A Coast-to-Coast Marriage of American Railroads

The New York Times - May 22, 2019

A president can get a lot done in Washington when a slew of congressmen — the ones who hate his guts — skip town for four years. In 1862 alone, between the blood baths at Shiloh in April and Antietam in September, President Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery in the District of Columbia, created the indispensable Department of Agriculture — “the people’s department,” the former boy bumpkin called it — and signed into law a series of westward-facing bills that the secessionist quitters would have never O.K.’d, including the Homestead Act on May 20 and the Pacific Railway Act on July 1.

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