legal and political careers. He was a river man in his early years, and a railroad attorney of sorts in his middle years (he never worked exclusively for railroads, but took cases both for them and against them). The river and the railroads form an indispensable background to the story of the Rock Island Bridge, the Effie Afton’s demise at its base in 1856, and Lincoln’s career as a lawyer and politician, both before and after the Effie Afton trial.

  Given its importance, it is curious that historians have not focused more attention on the trial and its place in the transportation history of the nation. It has, of course, been mentioned in almost every serious book and article about Lincoln’s legal career, sometimes as a mere footnote to the main narrative, more often as the subject of a few paragraphs outlining its contours. And, in recent years, more and more light has been focused on Lincoln’s life as a lawyer and the influence it had on his political life and his ultimate service as president, thanks in large part to the momentous Lincoln Legal Papers project, which has uncovered tens of thousands of documents from his law practice.

  Yet, for all the attention given Lincoln the lawyer, the Effie Afton case has been strangely neglected.6 Perhaps this is at least in part because it does not have the raw appeal of a sensational murder trial (Lincoln and his partners participated in at least twenty-six homicide trials in their careers)7 or one that touched on the knotty issue of slavery, the great political, moral, and legal issue of Lincoln’s day (Lincoln was involved in a handful of such cases).8 Students of the man history reveres as the Great Emancipator and the Savior of the Union deserve to know the real facts about the trial he participated in in Chicago in 1857, the pivotal role it played in the advance of the railroads from east to west, and the facts that gave it its “transcendent importance.”

  The Effie Afton case, like most other civil lawsuits, was a contest between private litigants with private economic interests. The three plaintiffs—Jacob S. Hurd, Alexander W. Kidwell, and Joseph W. Smith—were the owners of the steamboat that was lost in its crash with the Rock Island Bridge. The defendant Railroad Bridge Company was an Illinois corporation created and controlled by railroad corporations in Illinois and Iowa: the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad Company in Illinois and the Mississippi and Missouri Railroad Company in Iowa. The plaintiff boat owners and the defendant corporation all had significant “skin” in the contest, in the form of the money they had invested, the property they owned, and the losses that had been suffered—and potentially might be suffered in the future. If the decision was in favor of the steamboat owners, they stood to recover $50,000, perhaps even more, in damages—an enormous sum in the 1850s—and the Railroad Bridge Company stood to lose that sum. If the decision was in favor of the Railroad Bridge Company, it would not only be absolved of any obligation to pay damages to the owners of the Effie Afton, but more importantly, future lawsuits brought by other owners whose boats had been damaged in collisions with the Rock Island Bridge would be discouraged—perhaps totally stifled.

  Unlike many other lawsuits, however, the Effie Afton trial also had enormous legal, economic, and p
olitical implications for the public. As the first railroad bridge to span the largest and most important river in North America (a bridge for pedestrians, carriages, and wagons had opened a year earlier in Minnesota, but no span with rails had previously crossed the Mississippi),9 the Rock Island Bridge permitted trains of the Chicago and Rock Island and the Mississippi and Missouri railroads (and potentially other railroads as well) to cross the great river, significantly increasing their capacity to move passengers and freight from east to west. At the same time, however, the bridge threatened the economic supremacy of the steamboats that had, for almost half a century, been the most important, most lucrative, and politically most influential mode of transportation in the trans-Mississippi region—perhaps in the entire nation. Chicago was an up-and-coming railroad center on Lake Michigan, recently connected to the Atlantic states by railroads that ran through New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana. Chicago stood to gain enormously from the Rock Island Bridge, for it provided the first railroad connection between Lake Michigan and the rapidly expanding farmlands of Iowa and Nebraska, while St. Louis, the throbbing center of steamboat traffic on the Upper Mississippi (and a much bigger and richer city than Chicago), stood to lose significantly from the Rock Island Bridge. If the bridge was allowed to stand, farm products that had previously passed on steamboats through the Missouri city to markets in the South and East would be diverted to Chicago.

  Before and after the Effie Afton suit was filed, railroad interests in Chicago complained that St. Louis steamboat owners, acting through the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce, were the real parties in interest in the litigation. The St. Louis interests denied the charge, but effectively admitted its truth by gathering witnesses for the trial and raising money to pay the prestigious lawyers who were hired to represent Hurd, Kidwell, and Smith. Hurd et al. v. The Railroad Bridge Company was the official title of the litigation, but it might as well have been St. Louis v. Chicago.

  The trial was a landmark in the development of the law governing America’s navigable waters. It had long been conceded that states had the right to control the use of the lakes, rivers, and streams within their borders. It was also understood, however, that Congress, as the legislative authority of the federal government, had the power to regulate interstate commerce.10 Where waterways crossed state lines, Congress’s power to regulate the commerce on them was superior to the conflicting laws of any state.11 But another basic law, the so-called Northwest Ordinance, by which the territory north and west of the Ohio River had become part of the United States in 1787, also played a part in the legal puzzle. That law declared that the navigable waters leading into the Mississippi and St. Lawrence were “common highways and forever free” to inhabitants of the territory, as well as to citizens of the United States and any states created out of the territory.12 Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota eventually occupied Northwest Territory land, so all of those states were subject to the Northwest Ordinance. But what would happen when a state (or states) authorized a bridge to be built over a navigable river (both Illinois and Iowa had authorized the Rock Island Bridge) and the boats that had long had the exclusive use of the river labeled the bridge an “obstruction” and a denial of their legal rights to free navigation? The American courts, led by the Supreme Court of the United States, had tried to delineate an answer to this difficult question.13 By the time of the Effie Afton trial, however, it was still unclear whether the owners of a steamboat that collided with a bridge over the Mississippi could force the bridge owners to compensate them for the damage to their steamboat, and even demand that the bridge be demolished to eliminate the possibility of future collisions. This was the overriding legal question that Lincoln and his fellow attorneys wrestled with in Chicago in September 1857, and the reason the Effie Afton trial was, in the words of the noted railroad historian Albro Martin, recognized as a “milestone in the vast changes in American law and jurisprudence.”14

  It is ironic that the Effie Afton trial and the Supreme Court’s famous (and to some infamous) Dred Scott decision both occurred in 1857. Both cases had factual roots at Rock Island, Illinois, and both are to this day closely associated with Lincoln, although in strikingly different ways. Rock Island, of course, was the site of the Rock Island Bridge, the subject of the intense legal battle waged in the Effie Afton trial. But it had also been the home of an obscure slave named Dred Scott during an important part of his early life, and his residence there had given rise to his history-making claim to be a free man. Scott’s legal bid for freedom began in a St. Louis court in 1846 and ended in the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., in 1857, when Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled that blacks were ineligible for American citizenship and thus unable to bring suit in federal court. Taney declared in bold terms that Americans of African descent were not included in the Declaration of Independence’s soaring assertion that “all men are created equal” and went on to make equally draconian assertions about the inability of Congress to make laws excluding slavery from any American territories or depriving slaveholders of the right to take their slaves anywhere in the country they wished.15

  Lincoln was outraged by Taney’s Dred Scott decision. He called it “an astonisher in legal history”16 and embraced the dissenting opinions filed by Associate Justices John McLean of Ohio and Benjamin Curtis of Massachusetts. Then he went on to formulate his own theories of the case and the deference it was (or was not) entitled to under the Constitution.17 The Effie Afton trial, fought out in Chicago in September 1857, was the most important courtroom battle of Lincoln’s legal career, the one that best displayed his legal skills and had the greatest economic and political consequences for the country, while the Dred Scott decision, announced in Washington in March 1857, gave rise to one of Lincoln’s most powerful political arguments. Both, however, contributed to Lincoln’s growing reputation as a rising star on the nation’s political horizon.

  Historian Kenneth M. Stampp called 1857 “a crucial year in the antebellum American sectional conflict.”18 It was, he wrote, a year that “encompassed a political crisis which proved to be decisive in the coming of the Civil War.” It was the year in which conflict over the admission of Kansas to the Union as a slave state split the national Democratic Party. It was also a year in which a panic in the financial institutions of eastern cities, beginning in New York and rapidly spreading across the nation, plunged the country into economic turmoil.19 Stampp believed that the conflict in Kansas, the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, and the economic depression that followed the financial panic all contributed to the growing rupture between the North and the South. “As a result, 1857 was probably the year when the North and South reached the political point of no return—when it became well nigh impossible to head off a violent resolution of the differences between them.”20

  The struggle over the Rock Island Bridge that was the subject of the Effie Afton trial may not have appeared to be as earthshaking as the Kansas conflict, the Dred Scott decision, or the financial panic, although it contributed significantly to the widening sectional gulf. At the end of the trial, thanks in large part to Lincoln’s efforts, the Rock Island Bridge stood tall and erect. The iron rails that spanned the river remained intact, binding together the eastern and western banks of the Mississippi on a northern (not a southern) latitude, providing a powerful spur to the growth of the northern city of Chicago and stifling (for the time being at least) the transportation aspirations of southern cities like Memphis, Vicksburg, and New Orleans. It handed Chicago, a city free of slaves in a state free of slavery, a victory at the expense of St. Louis, a city where slaves toiled in the streets and in the warehouses, hotels, restaurants, and factories that led back from the crowded waterfront. It provided a vital rail link across the Mississippi, inviting anti-slavery settlers to make new homes in Iowa and adjacent territory, where they tilled the land and built up a substantial population that, during the Civil War, made significant contributions of men and supplies to
the Union war effort. If, as Stampp argued, 1857 was a crucial year in the history of pre–Civil War America, the Effie Afton trial made a powerful contribution to that history.

  Although this is not a book about Lincoln’s legal career (other writers have paid due attention to that fascinating part of his life),21 it touches in many places on his long and eventful life at the bar. Historians’ opinions of Lincoln’s legal abilities, and of the importance that his legal career had in preparing him for his duties as president, differ widely. Among recent writers, Phillip Shaw Paludan, author of a widely read study of Lincoln’s presidency, has expressed the view that Lincoln’s legal experiences helped him develop skills that were “imperative in the crisis of disunion.”22 “Thinking like a lawyer,” Paludan wrote, “was a profound part of his makeup.”23 But Mark Neely Jr., author of important books about Lincoln’s career as a political leader, has written that “the law did not offer especially good training” for Lincoln’s “constitutional thinking in a political context” and that Lincoln was successful in large part because he “was able to escape the habits of thinking like a lawyer.”24 “Lawyers,” Neely wrote, “are paid to come up with clever arguments,”25 and Lincoln’s presidential triumphs were certainly not the result of “clever arguments.” Lincoln was successful, Neely said, because he was able to escape the “straightjacket” of his legal background.26 Brian Dirck, author of books about Lincoln’s legal career and his views on the Constitution (and a student of Phillip Shaw Paludan), has written that “as a whole the Lincoln law practice was unremarkable.”27 “Lincoln the great American,” Dirck wrote, “was in reality a pretty ordinary attorney.”28 In contrast, the prolific Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer has written that “Lincoln’s life as a lawyer informed nearly every aspect of his future, a future that became inseparable from the nation’s future.” “Nothing,” Holzer added, “was ever more sacred to Lincoln than the rule of law.”29