But it was neither all white men nor all capitalists who brutalized the American Indians. The dispossession of the Indians—culminating in the late 1880s with the surviving tribes of the West being herded onto reservations—was the result of a corrupt and immoral relationship between certain Northern industrialists, particularly government-subsidized railroads, and the federal politicians whose careers they financed and promoted.
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Sherman’s (and Lincoln’s) close friend and former business associate, Grenville Dodge, was in charge of building the government-subsidized transcontinental railroads that were “protected” by Sherman’s armies, and he did so in a thoroughly corrupt and inefficient manner.Per-mile subsidies provided incentives for bilking the taxpayers by building winding, circuitous routes. Dodge even laid track on top of several feet of snow in the winter months, and then rebuilt them after the spring thaw, collecting twice the subsidies. The entire enterprise was so marred by corruption, inefficiency, and fraud that at one point (1893) all of the government-subsidized railroads were bankrupt.
Your recent posts do not substantiate any claim that the Federal government subsidized railroads with federal money.
the 1862 Transcontinental railroad act subsidized the Union Pacific and Central Pacific by giving them Federal land for the right of way and every other section of land along the right of way. . The Feds had been giving federal land to railroads for right of ways beginning in 1847. This land for right of ways was available to Southern railroads as much as it was to Northern railroads. The vast disparity of rail construction between North and South cannot be pinned on “Federal monetary subsidies”. Because there were none.
The Government paid railroads to haul government cargo. If the mail or cargo was bound for a destination in the South, a Southern owned railroad was paid to haul that cargo.