Especially significant now is the memory of Mr. Osborn, and we might well speak of him as assistant and coadjutor of such men as Lincoln and Grant, and the statesmen who since the war have sought to unite North and South. As we find that it was the South that first marched westward, and a Southern man who first planned a great highway of iron into the West, we may state with equal pleasure and confidence that it was the East, and an Eastern man, that made the South a portion of the West, and both a part of a united America.
William H. Osborn was a native of Massachusetts, and was by birth of no exalted position in the world. His chief capital was a clear brain and an unclouded purpose, which later ripened into a farsightedness in large affairs that has rarely been equaled in the ranks of practical American men. Sent to the East Indies as the representative of a New York firm, he got a good insight into the trade in spices, and was successful in its operation. Later he married the second daughter of that sterling American merchant, Jonathan Sturges of New York, whose first daughter was the first wife of J. Pierpont Morgan. Mr. Sturges was heavily interested in the young Illinois Central Railroad, the first of the land-grant railways, the original seven hundred and five miles of which were intended to develop the agricultural lands of the great prairie state of Illinois, and to bear the products of that state up to the water-transport of the Great Lakes, which then carried most of the long-haul business from the West to the East.
The original lines of this road were laid out in the form of a large Y, one leg of which ran from Dubuque, Iowa, southward, meeting the other leg, which extended south from Chicago. The two legs of the Y met at what is now Central City, and thence the line ran south to Cairo. This road was one of the earliest attempts to parallel the old water-highways that had once carried the freight of a riparian population. Its first grant was made in 1850, and its first train was run in 1855. During the war this line was of much service in transporting troops and material to the southward.
Yet, in spite of its well-conceived plan, and in spite of the natural wealth of the country it traversed, the road as a property was a source of perpetual anxiety to its shareholders. It needed a great mind to straighten out its problems, and Mr. Sturges thought that his son-in-law had that mind. He therefore despatched Mr. Osborn to Chicago, and gave him full charge of the system. The choice was a wise one. Mr. Osborn brought the property through the panic of 1857, when all securities were falling in ruins, and weathered even an assignment, which was made by the company during his absence in England. He backed his faith in his judgment by negotiating a personal loan of three million dollars, out of which he paid the matured coupons that were pressing for payment. He secured a new loan of five million dollars, paid off all the smaller debts, established the credit of the company, and set its affairs thenceforth upon a secure footing.