Kitabı oku: «Minnesota», sayfa 14

Ignatius Donnelly, who had been elected to Congress in 1862, had been accorded two reëlections. His diligence in business and readiness in debate had gained him influence in the House, and his campaign speeches had increased his popularity at home. To all appearance he was certain of a third reëlection in the fall of 1868, and among his admirers were those who suggested that the state and country would profit by his promotion to the Senate. Such propositions were not relished by the friends of Senator Ramsey, whose first term would be expiring in the following winter. Elimination of Mr. Donnelly thereupon became to them a desirable political object. It might not have been attained but for an error of Mr. Donnelly himself in a moment of perhaps excusable exasperation.

In the winter of 1868, in a letter to a constituent explaining why he had not pushed a certain railroad land grant bill, Mr. Donnelly stated that E. B. Washburne, member of Congress from Illinois, had repeatedly hindered his efforts to secure legislation for his state. Mr. Washburne replied through a St. Paul newspaper, April 10, 1868, attacking Mr. Donnelly’s personal character, and declaring him cowardly and mendacious. He represented him also as “whining like a schoolboy” over his disappointments. Thus assailed, Mr. Donnelly, on May 2, made on the floor of the House a consummate display of those powers of ridicule and invective of which he was master. Tolerated by the House because of its enjoyment of the play of rhetorical lightning, and perhaps because of a feeling that the speaker’s indignation had some just ground, the Minnesota member descended into an utterly indefensible tirade. It has ever since been traditional in Minnesota that that speech “cooked Donnelly’s goose.”

Washburne could only say in wrath that he would “make no reply to a member covered all over with crime and infamy, a man whose record is stained with every fraud, a man who has proved false alike to his friends, his constituents, his country, his religion, and his God.” Both gentlemen apologized for using unparliamentary language, and the special committee of the House reported that as neither had made charges affecting the action of the other as a representative, they might be left to settle personal difficulties outside. On his return to Minnesota after the close of the session, Mr. Donnelly gave expression to his sentiments towards the Washburn family in a series of speeches in which his peculiar gifts were displayed in the highest degree.

The friends of Senator Ramsey selected for their support, as successor to Mr. Donnelly, William D. Washburn, a younger brother of the representative from Illinois just mentioned, who had won for himself a place in their esteem for ability and character. When the hour for the convention came, Mr. Donnelly’s supporters “bolted,” and in a separate body put their idol in nomination. Seeing the regular convention so largely depleted, Mr. Washburn withdrew after the first ballot. General Lucius F. Hubbard also declined the honor of a candidacy; and it was only after assurances of active and substantial support that General C. C. Andrews was persuaded to enter the lists. The Democrats saw their opportunity in this split in the Republican ranks, and put in nomination and elected Eugene M. Wilson of Minneapolis, a gentleman whose character and services entitled him to their support. He served to the general satisfaction in the Forty-first Congress.

Mr. Donnelly now came out openly as a candidate for the senatorship, and he had reason to expect an election. On the eve of the Republican caucus, however, his muster roll contained but twenty-six names of those who could be depended on. Twenty-eight votes were necessary to nominate. Failing to secure absolute pledges of the two lacking votes, Mr. Donnelly advised his friends to give their support to Morton S. Wilkinson, who was willing to serve another term in the Senate. His hope was to give Mr. Ramsey a rest from senatorial labors. In that he was disappointed. Mr. Ramsey’s friends secured the adoption of a resolution to dispense with informal balloting, thus revealing their strength, but they were only able to give him the exact number of votes (twenty-eight) necessary to a choice. The election followed as a matter of course, and Mr. Ramsey continued in a senatorial career creditable to himself and serviceable to the state and nation. Mr. Donnelly did not at once renounce the colors of the Republican party, but he was ever after a free lance in politics. He was repeatedly elected to the state legislature.

In the fall of 1869 an effort was made to give Mr. Donnelly the regular nomination for the governorship. This was not opposed by the Ramsey leaders, who were willing to bring back into the fold so dangerous a rival. That effort, however, had but slight recognition in the nominating convention, which chose for the party candidate a gentleman as yet not widely known in state politics, the Hon. Horace Austin of St. Peter.

The removal of the state capital from St. Paul, which would have been accomplished in 1857 but for the high-handed exploit of Councilor Rolette, though frequently broached informally, was not seriously taken up by any legislature till 1869. A bill for removal to Kandiyohi County, on to land belonging to the state, was passed through both houses so easily and rapidly as to invite the surmise that the necessary votes had been secured in advance. Superfluous debate was shut out by the operation of the previous question. The vote in the house was 39 to 7, that in the senate 12 to 10; but the house could not muster enough votes to pass the bill over Governor Marshall’s veto. The veto message was moderate in tone; suggesting that it would be wise to hear from the people on the question, that there should be no haste about a final location of the capital, and that it was no time to expend a great sum of money on buildings.

Two years later a final proposal to remove the capital from St. Paul to the imagined city of Stanton met with a prompt indefinite postponement.

CHAPTER XVI
STORM AND STRESS

Horace Austin was inaugurated governor January 9, 1870. A native of Connecticut, who had lived and married in Maine, he had come to Minnesota in 1855 at the age of twenty-five and settled at St. Peter. He had studied law and taught school, but had taken no college course. In the campaign of 1863 against the Sioux he commanded a company of Minnesota Mounted Rangers and gave a good account of himself on the march and battlefield. His neighbors had elected him a district judge and were more than content with his wise and fearless conduct on the bench. It was a piece of good fortune for the state that the warring Ramsey and Donnelly factions of the Republican party in the convention of 1869 compromised upon a candidate unobjectionable to both, but no especial favorite with either. His majority was less than two thousand over the popular candidate of the Democrats, George L. Otis. Ingenious, hopeful, independent, Mr. Austin in successive messages showered upon the legislatures projects of reform and development. In many of them he was doomed to disappointment because he relied entirely on the merit of propositions, and was not politician enough to understand that it is only by timely and happy combination of interests that measures can be carried in legislative bodies. Among these abortive recommendations may be mentioned the one in his second message, urging a revision of the state constitution, which he declared to be a motley of inconsistencies. His desire was that a revised constitution should contain such provisions as these: (1) Restriction of special legislation; (2) prohibition of exclusive franchises; (3) limitation of local taxation; (4) restriction of municipal debts; (5) ample power to regulate railroads; and (6) abolition of the grand jury. Neither the legislature to which the recommendation was addressed nor any subsequent one has been willing to propose to the people a revision of the constitution. Casual amendments have been frequent, but a late amendment to the amending article, requiring an affirmative vote of a majority of all the electors to adopt a proposed amendment, will certainly render it difficult, and it may be impossible, to make further casual changes in the state’s organic law. A happy illustration of Mr. Austin’s independence may be found in his action on the disposition of the so-called “internal improvement lands” of the state. An almost forgotten statute of the United States, passed in 1841, authorized the gift to any new state of five hundred thousand acres of public lands for “internal improvements.” The claim of Minnesota to this grant had been tardily conceded by the Secretary of the Interior. In his inaugural address Governor Austin recommended that the disposition of the lands should be submitted to popular vote. The legislature then opening (1870) was of a different mind, and listened to suggestions that the end of the law would be served if the lands should be bestowed on certain railroad corporations willing to accept them. When the legislature of 1871 convened that proposition seemed much in favor, and a bill to divide the whole grant, then possibly worth ten millions of dollars, in eleven parcels among seven corporations was passed in so summary a manner as to suggest a careful rehearsal for the purely formal proceedings. The support of the bill was so evenly derived from the two political parties that neither of them could claim the greater credit for guarding the public interest.

The veto message of Governor Austin will long remain a landmark in the political history of the state. In the plainest of English he told the legislators that they had been either cajoled or bullied into passing a measure they dared not submit to the people, that the minute parceling of the lands would be ridiculously ineffective, that they had no power to divide the lands, but only the proceeds thereof, and that they had voted to divert the national gift from its intended object. From this date there was no question of a reëlection, should he desire it. In the following year an amendment providing that no disposition should be made of those lands until after the ratification of any proposed measure by vote of the electors was submitted and, at the election, adopted. The use to which they were put ten years later will be related in its place.

For Minnesota as for the country at large, the early seventies belong to one of the most notable “boom” periods in our economic history. The census of 1870 verified the hopes of enthusiastic promoters in many lines. The total population footed up 439,706. The native born in round numbers were 279,000, of whom 126,000 had been born in the state. The foreign born were 161,000, of whom the Scandinavian kingdoms had sent 59,000 and Germany 41,000. The English-speaking immigrants numbered 47,000. The swelling number of inhabitants was inspiring and the high quality of the population was equally satisfactory. One hundred and thirty-one thousand coming from the north Atlantic and north central states had brought with them American traditions and culture, capital, brains, and ambition for an enlarged career in a land of opportunity. The foreign accessions were Christians, willing workers, and many of them passionate lovers of free government.

The rapid extension of railroads was both a cause and a consequence of this increase of people; of their distribution, their productive power, and their demands for the comforts and luxuries of other skies. Rail connection eastward by way of the head of Lake Michigan, established in 1867, had given quicker mails and shortened the passenger journey to the seaboard. No produce save that of highest value in smallest bulk could stand transportation charges to New York. The completion of the railroad from St. Paul to the head of Lake Superior in 1870 brought that city almost as near salt water as Chicago, and opened the great waterway of the lakes for Minnesota’s grain and lumber, and returning coal and merchandise. Later her annual millions of tons of iron ore have passed down through “The Soo” to Lake Erie ports.

The year following (1871) was abundant in railroad extension. The main line of the Great Northern was extended to Breckenridge on the Red River of the North; the River division of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul, prolonged to Winona, shortened the journey to Chicago by many hours; and the Northern Pacific had reached the Red River at Moorhead. Meantime the Southern Minnesota had been pushed out to the Blue Earth, and the Winona and St. Peter to the Minnesota. The 350 miles built in 1872, though reaching no important terminals, brought the total mileage at the close of the year up to an even 1900.

In those years of plentiful money and multiplying fortunes, railroad building was rapid and easy in Minnesota. Investors were keen for bonds secured by land grants of enormous extent, and bearing a liberal interest, especially when offered at a seductive discount. The controlling spirits of the companies found some profit in financing construction companies, but more in town lot and land speculations. Railroad building out on the open prairie far in advance of settlement was a novelty then. The gentlemen whose privilege it was to determine the lines and locate the stations were in position to make profitable selections of lots and lands, and to let their friends “in on the ground floor” for a consideration. Around the selected stations considerable villages would arise in a single season. In some cases the town would be built before the track had reached it. There were instances in which settlements were made on mistaken calculations of actual location, and then the houses and shops were literally put on wheels and hauled over to the chosen spots.

The lands adjacent to the railroad lines, especially within a few miles of the stations, were, of course, in great demand and rose rapidly in price. Cultivation was no longer confined to the river counties, but spread rapidly inland. It did not take a generation of the hardest labor to make a farm on the Minnesota prairie. In the first season the newcomer could win his subsistence, and in the second begin to build. The cultivated area of the state, which was 630,000 acres in the closing year of the Civil War, rose to 1,863,300 in 1870, and five years later fell not much short of 3,000,000.

A large fraction of this area was devoted to a kind of cultivation novel to this country, but which remained profitable only so long as the virgin fertility of the soil survived, and that was rarely longer than ten years. “Bonanza farming,” so called, was carried on by large proprietors or lessees, owning or controlling many thousands of acres, employing machines and large gangs of men and animals. For these estates there were developed out of the petty apparatus suitable to the little eastern farm, the sulky plow with its two mould-boards, the disk harrow, the twelve-foot seeder, the self-binding reaper, and the giant threshing machine. There was but one principal crop, spring wheat, which was commonly threshed from the shock and immediately marketed. To handle the great quantities, grain “elevators” were built at the railroad stations, tall, ungainly structures with conveniences for weighing in, lifting, weighing out, and spouting into waiting freight cars. At terminals were erected elevators for cleaning and drying grain, as well as for storage for many thousands or millions of bushels. The country elevator was also convenient for the small farmer, who was saved the cost of building a granary of high-priced lumber from distant pineries.

Early settlers in the Northwest had found spring wheat, with its power of rapid growth in the long sunshine of high latitudes, a better crop than winter wheat, occupying the soil for two seasons and liable to winter kill. But the spring wheat berry, although of higher nutritive value than that of winter wheat, had a flinty envelope and yielded a flour too dark in color to suit the market. A revolution in the process of milling presently reversed the places of the two flours. Milling had already advanced so far beyond the primitive separation of flour from bran by hand sifting as to segregate a residuum of coarser granules, called “middlings,” which, subjected to a second grinding, yielded a low grade flour. It had been discovered also that these middlings contained the more nutritive elements of the wheat berry, and it had been a problem how to recover them. French millers were in possession of a method for its partial solution. George H. Christian of Minneapolis had long studied on the problem, and in 1870 employed a French immigrant named La Croix to construct a rude apparatus in his mill at Minneapolis. This was the germ of the “middlings purifier,” soon developed and installed in all mills using spring wheat. Receiving middlings from the first grinding, the machine by use of sieves and air currents separated out the pure wheat granules. These were reground and “bolted” into two or more grades of flour. The first grade was put on the market as “Minnesota Patent,” and for a time commanded a price of three dollars a barrel above any other. The same principles, refined upon, have resulted in the more modern process of “gradual reduction” by means of rollers, displacing the immemorial millstones.

The rapid development of a great milling centre at the Falls of St. Anthony opened a market for the spring wheat, which could not otherwise have been grown. The Minnesota crop of fifteen million of bushels in 1870 was to be doubled in 1875. The patent milling process gave to Minneapolis an advantage soon apparent in the multiplication not only of flour mills, but of industries ancillary thereto. The manufacture of lumber out of logs from the pineries of the upper Mississippi and its tributaries, which had been her leading industry, now took a second but still important place. The city of Saint Anthony’s Falls had suffered by the migration of many of her most capable men of affairs to “the west side,” where Minneapolis sprang into being as by magic when the military reservation was reduced in the middle of the fifties. The new city soon outstripped the old in population, in manufacturing, and in merchandizing. At length it became apparent that there was no propriety in the maintenance of separate municipal organizations at the falls. By virtue of an act of the legislature, approved February 28, 1872, the older city lost its name and became the east division of Minneapolis. The regrets of some of her oldest citizens were mitigated by the suggestion that the Minneapolis thus enlarged might some day become the rival of Minnesota’s capital city in wealth and numbers, if not in political importance.

The land grant railroads, rapidly extended after the Civil War, had occasioned the building of new towns, the opening of new farms, the production of more millions of bushels of wheat, to be passed through more elevators and carried in more freight cars to more mills, for conversion into more thousands of barrels of Minnesota Patent flour. All these called for more miles of railroad, and the revolving game went merrily on for some years. So obvious were the advantages of railroad transportation that every possible inducement was held out to invite construction. Rights of way and bonuses in the shape of town, county, and city bonds were willingly bestowed. State and municipal authorities were so indulgent and generous that railroad “interests” came to expect the fulfillment of any requisitions they should please to make. A crowning example of this confidence has been given in the so-called “land grab” of 1871, whose consummation lacked only the approval of Governor Austin. But under this seeming of prosperity for the public and the people whose wealth was going into the railroads there was trouble brewing. Transportation did not come as cheap as the public was expecting from corporations, which had received from Congress public lands worth about $10,000 per mile at government prices, to aid them in building. Five cents per mile passenger fare seemed exorbitant, as did freight rates ranging from seven cents to sixty cents per ton mile. The immense loans made by sale of bonds were understood to be part of a policy of the corporation managers to get their roads built on credit, and to hold the lands, released from the primary mortgages, for speculation. There were abundant innuendoes thrown out in political campaigns that public officials, especially members of legislative bodies, national, state, and municipal, had not been losers by the grants and indulgences showered on the corporations. It is improbable that many individuals were thus persuaded or enriched by large benefactions. When the whole community were ready to grant everything a railroad company could ask, there was little need for “graft.”

Chief, however, among all causes of exasperation were the frequent and notorious discriminations in favor of some individuals, industries, and places against others. By the connivance of one or more companies the fuel supply of a city was put into the hands of a single firm or clique. The big shipper generally was conceded a better rate than his small competitors. But it must be said that at terminal points and junctions, where shippers had the choice of two or more lines, they sometimes forced the hungry traffic managers to offer rates by no means agreeable or profitable. When the rate per hundred pounds on merchandise from New York by way of the lakes to St. Paul, including 156 miles of railroad haul, was 35 cents, that from St. Paul to Faribault, 56 miles, was 39 cents. The state constitution contained (and still contains) the provision that all common carriers enjoying right of way for public use shall carry the mineral, agricultural, and other productions of the state “on equal and reasonable terms.” The farmers could not see that a rate on wheat from Owatonna to Winona of 2.6 cents, and one of 6 cents from Rochester, 40 miles on the road nearer Winona, were “equal”; nor could the people of Faribault and vicinity see what justice there was in paying $29.50 freight per carload of lumber from the falls, while residents of Owatonna, 15 miles farther on, should enjoy a rate of $18.

As early as 1866, in his inaugural address to the legislature, Governor Marshall had advised that body to be looking out “for the interests of the people against possible oppression from these corporations, which will soon be a power in the land.” In his message of 1867 he suggested that it was time to attach proper terms and conditions to railroad aid. He did not like the withdrawal of ten million acres of land from the operation of the homestead act.

Governor Austin, in his inaugural address of 1870, went no further than to ask the attention of the legislature to the complaints of railroad extortions and discriminations, and the use of the constitutional powers possessed by it for their abatement. His first annual message, delivered one year later, is a notable document in the literature of railroad regulation. It may be questioned whether there was another state executive in the country ready at that time to nail any such array of theses on the doors of the capitol. His propositions, briefed out of his text, were: 1. All special railroad charters not put into operation within ten days after consummation, to be void. 2. Every railroad corporation doing business within the state to maintain a public office within the state, and keep therein records of the officials, capitalization, assets, and liabilities. 3. No new road to be built parallel to an existing road. 4. All railroads in the state to be public highways free to all persons for transportation at reasonable charges. 5. No railroad company to issue any stocks and bonds except for money, labor, or property actually received and applied to the purposes of the corporation; all fictitious stocks and bonds to be void, and no increase of either, unless in a manner prescribed by law. 6. The state’s right of eminent domain to apply to railroad as to other property. 7. Adequate penalties, extending if deemed necessary to forfeiture of property and franchise, to be provided for unjust discrimination or extortion. 8. Finally, the creation of a national railroad commission for the regulation of commerce by rail and otherwise among the several states.

It is remarkable that the same legislature which passed the 500,000 acre land grab also enacted one of the first and most stringent acts for railroad regulation. It is chapter 24 of the General Laws of 1871. It classified all freight and fixed a maximum rate for each of the five classes, according to distance. It determined a maximum passenger fare of five cents per mile. It declared all railroads in the state to be public highways, and fixed a penalty of $1000 for every denial of the right of any person to travel or ship goods at the prescribed rates. The law finally declared the rates therein established to be “maximum reasonable rates,” and any corporation demanding or receiving more should, on conviction, forfeit its charter.

The same legislature (1871) provided for the appointment by the governor of a state railroad commissioner to observe the behavior of the corporations under the new law. The first incumbent was General Alonzo J. Edgerton, who had given proof of ability by gallant military service and successful practice as an attorney. The three reports of this official are a pitiful record of the unequal struggle of the legislatures with their informally confederate creatures, the railroad corporations. To the regulative act of 1871 the corporations gave not the slightest heed, partly on the ground of their rights as quasi-persons, partly because in their territorial charters they had been authorized to make “reasonable charges” for services, and the legislature had not reserved the right to determine what charges were reasonable. If some of the roads somewhat abated their rates, it was not because of the legal mandate. Gross discriminations continued to be practiced. The evasion of taxes by the companies by various devices added to public exasperation. The commissioner was gratified to have exacted an increase of railroad taxes from $56,505.54 in 1871 to $106,876.35 in the year after, and regretted his inability to reach $250,000 more illegally withheld. One company, the Minnesota Central, sold its entire railroad property to the Milwaukee interest, retaining its unsold lands, and claimed to survive as a railroad company entitled to hold its lands free of taxation. For lack of authority to make personal inspections of company accounts and property the commissioner could not verify their reluctant reports, which, because not made on a prescribed uniform plan, were of slight practical service. In his report for 1873 he reminded the legislature that the companies, which had by the beginning of that year constructed 1900 miles of road, had received from the nation, state, and municipalities, grants and gifts to the value of $51,000,000, being about $27,000 per mile of completed road. The average necessary cost of construction and equipment, according to an expert computation, would have been a trifle over $23,000 to the mile. In that year the bonded debt of the roads amounted to $54,500,000. The aggregate of capital stock, $20,000,000, raised the “capitalization” of the roads to $74,500,000; nearly $48,000 per mile. Only nominal amounts of stock-proceeds had gone into construction and equipment, and there were wide margins between the face value of the bonds sold and the actual expenditures. In some instances, says the commissioner, not more than forty per cent. went into construction. In these years in which building was going on so swimmingly, operation was far from encouraging. The managers had been more concerned to increase mileage than to build substantially. Heavy grades, sharp curves, and slight construction were the result. The iron rails weighed for the most part but fifty pounds to the yard. Equipment corresponded, of course, with track and rail. The amount of business obtained at the fares and rates exacted was disappointingly small. After the grain crop was moved the amount of paying freight was meagre and backloading trifling in amount. Operating expenses rose to eighty per cent. of the gross earnings. The balance of earnings and expenses for the year 1873 was but $1,400,000 for all the Minnesota roads, a sum which must have seemed pitifully small in the eyes of the men whose money had built them. The reader need hardly be told that the Minnesota railroad corporations went down in the crash which came upon the country in 1873. Three defaulted in their interest, two borrowed money to pay it, two went into receivers’ hands, and others attempted assessments on their stockholders. In the next four years but eighty-seven miles of new road were built.

When the roads refused to conform to the law of 1871 it became the duty of the attorney-general to bring suit for forfeiture of charters, the prescribed penalty for disobedience. John D. Blake and others sued the Winona and St. Peter Railroad Company in the district court of Olmstead County, alleging that said corporation had exacted for a certain service one dollar and ninety-nine cents, whereas the statute had determined the sum of fifty-seven cents to be the reasonable maximum charge. This court held, with the defending company, that the legislature had no power under the constitution to fix and determine railroad rates. The state intervened and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court of Minnesota, which reversed the decision of the court below, thus sustaining the validity of the act of 1871. The case was then carried to the Supreme Court of the United States and was numbered among the well-known “granger cases,” held under consideration for four years and disposed of according to the principles laid down by that court in the case of Munn vs. Illinois. In the “Blake case,” decided in October, 1876, it was held that the legislature of Minnesota was within its constitutional powers in regulating and fixing railroad rates and charges and prescribing penalties for violations of her laws in that behalf.