Chicago pamphlet printing of the July 1862 Pacific Railroad Acts, creating (July 1) and calling the first meeting of commissioners (July 12), September 2, 1862, at Chicago's Bryan Hall, for organizing the Union Pacific Railroad Company and commencing construction of the transcontinental railroad west of the Missouri River.
Title
Subject
Pacific Railroads
Union Pacific Railroad Company
Bryan Hall (Chicago, IL)
Chicago Tribune
Description
This is a sixteen-page Chicago pamphlet reprinting of the July 1, 1862 approved Act leading to the creation of the Union Pacific Railroad and the construction of the first transcontinental rail line to the Pacific Ocean in California. It also reprints, on p. 16, a subsequent July 12, 1862 act calling the first meeting of all the many named commissioners, plus five to be appointed by the Secretary of the Interior, at Chicago for "the first Tuesday of September next [September 2, 1862]." To see/read the pamphlet, click on "Pacific Railroad Acts..." under the image under "Files," below.
The pamphlet's bibliographic description is An Act to Aid in the Construction of a Railroad and Telegraph Line from the Missiouri River to the Pacific Ocean, Aprroved July 1, 1862.Chicago: Tribune Book and Steam Printing Office,..., 1862.The pamphlet is 24 cm. tall and its cover, the first and last two pages of this document, are light green paper.
The Chicago Tribune newspaper covered in detail the three-day conference in early September (in the issues for Sept. 3, 4, and 5) and this printing of the Act was perhaps either to help publicize the convention or for persons attending that historic gathering. The meeting place was Clark Street's Bryan Hall, located "opposite the Court House" (interior shown here), a large meeting space/convention hall that in 1861 had seen two Spring epic funerals, for Senator Stepehn A. Douglas (illus. of Bryan Hall interior in Harper's Weekly, June 22, 1862, 389; from a drawing by A. L. Rawson, Chicago) and for Col. Elmer Elsworth shortly before. See Diana Dretske on her Lake Co., IL, history blog, http://lakecountyhistory.blogspot.com/2010/07/civil-war-and-tale-of-two-henrys.html ). The location and more information about it is found on this Library of Congress broadside: http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/h?ammem/rbpebib:@field(NUMBER+@band(rbpe+01807500)) .
As the above reference to the funeral of Col. Ellsworth suggests, this all took place during wartime, in the midst of the Civil War, 1861-65. On April 6 and 7, 1862 the first major battle in the West took place: Shiloh, at Pittsburgh Landing, in Tennessee, with over 23,000 casualties. One of these was William Price, an officer and a member of the first Class of 1865, Lind University, predecessor of Lake Forest College. Just before the September 2-4 meeting in Chicago there were over 25,000 casualties at the Second Manassas (Virginia) battle, August 29 and 30. So a great price was being paid to advance the Northern and Chicago agenda of building a transcontinental railroad, stymied until then by the "war" going on in 1850s Kansas, left to popular sovereignty on the question of slavery in the trans-Mississippi West since the Compromise of 1850. Lake Forest, IL, and the institution that became Lake Forest College were founded with a background of these issues, too, in 1856 (Lake Forest Association) and 1857, respectively.
Creator
Chicago Tribune
Harper's Weekly
Rawson, A. L.
