Humphreys carefully tested generally accepted theories and found them all wanting. The levees-only theory seemed particularly flawed, and these flaws suggested that outlets would best control floods. He discovered that, for example, contrary to the predictions of Guglielmini and the levees-only theory, the Mississippi did not always carry its maximum sediment load, and water moving at a higher velocity did not necessarily carry more sediment, per unit of volume, than water moving at a slower velocity. He reported, “The opinions of Frisi, Gennete, Guglielmini, and various others adverse to outlets with the facts respecting the Rhine and the Italian rivers, the Po, the Rhône, etc. cited by them…do not apply to the condition of things here.”
Increasingly confident that his investigations might leave a great mark on science, he wrote in March 1851, “Facts of great interest are developing constantly—new facts too that bear upon hydraulic questions of the first importance.” In April he added, “Never was there a finer field for a man!” In May he remained excited: “You see how I shall have to upset pretended facts.”
But he was also becoming erratic. He worked intensively, then more than intensively. The work obsessed him, unbalanced him, pushed him to the margin. He stopped writing his wife because it distracted him. He tried to buy a steamboat for the sole purpose of conducting a few soundings. He tongue-lashed his assistants for speaking with outsiders, even though they had simply been trying to glean information about Ellet. He himself talked to reporters. He basked in their attention, basked in their portrayal of him as a major figure so much that his superiors reprimanded him for talking so much to the press.
The reprimand was a sudden and disconcerting blow. Then came a far heavier one. Deep into summer, rumors filtered into Louisiana that Ellet had nearly finished his report. Soon after, Humphreys collapsed and returned to Philadelphia for an extended recuperation.
It seems to have been a nervous breakdown. The attending physician diagnosed “a lesion of Enervation of the whole system, produced by excessive mental exertion and intense application to business.”
In October 1851, Humphreys still lay in bed. And Ellet officially submitted his report.
Time would prove it an extraordinary document, lacking in hard data but brilliant and intuitive. Ellet began by noting that if floods were controlled, then “the lands which are now annually overflowed…would possess a value that it might seem extravagant to state; while the annual loss and distress of the present population caused by the inundations of the river can scarcely find a parallel, excepting in the effects of national hostilities.” He also warned that “future floods throughout the length and breadth of the delta, and along the great streams tributary to the Mississippi, are destined to rise higher and higher, as society spreads over the upper states, as population adjacent to the river increases, and the inundated low lands appreciate in value.”
Then he discussed river engineering, seizing the scientific glory Humphreys had foreseen for himself by showing that the theories of the famous Europeans “fail to give results in close agreement with recognized facts. It has therefore been deemed advisable, indeed necessary, to derive new and better formulae from a wider range of experiments.”
He dismissed the levees-only theory as “a delusive hope, and most dangerous to indulge, because it encourages a false security.” Indeed, he blamed levees for exacerbating the problem: “The water is supplied by nature, but its height is increased by man. This cause is the extension of the levees [his italics].”
Finally, he proposed a comprehensive approach to control floods, including improving levees, enlarging natural outlets, and adding artificial outlets and reservoirs.
Humphreys had expected his own report to set policy toward the Mississippi River forever. Instead, he lay in bed impotent. He had no response to Ellet. Indeed, Humphrey’s superior, Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Long, could only write, “The continued illness of [Captain Humphreys] renders him unfit for the laborious task of collating and reporting on the proceedings.”
The Army’s office of the Mississippi survey closed. Logs, instruments, and data were shipped to Louisville to be stored and gather dust.
Yet Humphreys swore he would complete his work. He had become not merely Ellet’s rival now, but his enemy.
CHAPTER THREE
ELLET PUBLISHED his report as a book and distributed it nationally to politicians and engineers. His stature and triumph grew, driving Humphreys past the point of toleration, making him more determined to produce a masterpiece himself.
In 1853, to escape Ellet’s success, Humphreys, though still recuperating, used his political connections to obtain orders to study European deltaic rivers. He spent eighteen months there, making observations, meeting with Europe’s leading hydraulic engineers. But they asked him about Ellet’s report too. When he returned home, he published—at his own expense—a pamphlet attacking Ellet methodology, calculations, and conclusions.
Upon his return in 1854, Humphreys’ close friend Secretary of War Jefferson Davis gave him a prime assignment: overseeing surveys for transcontinental railroads. This he did well; his office laid out four routes through the mountains, each one of which would later be used. But the Mississippi obsessed him. He continued to follow every development and assemble information, always planning to write his report. In 1857, after several years of intense politicking, Humphreys succeeded in reopening the Mississippi survey office in Washington.
He still had to give most of his time to other assignments, but he obtained all his old data from storage, reviewed it, and hand-picked a young lieutenant named Henry Abbot, whom he sent to the Mississippi to perform new measurements from Kentucky to Louisiana. In 1860, Humphreys was finally ready to begin writing his report. As the nation prepared to go to war, he isolated himself in his office in the new five-story Winder Building, at Seventeenth and F Streets, just behind the War Department. Through the winter of 1860, Humphreys was there, working through the night, night after night, rarely emerging from his office. As the cold weeks turned into spring, as state after state seceded from the Union, as war talk filled Washington, Humphreys worked, his only respite his view of the Mall, an enchanted carpet of green interspersed with great forest oaks and pines and twisting private paths past boscage and flower beds. West Point classmates and friends clasped hands and separated, knowing that they would be called upon to kill each other. Humphreys had no time for such partings. While he made clear to superiors that he was “desirous of taking part at the earliest day practicable in military operations,” he focused only upon his report. He was desperate not to leave “the work of my life in an unfinished condition. I was deeply anxious to complete [it]. A few hours…under such circumstances became important.”
In this, Jefferson Davis ironically helped him again. Hostility lingered in the Union Army over Humphreys’ friendship with Davis. On April 12, 1861, Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter and war broke out, but Humphreys was not given immediate combat responsibility.
While the nation went to war, Humphreys engaged in hostilities too, only his were personal. His report was his weapon. He had never been generous to rivals. He now became ruthless. If earlier, while gathering information, Humphreys had pursued pure truth, now he saw himself as having been wronged by Ellet. His own son conceded that his father “schooled” himself “not to feel love, friendship, or sympathy, but wrong, injustice, and misrepresentation.” Ellet had cheated him out of glory. What if Humphreys could show that Ellet was mistaken?
On July 21, 1861, Union forces were routed at the first battle of Bull Run. Soon afterward Humphreys submitted his report to the secretary of war. To prevent its loss in the confusion of war and his own possible death, he also had one thousand copies printed immediately by a Philadelphia publisher.
The report quickly won attention and praise in Europe. In the United States, both the Union Army and the southern states along the river had other priorities. But the war would eventually give Humphreys’ report the greatest imaginable weigh
t.
LIKE VIRTUALLY ALL West Point graduates, Humphreys advanced rapidly, in eight months rising from captain of engineers to brigadier general and commander of a combat infantry division. And in combat Humphreys showed the iciness of a man who saw others as a means to his end. He displayed his temperament chiefly in letters to his wife, where a portrait emerges of a man enormously prideful and enormously sensitive to position, while his desire for glory showed itself in war.
When Theodore Lyman, a young Union officer, encountered him for the first time, he found “an extremely neat man…continually washing himself and putting on paper dickeys…an extremely gentlemanly man…. There was never a nicer old gentleman”—Humphreys was fifty-two—“and so boyish and peppery that I continually wanted to laugh in his face.” Then on December 14, 1862, at Fredericksburg, Virginia, Lyman saw a different Humphreys, a chilling Humphreys, and said of him, “I do like to see a brave man, but when a man goes out for the express purpose of getting shot at he seems to me in the way of a maniac.”
Fredericksburg was Humphreys’ first real battle. The Confederate Army under Lee sat behind a stone wall atop a steep high bluff, overlooking open ground. The Union General Ambrose Burnside (whose trademark whiskers later became known as “sideburns”) ordered his troops to charge.
It was one of the great bloody blunders of the war. Yet in it a strange detachment surrounded Humphreys, a penumbra of raw ego.
Division after division charged and fell back. Then came Humphreys’ turn. His soldiers fixed bayonets. One of his officers told the rawest, youngest recruits to remain in the rear. Humphreys called them stragglers and ordered them forward with the rest of his troops. He then bowed to his staff, said, “Gentlemen, I shall lead this charge. I presume, of course, you will wish to ride with me?” With him at their head, they started up the hill.
After the battle he wrote his wife: “I led my division into a desperate fight and tried to take at the point of a bayonet a stone wall behind which a heavy line of the enemy lay. The heights just above were lined with artillery that poured upon us round shot, shell, and shrapnel; the musketry from the stone wall made a continuous sheet of flame. We charged within 50 yards of it each time but the men could not stand it.”
Still, he told her, “The charge of my division is described by…some general officers [as] the grandest sight they ever saw, and that as I led the charge and bared my head, raising my right arm to heaven, the setting sun shining full on my face gave me the aspect of an inspired being…. I felt gloriously, and as the storm of bullets whistled around me, and as the shells and shrapnel burst close to me in every direction with hissing sound, the excitement grew more glorious still. Oh, it was sublime!”
To an old friend he added, “I felt like a young girl of sixteen at her first ball…. I felt more like a god than a man. I now understand what Charles XII meant when he said, ‘Let the whistling of bullets hereafter be my music.’”
As an afterthought, he noted, “In ten or fifteen minutes I lost more than 1,000 officers and men.” The casualties exceeded 20 percent of his command. Five of his seven staff officers were shot off their horses. Yet only the glory mattered to him. “The division has made such reputation as will make the fortunes of many of its officers,” he wrote.
Only one thing seemed to have perturbed him. After the battle a fellow officer noted, “General Humphreys with his usual bland smile appeared on a small gray horse, which was of a contrary and rearing disposition; but the General remarked that he had had three valuable horses killed under him, and now he would get only cheap ones.”
More heavy fighting followed. His division shrank from 7,000 men to 3,684. In a series of letters to his wife there is no mention of the horrors they, and he, had gone through, only reports of praise of himself. “It is acknowledged throughout this army,” he wrote, “that no officer ever did as much with troops of short term of service as I did with these, and…that no one else would or could have done as much.”
He was given a new division. At Gettysburg there was more bloodshed. A Union officer watching from a distance reported: “The space occupied by the division of Humphreys was the vortex of a cauldron of fire, the crater of a volcano of destruction…every horse killed and every man in the battery having fallen at his post. Against the weakened, struggling lines of Humphreys…Confederates were pressing with eager yells, trampling the wounded Union men under their feet.”
Humphreys, himself unscathed, only noted with pride, “The newspaper correspondents have congratulated me too and said the handsomest things.” A few weeks later he was promoted to major general and transferred. In his farewell speech to his troops he said nothing of them, their blood, nor even what they had achieved together. He spoke only of himself: “Why, anyone who knows me intimately knows I had more of the soldier than a man of science in me. I did not go to pure science or book science for that would soon have been unendurable, but to science that partook of practicable application, and looked besides to greater application eventually…in the development of the resources of the country.”
Humphreys’ new post was chief of staff to General George Meade, commander of the Army of the Potomac. But staff officers received no glory. Quickly discontented, he complained, “I prefer infinitely command of troops to this position of Chief of Staff. It suits me in nothing, my habits, my wishes, my tastes. I hate to be second to anyone.”
Again: “My mortification at seeing the men over me and commanding me who should have been far below me has destroyed all my enthusiasm and I am indifferent…. How much I could say! I have hardly begun yet.”
And again: “I know that as a Division Commander I have done what no other Division Commander ever has done, and I know that my example has taught others what to do.”
And again: “I have good reason to believe that if it was left to each of the Corps of this Army to say who should command them, I should be chosen in preference to any other.”
Later, ignoring the illnesses that had forced him to leave active service for long periods, he even bragged of physical superiority, claiming, “I do not believe there was a stronger man physically in the whole Army than myself, and but few equally strong.”
In 1864, General Grant was placed over Meade. Humphreys became even more disenchanted: “The reputation justly due to those labors, responsibility and deeds will go to General Grant, and not to General Meade, much less to myself. General Grant will reap all the glory, all the reputation of success, and share none of the obloquy of disaster if such should befall us.”
IF HUMPHREYS’ HOPES in the war were not realized, neither were his fears. He ended the war not on Grant’s staff but as one of Grant’s corps commanders, chasing Lee down, with considerable power within the Army. His report on the river gave him more.
During the war his report had been hailed throughout Europe. Now, after the war, his own country gave him honors enough to satisfy even him. Every major scientific society in the nation elected him to membership, joining the many in Europe that had already done so. Both the scientific and lay press heaped praise upon him. Dozens of newspapers wrote encomiums like that of the New Orleans Daily Crescent: “Its publication constitutes an epoch in hydrographical science…. General Humphreys, in spite of so many previous failures on the part of so many eminent scientific men, succeeded.”
Humphreys’ report would in fact become the single most influential document ever written about the Mississippi River. Indeed, it would become one of the most influential single engineering reports ever written on any subject. It would have such influence both because of the position Humphreys would soon attain and because of its quality. It included hundreds of pages of drawings, graphs, and raw data on sandbars, on riverbanks, on levees, on every imaginable river phenomenon, along with critical analyses of several centuries of scientific literature.
The title alone was a monument to thoroughness: it began Report upon the Physics and Hydraulics of the Mississippi River and went on for ninety words. For brevit
y, it became known as “Humphreys & Abbot” (he graciously credited his assistant Lieutenant Henry Abbot as coauthor), Physics and Hydraulics, or simply the Delta Survey.
More important, the report appeared in the first great age of science, a time when science was redefining the world, when man believed nature was governable and scientists were daily promulgating new laws to subdue it. The telegraph had made communication virtually instantaneous. Already there were plans to lay a cable across the Atlantic, binding Europe and America unimaginably close. In 1859, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared. In Europe, Louis Pasteur was probing the world of microbiology, and Pasteur had written, “I am on the verge of mysteries, and the veil is getting thinner and thinner.”
Humphreys saw his own work ripping away the veils that had shrouded the great river, and promulgated his own laws to govern it. He declared that he had found “the crowning proof of the exactness of the new formulae as applied to water moving in natural channels…. It establishes beyond reasonable doubt, first that the same laws govern the flow of water in the largest rivers and in the smallest streams; second, that the new formulae truly express these laws; and, third, that the formulae heretofore proposed do not express them even approximately.”
Humphreys considered his methodology, observations, and conclusions irrefutable, and on his title page indirectly rebuked other engineers—especially Ellet—for theorizing without data, when he quoted Benjamin Franklin: “‘I approve much more your method of philosophizing, which proceeds from actual observation, makes a collection of facts, and concludes no further than those facts warrant.’”
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