Rising Tide

by John M. Barry

  Eads made only one compromise. The same Jacob Linville whom he had fired as a consultant was president of the Keystone Bridge Company, an iron and steel contractor. His partner was Carnegie. Both Linville and Carnegie had close ties to the Pennsylvania Railroad, which was represented on the bridge company’s board. Eads also needed Carnegie’s financial connections. So Eads made the Keystone company chief contractor. Carnegie knew the pressures on Eads and repeatedly squeezed him, demanding new financial concessions and secretly maneuvering to control—and milk—every subcontract. Typically, Carnegie wired one steel maker not to inform Eads “about our confidential efforts to throw the steel contract your way…no one knows about this in St. Louis and no one should know.”

  But Eads pushed Carnegie as well. Eads was demanding, demanding of everyone, demanding of seemingly impossible standards. Each individual piece of key materials—not random samples from a production run—was tested. Eads’ assistant Flad invented a testing machine capable of detecting deformations of 1/200,000 of an inch, a heretofore unimaginable tolerance. In one instance, the Keystone factory worked for six months to produce a single steel plate good enough to test. It failed.

  To William Taussig, chairman of the bridge company—Eads was nominally only chief engineer—Carnegie complained, “The very machinery to make the raw material has in large part to be created…. Your man of decided real genius is the most difficult to deal with practically…. Nothing that would please and that does please other engineers is good enough. Capt. Eads must only require the custom of the trade…. You must keep Eads up to requiring only what is reasonable and in accordance with custom.”

  Eads cared nothing for custom. He drove on, turning to an other company that pioneered chrome-alloy steel, a product he helped develop. The bridge rose up and reached across the river.

  Then, abruptly, six years after Congress had specifically authorized the bridge and years after the Corps of Engineers had approved the plans for it and construction had begun, the Corps threatened to tear the bridge down.

  IN REALITY, the Army’s objection had little to do with the bridge. It had to do with who would control the Mississippi River.

  The fight for control began on May 13, 1873, when Eads read a resolution he had written, endorsed by the city’s businessmen, to a huge river convention in St. Louis attended by a dozen governors, more than one hundred members of Congress, and several thousand delegates representing every commercial interest in the Mississippi valley.

  The bridge made Eads the biggest man at the convention. The sight of it was more eloquent than any acclaim, and it was the talk of the delegates. Its piers had long since been sunk to bedrock, and now its steel arches, like dancers whose outstretched arms did not quite touch each other, extended across the great river, while hundreds of men teemed about on giant derricks and great workboats.

  But Eads said nothing about the bridge. Instead, he addressed the problems at the mouth of the Mississippi River, where sandbars were choking commerce.

  The bars were not a new problem. In 1718 the French had noted, “It is necessary, by all sorts of methods, to open the entry of the river.” In 1859, General Winfield Scott, commander of the Army, had examined the sandbars and found thirty-eight ships in the river trying to get into the Gulf, twenty-one in the Gulf waiting to get into the river, and three ships aground on the bar itself; another fifty ships were waiting to depart New Orleans. One of the ships at the bar had been waiting eighty-three days. Bad as that situation was, the problem—like the floods—was growing worse. Larger and larger ships were being blocked more and more often.

  The Corps of Engineers had been trying different approaches for forty years to solve the problem. None had succeeded. Only recently the Corps had pronounced the sandbar a permanent, immovable barrier. So it planned to outflank it by building a canal to connect the river to the Gulf. The canal idea had gained nearly universal support throughout the Mississippi valley, from Louisville to Davenport and especially in New Orleans, where the issue of the sandbars was of vital concern.

  So his words were controversial, even inflammatory. When Eads rejected the canal idea, he declared, “The solution of this problem, it is believed, will be achieved…by a system of jetties.”

  Eads called for constructing two parallel piers far out into the Gulf. This would narrow the river and increase its current, and Eads believed that the concentrated current would cut its own channel through the bar. In 1837, Eads had watched this happen in St. Louis. Sandbars had grown into tree-covered islands so large that they threatened to cut the city off from the river. Robert E. Lee, then a captain in the Army engineers, had built a jetty into the river that directed the force of the main channel against the islands. They had quickly melted away. Now Eads wanted to do the same thing at the Mississippi’s mouth.

  Eads made few converts at the convention. But after the convention many delegates, including Eads, members of Congress, and reporters from major Mississippi valley and eastern papers, traveled to New Orleans to examine the sandbar.

  There Captain Charles Howell of the Corps of Engineers, author of the report calling for the canal, took them on a two-hundred-mile roundtrip to the mouth of the Mississippi. Eads spent the entire trip explaining to an interested audience why jetties were superior to the canal. Howell, increasingly irritated by this civilian who questioned the judgment and authority of the Army engineers, immediately reported the interference to Humphreys.

  Humphreys was already warding off plans pushed by critics to create a U.S. Geological Survey and transfer to it the Army’s authority to survey the West, and—an even more serious attack—to transfer control of the Mississippi River from the Corps to a new commission of both Army and civilian engineers. In resisting these proposals, Humphreys had advised a subordinate: “We must get ready for a combat at the next session [of Congress]—not only defensive but offensive if necessary…. The contest must be sharp and merciless.”

  He had won those contests. In triumph he turned to Eads.

  Eads considered his comments about the canal and jetties impersonal, a question of science, efficiency, and truth. Humphreys considered them a personal insult directed at the single greatest failure, and embarrassment, of the Corps.

  But Humphreys had never engaged a man like Eads. In his own way Eads was colder than Humphreys, far larger of vision and thus impersonal. Eads was, said a friend, “a bitter and unrelenting foe…. To him the unfolding of great and correct principles was more than personal friendships. His beliefs were his friends.”

  HUMPHREYS INTENDED to teach Eads a lesson, and his weapon was the Army’s authority over obstacles to navigation on the Mississippi. He wielded that weapon when a formal complaint about the bridge was filed with Secretary of War William Belknap by the Keokuk Steamboat Company and several ferries, each of which would be hurt by competition from the bridge. Belknap, who later resigned after the House voted to impeach him over an unrelated matter, was from Keokuk and a partner of the steamboat line’s owners. The charge was that some of their steamboats had smokestacks too high to fit under the bridge. Ten years earlier a solution to this problem had been found: smokestacks could simply be hinged, and lowered when passing under bridges.

  Although the bridge complied precisely with the earlier congressional legislation and plans for the bridge had been widely discussed for years and approved by both Belknap’s predecessor and Humphreys himself, now, a few weeks after Eads first criticized the canal idea, Humphreys ordered a board of Army engineers to investigate the complaint.

  Major G. K. Warren was the board member closest to Humphreys. His own career, once filled with such promise, had been derailed a few days before Appomattox when he had been unfairly relieved of his command. He had not only worked under Humphreys on the Delta Survey but fought beside him during the war, and Humphreys was helping him convince a board of inquiry that he should not have been relieved. Warren may also have felt personal animosity toward Eads. Eads was suing Warren’s brother-
in-law Washington Roebling, the great engineer building the Brooklyn Bridge; Eads had given Roebling a tour of his own work, and Roebling had then used caissons similar to Eads’ design. Finally, Warren himself was building a railroad bridge at Rock Island, Illinois, which would compete with the St. Louis bridge.

  The Army board convened at St. Louis on September 2, 1873, without officially informing the bridge company of its inquiry and while Eads was in England raising capital. In a small room with Warren suggesting appropriate answers, bridge opponents presented two full days of choreographed testimony. Then Warren drafted a statement for bridge opponents to sign saying that “the river interests” considered the bridge “a serious obstruction to navigation.”

  Only then, late on a Friday afternoon and minutes before the scheduled end of the hearing, was Taussig, chairman of the bridge company, invited to speak. He asked for an additional day of hearings to allow experts and steamboatmen who did not object to the bridge to testify, requesting “as many hours as the complainants had had weeks with which to prepare their testimony.”

  Warren snapped, “If a thousand steamboat men should come and say that this bridge was no obstruction, it could not change my opinion.” The request for another day of testimony was denied.

  A week later the board issued its report. Humphreys quickly approved it. It was merciless indeed. Eads had criticized a canal near the river’s mouth. The Corps would now ram a canal down his throat. The report not only concluded that the bridge would obstruct navigation but stated: “The Board have very carefully considered the various plans proposed for changing the present structure but find none of them satisfactory. They would therefore recommend that a canal be formed behind the east Abutment of the Bridge.”

  Humphreys was ordering Eads to build a canal with a drawbridge so ships could go around his bridge. It was an absurdity, but Humphreys had the authority to require it. Only an order from the secretary of war or the president, or an act of Congress, could prevent it.

  From Europe, Eads began his counterattack, generating a flurry of condemnations of the Corps by steamboat owners and captains. Then he returned and, with Taussig, went to Washington.

  On an unseasonably hot morning in the fall of 1873, they walked into the White House and with some trepidation asked to see President Grant. Just before the war Taussig had blocked the hiring of the then-struggling Grant as superintendent of county roads in St. Louis County, ironically because his father-in-law was a prominent southern sympathizer. The preceding year Eads had publicly supported Horace Greeley for president, against Grant. But Eads and Grant had always liked each other. And Eads had smoothed the way with Grant’s private secretary General Horace Porter. Porter, who had captured Jefferson Davis at the end of the war, was leaving the government; he and Eads would soon reach a secret agreement giving Porter a share of Eads’ profits on a venture he was about to propose.

  Grant received Eads warmly, clasping his hands in both of his own. But he addressed Taussig as “Judge,” his title when he rejected Grant’s job application—an indication that Grant remembered. Taussig froze. Then Grant laughed, saying he bore no grudges, “since I prefer my present position to that one.”

  They sat in Grant’s office while a steward served coffee. Eads recounted everything that had happened, along with the technical issues. Grant sat back, listening. He knew Humphreys well enough from the war. After half an hour he summoned his secretary of war.

  Within moments Belknap appeared. He saw Eads and blanched. Grant asked curtly: Did the bridge not conform to the congressional legislation? Had it not already received approval from the War Department? Belknap conceded both points, but pleaded for Grant to review the papers relating to the case. Coldly, Grant said: “I do not care to look at the papers. You certainly cannot remove this structure on your own judgment…. If your Keokuk friends feel aggrieved let them sue the Bridge. I think, General, you had better drop the case.”

  Belknap reddened, bowed briefly, and left.

  A few weeks later Grant was in St. Louis. He visited Eads at the bridge. The great arches were complete but only narrow planks connected them, where the roadway would be. It was a cold damp November day. They took a walk single file along the planks with the wind blowing, each of them holding their hats, walking past whistling wire ropes, the white-capped river far below them. Grant was in good cheer. They retired to the work shed. Eads opened brandy and they drank, smoked cigars, and played cards, and spoke of the past.

  DESPITE GRANT’S ORDER, Humphreys did not quit. In January 1874 the Corps issued a new report, rejecting as insufficient its own earlier recommendation of a canal, calling the bridge a “badly designed…monster…Justice demands that the bridge must come down.”

  The bridge would not come down. Eads simply ignored the order. The bridge opened July 4, 1874, on schedule, with a great celebration attended by 300,000 men and women. It spanned the river with clean and powerful symmetry, the design as simple and elemental as the river itself, and it would carry trains for a century. An extraordinary architectural and engineering achievement, Richard Kirby and Philip Laurson in their book The Early Years of Modern Civil Engineering call it “[O]ne of those remarkable advances which speed the progress of an art or science…an achievement out of all proportion to its size.” The tremendous attention focused on the bridge created instant confidence in steel and helped fuel an explosion in demand for it. In 1867, when Eads started construction, America produced 22,000 tons of steel; in 1874, when he finished, America produced 242,000 tons. But no tribute could say more than Louis Sullivan, the first great modern architect, father of the phrase “form follows function.” (To him, function included not only utility but man’s aspirations and ideals.) As a child in Chicago, he said, his “soul became immersed” in the bridge. “I followed every detail of design, every measurement…with the intensity of personal identification …here was Romance, here again was Man, the great adventurer, daring to think, daring to have faith, daring to do.”

  EVEN BEFORE THE BRIDGE OPENED, Eads embarked upon another great adventure. He had begun his career riding on the surface of the Mississippi. Then he had penetrated its depths, walked its bottom. His bridge had gone deeper than the bottom, into the bedrock below it, while enveloping it above. Now he intended more: to make the river obey his will and to transform it into a tool for his own use. If in the course of pursuing this new adventure Humphreys happened to be destroyed, that would be, as they said in New Orleans, lagniappe.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE STRUGGLE between Eads and Humphreys had become personal, rich with hatred and contempt. At stake was far more than their respective reputations, or how engineers dealt with sandbars at the mouth of the Mississippi River. At stake was the future of the millions of people who were settling in its natural floodplain. And at stake was money. The river meant money, both the money that came from trade throughout the Mississippi valley and the possible development of its floodplain. For the river itself had created enormous potential wealth in the land beside it, depositing sediment—some of the deepest and lushest soil in the world—across its floodplain. In 1857 a geologist predicted: “Whatever the Delta of the Nile may once have been will only be a shadow of what this alluvial plain of the Mississippi will be. It will be the central point—the garden spot of the North American continent—where wealth and prosperity culminate.”

  But the trade was limited as long as the river choked its mouth with sandbars, and the land was worthless as long as the river overflowed it at will. In the 1870s the river did just that. The war was one reason. Grant, in his campaign against Vicksburg, had cut levees, including the single strongest in the country. “On the second of February, [1863,] this dam, or levee, was cut,” he later wrote. “The river being high the rush of water through the cut was so great that in a very short time the entire obstruction was washed away…. As a consequence the country was covered with water.”

  His act had exposed several thousand square miles to inundation, a
nd it remained naked to the river. The poverty of southern states prevented either repairing destroyed levees or maintaining good ones. At Bonnet Carré, a few miles above New Orleans, the river broke through the levee in 1871; the crevasse would remain open, pouring water into nearby Lake Pontchartrain every flood season, until 1882.

  Since the war the lower valley had gone backward, and land that had once produced wealth had gone back to jungle. Development had become a national issue as northern investors became interested. Even Massachusetts Congressman Nathaniel Banks, a Union general, called for action: “If we make the river what it ought to be we will make 40,000,000 acres of the best cotton and sugar lands on the face of the earth in consequence of the necessary improvement of the river—40,000,000 where now 1,000,000 exists. It is inseparable from and incidental to the improvement of the Mississippi river.”

  DESPITE EADS, Humphreys seemed in a position to dictate engineering policies toward the river. He had always nurtured his relations with Congress, and had the infrastructure of the War Department behind him. In January 1874 a board of Army engineers formally considered Captain Howell’s report calling for a canal from the Mississippi to the Gulf. This board, which included Warren and, despite an obvious conflict of interest, Howell himself, first rejected Eads’ call for jetties because they had been “exhaustively treated” by Humphreys in his Physics and Hydraulics “and there is nothing more to add.” The board then endorsed Howell’s plan.

  The board’s vote was 6 to 1, the lone dissenter the board’s chairman, Colonel John Barnard, who urged further study of jetties. Barnard had actually once declined appointment as chief of engineers, urging that his mentor Fred Delafield be appointed instead. Delafield had been named, but when he retired, Barnard was not offered the post again. Humphreys was. And Humphreys immediately began making Barnard’s life difficult. Barnard later called Humphreys’ appointment “my death blow…. Every door to promotion or recognition closed.”