Lincoln Unmasked by Thomas DiLorenzo

Author:Thomas DiLorenzo [DiLorenzo, Thomas J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-307-49652-2
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

The Pacific Railroad bill was a gigantic political payoff to the Northern business interests that supported Lincoln’s political career and the Republican Party. As Dee Brown wrote in his classic history of the transcontinental railroads, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow, when Lincoln signed the bill he “assured the fortunes of a dynasty of American families … the Brewsters, Bushnells, Olcotts, Harkers, Harrisons, Trowbridges, Lanworthys, Reids, Ogdens, Brad-fords, Noyeses, Brooks, Cornells, and dozens of others.”8

Lincoln had been associated with a powerful clique of New England/New York/Chicago businessmen, including Thomas Clark Durant, Peter Day, Grenville Dodge, and Benedict Reed. These men all had experience in canal and railroad building and financing, and when, in 1857, they were looking for a lawyer to represent their Rock Island and Pacific Railroad, they settled on Abraham Lincoln. These men would later go on to fame and fortune as notorious “robber barons” involved in the government-subsidized transcontinental railroad industry after the war.

Lincoln’s cherished Pacific Railroad Bill became the mother of all political payoffs.

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