Excerpt from Speech of Hon. Milton S. Latham: On the Pacific Rail Road, Delivered in the Senate of the United, on the 12th Day of June, 1862; Also, Debate in the Senate, on the Steam Ship Line From California to China, and Passage of the Bill, on the 25th Day of April, 1862 Mr. Latham. I move that all prior orders be suspended, and that the Senate proceed to the consideration of House bill No. 364, being the Pacific railroad bill, which was set down for one o'clock. The motion of Mr. Latham was agreed to; and the Senate, as in Committee of the Whole, resumed the consideration of the bill (H. R. No. 364) to aid in the construction of a railroad and telegraph line from the Missouri river to the Pacific ocean, and to secure to the Government the use of the same for postal, military, and other purposes. Mr. Latham. Mr. President, before the Senate proceeds to a critical analysis of the various sections, I feel it my duty to present a few general ideas upon this important measure, and a special review of the leading features of the bill. I deem this course most economical of the time of every Senator, and perhaps it may obviate the necessity of response to many objections which will legitimately arise in the progress of debate. The subject of an inter-oceanic railway, uniting the Pacific with the Atlantic, has seriously occupied the attention of the American people and Congress since the admission of California into the Union. There is, in fact, no measure more universally understood and its necessity appreciated by men of all parties, or any more earnestly advocated in years past by distinguished statesmen, than this project now before the Senate of the United States. Mr. Jefferson, at the opening of the present century, saw the importance, nay, necessity, of exploring a route from the valley of the Mississippi to (he ocean; at a period, too, when the Republic was in its infancy; its population but five millions; its territorial rights in the vast region within the then Territory of Oregon undefined, the separation of the American from British territorial lines not having been made until nearly forty years after, when adjustment was effected by the Washington treaty of 1846. The celebrated expedition of Lewis and Clark, through the long, bleak, unbroken wilderness as it was in that age, passing three winters in the enterprise, was more than two years in exploring to the mouth of the Columbia river, having traveled four thousand miles, starting from the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri, and occupying three years in the overland and return transit. The time, the toil, the incredible hardships and perils of the expedition show the importance of the contemplated results, destined to affect so vastly the interests of the great American family. Since then, what an amazing change has taken place! Two generations are no more, and the illustrious men of that age have passed into history. The Republic, as it came from the victorious patriots of the Revolution, in virtue of the Declaration of Independence, as recognized in the definite treaty of peace in 1783, fixed the territorial limits in area equal to eight hundred and twenty thousand six hundred and eighty square miles. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

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When American slaveholders looked west in the mid-nineteenth century, they saw an empire unfolding before them. They pursued that vision through diplomacy, migration, and armed conquest. By the late 1850s, slaveholders and their allies had transformed the southwestern quarter of the nation – California, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Utah – into a political client of the plantation states. Across this vast swath of the map, white southerners defended the institution of African American chattel slavery as well as systems of Native American bondage. This surprising history uncovers the Old South in unexpected places, far beyond the region's cotton fields and sugar plantations. Slaveholders' western ambitions culminated in a coast-to-coast crisis of the Union. By 1861, the rebellion in the South inspired a series of separatist movements in the Far West. Even after the collapse of the Confederacy, the threads connecting South and West held, undermining the radical promise of Reconstruction. Kevin Waite brings to light what contemporaries recognized but historians have described only in part: The struggle over slavery played out on a transcontinental stage.