The Great Bridge

by David McCullough

  Later, he would also write this memorable description of Abraham Lincoln:

  …I was in the Civil War for four years and saw Lincoln on two occasions—the first in May 1861, when he spoke a few words of welcome from the rear portico of the White House to the newly arriving soldiers, one of whom I was, and secondly about April 1, 1864, when he came down to Culpeper County to review the army previous to the Battle of the Wilderness. I was at that time major and aide-de-camp to General Warren, commanding the 5th Corps, and joined the cavalcade.

  The President was mounted on a hard-mouthed, fractious horse, and was evidently not a skilled horseman.

  Soon after the march began his stovepipe hat fell off; next his pantaloons, which were not fastened on the bottom, slipped up to his knees, showing his white homemade drawers, secured below with some strings of white tape, which presently unraveled and slipped up also, revealing a long hairy leg.

  While we were inclined to smile, we were at the same time very much chagrined to see our poor President compelled to endure such unmerited and humiliating torture. After repairs were made the review continued…

  As the war dragged on, Roebling, like thousands of others on both sides, grew increasingly despondent, wondering if ever there would be an end to the killing days, as he said. “They must put fresh steam on the man factories up North,” he told Emily, “the demand down here for killing purposes is far ahead of the supply; thank God however for this consolation that when the last man is killed the war will be over.”

  The real heroes, he said, were the privates in the line, but then added bitterly, “When I think sometimes what those men all do and endure day after day, with their lives constantly in danger, I can’t but wonder that there should be men who are such fools, I can’t call them anything else. And that is just the trouble we are laboring under now—the fools have all been killed and the rest think it is about played out to stand up and get shot.” It was only a matter of time, he believed, before he too would be dead.

  Off duty he played cards, picked fleas, smoked cigars, drank whiskey whenever he could get it, cursed the heat and tried to think of Troy, New York, in the winter of 1856, when the thermometer outside his bedroom window had marked 20 below. Like others about him, he developed increasing sympathy for the people he was working so hard to defeat. He wrote again to Emily, “…the conduct of the Southern people appears many times truly noble as exemplified for instance in the defense of Petersburg; old men with silver locks lay dead in the trenches side by side with mere boys of 13 and 14; it almost makes me sorry to have to fight against people who show such devotion for their homes and country.”

  Emily had come into his life on the evening of February 22, 1864, at the Second Corps Officers Ball, which had been held in a huge wooden hall especially built for the occasion under his supervision. “In point of attendance,” he had written to Elvira, “nothing better could have been desired; at least 150 ladies graced the assemblage, from all quarters of the Union, and at least 300 gentlemen from General Meade down to myself.” The occasion was a grand success.

  Our supper cost 1500 dollars and was furnished by parties in Washington. The most prominent ladies of Washington were present from Miss Hamlin, Kate Chase and the Misses Hale down. Last but not least was Miss Emily Warren, sister of the General, who came specially from West Point to attend the ball; it was the first time I ever saw her and I am very much of the opinion that she has captured your brother Washy’s heart at last. It was a real attack in force. It came without warning or any previous realization on my part of such an occurrence taking place and it was therefore all the more successful and I assure you that it gives me the greatest pleasure to say that I have succumbed…

  They wrote to each other almost daily after that and met again, two or three times, at General Warren’s wife’s home in Baltimore, and at camp, when Emily and young Mrs. Warren came to visit the general. At about the time Lincoln made his visit, Roebling was writing to his father to tell him he planned to be married, expecting all kinds of arguments in return. But the letter from Cincinnati was not what he expected and represents one of those rare instances when John A. Roebling revealed his affection for his oldest son, as well as his total confidence in his judgment.

  MY DEAR WASHINGTON,

  Your communication of the 25th came to hand last night, and I hasten to reply. The news of your engagement has not taken me by surprise, because I had previously received a hint from Elvira in that direction. I take it for granted, that love is the motive, which actuates you, because a matrimonial union without love is no better than suicide. I also take it for granted, that the lady of your choice is deserving of your attachment. These two points being settled, there stands nothing more in your way except the rebellion and the chances of war. These contingencies having all passed away, you and your young bride, as you know beforehand, will be welcome at the paternal house in Trenton. Our house will always be open to you and yours, and if there is not room enough, a new one can be built on the adjoining ground, or one can be rented.

  As to your future support, you are fully aware, that the business at Trenton is now suffering for want of superintendence, and that no increase or enlargement can be thought of without additional help. Of course I do not want to engage strangers, and it is you therefore, who is expected to step in and help forwarding the interests of the family as well as yourself individually…

  Should you be in want of money at any time, let me know.

  I conclude with the request that you will assure your young bride of my most affectionate regards beforehand, and before I shall have the pleasure of making her personal acquaintance.

  Your affectionate father,

  She had gone to Trenton herself after that. His father had met her in New York and they had taken the train to Trenton together. “I like her very much and have not the least doubt that your union with her will be a happy one,” John Roebling informed his son. And Washington wrote to her at Trenton, “I dare say you could not sleep the first night on account of the water in the raceway making such a terrific noise…. Be sure and tell me all about your impressions…what do you think of Tilton the Bridgetender or Mitchell the lockkeeper or Mrs. Reilly that keeps the Irish tavern across the canal?”

  Thereafter his days seemed endless. Little was happening and the boredom was unlike anything he had ever known, as he tried to describe for her:

  This day might be signalized as one of the most uneventful ones I ever passed. I wrote perhaps two hours, fooled around for two more, walked for one, and that besides eating and drinking was the end of it. The programme at night is still more stupid, as it is chiefly spent shivering, turning over fifty times and occasionally dreaming of you. My mind is no longer as imaginative as it was 10 years ago, many of my dreams at that period are still vivid in my recollection. Had a great time hunting for a button tonight, finding none after all my search, and as I write the string at the bottom of my drawers comes off; that will be another sewing job before I go to bed.

  He worried about his mother, who was failing rapidly, and not the least of her troubles, his father wrote, was concern over his safety. He thought about the future, worried that he had forgotten everything he ever knew about engineering, puzzled over where he and Emily might settle once the war was over. He pondered the possibility of not following in his father’s footsteps. Trenton had no appeal, despite his father’s generous proposals. “The town is horribly dull,” he told her, “and I always get tired of it after being there a week.” When he daydreamed of home, it was nearly always of Saxonburg. “I have now more lasting memories of the first eight years of my life there, than I have of the intervening twenty,” he wrote. But there could be no going back to Saxonburg.

  He grew a beard, changed the way he combed his hair to suit her, adopted two stray dogs, a family of kittens, a lizard, and took to sleeping with the blanket pulled over his face to keep off the flies, his feet sticking out at the bottom, a pose that inspired a fellow officer to do
a pencil sketch, which Roebling included in one of his letters to Emily. In another letter, he told her, “I have been solacing myself all evening by playing on a fiddle, had a great time getting it, borrowed a bow from another man and stole the rosin from a sick horse; it did me good and so I played until the tips of my fingers began to ache…”

  In November of 1864 his mother died and he hurried back to Trenton for the funeral; “…the greatest giver of us all [is] gone,” he told Emily. Then, at the end of the year, the war, for him, was over. He was commissioned lieutenant colonel, by brevet, as of December 6, for gallant conduct during the campaign before Richmond. By Christmas he was home to stay. In January, at Cold Spring, New York, he and Emily were married.

  They lived in Trenton at first and he went back to the wire mill. But that lasted only a few months. In the early spring of 1865, just before the war ended, he left for Cincinnati to join his father on the Ohio River bridge and once he found a place to live, she came on. By the time the bridge was completely finished, they had spent nearly two years in Cincinnati, and his father had been back in Trenton the better part of that time.

  In early 1867, when it appeared that the East River bridge at last had some serious support, his father had written to say he wanted him to go to Europe the following summer to make a study of pneumatic caissons, that Emily ought to go too, and that he would pay all their expenses. “Your kind offer…I accept with pleasure,” Washington Roebling wrote in answer; “Emily is especially delighted, to her the idea of going to Europe is something exceedingly grand.”

  They sailed at the end of June, when Emily was a few months’ pregnant. They were in England for a number of weeks, then France later, and Germany, where the baby was born. In London they visited St. Paul’s, Parliament, Westminster, the Zoological Gardens. From their window at the Royal Hotel, he had watched construction of the Blackfriars Bridge and made a drawing of it to send his father.

  He made flying visits to Telford’s bridge over the Menai Strait and Brunel’s bridge at Clifton, for a long time considered the most beautiful suspension bridge in the world. He did not think Telford’s towers very handsome, he wrote to John Roebling. The floor, very light in weight, had no strengthening truss. There was a stiff breeze blowing as he walked out on it and the vibrations were very strongly felt, he said. The towers for the Clifton Bridge he called remarkably ugly.

  They visited Manchester and he spent several days looking over the noted steelworks of Richard Johnson & Nephew, where the wire for the Cincinnati Bridge had been made. They went to Birmingham, Sheffield, Newcastle, then on to Paris to see the Exposition, but left after a week because they were running low on money. One lady costs twice as much in Paris as two men, he explained to his father. The fair was considered the greatest international exhibition ever and among the American Commissioners was his Trenton neighbor and competitor in the wire business, Abram Hewitt. But Roebling thought little of the fair, nothing but “a great advertising show,” he said.

  At Essen, Germany, to his astonishment, he was given the grand tour of the Krupp works, as though he were visiting nobility. On first arriving in Essen he had been told by several townspeople that an outsider had virtually no chance of visiting the works. He had spent one long night drinking wine with some of the young engineers employed there, hoping to win a friend who would open a few doors, but he had received only long faces whenever he mentioned the subject. Finally, figuring he had nothing to lose, he went directly to the main office, expecting to get nowhere and finding instead that they were eagerly awaiting his arrival. The management, he discovered, was well aware of the forthcoming East River bridge, knew all about his trip to Europe, and had already made up a sample eyebar for his personal inspection.

  In all three countries he talked to bridgebuilders, wire manufacturers, visited iron works, filled his notebooks and letters with tens of thousands of words and hundreds of tiny freehand drawings and diagrams. He had an almost uncanny gift for observation and could commit vast quantities of information to memory, yet he never gave any sign of making a special effort along those lines. He would walk about a construction site or through a mill listening politely to his host, paying, it would appear, only the most casual attention to what he was being shown. Then he would return to a hotel room and write down a full description of what he had seen, with the most extraordinary memory for detail and great critical analysis.

  After his return from Europe, for instance, while stopping over in Pittsburgh, he was invited to take a walk through Andrew Carnegie’s new Keystone Bridge works and that night, in private, at the Monongahela House, he had written his father a complete report of the entire Keystone operation, describing the different machines in use and how they worked, the production patterns followed, the personnel involved, the various products turned out and his opinion on their relative merits. The letter went on for pages, even in his minute hand, and it was all put down directly, with no apparent hesitation, no erasures or editing, and, apparently, with no special effort. At the close, after remarking that he found Carnegie and his brother “very pleasant people,” he told his father, “I could fill another letter of 20 pages to describe all I saw—still I keep it all in mind.”

  The value of such a son was not lost on the father, and as the young man made his way across Europe, he sent off one letter after another, each taken up almost entirely with technical matters—on wiremaking, on the latest developments in metallurgy, Bessemer steel making in particular, and on caissons, which he spelled “cassoons” for some reason—and everything was set forth with the sort of clarity and thoroughness demanded by the exacting mind back in Trenton. By the time he and Emily and the baby were on their way home across the Atlantic in March of 1868, he knew more on the subject of pneumatic caissons than any American engineer.

  The success of the bridge at Brooklyn, he and his father knew, would depend on the caissons. Everything hung on their success. If they could be sunk beneath the river properly and to the required depths—and they would have to be bigger by far than any caissons ever constructed before—then there seemed little doubt that the bridge could be built. If not, there would be no bridge, or at least not the one John Roebling had described with such persuasive language in the fall of 1867, when, as it happens, his son was still in Europe trying to determine just how the thing could best be done.

  After returning home, Roebling busied himself at the Trenton mill, waiting for the New York politicians to settle their affairs. In 1868 his father finished the basic plans for the caisson, while he made another long tour at his father’s request, this time through the hard-coal regions of eastern Pennsylvania to see how wire rope could be used in mining operations. He and Emily were staying in the big house temporarily. His father had remarried. Ferdinand too was married by this time. Laura came visiting from Staten Island with her children. By fall the baby was walking.

  When the word came from Brooklyn that the bridge was all set to go, he and Emily packed up and moved to the house on Hicks Street.

  In the months immediately following his father’s death, Roebling spent much of his time away from Brooklyn. He made repeated trips to Trenton, where he had his father’s estate to settle, as well as the wire business to look after. There were long family gatherings in the big house. It was agreed that Ferdinand would take charge of the business eventually and that Charles would come in with him as soon as he finished at Troy. But for the time being Washington would make the major decisions. Nobody foresaw any problems with that, but not very long afterward, at a time when Washington was having troubles enough in Brooklyn, a full-scale family fight developed over what to do about Charles Swan. Ferdinand did not want Swan made a partner, as his father had requested in his will. Washington said he should be. Swan quit and went off somewhere, leaving no word behind; plainly furious. But things were patched up eventually and Swan returned to work, on generous financial terms, but not as a partner.

  It was also agreed, after some difference of opinion, th
at Washington was to be Eddie’s guardian. Roebling felt he had more than enough to cope with as things were, building his father’s bridge and looking after his own small family, without trying to be the father his father had never been to his troubled little brother. But the others felt differently, it appears, and so Eddie was packed off to Brooklyn, where Emily had a room prepared for him.

  For Roebling, there was still more traveling to be done. He spent a day with Horatio Allen in Port Chester looking at dredging gear. He went to Albany to look at the black limestone and granite going into the foundations of the new state capitol, which had been engineered by William Jarvis McAlpine. He stopped at Kingston to visit a limestone quarry and to talk to the people there. He filled his small black leather notebook with pages of names, addresses, and reminders. “Find out where they get the broken stone at the Post Office…. Find out all about calcium light…. Find out who makes derrick forgings.” He went to Niantic, Connecticut, to look at granite and to Hallowell, Maine, to inspect the quarries of J. R. Bodwell. The infamous Tombs prison had been built of Bodwell’s stone, as had the coping of the huge new reservoir in Central Park, some of which had been built by William C. Kingsley. The quality of the granite, Roebling wrote in his notebook, was “very fine, very durable…the whitest granite known.”

  His most vital concern, however, was the first giant caisson. In mid-August, immediately after Collingwood reported for work, Roebling had handed him rough drawings and a long written account of what was wanted, and Collingwood, Paine, and Hildenbrand had set to work on final plans, figured down to the last inch. The only one who could handle such an order, it was decided, was a shipbuilder, and on October 25, 1869, the contract was awarded to the firm of Webb & Bell, whose yards were up the river at Green-point. And if a date were to be picked to mark the beginning of the building of the bridge, it probably ought to be that one.