Greatest among these enthusiasts was Asa Whitney, a New York merchant interested in the China trade and eager to win the commerce of the Orient for the United States. Others had declared such a road to be possible before he presented his memorial to Congress in 1845, but none had staked so much upon the idea. He abandoned the business, conducted a private survey in Wisconsin and Iowa, and was at last convinced that "the time is not far distant when Oregon will become ... a separate nation" unless communication should "unite them to us." He petitioned Congress in January, 1845, for a franchise and a grant of land, that the national road might be accomplished; and for many years he agitated persistently for his project. The annexation of Oregon and the Southwest, coming in the years immediately after the commencement of Whitney's advocacy, gave new point to arguments for the railway and introduced the sectional element. So long as Oregon constituted the whole American frontage on the Pacific it was idle to debate railway routes south of South Pass. This was the only known, practicable route, and it was the course recommended by all the projectors, down to Whitney. But with California won, the other trails by El Paso and Santa Fé came into consideration and at once tempted the South to make the railway tributary to its own interests. Chief among the politicians who fell in with the growing railway movement was Senator Benton, who tried to place himself at its head. "The man is alive, full grown, and is listening to what I say (without believing it perhaps)," he declared in October, 1844, "who will yet see the Asiatic commerce traversing the North Pacific Ocean--entering the Oregon River--climbing the western slopes of the Rocky Mountains--issuing from its gorges--and spreading its fertilizing streams over our wide-extended Union!" After this date there was no subject closer to his interest than the railway, and his advocacy was constant. His last word in the Senate was concerning it. In 1849 he carried off its feet the St. Louis railroad convention with his eloquent appeal for a central route: "Let us make the iron road, and make it from sea to sea--States and individuals making it east of the Mississippi, the nation making it west. Let us ... rise above everything sectional, personal, local. Let us ... build the great road ... which shall be adorned with ... the colossal statue of the great Columbus--whose design it accomplishes, hewn from a granite mass of a peak of the Rocky Mountains, overlooking the road ... pointing with outstretched arm to the western horizon and saying to the flying passengers, 'There is the East, there is India.'"