Brian McGinty - Lincolns Greatest Case: The River, the Bridge, and the Making of America

LINCOLNS
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

LINCOLNS
GREATEST CASE

O n 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 itselfcalled the Rock Island Bridgewas 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,

This book tells the story of the Effie Afton case, the dramatic series of events that led up to it, Lincolns 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 rivers 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 Lincolns participation in it saved the bridge from destruction, how the trial contributed to Lincolns 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 Aftons demise at its base in 1856, and Lincolns 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 Lincolns 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 Lincolns 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. 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 plaintiffsJacob S. Hurd, Alexander W. Kidwell, and Joseph W. Smithwere 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 sufferedand 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 damagesan enormous sum in the 1850sand 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 discouragedperhaps totally stifled.

Unlike many other lawsuits, however, the Effie Afton trial also had enormous legal, economic, and political 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), 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 regionperhaps 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.