These often-overlooked actors and what a contemporary called their "dreadful vitality" figure prominently in Ambrose's narrative, alongside the great financiers and surveyors who populate the standard textbooks. The real work of doing so, of course, was on the shoulders of immigrant men and women, mostly Chinese and Irish. Through an ambitious program of land grants and low-interest government loans, he encouraged entrepreneurs such as California's "Big Four"-Charles Crocker, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Leland Stanford-to take on the task of stringing steel rails from ocean to ocean. He was also convinced that the United States would flourish only if its far-flung regions were linked, replacing sectional loyalties with an overarching sense of national destiny.īuilding a transcontinental railroad, writes the prolific historian Stephen Ambrose, was second only to the abolition of slavery on Lincoln's presidential agenda. Abraham Lincoln, who had worked as a riverboat pilot before turning to politics, knew a thing or two about the problems of transporting goods and people from place to place.
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