Chapter 2. Railroading the Nation

A transcontinental railroad was unprofitable on market terms—“1800 miles of railroad through an uninhabited country”—but attractive once Congress supplied land and subsidies. Patrick Newman follows the four Sacramento merchants who saw the opportunity and the Republicans who justified it as a wartime necessity, then the reversal of the 1870s, when the subsidized lines moved from the Great Barbecue’s dinner table onto the menu.