Run from the Shadows

Wracked with dread on a wintry Tuesday evening in 1873, U.S. Representative James A. Garfield retreated to the pages of his diary. “At 11 o’clock went before the Credit Mobilier Investigating Committee and made a statement of what I know concerning the Company,” Garfield, 41, wrote. “I am too proud to confess to any but my most intimate friends how deeply this whole matter has grieved me. While I did nothing in regard to it that can be construed into any act even of impropriety much less than corruption, I have still said from the start that the shadow of the cursed thing would cling to my name for many years. I believe my statement was regarded as clear and conclusive.”

Garfield had appeared earlier on January 14 before a House committee investigating sweetheart stock sales by a congressman to colleagues. In the years after the Civil War, Washington was awash in sleazy deals, but Garfield had avoided the mire—until now. In sworn testimony, the Ohioan insisted he “never owned, received, or agreed to take any stock of the Credit Mobilier or of the Union Pacific Railroad, nor any dividends or profits arising from either of them.”

That night, as Garfield was scribbling in his diary, he feared permanent stain from the scandal consuming the capital.

in the effort to construct a transcontinental railroad linking the country’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts. The visionary scheme aimed at establishing not only a passenger and freight transportation network but a grid of communities around which the nation could grow. Knowing the stakes and wanting to speed the project, Congress in 1862 passed the Pacific Railroad Act, authorizing issuance of generous land grants and government-backed bonds to the railroads. The companies building the rails, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, incurred huge expenses and took giant risks, hoping for enormous returns. No project in America’s preceding 90