[VinnyTex]

Look, Lincoln was a lousy railroad lawyer. In the 1840s-50s, railroads were the epitome of corporate welfare. This was all part of Henry Clay's American(National)system. Which he learned from Friedrich List and his book "The National System of Political Economy." Government intervention in the economy to develop favored industry instead of allowing the market to dictate winners and losers.

[davidjquackenbush]

Sorry, I'll stop distracting your poem with texts. And you do read very fast.

[Restorer]

Look, Lincoln was a lousy railroad lawyer. In the 1840s-50s, railroads were the epitome of corporate welfare.

You guys kill me. It is so obvious that you look back at the past from today's perspective and assume the US government had massive resources to distribute among favored groups. It didn't.

The total federal budget in 1860 was about $60,000,000. This was something around $2 per capita taxation. Crushing tax burden, huh?

Most of this gigantic sum was spent on the Army, Navy and post office. There just wasn't much left to distribute to favored groups, even had the government wished to.

I think you are also anachronistic by assigning the landgrants for the transcontinental railroad to this period. Obviously they were later, and there were huge abuses with regard to them. But I'm not aware of any massive payments by the federal government to railroad companies in the 40s and 50s.

State governments, that's another matter.