This is my first letter to you in 1860 and consequently I shall make it very short, because it is always a good rule to make a small beginning, but a big ending, and since I don’t expect to be here towards the end of the year, you may always expect small letters. Cousin Henry from Cincinnati was here yesterday; he is a very fine young man now, a perfect beauty; he was raising a goatee, containing 11½ hairs, just about as I would have if I were to attempt it.
That fall of 1860 he finished up on the Allegheny River Bridge and returned to the wire mill. The following spring he was in uniform, marching up and down a dusty drill field in Trenton.
“My enlistment was rather sudden,” he said later, recalling the night his father had driven him from the house. It would be said by others that the break with his father was so angry and unpleasant that the two neither saw each other nor communicated in any fashion for the next four years. But there is nothing to this. Roebling returned to Trenton several times during the war, and while his letters to his father were customarily quite formal, and answered in kind, he had more to say to him than to anyone else, until he met Emily.
He enlisted on April 16, 1861, as a private in the New Jersey State Militia. Two months later, fed up with garrison duty, he resigned to enlist in New York, again as a private. In January of 1865, the war nearly over, he resigned from the Army, a lieutenant colonel, age twenty-seven, and a veteran of Second Bull Run, South Mountain, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and the Crater at Petersburg.
The letters he wrote during the war years number in the hundreds and provide not only an extraordinary personal footnote to the history of the Campaign in Virginia, but reveal much about the young man himself. During the years of the bridge, with Emily with him constantly, with his father dead, his brothers and sisters scattered and living their own adult lives, there would be little call for personal letter writing.
Except for promotions and some moving about, his first year at war had been uneventful and disappointing. “Loafing in the camp seems to be the principal occupation,” he wrote from Washington. Later, from Harpers Ferry, he told Elvira, “This is a mean little town about the size of Morrisville, presenting a deserted, sleepy appearance, like most Virginia towns. John Brown was hung in a cornfield next to us. The site of the gallows are marked by a cornstalk and pieces of the gallows sell at $1 per lb.”
But even when the fighting began, he would have little to say about that side of soldiering. “This artillery business is very hard work,” he wrote, and that was about as far as he would ever go.
He was made a sergeant after four months and spent his first winter at Budd’s Ferry, Maryland, on the lower Potomac, where his battery was supposed to protect shipping from Confederate batteries over on the Virginia shore, but where nothing much happened. He was billeted in a tent housing “ten choice sports” and about the only memorable event had been “a musical soiree at the widow Mason’s house, down on the river bank.” The music consisted of singing, piano, guitar, and Roebling on the violin. A supper was served (“Very creditable for this part of Maryland”) and a couple of Confederate shells landed in the yard but failed to go off. Years later one of the other musicians wrote that Roebling “could make a violin talk.”
He was elected a lieutenant in February and the next month he was at Hampton Roads in time to witness the battle of the Brooklyn-built Monitor and the Confederate counterpart, the Merrimac. Then he was designing and building his own first bridge—substituting for his father. He had been transferred to McDowell’s staff and was ordered to put a suspension bridge across the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg. “My father being too old to rough it, I was selected.” He had no experienced help to work with, no proper tools, no material except for some reels of Roebling cable that had been sent down from Trenton. At times the enemy was only five miles away.
The bridge he designed was more than a thousand feet long, longer than the Niagara Bridge, in other words, but broken up into some fourteen short spans. He hired contraband Negroes, trained them as they went along, had his lumber sent on from Alexandria, smoked up a box of Plantation cigars, and had the bridge built in a month.
Almost immediately he was ordered to Front Royal to build another one, over the Shenandoah. With no boats available to cross the river to make his measurements, he jumped in and swam over with the tape in his mouth. But when he and his work party had the bridge about halfway up, the Confederates under Jackson drove them off. Another bridge at Waterloo shared the same fate, and in the meantime General Burnside, retreating from Fredericksburg, blew up Roebling’s bridge there. It had lasted about as long as it had taken to build.
That had ended his bridge engineering for the time being. He was assigned next to a cavalry expedition, spent some ten days on the move, scarcely ever out of the saddle, and once, at about five in the morning, surprised Jeb Stuart at his breakfast and very nearly captured him.
Second Bull Run followed after that and Roebling was with McDowell, as a staff aide, through all of it. Less than a month later he came very close to being killed at the hideous bloodbath at Antietam. Then he was back at Harpers Ferry, building another suspension bridge and writing to tell his father how young General Slocum had come along and taken away fifty of his best men. But by December he had it finished. “The bridge has turned out more solid and substantial than I at first anticipated,” he told Charles Swan; “it is very stiff, even without a truss railing, and has been pretty severely tested by cavalry and by heavy winds.” It was the last bridge he would do on his own until he got to Brooklyn, but as he wrote later, “The Harpers Ferry bridge met the same fate as the others. When Lee came up for Gettysburg the suspenders were cut and [the] floor dropped into the river, but I rebuilt it completely and the army in parts marched over it. The following year [General Jubal] Early destroyed it absolutely.”
Roebling rejoined the Army of the Potomac in February 1863 back at Fredericksburg, where he was quartered late one night in an old stone jail, from which he would emerge the following morning with a story that would be told in the family for years and years to come. The place had little or no light, it seems, and Roebling, all alone, groping his way about, discovered an old chest that aroused his curiosity. He lifted the lid and reaching inside, his hand touched a stone-cold face. The lid came back down with a bang. Deciding to investigate no further, he cleared a place on the floor, stretched out, and went to sleep. At daybreak he opened the chest to see what sort of corpse had been keeping him company through the night and found instead a stone statue of George Washington’s mother that had been stored away for safekeeping.
It was shortly after that when he was reassigned to the staff of General G. K. Warren. Then came Chancellorsville, where Hooker was facing Lee with more than twice the men Lee had and seemed to have forgotten anything he ever knew about commanding an army. At one point Roebling found himself leaning against the same post as Hooker, just as it was about to be split in two by a cannon ball. For years afterward, he would speculate on how history might have been altered had he not shouted a warning when he did. “Fighting Joe” Hooker would have been fighting no more, Roebling reasoned, and with another man in charge his army might have won the battle.
In the weeks after Chancellorsville, Roebling began going up in a reconnaissance balloon every morning at daybreak to see what the enemy might be up to and it was he, on one such flight, who first discovered that Lee had started to move again, toward Pennsylvania and Gettysburg.
That was in early June. On the 24th he was handed orders from Warren to proceed at once to Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia if necessary, to find the best available maps of Maryland and the southern border of Pennsylvania. Warren happened also to be on his way to Baltimore to get married, so Roebling accompanied him that far, the two of them riding all night. Then he went on to Philadelphia and to Trenton, where his father, he knew, had one of the best and latest maps of Pennsylvania.
He startled everyone in the big h
ouse with his sudden appearance there after dark. His father especially was very much alarmed. He stayed all of an hour. By the evening of June 29 he was back in Baltimore with the maps, only to find that Warren had already left to rejoin his army. The whole city was in a state of panic. The following morning, every bell was ringing an alarm as he headed west on horseback, toward Frederick.
He did not find Warren until he reached Gettysburg, on the second day of the battle. After that, events followed swiftly.
Through the whole war Roebling said very little about battles in his letters and next to nothing about his own exploits. But he seems to have had a great gift for being on the spot when needed. Long after the war, at the request of a friend who was also at Gettysburg, he gave this account of what happened:
At Meade’s headquarters I found General Warren. After making myself familiar with the situation and looking around, Meade suddenly spoke up, and said Warren! I hear a little peppering going on in the direction of that little hill yonder. I wish you would ride over and see if anything serious is going on, and attend to it. (This is verbatim.)
So we rode over…Arriving at the foot of the rugged little knob, I ran up to the top while Warren stopped to speak to General Weed. One glance sufficed to note the head of Hood’s Texans coming up the rocky ravine which separates little and big Round Tops. I ran down, told General Warren, he came up with me and saw the necessity of immediate action.
…waiting for General Sykes’ approval, who was some distance ahead, Warren ordered these troops to face about and get into line, covering little Round Top and the adjacent ground. Firing began at once. It was deemed very important to get a section of artillery up there [on Little Round Top].
Hazzlitt’s battery was nearby, it started up the hill, but the horses could not pull it up, so all hands took hold of the wheels and tugged away. I strained at one hind wheel, and you, my dear Sir, at the other hind wheel, until we reached the summit, and some shots were fired. They had a great moral effect, as the enemy supposed the hill to be unoccupied.
The safeguarding of Little Round Top would be viewed by many historians as the turning point of the war. Warren, understandably enough, got nearly all the credit and would be remembered as one of the heroes of Gettysburg. But later on, speaking generally of his young aide-de-camp, Warren said, “Roebling was on my staff and I think performed more able and brave service than anyone I knew.” Roebling himself would be characteristically laconic and self-effacing. “I was the first man on Little Round Top. There is no special credit attached to running up that little hill, but there was some in staying there without getting killed.”
Roebling’s morning on Little Round Top would be the thing people would talk most about when describing his war record. But he had also been near Sickles when that flamboyant figure lost his leg. He helped engineer the tunnel under the Confederate lines at Petersburg, the daring scheme that so very nearly worked, but resulted in the disastrous Battle of the Crater. Once, before the great blast went off, before dawn, with the moon still up, he and Warren had crawled on their stomachs to the very edge of Lee’s works.
Later, he would also write this memorable description of Abraham Lincoln:
…I was in the Civil War for four years and saw Lincoln on two occasions—the first in May 1861, when he spoke a few words of welcome from the rear portico of the White House to the newly arriving soldiers, one of whom I was, and secondly about April 1, 1864, when he came down to Culpeper County to review the army previous to the Battle of the Wilderness. I was at that time major and aide-de-camp to General Warren, commanding the 5th Corps, and joined the cavalcade.
The President was mounted on a hard-mouthed, fractious horse, and was evidently not a skilled horseman.
Soon after the march began his stovepipe hat fell off; next his pantaloons, which were not fastened on the bottom, slipped up to his knees, showing his white homemade drawers, secured below with some strings of white tape, which presently unraveled and slipped up also, revealing a long hairy leg.
While we were inclined to smile, we were at the same time very much chagrined to see our poor President compelled to endure such unmerited and humiliating torture. After repairs were made the review continued…
As the war dragged on, Roebling, like thousands of others on both sides, grew increasingly despondent, wondering if ever there would be an end to the killing days, as he said. “They must put fresh steam on the man factories up North,” he told Emily, “the demand down here for killing purposes is far ahead of the supply; thank God however for this consolation that when the last man is killed the war will be over.”
The real heroes, he said, were the privates in the line, but then added bitterly, “When I think sometimes what those men all do and endure day after day, with their lives constantly in danger, I can’t but wonder that there should be men who are such fools, I can’t call them anything else. And that is just the trouble we are laboring under now—the fools have all been killed and the rest think it is about played out to stand up and get shot.” It was only a matter of time, he believed, before he too would be dead.
Off duty he played cards, picked fleas, smoked cigars, drank whiskey whenever he could get it, cursed the heat and tried to think of Troy, New York, in the winter of 1856, when the thermometer outside his bedroom window had marked 20 below. Like others about him, he developed increasing sympathy for the people he was working so hard to defeat. He wrote again to Emily, “…the conduct of the Southern people appears many times truly noble as exemplified for instance in the defense of Petersburg; old men with silver locks lay dead in the trenches side by side with mere boys of 13 and 14; it almost makes me sorry to have to fight against people who show such devotion for their homes and country.”
Emily had come into his life on the evening of February 22, 1864, at the Second Corps Officers Ball, which had been held in a huge wooden hall especially built for the occasion under his supervision. “In point of attendance,” he had written to Elvira, “nothing better could have been desired; at least 150 ladies graced the assemblage, from all quarters of the Union, and at least 300 gentlemen from General Meade down to myself.” The occasion was a grand success.
Our supper cost 1500 dollars and was furnished by parties in Washington. The most prominent ladies of Washington were present from Miss Hamlin, Kate Chase and the Misses Hale down. Last but not least was Miss Emily Warren, sister of the General, who came specially from West Point to attend the ball; it was the first time I ever saw her and I am very much of the opinion that she has captured your brother Washy’s heart at last. It was a real attack in force. It came without warning or any previous realization on my part of such an occurrence taking place and it was therefore all the more successful and I assure you that it gives me the greatest pleasure to say that I have succumbed…
They wrote to each other almost daily after that and met again, two or three times, at General Warren’s wife’s home in Baltimore, and at camp, when Emily and young Mrs. Warren came to visit the general. At about the time Lincoln made his visit, Roebling was writing to his father to tell him he planned to be married, expecting all kinds of arguments in return. But the letter from Cincinnati was not what he expected and represents one of those rare instances when John A. Roebling revealed his affection for his oldest son, as well as his total confidence in his judgment.
MY DEAR WASHINGTON,
Your communication of the 25th came to hand last night, and I hasten to reply. The news of your engagement has not taken me by surprise, because I had previously received a hint from Elvira in that direction. I take it for granted, that love is the motive, which actuates you, because a matrimonial union without love is no better than suicide. I also take it for granted, that the lady of your choice is deserving of your attachment. These two points being settled, there stands nothing more in your way except the rebellion and the chances of war. These contingencies having all passed away, you and your young bride, as you know beforehand, will be welcome at the pa
ternal house in Trenton. Our house will always be open to you and yours, and if there is not room enough, a new one can be built on the adjoining ground, or one can be rented.
As to your future support, you are fully aware, that the business at Trenton is now suffering for want of superintendence, and that no increase or enlargement can be thought of without additional help. Of course I do not want to engage strangers, and it is you therefore, who is expected to step in and help forwarding the interests of the family as well as yourself individually…
Should you be in want of money at any time, let me know.
I conclude with the request that you will assure your young bride of my most affectionate regards beforehand, and before I shall have the pleasure of making her personal acquaintance.
Your affectionate father,
She had gone to Trenton herself after that. His father had met her in New York and they had taken the train to Trenton together. “I like her very much and have not the least doubt that your union with her will be a happy one,” John Roebling informed his son. And Washington wrote to her at Trenton, “I dare say you could not sleep the first night on account of the water in the raceway making such a terrific noise…. Be sure and tell me all about your impressions…what do you think of Tilton the Bridgetender or Mitchell the lockkeeper or Mrs. Reilly that keeps the Irish tavern across the canal?”
Thereafter his days seemed endless. Little was happening and the boredom was unlike anything he had ever known, as he tried to describe for her:
This day might be signalized as one of the most uneventful ones I ever passed. I wrote perhaps two hours, fooled around for two more, walked for one, and that besides eating and drinking was the end of it. The programme at night is still more stupid, as it is chiefly spent shivering, turning over fifty times and occasionally dreaming of you. My mind is no longer as imaginative as it was 10 years ago, many of my dreams at that period are still vivid in my recollection. Had a great time hunting for a button tonight, finding none after all my search, and as I write the string at the bottom of my drawers comes off; that will be another sewing job before I go to bed.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 95