The Great Bridge

by David McCullough

  A century later, D. B. Steinman, a noted bridgebuilder and professor of civil engineering, would write, “Under such a curriculum the average college boy of today would be left reeling and staggering. In that earlier era, before colleges embarked upon mass production, engineering education was a real test and training, an intensive intellectual discipline and professional equipment for a most exacting life work. Only the ablest and the most ambitious could stand the pace and survive the ordeal.”

  Roebling, however, would take a different view when he came to appraise the system long afterward. He saw no virtue whatever in what he called “that terrible treadmill of forcing an avalanche of figures and facts into young brains not qualified to assimilate them as yet.” “I am still busy,” he said, “trying to forget the heterogeneous mass of unusable knowledge that I could only memorize, not really digest.” The strain was terrific. Of the sixty-five students who started out in his class, only twelve finished. And among those who did not finish there had been some rather severe breakdowns, it appears, and one suicide.

  The suicide was Roebling’s first real experience with tragedy. It is not entirely clear what happened, but in the late fall of 1856, during his final year at Troy, a classmate killed himself and apparently it was because of his feelings for Roebling. All there is of the incident in the written record is a letter Roebling wrote to Emily during the war, and two desperate notes written by the unfortunate young man shortly before he did away with himself, all three of which Emily saved.

  “My candle is certainly bewitched,” he wrote to her from Virginia, nearly ten years after the incident, “every five minutes it goes out, there must be something in the wick, unless it be the spirit of some just man made perfect, come to torment me while I am writing to my love. Are any of your old beaus dead? If I wasn’t out of practice with spiritual writing I would soon find out.

  “There is only one friend whose spirit I want to communicate with,” he continued, “you have his picture with mine; he committed suicide because he loved me and I didn’t sufficiently reciprocate his affection; I advised him to find someone like you for instance, but he always said no woman had sense enough to understand his love.”

  And that is all Roebling seems to have written on the subject, just one small paragraph in his neat copperplate hand that leaps out of the last page of a love letter written late at night in Virginia, after he had been “building bridges and swearing all day.”

  The first of the other two letters was in German and written on the evening of October 5, 1856, which was apparently after Roebling had rejected his friend’s proposal for some sort of formally declared bond between them. The writer pleads for Roebling to understand the nature of his affections and his misery, and asked Roebling to “make allowances.” “Our temperaments are so very different, that something which appears only natural to me may perhaps appear incomprehensible or ridiculous to you.” And again he begged Roebling to declare his own affections for him, and for him alone. The letter is signed “Your friend,” but the name has been erased, whether by Roebling or the young man who wrote it is not known. Roebling was still quite unwilling to agree to what was being asked of him.

  The next letter was written on Thanksgiving Day. There is only a copy of the first part of it, written from memory by Roebling later that day. The young man, it seems, had taken to using chloroform as a narcotic and explained to Roebling how to bring him out of an overdose, should Roebling find him in that condition (“…pour cold water over my head, then breath air from your mouth into my lungs and if there is no success get Dr. Bonetecon and tell him to cup me in the neck; as ultima ratio you may try Electro-Magnetism….”). Then he wrote, “If your efforts should prove fruitless do this: Keep of my things whatever you like, it is all yours!”

  Roebling noted on the letter, “At this moment he suddenly staggered in, asking why I did not stay with him. Accordingly I went to his room—he took the letter afterwards so that I had no opportunity to copy it. The rest was merely an inventory of his property, together with some parting words of love.”

  Just when the young man died, or how, remains unknown. But the whole pitiful affair was a dreadful experience for Roebling, an unpleasant memory ever after. It may also account in large measure for the bitter feelings he later expressed about the prescribed regimen at Rensselaer. Even the few who did graduate, he wrote, “left the school as mental wrecks,” which was an exaggeration clearly, his own case being the most obvious evidence to the contrary.

  It was the summer of 1857, the time of the great panic, the year his father first proposed an East River bridge, the same year William Kingsley moved to Brooklyn, and the same summer Henry Murphy sailed for the Netherlands, that Roebling finished college and returned home to Trenton, his boyhood over.

  His first job was in the mill, and it seems he was actually running things there, entirely on his own, almost immediately, his father and Charles Swan both being away on other business. Then in the spring of 1858, he was on his way to Pittsburgh to work with his father on the Allegheny River Bridge. His salary was eight hundred dollars a year.

  Pittsburgh was home for the next two years and he developed a great attachment to the place, writing his family that he regretted the day when he would have to leave. “Pittsburgh is getting along quite smart now,” he informed Charles Swan. “I doubt if there is a lazy man in it, your humble servant perhaps excepted.” Already he had ten times as many friends as in Trenton, he said. He kept a small notebook that he titled “Lists of Persons I have been introduced to in Pittsburgh, Pa.” and scattered among the names of contractors and ironmongers were a Miss McClure, Miss Carr, Miss Mendenhall, Miss Blake, and a Miss Molly Smith of Chambersburg.

  He lived in a boardinghouse on Penn Street, worked hard, played chess with the other boarders, went to the opera, argued with his father about invariably starting the work day at six thirty in the morning, recovered from a series of severe abdominal attacks (the cure was his father’s vile concoction of raw eggs, warm water, and turpentine), and he wrote home at length, describing with spirit and humor, as his father never would, what was happening in the world about him, apart from work.

  He had been to hear Edward Everett at a celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the taking of Fort Duquesne. He described the iron buildings going up everywhere (“There is a perfect mania here for improvements…”), a storm that nearly took part of the bridge away, and “dark, cloudy, smoky afternoons, when the sun doesn’t shine and the gas is lit at 4¼.” One letter he began this way:

  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, Gettysbur
g, 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 house 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.