The Great Bridge

by David McCullough

  By the time they were at the door saying good night, Murphy had been converted. What exactly Kingsley said to him during the course of the evening was never revealed, however. All McCue said was that nobody could have withstood Kingsley’s onslaught of facts and figures.

  Possibly the story is true. Possibly Henry Murphy, like earlier patrician figures in Brooklyn, saw the bridge as a threat to a whole way of life. Old General Johnson, Brooklyn’s “first and foremost citizen” when Murphy was a young man, had declared during his campaign for mayor in 1833 that Brooklyn and New York had nothing whatever in common, in “object, interest, or feeling,” and that the river dividing them was a wonderful thing for Brooklyn. During the War of 1812 the general had been put in charge of Fort Greene, to stand in wait for an invasion of Long Island that never materialized. Later he had grown gravely concerned about an invasion of another kind. He liked Brooklyn the way it was, and said so. There were still people who felt that way, not many, but some, and perhaps Murphy was of the same mind.

  But it does not seem very likely—if only in light of Murphy’s total, unwavering devotion to the bridge from that night on. Furthermore, nearly ten years before, in 1857, the year of Roebling’s letters in the Tribune and Journal of Commerce, Murphy said most emphatically that the East River would soon cease to divide Brooklyn and New York. Speaking at a farewell dinner in his honor at the Mansion House, just before leaving for the Netherlands, he had hailed the “spirit of advancement” stirring in Brooklyn and suggested that the new water works was only a sample of the monumental enterprise such a community was capable of. Even the Tammany guests had applauded.

  But be that as it may, Kingsley was unquestionably the spearhead of the bridge idea in 1867, and he would have more at stake in the venture ahead than any other one man, with the single, notable exception of Washington Roebling. Kingsley and Murphy were the two most powerful, influential Democrats in Brooklyn—Boss McLaughlin not included—and the Brooklyn Democrats had just about all the political power and influence there was to have in Brooklyn. So whether it was that particular night by the log fire that the two of them struck their bargain is nowhere near so important to the story of the bridge as are the men themselves.

  Had a political cartoonist of the time decided to do a simplified illustrated key to Kings County politics, circa 1867, he might have drawn a bird’s-eye view of Brooklyn with Beecher commanding the Heights—just to orient people—and behind Beecher’s back, Boss McLaughlin, looking a little dull-witted, holding City Hall in the palm of his hand. At the foot of Fulton Street, beside an office labeled KINGSLEY & KEENEY, CONTRACTORS, would be the strapping young Kingsley, energetically cranking a cement mixer that spews out something marked $$$. And down the bay, off to himself, gazing from a tower window at his “villa,” his eyes on some distant horizon and looking very senatorial, would be Henry Murphy, noble as a Roman.

  In their different ways both Kingsley and Murphy were very impressive men. Kingsley was all of thirty-four in 1867, which made him young enough to be Henry Murphy’s son. Hard, resourceful, ambitious, he had established himself in business in Brooklyn the same year Murphy went to The Hague, 1857, a depression year. He came to town not knowing a soul, apparently. He had been a school teacher and also a construction boss on canals in Pennsylvania and on railroads in the Midwest. For a brief time he had worked on the Portage Railroad at Johnstown (where perhaps he heard tales of Roebling installing his iron rope a decade before). His prime attribute in that earlier time appears to have been an ability for snuffing out strikes.

  Now he was Brooklyn’s most prosperous contractor. He had paved streets, put down sewers, built the big storage reservoir at Hempstead, built much of Prospect Park, some of Central Park, branched out into the lumber business, the granite business, bought up real estate, and became “identified” with Brooklyn’s gas company and banking interests. Just ten years after stepping off the Fulton Ferry, a total stranger, and with no money to speak of, he was worth close to a million dollars and was one of the best-known men in Brooklyn.

  Boss McLaughlin had taken an almost immediate liking to him. McLaughlin himself had been nothing more than a waterfront gang leader until 1856, when, as a reward for services rendered locally in the campaign to put Buchanan in the White House, he had been appointed “Boss Laborer” at the Navy Yard. It was not long before he was “Boss” of all Brooklyn. He was, in fact, the first political manipulator to be called “Boss,” a name he never cared for. Soft-spoken, dingy-looking, a man who played dominoes for off-hours excitement, he walked about Brooklyn with his shoulders thrown back, his great stomach thrust forward. His silk hat was always last year’s and brushed the wrong way. And yet there was something “about the bearing of his round head, and the quiet keen look of his small blue eyes that betrays the leader.” It must have been something of the same look that he himself spotted in Kingsley the first time the two laid eyes on one another.

  McLaughlin had just begun to organize “The Brooklyn Ring.” With Henry Murphy out of the country, he was moving fast. Kingsley got a few paving contracts to start, then work on the water works. Kingsley’s interests in politics became very great. In no time the young man was reputed to be the most effective money raiser in the party and nobody, it was said, was closer to the Boss. For McLaughlin, plainly, he was a valuable find.

  Well over six feet tall, powerfully built, with broad shoulders and a deep chest, Kingsley “cut a striking figure in the street.” His face, smooth and honest-looking, was set off by a fine head of wavy dark-red hair and a neatly trimmed beard. He looked people right in the eye and was obviously many cuts above Boss Hugh McLaughlin. Even the New York World, which normally had no use for Kings County Democrats, credited him with “plausible” manners.

  Kingsley was Irish, but like Tweed, he was a Protestant. He was also a natural politician but, having no gift for public speaking and no apparent yearning for public office, preferred working behind the scenes. Like McLaughlin he gave no signs of aspiring to more power than could be had right at home in Brooklyn. Between them—the boss politician and the boss contractor—they had worked out a very pleasant, profitable partnership. But unlike McLaughlin, Kingsley had what another generation would call “upward mobility.” He had the potential of going very far.

  Murphy was quite a different sort. He was Old Brooklyn, he was grace and learning. For a long time he had been considered the handsomest man in town. Where Kingsley and McLaughlin were men of great physical bulk and had made their way up in the world in part because of that, Murphy was small, spare, well knit, and clean-shaven, a refined-looking man with gray hair and sharp, intelligent eyes. Judge McCue called him “cautious and subtle.” Henry Stiles, the Brooklyn historian, described him as “very earnest in manner, a little severe even.” Everybody respected him, it appears, and it is not hard to see why. According to Stiles, “no public man has, probably, passed thus far through the trying ordeal of a legislative career, so entirely free from the taint of corruption.” Once upon a time, as some of his other admirers liked to tell, Henry Murphy had nearly become President of the United States.

  John Murphy, his father, a “thorough Jefferson Democrat,” had been a Brooklyn judge, a man of some renown in his own time, who did well enough with one thing and another to send Henry to Columbia, where he was graduated in 1830. In the next few years, while reading law—at the same time young John Roebling was struggling to become a Pennsylvania farmer—Murphy made quite a name for himself. “His pen embellished and enriched” the pages of the North American Review and the Atlantic Monthly. He edited the old Brooklyn Advocate and helped organize the Young Men’s Literary Association of Brooklyn. In 1835 he went into partnership with an attorney named John A. Lott and was soon joined by another named John Vanderbilt, both older men and already prominent in Brooklyn. “From the first his firm was in high favor with Brooklyn people,” reads one biographical sketch, “especially wealthy and conservative old property-holders of Brooklyn, and it
soon built up an extensive and lucrative practice.” It also ran the Democratic Party on the Brooklyn side of the river.

  In 1841 Murphy founded the Eagle, then more explicitly named the Brooklyn Eagle and Kings County Democrat. The next year he was elected mayor at age thirty-one and commenced his administration by cutting his own salary. He went to Congress presently, served there twice, and distinguished himself by sounding forth against slavery and fostering McAlpine’s dry dock at the Navy Yard. By the time his political career had run its course, he would also serve six terms in the State Senate, try three times for the United States Senate, once for the governorship, and fail every time mainly because of the opposition of one man, William Tweed.

  But his closest brush with real glory had come in 1852 at the Democratic National Convention in Baltimore. The convention had been deadlocked after forty-eight ballots, when the Virginia delegation put up a compromise candidate, an old-fashioned party regular from New Hampshire, Franklin Pierce. But the Virginians’ support for Pierce had been anything but unanimous. Murphy had been the other choice and had lost by a single vote. Pierce had a military record, Murphy did not, and apparently that had been the deciding factor. Had Murphy been put up instead, his admirers held, he would have been nominated, elected, and done better as President than did the colorless New Hampshire man. (For one thing, coming as he did from Beecher’s home town, it is doubtful Murphy would have underestimated the abolitionists.)

  It was five years after that when Murphy was named the American Minister to The Hague, by Buchanan, and no sooner was he out of the country than Boss McLaughlin swung into action, taking complete control in Brooklyn at the same time Tweed was taking over in New York. “It was not a change for the better,” the Eagle would write in retrospect, many years later, after Murphy was dead. “Deftness in speech was supplanted by deftness in manipulation of votes; dexterity in argument made way for the dexterity which makes one count for two for your side. The deterioration of our political methods began then…”

  Recalled from The Hague by Lincoln in 1861, Murphy returned to face other problems as well. A man taken into his law firm had squandered money and left the firm unable to pay its bills. Murphy, who had been planning to retire once he was home again, made good on all the firm’s commitments out of his own savings, which nearly ruined him. As a result he had not only gone back to practicing law, but began taking an interest in various local business propositions, such as the development of Coney Island, which was something he had not done before.

  In the years since, it was commonly remarked, there had been a certain air of disappointment about Henry Murphy. Albany was now his only field of political influence and there he appears to have been a rather lonely, incongruous figure, with his literary tastes and perfect manners. But he was immensely influential all the same, and for Brooklyn, a most valuable asset.

  Privately he turned more and more to his family, his books, his scholarly interest in Brooklyn history. At the moment, he was finishing up a translation of a journal kept by two Dutchmen during a trip to New Netherlands in 1679, something he had found in an Amsterdam bookshop. * This was his third such translation and the library where he, Kingsley, and McCue held their historic conversation housed what would one day be evaluated as among the two or three finest collections of early Americana in the entire country. “Mr. Murphy only failed as a politician,” said one Brooklyn observer of the time; “in all else his life was a grand success.”

  In talent, disposition, age, background, physique, in just about every way, Kingsley and Murphy were as different as they could be, opposite and complementary, and they worked superbly together.

  Murphy “threw himself” into the bridge enterprise. He drafted an incorporating charter and “with great energy…enlisted the interest of his friends,” his prominent, respectable friends, to be more exact. The thirty-eight directors he rounded up included the mayors of both cities, such presentable Brooklyn Democrats as McCue and Isaac van Anden, owner of the Eagle, and for the Republicans and old Brooklyn, Simeon Chittenden, J. Carson Brevoort, and Henry E. Pierrepont (son of Hezekiah). He also talked up the bridge at every opportunity and took framed copies of a bridge Julius Adams had designed with him to Albany to pass about among his fellow legislators. To no one’s surprise, the Eagle gave him full support. “Every Brooklynite, resident or capitalist, is interested in bridging the East River,” wrote Thomas Kinsella.

  The bill was submitted on January 25, 1867, and passed on April 16. Neither Murphy nor Kingsley, nor the name of any engineer, was listed as having any association with the proposed project.

  The New York Bridge Company, a private corporation, was to have the power to purchase any real estate needed for the bridge and its approaches and to fix tolls. The legislation fixed the capital stock at five million dollars, with power to increase it, and gave the cities of Brooklyn and New York authority to subscribe to as much of the stock as determined by their respective Common Councils. The stock was to be valued at a hundred dollars a share. The company was to be run by a president who would be elected annually. In time this document of Henry Murphy’s creation would be looked upon as little better than a license to steal, but at this stage, for some reason, nobody seems to have regarded it that way.

  Kingsley was to line up private money and see about the engineer. Perhaps his initial impulse had been to go along with Julius Adams, as he had led Adams to believe he would. But that seems doubtful. Adams would have been a bad choice and it is known that Murphy never entertained the idea for a minute. Adams had no reputation and had never built a bridge of any consequence. Indeed, one might well wonder why Adams was ever brought into the picture in the first place were it not for some comments made later by Washington Roebling in his private notebooks, where, it happens, a very great deal about the bridge would be said that does not appear in the official records or the various old “histories.”

  Adams had been nothing more than a straw man all along, according to the young engineer. His role had been not so much to design a bridge as to concoct the lowest possible estimate for a bridge. That way the real engineer, if he seriously wanted the job, would have to pare his figures to the bone, which in turn would give the promoters of the scheme a more attractive price tag to talk about. The point was to work a little businesslike deception right at the start, before any real plans had even been drawn up. “Adams surpassed himself by an estimate of $2,000,000,” Washington Roebling wrote. As a result John A. Roebling was forced to trim his own estimate by more than one million dollars, knowing perfectly well what was going on and that his figure was ridiculous.

  Then Kingsley and Murphy did some more cutting of their own to arrive at the five-million-dollar figure used in the Albany bill.

  In May 1867, a month after the bill was passed, a meeting of the New York Bridge Company was held in the Supreme Court chambers at the County Courthouse in Brooklyn. Henry Murphy was appointed to fill a vacancy caused by the death of one of the directors. At a meeting three days later, Henry Murphy was elected president, and a week after that John A. Roebling was appointed Chief Engineer with full authority to design any sort of bridge he wished. A man had been selected, rather than a particular plan—Roebling had no real plan at that point. Kingsley said later the very nature of the enterprise demanded someone of towering reputation. The name Roebling was “invaluable to this enterprise in its infancy,” Kingsley would explain. There could not be a breath of doubt or suspicion concerning the integrity of the builder.

  The explanation of the choice of Chief Engineer was worded thusly in the official company records: “Confidence on the part of the public and of those whose money was to be invested in the undertaking would best be insured by employing the Engineer who had achieved the most successful results, and who was thus most likely to accomplish this great enterprise.” No other engineer was ever considered.

  Roebling’s salary was to be eight thousand dollars a year, but any work he did until the bridge actually got un
der way was strictly on speculation.

  Things were moving very fast that spring of 1867. Roebling was told to proceed at once with his surveys and come up with a proposal. He was also led to understand that Kingsley, who was neither a director nor officer of the new company, would personally cover any expenses involved, although nothing was put in writing about it. Test borings were made and in two months’ time, having scrapped all his earlier sketches, Roebling was back in Brooklyn with his plan. At the first meeting of the Bridge Company’s newly formed Board of Directors, a Committee on Plans and Surveys recommended “the immediate commencement of the work.”

  That was in October. But more than a year would pass before another meeting was held. Nor would there be any noticeable progress made on even the most preliminary construction. Three thousand new buildings went up in Brooklyn in 1868—churches, stores, banks, more factories, an ice-skating rink, row on row of plain-fronted brick and brownstone houses that sold about as fast as they were finished—but to judge by actions, not words, the Great Bridge was no more than a great figment of the imagination, nothing but a lot of politicians’ talk, by all appearances. The New York Bridge Company was nothing more than a name on paper as far as most people could tell. The famous engineer from Trenton was nowhere to be seen.

  The delay, however, was not due to any indifference or lack of sincerity on the part of Kingsley or Murphy, or of Roebling certainly. The problem was in New York City. Back at the start of the century, when Thomas Pope’s “Rainbow Bridge” had been a favorite topic of conversation in Brooklyn, it was said that the only thing needed to bring a bridge about was “a combination of opinion.” Thus was the case now. Now especially that it had become something more than just a Brooklyn dream, the bridge could no longer be considered wholly a Brooklyn enterprise.