Between 1857 and 1861 the debates of Congress show the difficulties under which the railroad labored. Many bills were started, but few could get through the committees. In 1859 the Senate passed a bill. In 1860 the House passed one which the Senate amended to death. In the session of 1860-1861 its serious consideration was crowded out by the incipiency of war. Through the long years of debate over the organization of the road, the nature of its management and the nature of its governmental aid were much in evidence. Save only the Cumberland road the United States had undertaken no such scheme, while the Cumberland road, vastly less in magnitude than this, had raised enough constitutional difficulties to last a generation. That there must be some connection between the road and the public lands had been seen even before Whitney commenced his advocacy. The nature of that connection was worked out incidentally to other movements while the Whitney scheme was under fire. The policy of granting lands in aid of improvements in transportation had been hinted at as far back as the admission of Ohio, but it had not received its full development until the railroad period began. To some extent, in the thirties and forties, public lands had been allotted to the states to aid in canal building, but when the railroad promoters started their campaign in the latter decade, a new era in the history of the public domain was commenced. The definitive fight over the issue of land grants for railways took place in connection with the Illinois Central and Mobile and Ohio scheme in the years from 1847 to 1850. The demand for a central railroad in Illinois made its appearance before the panic of 1837. The northwest states were now building their own railroads, and this enterprise was designed to connect the Galena lead country with the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi by a road running parallel to the Mississippi through the whole length of the state of Illinois. Private railways in the Northwest ran naturally from east to west, seeking termini on the Mississippi and at the Alleghany crossings. This one was to intersect all the horizontal roads, making useful connections everywhere. But it traversed a country where yet the prairie hen held uncontested sway. There was little population or freight to justify it, and hence the project, though it guised itself in at least three different corporate garments before 1845, failed of success. No one of the multitude of transverse railways, on whose junctions it had counted, crossed its right-of-way before 1850. La Salle, Galena, and Jonesboro were the only villages on its line worth marking on a large-scale map, while Chicago was yet under forty thousand in population.