As a history teacher, I'm constantly warning my kids against applying contemporary moral standards to assessing behaviors to past societies. But that said, it's irresponsible to ignore the historical fact of the conquest of the Indian nations in the settling of the west. It also sells the audience short to ignore the larger strategic issues in the construction of the Transcontinental. It kept California and Oregon in the Union in an age of disunion (the law was passed in second year of the war). It insured that the Great Plains would be culturally American and not subject to incursions by Britain and Mexico. It also created in just a few years both billions of dollars in taxable wealth for ordinary citizens without capital to acquire it by AND it perpetuated for several generations a historically unique middle class of businessmen-export farmer unprecedented in the story of humanity, which became the foundation of the laborer middle class that has sustained liberal democracy for the last 150 years.
The land giveaway of the Transcontinental Railroad changed history in ways that dwarf the impact of anything else Lincoln did, including winning the war and ending slavery. Slavery was going to end within a few generations anyway. It wasn't economically sustainable. The American Indians were going to be pushed off their land anyway, although the Transcontinental Railroad probably accelerated that fact and the Homestead Act made sure there was political pressure to get it done as brutally as possible. Had development of the west been left to the private sector--meaning large corporations--the process may have taken an addition 50 years and the west would be filled up with company towns, not independent landowners and shopkeepers. The cost was heavy and unjust, but the results were in the long run better for democracy.
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