Lincoln's Greatest Case: The River, the Bridge, and the Making of America by Brian McGinty

Author:Brian McGinty [McGinty, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2015-02-08T23:00:00+00:00

Henry Binmore reviewed the developments of the first week of the trial in a special article for the St. Louis Missouri Republican. He thought his reporting had amounted to a “Herculean task” and told his readers that he had transcribed 96,280 words, which if stretched from end to end would extend for 1,872 yards, or more than a mile. He had already formed some opinions about the case and was not shy about expressing them. “The Rock Island Bridge being erected,” Binmore declared, “became an obstruction to navigation. There can be no question of that. No bridge can be erected but on its piers and, if piers it has, it will more or less impede the free navigation of the waters.” He thought the Bridge Company might have erected a suspension bridge, or made the draw wider, or placed the piers straighter, “or probably done a dozen things to decrease the risk of navigation. . . . To my mind it seems they ought to be liable because they have not taken care to avoid injuring the river and free intercourse upon it.”29

The pro-bridge Davenport Gazette had a different impression. The Gazette commented sarcastically that there was “some very pretty swearing going on” in Judge McLean’s Chicago courtroom. “One man swears that this bridge is a greater obstruction to navigation than the Falls at Louisville or the Mississippi Rapids! When we recollect that the Falls are not navigable on an average scarcely a month altogether the whole year, and that the Lower Rapids of this river are only really navigable for medium sized steamers at times of a high or good stage of water, and that to get around the one, millions of dollars have been expended to build a canal, and thousands to build a railroad around the other . . . it may be very safely surmised that there is no limit to the tip-top swearing now going on before the Chicago Court, among those opposed to this bridge.” The Gazette noted one witness who said that he had been up the river as far as Rock Island only two times since the bridge was built yet still claimed that “it is more chance than certainty to get through the draw. . . . And yet,” the Gazette continued, “there have been nearly eight hundred steamboat passages at the draw this season—and probably of the whole number not half a dozen boats, or a dozen at the utmost touched the piers even in the slightest manner! What remarkable chance, especially when the ‘obstruction’ is so dangerous! But we have only given these as specimens of the beautiful swearing having for its object the destruction of this magnificent bridge.”30

Binmore acknowledged that much of the evidence in the case was technical and confusing and that to listen to it day after day was “a mad, sick and serious job. . . . I see around me of an afternoon one or two jurors who are ‘nid, nod, noddin’,’ at times, and even the very worthy Judge who presides, occasionally shuts his eyes in an almost doze.

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