A Bridge Too Far... North

In a way, the whole bridge affair was a watered-down precursor of the Civil War—it had some of the same players, it was fought for some of the same reasons, and ultimately, the North won. 

 

Instead of opposing armies, this was a fight between the railroad and the riverboats, and since you know which one is still doing business, you already know who is going to win.  That’s one of the problems with telling stories about the Civil War—everyone already knows how the story ends.  (I wonder if the North had somehow managed to lose that lopsided war, I wonder whose statues we’d be tearing down today.)

 

There were two main issues at stake:  First, where the first transcontinental railroad would be constructed, tying the two halves of the country together.  Naturally, the North wanted a northern route through Chicago, while the South favored a southern route through St. Louis.  Both cities were competing to be the transportation hub of the Midwest and the gateway to the West.  St. Louis had the twin advantages of already being a great center for steamboats and there was the advantage that a southern route would be easier to construct. 

 

The second issue was a fight for the very existence of steamboats against the growing power of railroads.  Today, this may seem a mismatched fight, but steamboats did have some advantages as they could carry greater loads at a cheaper cost, and historically, most of the migration of settlers in the Midwest followed a North/South axis.  Railroads were faster, but cost far more to construct.  In the end, of course, railroads were going to win because they could go places the steamboats couldn’t.  It’s a lot easier to lay track than to dig a river.  (This is a damn shame, since at heart, I suspect I’m a born steamboat man.  Maybe I’ve read too much Mark Twain?  Nah! There’s no such thing as “too much Mark Twain”.)

 

The Government Bridge, the nation’s first bridge across the Mississippi had been built with the express purpose of linking the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad in Illinois with the Mississippi and Missouri railroad in Iowa.  Though the two railroads largely shared common ownership, each was chartered in a different state. 

The site for the bridge was carefully selected linking Rock Island, Illinois (the westernmost point of the C&RI) and Davenport, Iowa (the eastern most point of the M&M line) by way of Rock Island, the largest island on the Mississippi River.  From the very start, the steamboats fought the construction of the bridge on the grounds that it was a hazard to navigation and thus an impediment for an established industry necessary for the economic interests of the country.

 

Note.  One of the few constants in history has been the resistance of established industries to new technology that will swiftly put them out of business.  Today, I suspect that almost no one even remembers the once vital—but now completely defunct—flange industry.

 

Rock Island was the natural location for such a bridge and had been surveyed for just such a construction project in 1837 by Colonel Robert E. Lee.  Ironically, the biggest impediment to building the bridge was Jefferson Davis, the Secretary of War.  Davis, who supported the southern route for the Transcontinental Railroad, could stop the construction since Rock Island had previously been the site of Army outpost.  Though the military fort had been long abandoned, Davis still believed that he controlled the island.

 

Originally, Davis allowed the bridge construction to proceed, secure in the belief that the Southern route would still be constructed, first, because of the better building conditions that route offered.  However, when political tensions worsened in the Kansas/Nebraska territories, Davis realized that the Northern route might be constructed first.  

Although Davis had ordered the construction on Rock Island halted, for reasons unknown, it was allowed to continue by the Federal marshal who’d been sent to shut it down.  Was the marshal bribed?  Was he a passionate supporter of the North?  No one knows for sure, but the managing director of the M&M Railroad and the co-owner of the bridge construction company was Dr. Thomas Durant, a man infamous for bribes and far less than ethical business dealings.  Later, Durant would become infamous as one of the men responsible for the Crédit Mobilier scandal.  (If you watched the AMC television series, Hell on Wheels, Durant was played by Colm Meaney.)

 

There was little Davis could do about a bridge that was already operational, so the matter was dropped (at least temporarily).  The finished bridge was 1,581 feet long, crossing six spans. The single-track bridge included a swing draw span placed directly over the channel normally used by steamboats.  The bridge had two fixed spans on the Illinois side and three, on the Iowa side, with the draw span rotating on a massive center pier 32 feet wide resting on a turntable bearing arrangement with twenty wheels on a twenty-eight-foot diameter track. 

On April 22, 1856, people on shore cheered as three locomotives pulled eight passenger cars across the bridge.  The ‘Father of Rivers’, the Mississippi had been successfully spanned, opening up the way west by rail.  But...only for a short time.

 

Just fifteen days after completion, the steamboat Effie Afton passed through the channel heading upriver, when she suddenly lost power in her starboard engine.  Drifting backwards, the vessel swung sideways and struck a bridge piling, causing great damage to both the ship and the piling.  A cabin stove aboard the vessel tumbled, setting the ship afire, burning the ship to the waterline and destroying the bridge spans between the pilings.  All of the ship’s passengers were rescued and there were no injuries.

 

Almost immediately, there were claims of deliberate sabotage.  Witnesses said that the ship burned too quickly, and that the ship wouldn’t have swung sideways if the captain had not increased power to the port engine.  No record of the ship’s cargo survives, but the records that do exist prove that this was the first time the ship had operated above St. Louis.

 

Captain John Hurd, owner of the Effie Afton, filed suit in the U.S. District Court at Chicago, claiming that the bridge was constructed in such a way that eddies and currents around the pilings endangered shipping.  Hurd wanted to be reimbursed for the ship and cargo, further demanding that the railroad be prohibited from rebuilding the bridge.

 

The railroads countered, claiming that the “accident” was an intentional and deliberate attack on the bridge, by an industry trying to delay their inevitable demise.  The case, Hurd v. Rock Island Railroad Company, was to be the “trial of the century”.  (Yes, even back then they used the phrase, and even back then, they used it far too often.) Of course, it didn’t help the steamboats’ protestations of innocence that all the boats on the Mississippi, from one end to the other, blew their whistles rejoicing at news of the bridge’s destruction.

 

This was an important case, since the results could potentially dictate whether any bridge could ever be constructed across the upper Mississippi.  (And since a district court ruling would only be valid in that district, it would allow another district—one further south, for example—to successfully complete the Transcontinental Railroad, perhaps extending slavery westward). 

 

The railroad lawyer defending the case traveled to the site of the bridge, which was already being repaired.  He hired a small boat in which he rowed out onto the river, personally investigating the currents, the eddies, and noting exactly where the shifting flows took floating objects.  In particular, he studied the topography report created by Colonel Robert E. Lee.

 

The trial lasted fourteen days—two of which were used just for the railroad lawyer’s lengthy summation.  Finally, though a victory for the steamboats had been predicted, the jury announced it was split and could not reach a unanimous decision. 

 

The case wasn’t actually over, as it was argued in various courts for years, and became the topic of an investigation for the House of Representatives which, predictably, was split along North/South lines.  Eventually, a federal court ruled that the bridge was a threat to navigation and had to be destroyed—a decision that was immediately appealed to the Supreme Court.  However, by then, the railroads had friends in high places. 

 

Because of the Civil War, Rock Island was once again an active military post that was being used to house Confederate prisoners of war.  The Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, was in favor of the bridge, as was the majority of the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the railroads in January 1863. 

 

The riverboat companies screamed, “Foul!” because they believed that the President of the United States had influenced the decision.  And they just might have been right, for the lawyer who had represented the railroads in that first trial had been none other than Abraham Lincoln.