Rising Tide

by John M. Barry

  One year later, at the age of thirty-seven, Eads retired with a fortune exceeding $500,000 in cash, again blaming ill health. But he remained active. He was now a man of substance, owner of a mansion with parklike grounds on Compton Hill. His friends included congressmen, senators, publishers, big businessmen. Demonstrating what seemed more a sense of responsibility than love, he married his widowed cousin, who had four children; they had no children together, and he spent little time with her. He became a founding director of the St. Louis Philharmonic Society. He was active in the St. Louis Merchants Exchange (the city’s chamber of commerce). He became involved in railroads, director of a major bank. He had come very far indeed from the boy who sold apples on the street.

  In 1860, James Buchanan Eads was forty years old, his face framed by whiskers that met under his chin, and bald. He was sensitive about his baldness and rarely appeared in public without a skullcap. Though he looked frail, his years working the river had given him, one observer noted in surprise, “iron muscles.” Everything about him, from his clothes to his desk, was disciplined, clean, and orderly to the point of obsessiveness. “Really he seems to have been a point too precise,” his grandson said. “He was just the opposite to those geniuses whose great brain shows itself by a sloppy exterior. Eads was never sloppy, even at home.” In a photograph from the period he appears wise, possessing a kind of inner peace, yet he also seems intense, ascetic, with a disciplined and driven air.

  He was also hard, his hardness creating turbulence around him. Others would call him unreasonable and rigid. He conceded nothing and pursued everything with ferocity. Even when playing chess with his grandson, he yielded nothing, and advised, “Never let even a pawn be taken.” In later photographs he usually appeared tight-lipped; one man described his mouth as “shut[ting] so emphatically that it made plain his intention to do, in spite of all, what he believed could and should be done. [His mouth] admitted no trifling. When it spoke seriously it spoke finally.”

  And he was still willing to risk everything on himself. With a cheerfulness that understated the price he was willing to pay, he wrote, “Fortune favors the brave. ‘Drive on’ is my motto.”

  He had created, in his own person, a great and powerful machine capable of extraordinary accomplishment. Emerson Gould, a steamboatman and investor who knew Eads for sixty years, later wrote: “Whatever credit is due him as an engineer, or for his mechanical and inventive genius, all sink into insignificance when compared to his ability as a financier. Upon that all his success depended…. His ability to avail himself of the skill, of the experience and the brains of all with whom he came in contact, was phenomenal and enabled him to succeed in any mechanical proposition suggested…. To plan and execute, no man was his equal.”

  The machinery of Eads’ person was lying dormant, unused, restless. The Civil War was about to change that.

  AS SOME IN MISSOURI talked of secession, Eads and a handful of powerful men including Edward Bates, Francis Preston Blair, Benjamin Gratz Brown, and James Rollins met regularly in each other’s homes to plot stratagems to keep Missouri in the Union, and strategy in case of war. Bates would become Lincoln’s attorney general; Blair, whose father edited the Washington Globe (his home, Blair House, lies across the street from the White House and is now used to house visiting heads of state), Brown, and Rollins would become U.S. senators. Eads argued for building ironclad steamboats, seizing the Mississippi River, and dividing the South. The others listened.

  In April 1861, immediately after the firing on Fort Sumter, Bates, already in Lincoln’s cabinet, sent Eads a note marked “confidential…. Be not surprised if you are called here suddenly by telegram. If called, come instantly.” A few days later Eads was in Washington, presenting detailed plans for ironclads to Lincoln and the cabinet. Both the War Department and the Navy listened attentively. When the Army requested bids to build seven ironclad gunboats, Eads made the low bid and promised to deliver the boats in sixty-five days. He won the contract.

  Eads had never built a gunboat or worked with metal and needed thirty-five boilers, twenty-one steam engines, hundreds of tons of metal, and thousands of board-feet of lumber. He had no shipyard, no machine shop, no foundry, no factory, and lacked the capital to begin, but within two weeks he had 4,000 men in St. Louis working seven days a week, with more thousands working in machine shops as far away as Cincinnati. When the government failed to pay him as required by the contract, Eads used personal funds and money raised from friends to pay subcontractors.

  Although he could not deliver the seven gunboats in sixty-five days, he did deliver eight in one hundred days. The eighth one was the queen of his salvage fleet converted into a monster ship of war, 200 feet long with a 75-foot beam—wider than any oceangoing vessel. When it and the other ships arrived late in 1861 in Cairo, Illinois, for final outfitting, Commodore Andrew Foote reported to the quartermaster general that it “is greatly superior to any gunboat I have ever seen. Every officer here pronounces her the best gunboat in the Union.”

  Eads arrived in Cairo himself with his warships and gave Ulysses S. Grant, a brigadier general waiting to push south, and his officers a tour of the ironclads. Grant had no intellectual curiosity and seemed sometimes dull and torpid, but he got along well with Eads and shared one trait with him. When he moved toward his purpose, his energy rumbled with volcanic and frightening force, powerful enough to move not only men but events. The ships seemed like Grant somehow: lumbering, squat, ugly, angry-looking, and sinister, and if slow and difficult to maneuver upstream, they also moved with inexorable power. Troops called them “turtles.” And Grant was grateful that Eads, who still owned the boats—the Army had not paid for them—allowed them into combat. They performed magnificently. In February 1862, with minimal involvement of Grant’s infantry, the gunboats bombarded Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River. The forts surrendered, marking the first major Union victories of the war and significantly enhancing Grant’s reputation.

  Eads’ reputation grew as well. During the war he built twenty-five ships, and Admiral David Farragut, before the battle of Mobile Bay, pleaded with Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, “Only give me the ironclads built by Mr. Eads, and we will see how far Providence is with us.” Eads also designed a rotating, steam-driven gun turret that became an engineering classic and precursor to modern battleship guns. The Navy quickly chose it over the turret designed by John Ericsson for his better-known but inferior ironclad, the Monitor, and also asked Eads to go to Europe to study navy yards there. He was received everywhere, including by Bismarck in Prussia, and possibly had access to the secretive Krupp works, where experiments with steel weapons and new steel-making processes were being conducted. American ordnance experts with whom he worked definitely had that access.

  As the war ended, James Eads was among the most prominent and powerful men in the entire Mississippi valley. Eight hundred guests attended the wedding in 1867 of his daughter to the son of a former mayor; police were needed to hold back throngs of the uninvited curious. He put together a syndicate to buy the National Bank of Missouri, the largest bank in the West, served as president of the Mound City Life Insurance Company, controlled a railroad that was reaching west to Kansas City and north into Iowa’s grainfields, and cofounded a company to bridge the Missouri River. In 1871 the book Great Fortunes and How They Were Made devoted an entire chapter to Eads in a section titled “Capitalists”; other chapters in the section considered the likes of Cornelius Vanderbilt, John Jacob Astor, and Daniel Drew.

  The war proved Eads brilliant and formidable. But the war had also created opportunity for another man, a man with whom Eads would fight a personal war for control of the Mississippi River.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ANDREW ATKINSON Humphreys was born in 1810, the only child of a Philadelphia family of means and position. From boyhood he assumed that attention and prominence were his right. Often a disciplinary problem, he refused to return to one schoolmaster �
�who used the rod unmercifully,” so his parents changed his school, then changed it again, and again. When his father was away in Europe, his mother was unable to handle him and he “ran wild.” At sixteen years of age, the age at which Eads went his own way in St. Louis, Humphreys entered West Point. If taming him seemed an odd usage of the U.S. Military Academy, made possible only by his family’s connections, nonetheless he thrived.

  The Army Corps of Engineers then ran West Point, and Humphreys enjoyed the intellectual challenges of engineering. In fact, he loved challenges and combat of all kinds, embraced contests, competed with vigor. Unlike Eads, whose inner convictions allowed him to stand alone against the world, Humphreys saw himself largely in the mirror of others’ eyes. He wanted to achieve singularity, to stand out, and, even more, to be recognized for these things; he was driven by his desire for glory, and glory is a reflection of the world’s view. His only problem at West Point was discipline, and demerits for infractions lowered his class rank, but he graduated thirteenth in a class of thirty-three.

  Life after West Point was a disappointment. Not yet twenty-one years old upon graduation, he craved action. He found none in Army routine. Assigned to desolate Provincetown, Massachusetts, surrounded by giant sand dunes and facing the gray and wintry Atlantic, he found neither his intellect nor his courage engaged. He sought refuge by exploring scientific questions on his own, dismissing his routine duties as “a source of great discontent to me. I am constantly yearning to return to those contemplations which I hope will lead to some substantial good…. I had reached that point where everything was unsettled. I felt like one who from the ground has caught a glimpse of a beautiful sky and had felt a soft kissing wind…. My duty is constantly calling me away to pursuits which I feel are not of that importance…. It makes me look upon my labor as a dull, uninteresting task and I go about it with disgust.”

  His frustrations would only increase. Sent to fight Seminole Indians in Florida in 1836, he became so ill that he had to resign from the Army. It was not a disgrace, but it rankled. He worked as an engineer, a field exploding with opportunity, but in 1839 he sought and received appointment as a first lieutenant in the Corps of Topographical Engineers, a then-separate military unit. It brought him new frustration. In his mid-thirties, an age at which most men who will achieve significant things have begun to emerge—by then Eads was both wealthy and known the length of the Mississippi River—Humphreys had done nothing.

  The less he accomplished, the more the measures of rank and title mattered. Assigned to Washington, he devoted himself to personal advancement by cultivating politicians and maneuvering within the Army. First he blocked a rival from receiving a plum appointment by having him accused of conduct unbecoming an officer. Then Humphreys usurped the functions of his own superior, the prominent explorer J. W. Abert, who protested bitterly to the secretary of war that Humphreys’ action constituted a “serious irregularity…seriously injurious to the discipline and subordination of the Corps.” But Humphreys’ high-placed friends protected him from retribution. Senator John Crittenden of Kentucky may well have had Humphreys in mind when he castigated Washington-based Army engineers as “capitoline guards, half officer, half civilian, ‘sprinkled with the dandy,’ who were dancing attendance at the skirts of Congressmen,…never seen in the hour of danger, and found only where favors were to be had.”

  Yet Humphreys truly had abilities and wanted to demonstrate them. In 1845 he maneuvered for detached duty as an aide to Professor A. D. Bache, an internationally renowned scientist who headed the U.S. Coastal Survey. Later he recalled: “I went to science because the ordinary military routine nearly killed me; I was so restless and impatient under it, that any pursuit that required thinking would have been an acceptable change.”

  The Coastal Survey did far more than simply map the coastline. It and similar offices drew blueprints for the country’s development, especially for the construction of infrastructure—harbors, roads, canals, railroads, bridges. Finally, Humphreys had a position he could embrace with enthusiasm. For six years he did more than well, making in Bache a great and important friend.

  But despite all his good work on the Coastal Survey, the world was threatening to pass him by. Even within the Army, Humphreys was being passed by. He had twice had the opportunity to fight a war, against the Seminoles and in Mexico, and while his fellow officers had tested their courage and tasted blood, he had, on the first occasion, returned home ill and, on the second, remained in Washington with Bache.

  At forty he had brown hair that could appear golden in a certain light, and steadfast steely blue eyes. In photographs, his shoulders are broad, his mustache bristling, his hands large and thick-fingered. Nothing about him appears relaxed. He always seemed on the edge, always ready to explode. Charles A. Dana, later assistant secretary of war, described him as “very pleasant to deal with, unless you were fighting against him, and then he was not so pleasant.” Dana also called him “intolerant” and capable “of the most distinguished and brilliant profanity” in the Army.

  Then, in 1850, Humphreys saw his main chance.

  FOR DECADES the increasingly populated states of the Mississippi valley had been demanding that the national government address navigation and flood problems on the Mississippi River. Conventions in Cincinnati in 1842, in Memphis in 1844, in Chicago in 1847 (where 16,000 delegates overwhelmed a city of 10,000) had pressured Washington to act. At last, to keep the West, the upper Mississippi valley, from forging a political alliance with the South and spurred on by a flood in 1849 that inundated much of the lower Mississippi valley—including New Orleans itself—eastern politicians acceded to the demands, and Congress ceded millions of acres of federally owned “swamp and overflowed lands” to the states.* The states were to sell this land and spend the proceeds on flood control. And floods were not the only river problem. At the mouth of the Mississippi enormous sandbars often blocked access to the Gulf of Mexico. Sometimes fifty ships waited there for the sandbars to dissipate enough to allow passage into or out of the river; the largest ships sometimes waited as long as three months. The sandbars were choking the trade of the entire valley. Solutions were not obvious. Controversy existed over every aspect of river engineering, including both how best to control floods and open the river’s mouth.

  So on September 30, 1850, Congress authorized a survey of the lower Mississippi, from Cairo, Illinois, to the Gulf of Mexico. The aim was to discover the laws governing the Mississippi River and to determine how to tame it.

  The survey would be a monumental work, by far the most important of its kind ever conducted anywhere in the world, and it would break new ground in science. If successful, it would also frame the development of virtually the entire Mississippi valley, from Bismarck, North Dakota, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as well as the lush alluvial lands, the most fertile lands in the world, from Cairo to the Gulf.

  Humphreys desperately wanted to perform the Mississippi survey. With considerable understatement he wrote when officially requesting the assignment, “It is a work which I should desire, as it is one of much difficulty and of great importance.” Unofficially, he beseeched the congressmen he had earlier cultivated, used old family political connections, employed every professional allegiance. Bache personally lobbied the cabinet for him and wrote Secretary of War Charles Conrad: “To sound knowledge [Humphreys] joins a practical turn…. He is cautious in obtaining data, energetic in using them when obtained, is not likely on the one hand to run into unnecessary refinement or on the other to mistake rough guesses for accurate conclusions.” Conrad recalled Humphreys from detached duty and appointed him to the job.

  Ecstatic, home now in the Army, Humphreys had found “the work of my life.”

  BUT HUMPHREYS was about to become a pawn in a war between military and civilian engineers that would continue for a century. This conflict threatened both Humphreys personally and the Army Corps of Engineers itself, and it reflected the growing importance of a profession—the f
irst of the technocratic disciplines—that would largely define the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  Until the 1830s, West Point dominated American engineering. West Point offered the only academic training in the field in America, and Army engineers were a true elite. Only the top two cadets of each West Point class were allowed to enter the Corps of Engineers, while only the top eight cadets in each class could enter the separate Corps of Topographical Engineers. (Humphreys had fallen short of this mark but, after establishing himself as a civilian engineer, the corps commander personally selected him.)

  But these few could hardly supply the nation’s needs. Engineers who left the Army were besieged by job offers, and a civilian profession was developing through apprentice programs, especially on the Erie Canal. In 1835, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute first granted a degree in engineering. By 1850 so did Michigan, Harvard, Yale, Union, and Dartmouth. Meanwhile, technical knowledge was advancing at an exponential rate, and civilian engineers began denigrating their military counterparts for their rigid and dated training.

  Of all the civilian engineers in America, the most renowned was Charles Ellet, Jr. Ellet was exactly Humphreys’ age but entirely unlike him. Charming, athletic, brilliant, handsome, and arrogant, he would risk his own life simply to steal a scene. Ellet had, as a future time would say, charisma.

  At seventeen, already an assistant canal engineer, Ellet had complained there were “not above 3 Engineers who can be called men of science in the United States.” So he taught himself French, saved his money, solicited the help of Lafayette and the American ambassador to France, and, while Humphreys attended West Point, was admitted to the best engineering school in the world, the École des Ponts et Chaussées in France. He returned in 1829 the only engineer in the United States with a European education, and promptly proposed bridges across the Potomac and across the Mississippi at St. Louis. Neither project went beyond talk, but he did bridge the Schuylkill River at Philadelphia, and followed that with a 1,010-foot-long suspension bridge, then the longest in the world, across the Ohio at Wheeling, West Virginia. (It would later collapse.) While this bridge was under construction, Ellet became the first to cross the gorge at Niagara Falls. Initially, he strung a wire cable, hung a basket from it, got in, and pulled himself across, remarking, “The wind was high and the weather cold, but yet the trip was a very interesting one to me—perched up as I was two hundred and forty feet above the Rapids.” Then he built a catwalk of planks without guardrails, and was the first to cross it too, driving a horse and carriage, standing up like a charioteer, speeding and swaying, and transforming himself into a legend.