The project now before Congress was of vastly greater consequence than the proposed grant to Illinois.  Here was a bill of truly national importance.  It spoke for itself; it appealed to the dullest imagination.  What this amended bill contemplated, was nothing less than a trunk line connecting the Great Lakes with the Gulf of Mexico.  Now, indeed, as Douglas well said, “nationality had been imparted to the project,” At the same time, it offered substantial advantages to the two landless States which would be traversed by the railroad, as well as to all the Gulf States.  As thus devised, the bill seemed reasonably sure to win votes.

Yet it must not be inferred that the bill passed smoothly to a third reading.  There was still much shaking of heads among senators of the strict construction school.  Many were conquered by expediency and threw logic to the winds; some preferred to be consistent and spoil a good cause.  The bill did not sail on untroubled seas, even after it had been steered clear of constitutional shoals.  It narrowly ran foul of that obstinate Western conviction, that the public lands belonged of right to the home-seeker, to whose interests all such grants were inimical, by reason of the increased price of adjoining sections of land.[337]

The real battleground, however, was not the Senate, but the House.  As before, the bill passed the upper chamber by an ample margin of votes.[338] In the lower house, there was no prolonged debate upon the bill.  Constitutional scruples do not seem to have been ruffled.  The main difficulty was to rivet the attention of the members.  Several times the bill was pushed aside and submerged by the volume of other business.  Finally, on the same day that it passed the last of the compromise measures, on the 17th of September, 1850, the House passed the Illinois Central Railroad bill by a vote of 101 to 75.[339]

A comparison of this vote with that on the earlier bill shows a change of three votes in the Middle States, one in the South, ten in the Gulf States, and five in Tennessee and Kentucky.[340] This was a triumphant vindication of Douglas’s sagacity, for whatever may have been the services of his colleagues in winning Eastern votes,[341] it was his bid for the vote of the Gulf States and of the landless, intervening States of Kentucky and Tennessee which had been most effective.  But was all this anything more than the clever manoeuvering of an adroit politician in a characteristic parliamentary game?  A central railroad through Illinois seemed likely to quell factional and sectional quarrels in local politics; to merge Northern and Southern interests within the Commonwealth; and to add to the fiscal resources of State and nation.  It was a good cause, but it needed votes in Congress.  Douglas became a successful procurator and reaped his reward in increased popularity.