Thomas A. Scott

Thomas Alexander Scott (December 28, 1823 – May 21, 1881) was an American businessman, railroad executive, and industrialist. He was the fourth president of the Pennsylvania Railroad (1874-1880), later the largest publicly traded corporation in the world.

Scott was appointed in 1861 by President Abraham Lincoln as the U.S. Assistant Secretary of War during the American Civil War, and played a major role in using railroads in the war effort. He had a role in negotiating the Republican Party's Compromise of 1877 with the Democratic Party; it settled the disputed presidential election of 1876 in favor of Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for the federal government pulling out its military forces from the South and ending the Reconstruction era.

Scott was born in 1823 in Peters Township near Fort Loudoun, in Franklin County, Pennsylvania.

Scott joined the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1850 as a station agent, and by 1858 was general superintendent. Scott took a special interest in mentoring aspiring railroad employees, such as Andrew Carnegie. In 1860, Scott became the first Vice President of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

The 1846 state charter to the Pennsylvania Railroad diffused power within the company, by giving executive authority to a committee responsible to stockholders, and not to individuals. By the 1870s, however, officers directed by J. Edgar Thomson and Scott had centralized power.

Historians have explained the successful partnership of Thomas Scott and J. Edgar Thomson by the melding of their opposing personality traits: Thomson was the engineer, cool, deliberate, and introverted; Scott was the financier, daring, versatile, and a publicity-seeker. In addition, they had common experiences and values, agreement on the importance of financial success, the financial stability of the Pennsylvania Railroad throughout their partnership, and J. Edgar Thomson's paternalism. J. Edgar Thomson was the President of the Pennsylvania Railroad for more than three decades, from 1852 until his death in 1874.

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