21

Emily

At first I thought I would succumb, but I had a strong tower to lean upon, my wife, a woman of infinite tact and wisest counsel.

—WASHINGTON ROEBLING

SHE HAD been born and raised in a house much like this one and her whole life, until she married, had been spent in the upper Hudson Valley, where the river was not only a major event in the landscape, but a central part of everyone’s way of life. Talk of tides, of winter freeze-overs and the spring breakup, had been part of ordinary conversation for as long as she could remember.

The town dock at Cold Spring stood at the foot of Main Street. In summer when the “up” boats from New York stopped—the Mary Powell, the Emeline—it was always a grand occasion. And at night, from her bedroom as a child, she could hear the steam whistles of the great side-wheelers trailing off through the Highlands.

She had grown up on that part of the Hudson where, for some fifteen miles, it cuts a deep narrow channel through thickly wooded mountains, the most picturesque and fabled part of the whole valley. She could still see part of the river now, just the very broad leadgray final end of it, emptying into the Upper Bay, beyond the tip of Manhattan. And now, as then, she could stand at her window and watch the afternoon sun go down and the lights come on across the water. The sun set earlier in Cold Spring than it did here, and with the mountains crowding all around, the evening skies had never been so spectacular as these. Then, the lights had been few, from West Point only. Still and all there was enough that was the same to make her feel very much at home here.

The house stood at a prime spot on the Heights. It was tall, stately, spacious, built before the war in the Greek Revival style, and it was located at the northern end of Columbia Heights, the street running parallel to the river, about half a mile from the bridge. The address was 110 Columbia Heights, in the block between Pineapple and Orange Streets, on the west side of the street, the side with the view. Like nearly every house on that side, it had a deep garden in back, extending out over the top of a carriage house and stable built below the brink of the bluff, fronting on Furman Street beside the wharves. Moses Beach, the publisher and a pillar of Plymouth Church, lived next door. Henry Bowen, who had done much to stir up the Beecher scandal and whose deceased wife was said to have been another paramour of the famous divine, lived just up the street in a colossal white mansion with a two-story Corinthian portico, and Beecher himself lived in the next block.

From her front windows, overlooking the street, she could see the old Turkish baths that John Roebling had patronized and directly across the street stood a row of three-storied brick houses with beautifully arched doorways and long, polished plate-glass windows, much like her own. The houses fronted directly on to the brick sidewalk, as hers did, giving the street a nicely balanced, orderly look. With the sun casting tree shadows on the pink brick walls, everything looked secure and private, as in a courtyard. But from the back of the house, from the big bay windows on every floor, the whole of the harbor, the river, the bridge, and the city beyond were spread before her.

For six years in all, this would be the center of her universe. She was anything but a recluse by temperament, and unlike her husband she could come and go at will, but when she did it would be for his sake nearly always and for his sake she would do everything in her power to keep this place of theirs both private and utterly tranquil, like the eye of a storm.

She was thirty-five years old now. She had been married for fourteen years. For nearly ten of those years her husband had been working on the bridge and for more than half that time he had been an invalid, for a long while very close to death and always greatly dependent on her.

Their son now was nearly an adolescent and apparently she had known for some time that there would be no more children. She had had a bad fall in Germany shortly before he was born, and afterward had bled for nearly a month in the little inn in Mühlhausen, her husband calling in one German doctor after another. The trip home across the Atlantic had been an agony. But she seems to have kept in almost perfect health thereafter, despite everything she had on her shoulders. And she seems to have made an enormous impression on everyone she met.

One newspaper article said, “Mrs. Roebling is a tall and handsome woman, strikingly English in style and shows not only in her face, but in her graceful carriage, an aristocratic ancestry.” She was considered an exceptional horsewoman and known for both her “scientific bent of mind” and decided opinions on many subjects.

Among the best physical descriptions of her is one Washington Roebling wrote during the war, in a letter to his sister Elvira:

I would send you a little tintype [of Emily] if it didn’t happen to be a horrid picture, not doing a particle of justness to the subject. Some people’s beauty lies not in the features but in the varied expression that the countenance will assume under various emotions, etc., etc…. She is dark-brown eyed, slightly pug-nosed, lovely mouth and teeth, no dimples in her cheeks, like Laura the corners of the mouth supply that, and a most entertaining talker, which is a mighty good thing you know, I myself being so stupid. She is a little above medium size and has a most lovely complexion…

He would never be satisfied with any photograph of her no matter how many times she tried. They gave no idea of her “peculiar grace of carriage,” he said.

Six weeks after he had met her he had bought a diamond ring and gone off on a flying visit to Baltimore, where she was staying with her sister-in-law, the general’s wife. He had never had any second thoughts about her and apparently her feelings were the same. By April he was addressing his letters, “My good Mrs. Wash,” and telling her, “You know, darling, that your presence always made me feel so good, a kind of contented feeling pervaded me if you were only near. It was not necessary to say anything, perfect silence was as much companionship as the liveliest chatter.”

She had written him steadily through the rest of the war, long, affectionate letters full of the everyday details of her life. But he had destroyed them all, almost as soon as he read them, telling her they made the separation that much more difficult for him. She, however, had saved everything he wrote, more than a hundred letters from the front in less than a year’s time.

“This full moon evening would be delightful if I only had someone to enjoy it with,” she read in a letter from Virginia, shortly before the Battle of the Wilderness. “In fact I would not care how the evening was if I only had you with me. I do wonder which of us two can be called the most lovesick; I am disposed to yield the palm to you because you used to consider such a thing so utterly impossible in your case. How long will it be before we shall get tired of each other, in other words what is the length of the honeymoon among people raised around Cold Spring, just ask your friends about it and tell me dearest.”

He told her about the things he loved, dogs, astronomy, Thackeray. He told her about a Trenton girl named Gussie Laveille, who, he warned, was coming down to visit his camp if she did not. He told her about the boredom and futility of war, and it seemed he had an infinite number of names for her. “Dearest Emmie,” he called her, or “Sweet Em” or “My good Emily” or “Dearest Girl,” “My dear old woman,” “My charming Miss Warren,” “My loved one,” “My Darling,” “My darling Emmie,” “My Lazy Darling,” “My own particular Darling,” “My own Emily,” “Sweetest Love.”

“After all, dear Emmie, pray tell me what is love,” he asked. “Is it kissing each other, is it tickling, hugging, etc. one another? Is it writing billy duxes, kicking each other’s shins under the table? That must be it I think—the shins!”

“Look for a big thief next winter,” he wrote in July, “he proposes to steal the only valuable thing in Cold Spring and intends to escape detection by changing the name of the stolen article which will render identification impossible.”

“Does the Mary Powellrun when the river is frozen?” he asked later. “When I visit you at Cold Spring I am supposed to fly on wings of love so anything short of the railroad will be too slow. Isn’t it curious that although I was nearly four years at Troy and traveled ever so many times up and down by rail and boat I should recollect every place except Cold Spring. I dare say I must have seen you often when the train passed, rolling a hoop along the street in short frocks.”

She had gone down to Staten Island soon after that to meet some of his family for the first time—his sister Laura, her Mr. Methfessel from Mühlhausen, and their children. Apparently the experience was something of a cold bath for her, as he learned soon enough, to his great pleasure.

Your letter describing the visit to all the Dutch uncles and cousins, etc., was very amusing to me; your heart must have sunk within you as you seem to take it for granted that your life henceforth was to be spent in a Dutch atmosphere. The tone of your letter is one of sad resignation and even your Wash seems of scarcely sufficient weight to counter-balance the scale. And well might it be so if your life were doomed to be spent among that Dutch crowd on Staten Island…. However you must take heart my dear; all of our family is as much American as you could wish with the exception of Mother and she never had the opportunity. And again my dear you must remember that in course of time you will be the one to take the lead and be at the head of the home circle.

It was after that that she made her first trip to Trenton to see the “home circle” where she was expected to “take the lead.” Then his two brothers had gone to Cold Spring before he did, at her invitation. They were all looking each other over. Ferdinand especially had taken a great liking to her, a little too great, Roebling wrote to her, and only partly in jest one suspects.

“When the two hopefuls of the house of Roebling come I hope you will take good care of them and keep them out of temptation and danger,” Washington kidded her. “Their youthful minds are just at that stage now that their visit to you at Cold Spring will never be effaced from their minds as long as they live.” How many days would he be expected to stay at her house before the wedding took place he wanted to know. He hoped one would do.

“I still entertain a lively remembrance of the promise you exacted of me to stay in my own room the first night, but I forget whether I assented or not—how was that?”

He had come to Cold Spring on leave, in the fall, when the weather had turned suddenly sharp and raw. She had met him at the depot, just back from the boat wharf, and they had driven up Main Street, a straight steep climb back from the river. He was in uniform and if there had ever been a handsomer couple seen in Cold Spring nobody could remember when.

Everybody in the little town knew her. The Warrens were one of the prominent families in the county. Her grandfather was John Warren, who, according to one of the old Putnam County histories, “aspired to no higher distinction than that of a plain, practical farmer, which he was. The purity of his motives, and the honesty of his heart, were never questioned; and in all the relations of life he never gave just cause of offense to his neighbor…. His children, so far as we know them, inherit his virtues.” Her father, Sylvanus Warren, had been the youngest of old John’s seven children, a distinguished, learned man and a close personal friend of Washington Irving’s. Her mother had been Phebe Lickley before she married.

Old John had kept a well-known tavern that was still standing on the Albany Post Road and he had prospered until steamboats began plying the river and the Post Road was no longer the fastest route north and south. Her own father had also provided well for his big family, having invested in the famous West Point Foundry, an ordnance works and Cold Spring’s sole industry, which stood by the river’s edge. With the foundry testing its Parrott guns, and officers coming and going from West Point, the war had never seemed quite so far removed to Cold Spring people as it had to most Northerners. Often as she sat at her desk writing to Washington, she could hear the big guns pounding away. In a yard beside the foundry they were loaded to full capacity, then fired at the rocky face of Storm King Mountain on the far side of the river, upstream. The shells, when they hit, threw up enormous masses of earth and stone and the impressions made in the side of the mountain would be plainly visible for years to come.

The most notable member of the family, however, was her brother, the general, G.K. as he was called, who had been named after Gouverneur Kemble, an erudite, convivial Cold Spring man who had started the foundry. There had been twelve Warren children, but only six had survived beyond childhood, of whom G.K. was the oldest. He was nearly fourteen years older than Emily, who was next to the youngest, and for her there was no more dashing heroic figure. Except for Hamilton Fish, Grant’s aristocratic Secretry of State, who kept a country estate in nearby Garrison, General Gouverneur Kemble Warren was Putnam County’s most famous citizen.

His graduation from West Point had been a momentous event in the Warren family, but Emily had been too young to remember much of it. When he had entered the Academy at sixteen, he had gone with a lofty admonition from Gouverneur Kemble: “We expect you to rank, at graduation, not lower than second.” And he had done just that, finishing number two in a class of forty-four. For the next ten years or so he had returned home only rarely. He had been assigned to the Mississippi Delta first, to work on flood control projects, then to the West. He fought the Sioux under General Harney and mapped Nebraska and the Dakotas. When he came home again, in 1859, to become an assistant professor of mathematics at West Point, he was known as the first explorer of the Black Hills, a slim, black-haired, deeply tanned young man, who, except for his mustache, looked remarkably like an Indian himself, and who to his younger brothers and sisters seemed to have stepped from some exotic other world.

It would be said of him later, by numerous people who knew him, that he was notably gentle and kindhearted for a soldier. The distressing thing about Indian fighting, he had said, was that quite often one shot women and children and when it came time to tend to their wounds one found them to be not at all unlike other women and children. In the West he had been known as “the good Lieutenant.”

When his father died, the year he began teaching at the Academy, G.K. assumed most of the responsibility for his younger brothers and sisters, looking after their interests and health with uncommon care and faithfulness. For Emily, then just sixteen, he was much more than a brother only, and it seems his influence had much to do with her orderly ways and subsequent interest in science, and in botany in particular. Like a number of other celebrated soldiers before and after, he was passionately fond of flowers.

He was also an engineer with a particular interest in bridges, he seemed to have no fear of physical danger, and he had an obvious contempt for pretense of any kind, all qualities he valued in his young aide, Roebling, and which she too must have recognized soon enough after their first meeting at the Second Corps Officers Ball.

The Warrens were not wealthy people by Hudson River standards, but were considered gentry. Cold Spring had become a gathering place for a small but distinguished group of artists and literary people and the young Warrens were part of that society. Once, during the war, the artist Thomas R. Rossiter painted a hypothetical Picnic on the Hudson, which would one day be considered among the finest works of the Hudson River school. It is supposedly a representative portrait of Cold Spring elite, twenty ladies and gentlemen gathered with picnic hampers on Constitution Island, just down from Cold Spring. Dressed in elegant summer attire, bathed in sunlight, they pose formally beside the great river, sailboats and Storm King in the distance. Among the group are Gouverneur Kemble, looking very robust for his years; Julia Fish, daughter of Hamilton Fish; Robert Parrott, inventor of the gun; Robert Weir, the painter; and old white-bearded George Pope Morris, editor of the New York Mirror and author of Woodman, Spare That Tree. In the center foreground, looking rather stiff and self-conscious in a half-reclining pose, is G. K. Warren, the trousers of his uniform providing the only splash of bright red in the composition. But in the background, on the left, there is a young woman in a big flowered straw hat who has never been identified for certain, but who is probably Emily Warren.

Roebling’s first encounter with Cold Spring and her family was brief and apparently went very well. “I think we will be a pair of lovers all our lifetime,” he wrote to her soon after returning to Virginia.

They were married on January 18, 1865, in a little brick church on Main Street. It was a double ceremony, with her brother Edgar Washburn Warren, a major in the cavalry, marrying Cornelia Barrows of Cold Spring. There was a good-sized crowd gathered in the cold outside her house when she and Washington came out the door at the end of the reception, and years later old women in Cold Spring would tell how as children they had seen Emily Warren come down the steps on her wedding day, as though they had witnessed an occasion of state.

But even in January of 1879, for Emily all that seemed a long time back. Her stricken husband was in constant torment, his work a nightmare instead of the inspiration and source of pride it had once been for them both. Any chance for a normal life together was now beyond recall if she was to believe what the doctors were saying.

She had seen her husband all but destroyed before her eyes, his spirit as well as his body. And by uncanny coincidence, she had seen much the same thing happen to her beloved brother.

Only a few months after she was married, Gouverneur K. Warren’s brilliant career had run into a puzzling, tragic snag at Five Forks, the last decisive battle of the Civil War. The strain of war had begun to tell on the young general. Always fussy about details, he had grown increasingly engrossed in things he should have left to subordinates. He was taking a little longer with everything, and quite a little longer than Grant, for one, thought acceptable at this stage. Grant was in a great hurry. Warren was then commanding the V Corps, one of the most famous infantry units of the Federal Army, and Grant had put the V Corps and Warren entirely under the flamboyant Phil Sheridan, a cavalryman. Grant also told Sheridan to remove Warren if he saw fit. Grant never quite explained his reasons for this and historians still differ on who was right or wrong or to blame for the outcome.

After receiving conflicting orders on which route to take, Warren had marched his men all night through pitch-black, rain-flooded country to give Sheridan the support he needed, but he had arrived a little late. An attack planned for that morning had to be called off until afternoon. When the fighting started, Warren was again not where Sheridan wanted him. Warren had done his best, but that had not been good enough for Sheridan, who in a violent rage suddenly ordered that Warren be relieved of his command.

Warren’s subordinate officers were incredulous, furious, and would defend his reputation for the rest of their days. Roebling, who was out of the Army by then, would always feel things would have gone differently for Warren had he been there. He and Emily were both people of “decided temper,” as they said, but on this particular subject they were quite decided indeed, never seeing but one side of the argument.

“Just imagine Sheridan sitting on a fence, sending a staff officer every five minutes to Warren to hurry up and save him and his cavalry from being captured by Lee’s troops,” Roebling would write indignantly. “And when Warren does come (after wading through an icy creek up to their middle), saves Sheridan and wins the battle, then Sheridan turns on him and cashiers him.”

After Five Forks, Warren was put in command of defenses at Petersburg. Later he went to Memphis to command the Department of Mississippi. When the war ended, he decided to stay in the Army, serving as an engineer on the upper Mississippi and as a member of the commission assigned to examine the Union Pacific Railroad. He was also in charge of the survey of the Gettysburg battlefield, where he and his young brother-in-law had had their day of glory.

But in 1869, when Roebling was getting started on the Brooklyn caisson, Warren had been put in charge of building a bridge over the Mississippi at Rock Island, Illinois, where before the war an earlier railroad bridge had been the issue in a historic lawsuit involving Abraham Lincoln. In 1856 a new steamboat called the Effie Afton rammed into a pier of the Rock Island Bridge, caught fire, went down, and left part of the bridge burning. The bridge, a big timber truss belonging to the Rock Island Railroad, was repaired quickly enough, but the steamboat people decided they had a case and went to court. Lincoln represented the railroad, arguing that the east-west “current of travel has its rights as well as that of the north and south.” The fact that the jury failed to make up its mind on the matter was taken as a signal victory for railroads, for bridges, and for the notion that the manifest pattern of American commerce and growth was to be east-west.

But the new Rock Island Bridge was meant to satisfy the river interests as well, and Warren had labored so hard over it, between 1869 and 1870, that his health broke and in all the time since he had never quite recovered. Moreover, he kept struggling to clear his name of the Five Forks incident, repeatedly and futilely requesting a board of inquiry to examine the case. His duties never lessened; he continued with river and harbor work, on the upper Mississippi, along the Atlantic coast, on the Great Lakes. He served on Humphreys’ review board during the Eads bridge controversy, and just that October of 1878, he had been put on the advisory council of the Harbor Commission of Rhode Island. But overwork and exposure at Rock Island and the refusal of official Washington to grant him a hearing had all but broken him physically and drained his spirits. Pale, hollow-eyed, he looked more like sixty than forty-eight.

His problem was that in Washington the men implicated in his version of Five Forks were the ones in power now, and apparently he wanted more than just his name cleared.

“I have heard men like Humphreys and others say that Grant was inclined to give Warren an investigation,” Roebling wrote, “but that Warren demanded that Sheridan should be publicly reprimanded for having done a cowardly and unsoldierlike act—and in choosing between the two he finally shielded Sheridan. Grant was then at the height of his popularity and could do what he liked.”

The restoration of his honor had become an obsession with Warren. He refused steadfastly to admit defeat, and the effort was costing him dearly, financially as well as in other ways. Never a man of wealth, he had come out of the war all but penniless. Quietly, on occasion, his sister and brother-in-law were providing financial help as well as moral support.

For Emily it was a heartbreaking thing to see the men who mattered most in her life victims of such dreadful misfortune. It must have seemed as though the two of them, with their pride and decency, their old-fashioned sense of duty, were somehow out of step with the times and paying an awful price for it. Everywhere about her, lesser men, witless, vulgar, corrupt, men of narrow ambition and the cheapest of values, were prospering as never before, grabbing up power, money, or just about anything else they hungered for. This Gilded Age, as Mark Twain had named it, seemed to be tailor-made for that sort. It was the grand and glorious heyday of the political bribe, the crooked contract, the double standard at every level. It seemed the old verities simply were not negotiable any longer. Good and brave men who had a legitimate claim to honor, respect, position—at least according to every standard she had been raised by—were somehow in the way now and so got swept aside.

But if ever she let such thoughts plague her for long, or get her down, there is no suggestion of it in the record. And like the men she so loved and admired, she quite bluntly refused to give in. More, she seemed to gather strength as time passed and gradually she began exerting a profound and interesting influence in bridge matters.

There would be all kinds of stories told about her later and the part she played, and quite a number of them were perfectly true. She did not, however, secretly take over as engineer of the bridge, as some accounts suggest and as was the gossip at the time.

But it is not at all surprising that the stories spread. As was apparent to everyone who met her, Emily Warren Roebling was a remarkable person. And since every piece of written communication from the house on Columbia Heights to the bridge offices was in her hand, there was, understandably, a strong suspicion that she was doing more than merely taking down what her husband dictated. At first she was credited only with brushing up his English, which may have been the case. But by and by it was common gossip that hers was the real mind behind the great work and that this the most monumental engineering triumph of the age was actually the doing of a woman, which as a general proposition was taken in some quarters to be both preposterous and calamitous. In truth she had by then a thorough grasp of the engineering involved. She had a quick and retentive mind, a natural gift for mathematics, and she had been a diligent student during the long years he had been incapacitated.

Trustees grumbled over her reputed influence. Newspapers made oblique references to it. And the fact that she had assumed such importance was often used as a basic premise for the argument that Roebling was not right in the head.

Even Farrington was said to be partly her creation. Farrington had been giving a number of highly popular lantern-slide lectures on the bridge at the Brooklyn Music Hall and at Cooper Union (several thousand people had turned out to see and hear the illustrious master mechanic) and the New York Star remarked, “It is whispered among the knowing ones over the river that Mr. F’s manuscript is in the handwriting of a clever lady, whose style and calligraphy are already familiar in the office of the Brooklyn Bridge.” Maybe this was so. In any case a very great many people took it to be the truth and that was the important thing.

She had also become so adept at shielding her husband from visitors that many of them went away convinced she knew as much about the technical side of the bridge as any of the assistant engineers. When bridge officials or representatives for various contractors were told it would be acceptable for them to call at the Roebling house in Brooklyn, it was seldom if ever the Chief Engineer who received them. She would carry on the interview in his behalf, asking questions and answering theirs with perfect confidence and command of the facts. Most of them left quite satisfied that her husband would be correctly apprised of everything said. But so impressed were some that they went out the door convinced they had met with the Chief Engineer after all and their future correspondence would be addressed directly to her.

At one point in 1879, for example, a controversy developed over the honesty of an important contractor, the Edge Moor Iron Company. Ugly insinuations were traded back and forth in the papers and it began to look as though there might be still another drawn-out investigation. To assure the engineering department of their honesty and good intentions, the firm addressed a formal written statement to that effect, not to the Chief Engineer, but to Mrs. Washington A. Roebling. And there was no mention in the letter of conveying any of its contents to her husband, or to ask for his health or to solicit his response or opinions.

Her services as his “amanuensis,” as he called her, were enormously important, as he said later. She kept all his records, answered much of his mail, delivered various messages or requests to the bridge offices, went to the bridge itself to check on things for him, and was his representative at occasional social functions. She was quite literally his eyes, his legs, his good right arm. And the more she did, the more the gossips talked.

Half a dozen New York and Brooklyn papers were delivered to the big brick house regularly each day. For Roebling they were still the only access to the world beyond the bridge and his own four walls. They still had to be read aloud to him. His eyes were greatly improved, but he had trouble reading for more than a few minutes at a time. So the two of them would sit together in the room on the second floor that was his office, sickroom, command post, where the days dragged by, one by one, ever so slowly for him, and where week by week, month by month, year after year, as he talked, she saw the bridge take form and grow on paper just as clearly as its progress could be seen from the window.

A day rarely passed during that winter of 1878-79 when the newspapers did not carry something about the bridge, and after she had finished reading them to him, she would clip out whatever there was on the bridge and paste the articles in a big scrapbook, just as neatly and methodically as her brother had done with items on his campaigns all through the war.

But the clippings must have seemed the top of the iceberg only, knowing what they did, feeling as they did about certain people. Never during this time was anything written about the anguish of their years in that room. No journalist or magazine writer was permitted to interview them there. Nor did either of them write anything about the experience, beyond the briefest, most factual statements. There would be no soul-baring memoirs. Their privacy was total and strictly enforced.

Only in the letter books that have survived are there any chinks in the wall of privacy they built about themselves—brief, sudden bursts of emotion sandwiched in with page upon page of technical detail—and even these are frequently illegible, her penciled lines having become badly smeared after so many years. The frustration, the sharp, bitter indignation, the rage expressed are always his, however. What she felt, what she said or did to keep him in balance, to be ballast for them both, can only be guessed at.

His worst time since leaving Trenton had come in the spring of 1879, in early May. For nearly a month it had looked as though everything was back on course again. Comptroller John Kelly, for all his Tammany bluster, had been put in his place by the courts. Murphy had hired William M. Evarts as counsel for the Bridge Company. He was the celebrated and expensive New York attorney who defended Andrew Johnson in the impeachment trial and Beecher in the adultery case and who had just been made Secretary of State. The central issue, Evarts argued, was whether a great public work was to be pulled down because it did not quite conform to some early bookkeeping or in order to save a few ships from making minor adjustments to pass beneath it. Henry Murphy had been a persuasive witness, to no one’s surprise, and the judges, first in the Supreme Court of New York, then in the Court of Appeals, decided in favor of the bridge. The city of New York which meant Comptroller Kelly—was ordered to continue its payments without further delay. “There is, of course, great rejoicing in Brooklyn,” the New York Herald said. “The success of the bridge is assured, and the work upon it which has been interrupted for more than six months, will be resumed within a few days.” And that was what had happened. Six hundred men went back to building the approaches and the cable wrapping was resumed at once.

The so-called Miller suit, to remove the bridge altogether, had also been settled at long last and again largely as a result of the tireless, determined efforts of Henry Murphy. The State Committee on Commerce and Navigation had held hearings in the Metropolitan Hotel in New York and one by one Murphy, Stranahan, old Julius Adams, C. C. Martin, Paine, McNulty and Collingwood had all gone over to appear as witnesses for the bridge. The opposition had rounded up a number of harbor pilots, shipmasters, shipbuilders, warehouse owners, and a few engineers to testify against the bridge. Abraham Miller, the warehouse owner who was the plaintiff, said he had not brought suit until as late as he did because he never expected the bridge would be finished. He was convinced the cities would fail to get up the money it would take. A representative from Standard Oil warned that the bridge would divert trade to Philadelphia; some harbor pilots complained that the cables were already hazard enough, as did several ship captains. The total testimony taken, the exhibits presented, the charts, tables, statistics, and the like, all printed up and bound together eventually made one great doorstop of a volume weighing a full five pounds. But the opponents of the bridge achieved nothing. As with Lincoln’s Effie Aftoncase or Eads’s victory over the Corps of Engineers review board, the pattern of east-west travel prevailed, the bridge was the victor.

But in May came what for Roebling was the lowest blow to date. He had decided on another major change in the bridge. After receiving Paine’s report on the ability of various manufacturers to produce steel in certain desired shapes and quality, he had decided to substitute steel for iron in the trusswork. This meant that it was to be virtually an all-steel bridge now, and with the approval of the trustees he had called for new bids. General Slocum announced at a meeting of the trustees that the assistant engineers (and Paine in particular, it was understood) had been taking bribes from steel manufacturers, which at different times, Slocum said, amounted to sums of as much as ten thousand dollars. Except for Roebling’s assistants, just about everyone who had had any real say in bridge matters had been accused of something or other by this time. Now it was their turn. Slocum’s charges were omitted from the official record, but two days later the papers had the story, with the result that the trustees met again in secret session on May 5 to discuss the matter and this time their comments were released to the press.

Slocum said he had been told of the bribes by a man named Marshall P. Davidson of the Chrome Steel Company in Brooklyn. Slocum said he wanted it understood that these were distinct charges, not more idle rumors. He also said there was some question about certain transactions of the Roebling company. “And I want to say right here that I think it is indelicate that the brothers of the Chief Engineer should be engaged in furnishing us materials.”

It was William Kingsley, interestingly, who stood up at this point and, looking Slocum in the eye, said he regretted to hear such statements made about “gentlemen who were not present to defend themselves.” Furthermore, Kingsley said, no firm in the country had a reputation for honor and business integrity exceeding that of John A. Roebling’s Sons.

All the same a special committee was formed to investigate the charges and this committee met the following morning to hear Davidson speak for himself and to listen to Ferdinand Roebling, who had come on from Trenton. Davidson said Slocum had misquoted him. He had made no such remarks about the engineers. What he had said, he believed, was that there were rumors of bribes but that he himself did not believe them.

Ferdinand Roebling, for his part, said he thought the time had come for him to put the matter in the hands of a lawyer and begin suit against “somebody” for libel. He said the end had been reached so far as the abuse the Roebling company was willing to endure. His family’s connection with the bridge had been anything but advantageous, he reminded the trustees. His father had lost his life, his brother had sacrificed his health, the family reputation had been assailed. And so far as making money from their contracts was concerned, his company would be perfectly satisfied to produce the rest of the wire at cost.

Ferdinand almost certainly spent some time at his brother’s house while he was in Brooklyn and it seems Henry Murphy was going and coming from the Roebling front door rather frequently. The level of emotions Emily Roebling had to contend with can be gauged from this letter from her husband to General Slocum, dictated the same day Ferdinand appeared before the committee:

I hope I have heard for the last time your oft repeated remark that you think it indelicate in me that I should allow my brothers to do any work for the bridge while I am the Chief Engineer. Did it ever occur to you that my brothers act independently of me without consulting me and that I have no control over them even if I wished to prevent them bidding on any contract for the bridge? Or did you ever consider that the John A. Roebling’s Sons Company hold the first rank in this country as manufacturers of wire rope—and the word “fraud” has never been coupled with their name save in your board? Would it not be at least probable that my reputation as an engineer is as dear to them as it is to me and that I should feel better satisfied to have work that I know requires care and skill entrusted to them rather than to some rascally contractor without capital or reputation who after he has been again and again detected in fraud is allowed to go on with his contract.

You should have been very sure of Mr. Davidson’s meaning before you brought the subject up in the way you did, and you should not, if you really had any desire to know the truth, have been contented with his simple assertion that you misunderstood him.

The course of a true gentleman would have been to come to me first with a lie that had been whispered behind my back and at least heard what I had to say, whether you believed me or not…. I have the right to think Mr. Davidson never said anything to you, but you merely gave the board the benefit of your own opinions….

The investigation committee presented its findings at the end of the month and the engineers were completely exonerated, as was the Roebling company. It had all been an unfortunate misunderstanding, it was explained. On Roebling’s orders, Colonel Paine had spent some time in Pittsburgh with Andrew Kloman, Carnegie’s former metallurgist, who was now in business for himself, and had rolled the steel for General William Sooy Smith’s new railroad bridge at Glasgow, Missouri, the first bridge in America built exclusively of steel. Kloman had a new way of making steel eyebars and Paine had gone to Pittsburgh to study the process. This, apparently, was what gave rise to the bribery stories, since it appeared that Paine was giving Kloman preferential treatment.

The newspapers assured the public that all was fair and square inside the engineering department. The work went right ahead. But Slocum never apologized to Roebling or to Paine or to any of Roebling’s staff or to his brothers. Roebling never would forgive him for what he had done and the deep-seated animosity between the two former war heroes would prove to be no minor issue.

Then, almost immediately, there was a change-over in the bridge trustees, the first real realignment since the bridge began. Thomas Kinsella declined to serve again because of “pressing business engagements” and several new faces were to be seen now in the board room, most of them quite young faces by Bridge Company standards. It was also quickly noted that there was a decidedly dubious look in their eyes whenever some of the more notable older members commenced to talk.

Among the new men were William G. Steinmetz, who automatically became a member of the board when he became Comptroller of the City of Brooklyn. He was an engineer by profession and a German by birth, with a thick head of wild black hair and one wooden leg. Alfred C. Barnes of Brooklyn, the oldest son and business partner of A. S. Barnes, the book publisher, was “one of the most cultured and affable gentlemen in the city,” according to one account. Edward Cooper, son of Peter Cooper and brother-in-law of Abram Hewitt, was mayor of New York. And Robert B. Roosevelt, wealthy New York lawyer, was an energetic politicial crusader and noted sportsman, whose favorite nephew Theodore was then in his last year at Harvard.

All four had come in as a result of the elections of 1878. The two Brooklyn men, Steinmetz and Barnes, were Republicans, while Cooper and Roosevelt were Democrats. But they were all reputed champions of reform, and with the exception of Steinmetz, they were the gentlemen sons of wealthy, prominent fathers—city-born, expensively educated, urbane, public-spirited, and politically ambitious. Despite the party labels they had much more in common with one another than they did with a Kingsley or a Stranahan, the self-made men of another generation, who, with their back-country origins had grown up with the city, as it were, and had acquired, somewhere along the way, what the younger men found to be a reprehensible degree of patience with what the older men would call human failings.

The new men were determined to set things in order. But from the start it was Steinmetz who made the biggest fuss. Right off he wanted Kingsley removed, for one thing, and he made no bones about it. Kingsley was the keystone of the old regime, as the Brooklyn Comptroller saw it, and the reason the bridge had taken so uncommonly long to build was because the old regime either wanted it so or because they did not know how to run things. Either way Kingsley could no longer remain a trustee.

But Steinmetz grossly underestimated the power the contractor had. The mayor of Brooklyn, a man named Howell, who was a Democrat and doubtless beholden to Kingsley in innumerable ways, said Kingsley would stay. So Henry Murphy was removed instead—temporarily. No sooner was Murphy out, taking the blow very graciously, chatting affably with reporters as he packed his things, than another trustee resigned so Murphy could be reappointed in his place. That done, the others promptly voted Murphy president again and made Kingsley his vice-president. All of which left Comptroller Steinmetz, a testy, excitable man at best, so furious he was barely able to speak when the reporters came around to get his views.

But Steinmetz kept pressing the attack through that summer and into fall, opposing the use of Bessemer steel for the superstructure, opposing the awarding of the contract to the Edge Moor Iron Company, the lowest bidder, trotting out every old argument for crucible steel, and being so silly and tiresome about it much of the time that the other young men who had come in with him were left with no choice but to side with the opposition. They were just as eager as ever to clean house but they were looking for something more important to battle over.

But in December, just as had happened three years before, a sensational bridge disaster seemed to add credence to every rumor of shoddy steel and poor engineering. The new Tay Bridge over the Firth of Tay, in Scotland, one of the biggest, most famous bridges in the world, gave way in a gale and collapsed into the sea, taking with it a train carrying seventy-five people, all of whom were killed. The bridge was the work of Britain’s leading engineer and a disciple of the great Stephenson, Sir Thomas Bouch, who, along with Henry Bessemer, had been knighted by Queen Victoria that June. His bridge, a series of trusses, had been built mostly of wrought iron, however, not steel, and subsequent investigations of the disaster indicated that he had not calculated his wind loads accurately. The conclusion was that the engineer was mainly to blame. (His health and mind broken by the ordeal, Bouch died in less than a year.)

As might be expected, the news of the disaster caused a great stir in New York and Brooklyn. McNulty and Paine, interviewed at length in the papers, did their best to assure the reading public that the East River bridge was an entirely different kind of structure. But who was to say? Had not the word of the ill-fated Bouch been as respected as any in the profession?

By curious coincidence, the same papers that carried the Tay Bridge story also reported that J. Lloyd Haigh, “the well-known wire manufacturer” who had supplied the wire for the great cables, had just gone bankrupt. And to add one further note of doom, still another “noted engineer” was claiming the East River bridge would not hold a fifth of the weight that was liable to be put upon it. “WILL THE TAY DISASTER BE REPEATED BETWEEN NEW YORK AND BROOKLYN?” asked one big headline as the new year 1880, and the new decade, began.

There must have been moments in those early weeks of the new year when Emily Roebling stood alone at a window thinking of the Tay tragedy as she watched the tiny doll-like figures working up among the cables and suspenders. She knew enough now to appreciate the countless number of things that had to be taken into consideration and the immense weight of responsibility every calculation entailed. She knew enough to know how very many things could go wrong. The East River was not the stormy Firth of Tay, standing wide open to the sea, as some were saying, still it was salt water, and for all the shelter Long Island provided, winds on the river could be savage. When the Tay Bridge went, the papers said, the train had dropped nearly ninety feet.

But there must also have been moments during those same weeks when she went about the house or drove along the snow-covered streets of the Heights with her heart lifted as it had not in years. In December, G.K.’s request for a board of inquiry had at last been granted, fourteen years and eight months after Five Forks.

In late February she pasted into her scrapbook a large illustration of Ferdinand de Lesseps, in top hat and overcoat, standing with a group on the summit of the New York anchorage, “inspecting” the bridge, according to the caption. “The Great Engineer” (who was no engineer at all, but a diplomat) had arrived from France to promote what he intended to be the triumph of his career, a sea-level canal across the Isthmus of Panama. In another week or so he would deliver an impassioned speech before the American Society of Civil Engineers (Collingwood and McNulty would be in the audience) and be lionized at a sumptuous banquet at Delmonico’s at which Richard Storrs, the Brooklyn pastor, would deliver the welcoming address and she herself would be among the ladies accompanying De Lesseps when he made his grand entrance into the dining room. The grandfatherly Frenchman was greatly impressed by the bridge, he told reporters, but in the illustration Emily saved, he appears more interested in an unidentified young lady in the foreground.

A full page from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper went into the scrapbook, a close-up view of workmen out on one of the cables attaching iron suspender bands and to these the wire rope suspenders that would hold the steel floor beams of the roadway. The cables by this time had been thoroughly wrapped from end to end. Once the suspenders were in place, the men could start laying up the crossbeams of the deck, beginning with those closest to the anchorages and towers and working out. The nearest suspenders had only to be pulled back, the beam attached and swung out into place. Planks would be put down over the beam then for the men to stand on as they launched the next beam, and so on out over the water. Once the steel deck began to take form, she would be able to walk out on it herself to look things over as her husband directed.

In April she cut out two articles about St. Ann’s Church, which eleven years before Roebling and Paine had used to sight the center line. The historic old building was about to be demolished—to be “swept away by the march of modern improvement,” said the Eagle.

Her scrapbook tells the full story of the bridge that year as the public saw it. There was the usual wrangling over finances, a minor accident or two, a great deal of complaining and explaining about the steel contract (the Edge Moor Iron Company was maddeningly slow on delivery), periodic reports on the progress of the work (about the building of a big skew arch over William and North William Streets in New York, for example, and the steady advance of the bridge deck). One tiny item, a clipping not much bigger than a postage stamp, reports that J. Lloyd Haigh of Brooklyn was breaking rocks at Sing Sing. He had been convicted of passing bad checks.

In June Henry Murphy said it would be all right for two Plymouth Church musicians to take their coronets out to the center cradle on the bridge, and there “to the delight of hundreds of upturned faces from the ferryboats and the Fall River boat Newport,” they played “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” “Rock of Ages,” and “Old Hundred.”

Summer and fall were uneventful on the whole except for one incredible scene that took place at a trustees’ meeting in October, and which had all Brooklyn talking.

The meeting, involving only routine matters, had been about to adjourn when Comptroller Steinmetz announced that he had a communication for the president, whereupon he handed Henry Murphy an unusually lengthy printed document and a messenger burst into the room and distributed additional copies to everyone present. Willam Kingsley slowly got to his feet, unfolded his copy, and moved to have it tabled.

“It is an insult to the dignity of the board that this man should present any communication in this way,” he said.

“Mr. Chairman, Mr. Chairman,” exclaimed Steinmetz excitedly in broken English. “I demand my communication shall be read.” Kingsley said he had the floor and Steinmetz was out of order.

“Ever since this individual has been a member of this board,” Kingsley said, “he has never suggested a single practical or intelligent idea, but has continually been bringing before the board such claptrap stuff as has just been presented.”

“But the communication has not yet been read,” protested Steinmetz.

Kingsley, “glaring at the Comptroller,” exclaimed, “You must realize, sir, that you are not in the slums of politics.”

The motion to table the document was then quickly carried, while Steinmetz kept protesting. “I represent the citizens of Brooklyn,” he shouted. “I would not be here if I was a private citizen…. Mr. Kingsley’s suggestions have always been heard and accepted, while mine have not.”

“This is all buncombe,” Kingsley snapped back, shaking Steinmetz’ printed letter. “It’s ward politics brought into the board.”

Murphy promptly shut off any further discussion of the subject and took up another matter. But when the meeting adjourned, Kingsley marched over to Steinmetz, who was standing among some of the others in an adjoining office.

“You are acting the part of a demagogue,” Kingsley said to Steinmetz, who was nearly a head shorter. “What or whom do you represent?”

“Mr. Kingsley’s manner was determined,” according to one man in the group, “and as he stood facing Mr. Steinmetz, he looked steadily at him. The latter turned pale, and the other members of the board crowded into the room.”

“I represent the people of Brooklyn,” Steinmetz answered.

“You represent nobody,” said Kingsley.

“You are no gentleman,” said Steinmetz.

“You are a blackguard,” responded Kingsley.

“I am Comptroller and I represent the citizens of Brooklyn.”

“I say you represent nobody—nobody at all.”

“Well, Mr. Kingsley,” said Steinmetz backing off, “I can afford to take that from you.”

“Of course you will,” said Kingsley.

Steinmetz then turned his back on Kingsley and left the room, but Kingsley followed after, “continuing to express his indignation.”

The story was all over town by nightfall. Steinmetz said later that Kingsley had threatened to strike him, but nobody else who had been in the room agreed with that. But neither could any of the trustees justify Kingsley’s behavior, and the papers made a point of the fact that Steinmetz was a cripple. Even Kingsley’s own Eagle allowed it would have been better had the Steinmetz letter been read. As it was, the whole thing had taken on much more importance than it deserved. Every afternoon paper carried the Steinmetz letter in full and there was hardly enough in it to have attracted any but passing interest under normal circumstances. Steinmetz made a number of wild accusations—about the steel contract chiefly—none of which could be supported, and although a few editorial writers took them at face value and made some foolish charges as a result, the whole issue blew over in a matter of days.

Nonetheless, the confrontation in the board room was indicative of the strong feelings developing between various personalities on the board, and half a lifetime later, when Roebling would be asked what part his wife had played in building the bridge, it would be “her remarkable talent as a peacemaker” among these gentlemen and during these particular years that he would praise highest, telling people with customary deadpan understatement how she had a way of “obviating personal friction with her tact” and could smooth over difficulties that were “naturally inherent in a work somewhat political in its conduct.”

Apparently just about everyone involved with the work liked her enormously and held her in great respect, regardless of his politics, profession, age, or particular feelings about her husband. That she was welcome among them, her opinions regarded seriously, was considerable testimony in itself, in a day and age when a woman’s presence in or about a construction job except as a spectator on special occasions was absolutely unheard of.

How many ruffled feathers she smoothed, how many times she sat patiently listening first to one side of an argument, then another, how many tactful words of caution she offered a Henry Murphy or a Ferdinand Roebling or a C. C. Martin before they entered her husband’s sickroom, how frequently she herself dealt directly with a Steinmetz or a Kingsley, is not indicated in the record. But the impression is that she was very busy indeed at just such tasks. Roebling would describe her role as “invaluable.”

In February Henry Murphy, James Stranahan, and the Reverend Dr. Storrs put on formal attire and went over to New York with Martin, Collingwood, and three younger Rennselaer graduates recently hired as assistants to attend a gathering of the alumni of the famous Polytechnic Institute. Collingwood was to be the main speaker of the evening and his subject was the bridge. Murphy and Stranahan had been invited as representatives of the Bridge Company, and Storrs, it seems, was becoming something of a fixture at such occasions, a sort of unofficial chaplain to the somber-looking technical men who talked so matter-of-factly of improving on God’s handiwork and who, since the war, had already changed the look of the country more than any army ever had.

A great deal was said during the course of the evening about what had been accomplished by the 739 engineers the Institute had sent into the world in its fifty-five years, about the countless dams, canals, bridges, railroads, and water works they had built. The strongest testimony of all, however, according to a Professor Greene from Troy, was to say simply that the East River bridge was the work of RPI men—which was not altogether the case but which pleased the professor’s audience no end.

Collingwood spoke a little too long about the staggering quantities of brick, stone, steel, and iron that had gone into the bridge and then announced to great applause that the work was nearly done. The real hero, he said, was Roebling, who had never lost his hold on the bridge. “The men who have come from the Institute to the bridge had come to stay,” he said, “they seem to have a wonderful sticking power.”

There was much conversation about the Chief Engineer during the dinner that followed, almost as much apparently as there was about his wife, who by this time had become an idolized figure among the assistant engineers. ^*

In the spring the steel floor beams started going up and the great structure began to look like a bridge. By summer, even with the contractor behind on deliveries, the superstructure had advanced well over the river, coming from both directions. After studying the work from a boat out on the river, one admiring engineer told reporters that the way the bridge was being built it would be as immovable as an enormous crowbar and would last a thousand years. That was the summer Garfield was shot and Chester A. Arthur, who had been collector of customs for the Port of New York back in the early years of the bridge, became President of the United States.

The dome on the Custom House was one of those New York landmarks Washington Roebling could pick out quite easily from his second-floor window. His vista on the world was the same as it had been since the summer of 1877, when he returned to the house on the Heights. It was the only way he had seen the city or the bridge in four years.

From the Battery to the New York tower, all the best-known landmarks stood out like points along a ruler. The steeple on old Trinity Church was the highest point downtown. Then over to the right, farther uptown, was the tower on the Western Union Building, which was almost on a line with the New York landing of the Fulton Ferry and with his own house. Then came the Post Office, with its flags and heavy mansard roofs, the shot tower built thirty years before by James Bogardus, pioneer in the use of cast iron. Just to the right of that, before the bridge tower, was the Tribune Building, with its long spike of a clock tower. With his field glasses or telescope, it was possible to read the time on the Tribune clock.

There were any number of things to read through the telescope, written large in different colors on the sides of New York buildings—THE EVENING POST…ABENDROTH BROTHERS, PLUMBERS IRON ENAMELED WARE…HOME FOR NEWSBOYS…Roebling had seen the skyline steadily changing year by year, reaching a little higher always. Still the granite towers remained in full command. Trinity Church and the Tribune tower were actually taller, in measured feet and inches, but they did not look it, being farther in the distance, and by comparison they were mere needles against the sky.

From Roebling’s window both of the bridge towers stood out plainly. Indeed, very nearly the entire structure could be seen, silhouetted against that segment of sky that seemed to dome Harlem and Blackwell’s Island. It would be said that his telescope was so powerful he could examine the very rivets being put into the superstructure, which was nonsense. But the bridge was certainly close enough for him to see a great deal of what was going on. Interestingly, his wife would remark later that he actually spent little time peering through his telescope. One glance of his “practiced eye,” she said, was enough to tell him if things were being handled properly. His troubles with his vision, it seems, were confined to things close up.

In the fall C. C. Martin was saying the bridge would be finished by the next summer. By the time the first snow was flying, steel beams and suspenders had been strung all the way from tower to tower, and in early December Emily had her own first moment of triumph in a very long time. Presumably, from his window, the Chief Engineer watched the entire ceremony.

She had left the house in the early afternoon and was driven directly to the foot of the Brooklyn tower, where, accompanied by Farrington, she climbed the spiral staircase as far as the roadway. A gentle wind was blowing as she waited. The air was as mild as April nearly, with a smell of rain.

Presently a delegation of trustees arrived in the yard below, climbed the stairs, and were next tipping their silk hats, shaking her hand, commenting on the abnormal weather, and saying nothing of the meeting they had come from. It had been, she knew, one of the most crucial sessions since the bridge began. But neither she nor they made any mention of it.

Then they had set off, strolling along on the plank walk that had been put down on the steel superstructure, a plank walk no more than five feet wide that now stretched the whole way over the river. The sensation was apparently only a little less nerve-racking than on the footbridge.

She walked out in front, leading the way, escorted by Mayor Howell of Brooklyn and the new mayor of New York, William R. Grace, the wealthy steamship owner. The others, about a dozen in all counting the assistant engineers and two or three reporters, followed behind. The views were exclaimed over. A strong wind was blowing and one reporter noted how it played with the long white locks on the head of the venerable James S. T. Stranahan. Sea gulls were everywhere, gliding past cables and stays in big arcs, swooping beneath the bridge, tiny flashes of white far down below against the deep gray-green of the water. Boats passed beneath, white sails close-hauled. The water swirled and turned with great turbulence, from the wind, from the boats plowing through in both directions, from the churning tide. There was much animated conversation within the little procession. Everyone was having a fine time on this first crossing of the bridge by the actual roadway.

On their arrival at the New York tower several bottles of champagne were uncorked and the trustees drank to the health of Mrs. Roebling and “to the success of things in general.”