The Railroads and the Making of Illinois

By eighteen fifty-six, Illinois had more miles of railroad track than any other state in the Union. That fact, achieved in less than a decade of intensive construction, remade the geography, economy, and social order of the entire state.

The engine of that transformation was the Illinois Central Railroad. Congress passed a land grant act in eighteen fifty giving two and a half million acres to the future railroad, the first such federal land grant in American history, and the Illinois legislature chartered the company itself the following year. The Illinois Central was designed to run six hundred miles from the northern tip of the state at Galena to the southern tip at Cairo, a straight line down the spine of Illinois. It was completed in eighteen fifty-six. Its construction required tens of thousands of laborers, most of them Irish and German immigrants, working south from Chicago and north from Cairo simultaneously.

The land grant model that the Illinois Central pioneered became the template for every transcontinental railroad that followed: the Union Pacific, the Central Pacific, the Northern Pacific. Congress gave away roughly one hundred and seventy million acres of public land to railroads over the following decades. The deal made fortunes, settled territories, and dispossessed Native peoples along every rail corridor. Illinois, in a sense, invented that mechanism.

The railroads also made Abraham Lincoln a wealthy man. As a young Springfield lawyer in the eighteen forties and fifties, Lincoln argued numerous cases on behalf of the Illinois Central and other lines, earning fees that lifted him from poverty. The railroad money funded the political career. The railroad network that converged on Chicago made that city the hub of the continent and created the conditions for the industrial transformation of the American Midwest.