4
Nothing lasts forever. The most unforeseen circumstances will swamp you and baffle the wisest calculations. Only vitality and plenty of it helps you.
—WASHINGTON A. ROBELING
THE BRIDGE tour ended on April 20. “The parties left for the east,” reported the Niagara Falls Gazette, “…traveling in a special car well furnished with refreshments.” All, apparently, were still on the friendliest of terms.
In the temporary offices overlooking Fulton Street, work picked up about where it had left off, and with renewed vigor. Directors and stockholders came and went. Orders were placed for drawing tables and filing cabinets and there was a steady tramp of feet on the stairs as inventors came to show patents of tools and machinery, as salesmen arrived with samples of granite or promises of speedy delivery and the best possible price for coal, lumber, sand, or nails. And whenever the senior Roebling was in town and conducting interviews for jobs, the applicants could be seen in the outer office, waiting their turn to go in and sit before the old Prussian and tell him about their special attributes.
A man named William Lane, carpenter, mason, and all-around mechanic, came highly recommended by the Army engineers, Generals Wright and Newton. (“Looks like an energetic good man,” Roebling noted.) Charles Kinkel was a German who told Roebling he had had experience with foundations. John Morgan, an English draftsman, wanted employment badly, he said, while William McNamee looked like a “tolerably good man.”
And so it went. J. W. Jenkins, a diver, said that if he was hired by the month he would work for twenty-five dollars a day, do whatever blasting was wanted, and provide his own tools. Otherwise his regular day rate was a hundred dollars. Two experienced surveyors, Rudolph Rosa and Colonel William Paine, each wanted ten dollars a day and both were hired on the spot.
Paine in particular seemed exactly the sort of man Roebling was looking for. Self-taught in engineering, he had surveyed the so-called Johnson Route of the Union Pacific, across the Sierra Nevada. During the war, wearing civilian clothes, he had slipped through Confederate lines and worked his way from Washington to Richmond, mapping the location of every destroyed bridge along the way. Lincoln had personally made him a captain of engineers for this and Paine was put on the staff of a major general, a position customarily held only by a West Pointer. By the time the war had ended, he was reputedly the leading topographical engineer in the Union Army. It was said he could prop a drawing board on the pommel of his saddle and as he rode along sketch a map of the surrounding terrain that would be accurate enough to go right to the engraver. He was also well read in chemistry, geology, the natural sciences, and he enjoyed literature, he told Roebling. He was from New Hampshire originally, and he was modest, but very firm and sure of himself. His most notable physical feature was a great sweeping handle-bar mustache. Finding him so early was taken as a good sign.
The one technical chore to be finished up before actual construction could begin was the final survey. A center line had to be located and the responsibility for this Roebling had turned over to his son, to whom Paine was assigned forthwith.
The two worked extremely well together and became a familiar sight in Brooklyn that spring. They took their sightings, hammered down their little iron pins, and worked their way steadily inland from the river, through a neighborhood of narrow shops and warehouses and a terrible tangle of waterfront traffic. As each iron pin went in, young Roebling recorded its location, making a small diagram in the black leather notebook he carried. To show where the center line crossed through the juncture of Fulton, Dock, and James Streets, for instance, he drew the basic outline of the intersection—no easy thing, since the streets, like most in the vicinity, did not join at right angles—then the center line, cutting across the intersection at its own angle. Along this he marked points A, B, C, and D. Point A was a notch he and Paine had cut into the belt course of a yellow house on the corner of Dock Street; B was a crow’s-foot chiseled into the curbstone just up from the yellow house; C was an iron pin driven into the crosswalk on Fulton; D was another pin in the middle of the crosswalk, on the opposite side of the street.
St. Ann’s Church was their most conspicuous landmark. The historic old building would have to come down eventually. It was one of those numerous pieces of property the value of which had not been included in the engineer’s original cost estimate and there were those among its parishioners, as there were elsewhere in Brooklyn, who did not view the two intent surveyors with their brass instruments as necessarily the harbingers of progress.
Through most of this time John Roebling remained in Trenton. He would make an occasional visit of a few days, stopping at the Mansion House on Hicks Street, but the rest of the time he was content to leave things to his son, who by this time had apparently become greatly concerned over the possible verdict of the consultants, and who, like Charles Swan, was expected to keep Roebling regularly posted…
Brooklyn, May 21, 1869
DEAR FATHER,
Your Turkish Bath tickets came today.
Maj. King arrived yesterday. The Commission have made their report and sent it to Washington today. I think that if their report was at all favorable, they would not be so quiet about it.
Kingsley proposes to send Genl. Slocum to Washington next week in order to hurry up Humphreys…
Yours, Aff.
WASH.
Genl. Wright sent back the map for correction, to have the span put back to 1600 which I did.
Also to cables whether of steel and what diameter.
I said steel with 15” diam.
WASH.
That he could write so matter-of-factly of Kingsley, the contractor, proposing to “send” Slocum, the United States Congressman, on such an errand suggests that the engineering department had no doubts about how things stood among the Kings County Democrats and that possibly the bridge tour had been something of an education for the Roeblings as well. The P.S. concerning steel for the cables also suggests that Roebling senior had at last made up his mind on this crucial matter and, moreover, that the son felt at perfect liberty to speak for the father on just about everything concerning the bridge.
In any event Slocum did go to Washington and was doubtless a good choice for the mission, since both A. A. Humphreys, Chief of the Army Engineers, and John A. Rawlins, the Secretary of War, happened also to be prominent Civil War figures and were both well known by Slocum. Rawlins was the one who counted. Grant’s right-hand man through the war, he was generally respected in Washington for being both candid and decisive. That he was also dying of tuberculosis that spring was not generally known. Rawlins told Slocum not to concern himself, he could expect to see everything approved within a week. Kingsley was elated when Slocum returned with the news, as Washington Roebling dutifully informed his father. But by the end of the week nothing more had happened.
On June 12 John Roebling came on from Trenton to meet with his consultants still one final time, to receive their formal approval in writing. Washington Roebling ordered five hundred copies printed, then wrote to his father, who had immediately returned to Trenton, that General G. K. Warren, his wife Emily’s famous brother, was going to Washington and would report back privately “how the matter stands down there.”
On June 15 Slocum again saw Rawlins, this time at the sumptuous Brooklyn home of J. Carson Brevoort, where Rawlins was a guest briefly. Rawlins said Grant had told him to do whatever he liked about the bridge—the subject did not much interest the President, one would gather—and Rawlins guaranteed the whole business would be settled as soon as he got back to Washington. Taking no chances, Slocum once more was on his way to the capital, accompanied this time by Henry Murphy. “When Mr. Murphy returns we will have an authentic report,” Washington Roebling wrote to his father, which might be taken to mean there was some skepticism between them concerning Henry Slocum or that they simply thought very well of Henry Murphy.
Rawlins was as good as his word. On June 21 General Humphreys informed Murphy by letter that Rawlins had approved both the plan and the location of the bridge so long as it conformed to certain basic conditions stipulated by the Army Engineers.
The center of the river span was “under no conditions of temperature or load” to be less than 135 feet “in the clear above the mean high water of spring tides.” Nothing could be added that might project out from the towers and no guy wires were to be attached that might hang below the river span. (At both Niagara and Cincinnati Roebling had strung such wires below the bridge floor.) The river was to be kept perfectly clear, in other words, and the roadway of the bridge would have to be raised five feet higher than Roebling had intended.
Such seemingly small changes called for some rather serious revisions, however. The increased elevation would mean an increase in the grade of the approaches and land spans, which right away meant an additional cost of some $300,000, as near as the Roeblings could figure. To avoid all this it was decided to change the iron superstructure of the bridge floor. The stiffening trusswork would be built entirely above the roadway, instead of partly above and partly below as in the original design. And just to be certain that nothing projected beyond the pier lines, the length of the river span was extended from 1,600 to 1,616 feet. It was also decided to widen the bridge floor by five feet, to make room for two double roadways for vehicles, instead of single roadways as the elder Roebling had originally planned.
Such alterations were of little or no interest to the general public, but they were no trifling matter for the engineers and they would alter the looks of the finished structure.
Humphreys’ letter was not a very long or impressive document, but it signaled the conclusion of bureaucratic red tape and was big news in Brooklyn. “THE ROBELING PLANS FULLY ENDROSED” ran the headline in the Eagle the evening of June 25. The paper carried the complete text of the final report by the consulting engineers and concluded that now, with all obstacles at last out of the way, the work could commence.
Three nights later, at the Brooklyn Athenaeum, Congressman Demas Barnes delivered a lecture on the bridge before an audience “notable for its large representation of solid businessmen,” who listened “with the most evident interest and attention.” Barnes, who had made a fortune in patent medicines, had been the strongest voice for the bridge on the floor of the House. This night he began his talk with an impassioned description of Brooklyn and its future, from which he moved to the bridge itself, speaking with equal ardor. Then, for his grand finale, he proclaimed the following, summing up, it would seem, all that was so fervently felt, all the common expectations, concerning the Great Bridge:
This bridge is to be built, appealing as it does to our pride, our gratitude and prosperity. When complete, let it illustrate the grandeur of our age; let it be the Mecca to which foreign peoples shall come. Let Brooklyn now take up the pen of progress. Babylon had her hanging gardens, Nineveh her towers, and Rome her Coliseum; let us have this great monument to progress.
But that same day, Monday, June 28, 1869, beside the Fulton Ferry slip, John A. Roebling had been involved in an accident, which, though extremely painful, seemed of no serious consequence.
The mental torture after the accident had been nearly as severe as the physical, according to his son, who had been with him almost constantly. “He felt at his age he could ill afford to lose any time: this circumstance, combined with the prospect of being crippled to some extent, had a most depressing influence on his spirits.”
To have been struck down by such a foolish mishap did his spirits no good either. It was the sort of slip a new man might make, or one of the politicians or moneymen who invariably had to be conducted about bridge jobs. When he thought of the risks he had taken, the countless dangers he had exposed himself to over the years, to be felled this way was positively infuriating.
The afternoon of the accident had been clear and pleasantly warm in Brooklyn. He and Washington had been working since morning at the foot of Fulton Street, beside the ferry slip, where the Brooklyn tower was to go. He had come down to the waterfront to assist Washington and Colonel Paine in fixing the precise location of the tower. Paine had been over on the other side of the river, signaling to them.
At one point Roebling was standing as far out on the ferry slip as he could get, atop a cluster of piles. Seeing one of the boats approaching, he stepped back off the piles and onto a stringpiece, or beam, that was wide enough to get a footing and where, he supposed, he would be clear of the piles should they be forced against the beam by the docking boat. But there had been a knot—or something he had not noticed—sticking out from one of the piles and it had caught his right foot as the boat ground against the rack, crushing the tip of his boot and his toes.
The pain must have been excruciating, but he gave no sign of it. He went right on shouting directions until he toppled over, unable to stand any longer.
Washington rushed him to a doctor’s office close by, where his father was no sooner in the door than he was telling the doctor what to do. He demanded a tub of cold water and plunged his foot into it to staunch the flow of blood. Other doctors were called in for an opinion and it was agreed that his toes would have to be amputated. To this Roebling promptly consented and requested that the operation be performed without anesthetic. When it was over, he insisted on binding the wound himself and in his own fashion. Then he was taken to his son’s house on Hicks Street.
For several days there were no public announcements as to how he was getting along. But on July 8 the Brooklyn Eagle reported that he was busily engaged on his plans and drawings for the bridge, and that the injured foot had been so placed that a steady stream of cold water poured over it night and day. “The distinguished engineer has his notions about surgical treatment, and seems to be very stoic in regard to physical pain,” the article said. “He thinks and talks of the bridge as incessantly as ever, and seems unwilling to have the conversation of his professional assistants diverted for a moment to his own accident.” In another ten days, it was claimed, he would be out surveying again.
Dr. Brinkman, the family physician, came up from Philadelphia, and a Reverend John C. Brown from Trenton made a special trip. It seemed strange luck, the preacher told Roebling, that he should be laid up at the start of so great a work. “There is no such thing as chance,” Roebling is supposed to have replied. “All is wisely ordered.”
But in another week reports were he had taken a turn for the worse, though there was no mention of what was by then known inside the Hicks Street house.
Roebling, predictably, perhaps inevitably, had taken charge of his own case. He had fired one Brooklyn doctor, then another, much against his son’s wishes, and though he seems to have tolerated the presence of Brinkman, he never paid any attention to him. Now things were not going at all well. Signs of tetanus had been detected. It would be commonly said later that had he obeyed the doctors, he would have recovered. “But Mr. Roebling was a man of indomitable will and perseverance,” the Eagle would explain, “and the counsels of his friends were as naught.”
For eight days, from July 13 on, Roebling suffered intensely. Medical experts would agree when it was all over that only a very tough and determined man could have endured what he did that long.
At first he had become extremely restless, complaining of savage headaches. But presently he began having trouble swallowing. After that there was no mistaking what was wrong with him. The muscles around his face, neck, and jaws grew rigid as iron. Within a day or so his eyebrows were permanently fixed in a raised position and his mouth was pulled back in a terrible grimace, the teeth all showing and locked tight. He was unable to eat anything solid, or to talk, but he kept scribbling notes to Washington and the others attending him, instructing them on his proper care.
Then the hideous seizures began, set off by the slightest disturbance. His room was kept dark, the long shades drawn against the July sun, and everyone who had reason to go in or out did so as softly as humanly possible. But then a window shade would rattle in the breeze or someone would inadvertently brush against the side of his bed, a door would squeak or there would be a noise from the street below, and he would go into a convulsion, the sight of which was something they would all live with the rest of their lives. All at once his whole body would lift off the bed and double backward with a fierce, awful jerk, his every muscle clenched in violent contraction. Sweat streamed from his body, but he made no sound, not even a groan, because during the spasm his whole chest wall was frozen hard.
He was being horribly destroyed before their eyes and there was not a thing any of them could do about it. Moreover, as nearly always happens with lockjaw, his mind remained as clear as ever, and this made the sight of his suffering all the more unbearable. They all knew the terrible, titanic battle going on behind those blazing eyes and the ghastly smile that stayed fixed like concrete on his ashen face throughout everything that was happening to him.
When the seizures passed, he generally slipped into a coma. But even toward the end, there were hours when he would lie there perfectly still in the darkened room staring straight up at the ceiling, one of his family sitting motionless beside him. During the final few days there were tears streaking down his face.
The watch went on hour upon hour. Downstairs, visitors came and went, talking in whispers. They were told their concern was deeply appreciated, that there was nothing they could do but pray, and they went away to tell others what they had heard about the particulars of his condition, which was very little.
But on the evening of July 21, quite contrary to all the professional forecasts, the patient took a turn for the better. With paper and pencil he began giving instructions to his nephew, Ed Riedel, on a special contrivance he wanted built to lift him up and move him about his bed. He made a sketch, explained how it should be done, and told the young man to get at it immediately. Through the rest of the night he kept issuing orders on a variety of matters, including the bridge, and a wave of hope swept through the house, until sometime after midnight, when it became clear from the things he was scribbling down that his mind was going. He thought he was back at the bridge office.
About three in the morning he had a convulsion so violent that he leaped clear from the bed and was caught in the arms of C. C. Martin, the assistant engineer, who with Washington and one or two others was standing watch at the time. Within minutes Roeblling was dead.
Then in the gray light before dawn, Thursday, July 22, the undertaker arrived and an artist who had known Roebling in Cincinnati was called in to take a death mask.
The afternoon edition of the Eagle had the full story. Roebling was called a martyr, while in virtually the same breath the editors assured their readers that there was still great hope for the bridge. The implication was that the success of the bridge had been more or less assured now that it had claimed a life, like the bell in the old story that would not ring true until it had been cast of molten iron into which a man had fallen. Some people were saying the only safe bridge was one that had taken a life and stories were told of the lives sacrificed in the building of famous bridges of ancient times. The Eagle, for its part, said this:
He who loses his life from injuries received in the pursuit of science or of duty, in acquiring engineering information or carrying out engineering details, is as truly and usefully a martyr as he who sacrifices his life for a theological opinion, and no less honor should be paid to his memory. Henceforth we look on the great project of the Brooklyn Bridge as being baptized and hallowed by the life blood of its distinguished and lamented author.
Flags were flown at half-staff all over Brooklyn, and when it came time to take the body down to the ferry, to start the trip to Trenton, there was slow going in the streets because of the crowds. As a subject of popular interest, Roebling seemed a more notable success dead than alive. His training, all his ambition and ability, his entire life’s work had been building toward this greatest of bridges and he had not lived to do it—that was a tragedy people could readily understand regardless of how little previous interest they may have had in either the man or his work.
Word of Roebling’s death reached Trenton early the same morning he died. Within hours the whole town knew about it, and though there had been ominous talk of his condition for days, no one seemed quite ready to accept the fact that the worst had happened. Talk of Roebling dead was one thing, but the idea of him laid out in a black suit of clothes like any other man, those pale eyes shut forever, was something else. Somehow, it was felt, he would figure a way.
But by nightfall Saturday, when the body arrived, the truth had long since sunk in. Nobody had any doubts that the extraordinary life of John A. Roebling was over and plans had been laid for the biggest funeral in Trenton’s history.
The eulogies began that night at a special town meeting. Judge Scudder, General Rushing, and Charles Hewitt spoke, as did Reverend John Brown, who said that though Roebling was known the world over as a man of science, he ought to be remembered as a gentleman all the same. Then early the following morning, in twos and threes, some leading children, people began gathering outside the Roebling house.
Separated from the wireworks by a narrow strip of lawn, the house was a tall spacious affair, with some twenty-seven rooms, walls two feet thick, and few frills. Roebling had designed it himself before the war, in the Italian style and more for comfort than show, except for the glassy cupola on top. It had stood raw and pink-looking when it was first finished, taller even than the mill in those days, with nothing but bare fields to either side. But in the time since, Roebling had had it stuccoed over, the mill had more than doubled in size, and the trees he planted had closed in most of the property. In summer, only the windows of the cupola could be seen riding high above the treetops. They were the first windows in town to catch the morning sun.
The grounds themselves were neatly set off from the street by a tall iron fence. Flowers bloomed through the whole summer. Grapes hung from elaborate trellises. There were boxwood hedges, a handsome barn, an icehouse, and an especially fine orchard that he had been extremely proud of, adding to it year by year. As might be expected, everything was kept just so.
The house faced onto the street, a railroad track, and the old Delaware and Raritan Canal, which all ran side by side, parallel to the river. Past the canal and the state prison, the land sloped away toward the ironworks and the river. That part of town was all built up now, but behind the house, on the other side of the orchard, was a broad, flat wheat field that was just beginning to turn color.
By ten o’clock the small cluster of onlookers had grown big enough to fill the front lawn and most of the street. Carriages approaching the house had trouble getting through. But there was little commotion. The time passed about as quietly as on any Sunday morning, broken only by the sound of church bells from across town. Already the temperature was near eighty as the sun climbed into a cloudless bowl of summer sky. Nothing like this had ever happened in Trenton. Estimates were that perhaps two thousand people were gathered on the front lawn.
Inside the house the entire family was assembled—a rare thing for the Roeblings—surrounded by the books and paintings he had collected, the marble statuary and the steel engravings of his bridges. At eleven the doors were to be opened to the crowd outside, but for the time being, except for the servants, they had the house and its memories all to themselves.
With Washington Roebling, now head of the family, was his pretty and alert-looking wife, Emily, who had been a special favorite of her father-in-law’s. He had admired her for her energy and intelligence, often showing her a degree of kindness seldom granted his own children. After her son had been born, she had written to Roebling in an affectionate letter from Germany, “The name of John A. Roebling must ever be identified with you and your works, but with a mother’s pride and fond hopes for her first-born I trust my boy may not prove unworthy of the name…”
Then there was Ferdinand Roebling, slight, fine-featured, bespectacled, and now twenty-seven. This was the only one of his sons, John Roebling used to say, who had the makings of a merchant. His oldest boy, the bridgebuilder, he had ordered off to war, but Ferdinand had been kept at home, Ferdinand’s services to the wire business being too valuable to spare, according to John Roebling.
Charles, younger still by seven years, was a strangely silent, thoughtful young man, whose chief interest was flower gardening and who was home for the summer from Troy, where he was a student at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, like his oldest brother before him, and not particularly happy about it.
Edmund, or Eddie as he seems to have been called by most of them, was fifteen, very shy and uncertain-looking, and still a great worry apparently.
The sisters were Laura, Josephine, and Elvira. Laura was the oldest after Washington. She had dutifully played the organ at the German church every Sunday and married a “good German,” a Mühlhausen man at that, her Mr. Methfessel, as she called him. They had a number of children and lived on Staten Island, where Mr. Methfessel had started a school and where they would have failed to make ends meet by this time had it not been for the checks she received regularly in the mail from her father.
Josephine was now the wife of Charles H. Jarvis, one of the finest American pianists of the time, and Elvira, the last of the three to be married, was Mrs. John Stewart. Elvira had always been the most playful and high-spirited member of the family, the least like her father in this respect and the one whose company he most enjoyed. Her wedding had taken place only a few weeks before, in the same large front parlor where his corpse was now on display. All that spring, as he went back and forth to Brooklyn, he kept bringing home expensive gifts for her, dresses he had picked out at A. T. Stewart’s, hundreds of dollars’ worth of silks, fancy carpets, Tiffany silver. A few days before the wedding he had insisted that she take a hundred dollars in cash, to have with her on her wedding trip. Then he had given her away to young Stewart in a room full of guests, several of whom would comment at the funeral on how exceptionally genial and good-spirited he had seemed then.
Very little is known about the new Mrs. Roebling, except that she was the former Lucia Cooper of Trenton and that their wedding had taken place in February of 1867. He had presented her with two gold bracelets and a painting by Rembrandt Peale and in his cashbook he entered $125 as the cost of the wedding trip, about which he made no other notation that is known of. Two years later she had still not been fully accepted by the family, nor would she be. Washington Roebling would write that after the summer of his father’s death, he never saw her again.
And finally, there was Charles Swan, who, in a photograph taken some years later, sits in a stiff, upholstered chair, looking quite well upholstered himself as he focuses directly and amiably on the camera, every inch the solid, kindly, dependable man, it would appear, John Roebling’s sons would say he was. That Roebling also appreciated Swan for what he was and all he had done seems clear, despite the cold formality of their working relationship. For when he sat down to write a new will in 1867, after he remarried, he included twenty thousand dollars for Swan and the clearly stated wish that his sons take Swan into the business as a full partner.
The contents of the will would not be made public for several days, but for the family its general outline had been known for some time. In addition to the money for Swan, Roebling had left some eighty thousand dollars for distant relatives and several charities. The bulk of his estate he had split eight ways, between his new wife and his seven children—except that he deducted from each child whatever money had been advanced to him during his lifetime. Year by year, in a private ledger, he had carefully itemized his expenditures for his children, down to the penny, and now in his last summing up he docked them each accordingly.
The wire business he left to his four sons, requesting that they keep the name John A. Roebling’s Sons.
At eleven sharp the house was opened to the public and the crowd started moving for the front door. For the next two hours the town was permitted to pay its respects. The people passed through the dim front parlor in slow single file, in dark Sunday dress and funeral veils, the men with hats in hand, moving with almost no sound at all up to the rosewood casket with its huge silver handles, then on out through the back way, most of them glancing this way and that, trying to see as much as possible without appearing disrespectful.
Nearly everyone thought the Brooklyn undertaker had done extremely well. The body did look emaciated, it was agreed, and the massive brow stood out more even than in life, but when they considered the horrible way the old man had died, and the July heat, most of those who filed by thought he looked quite himself, perhaps even at peace, which was what seemed most unlike him of anything. For the majority of the people in line, it was a chance for a first real look at the man close up.
At one o’clock the front door was closed again. Then shortly after one, as the crowd regathered under the shade trees, the quiet was suddenly shattered by the shriek of a train whistle. People later described it as the most dramatic moment of the day.
Up the tracks crept a special train from Jersey City, five cars long. Like the one the night before that had brought Roebling’s body home, it steamed slowly to the front gate and stopped. Then down stepped the delegation from Brooklyn and New York, some fifty or sixty men, most of them in high, shiny silk hats. They stood about in a cluster beside the train, squinting against the sunshine, until the last of them had gotten down. Then they started up the front walk in a body, the crowd making way for them. At the front door Washington Roebling stood waiting to usher them inside.
The services began at two, on schedule, the family sitting in the upstairs hallways, the guests crowded into neat rows of chairs set before the casket. The heat was terrific, fans were going at a great speed in gloved hands as four ministers—one Presbyterian, one Lutheran, two Episcopal—took turns with the services at the foot of the stairs. There was little out of the ordinary said. The Lutheran spoke in German.
Of the eight pallbearers who took the casket out the front door, four were Trenton men; the others were all associated with the New York Bridge Company—Julius Adams, Horatio Allen, Andrew H. Green, and Henry Cruse Murphy. That a large part of the funeral expenses would also be met by the New York Bridge Company, or more specifically by William Kingsley on behalf of the New York Bridge Company, was privileged information at this point.
The clergy and immediate family led the procession to Mercer Cemetery, riding in special carriages. The Brooklyn delegation came rolling along after, followed by the Board of Trade in still more carriages. Two hundred men from the Roeblings’ rolling mill had marched up from South Trenton and they fell in behind, while the men from the wire mill walked two by two alongside the carriages. Estimates were that fifteen hundred people joined in the march, counting all the professional and trade associations, the orphans, and the singing societies. With everyone under way the whole procession stretched out more than a mile and a half and along the entire line of march—out Green Street, East Street, State and Clinton—sidewalks and doorsteps were thick with silent onlookers.
By four it was all over. John Augustus Roebling had been committed to eternity, beside Johanna Roebling and two of their children. Again the distinguished visitors from Brooklyn and New York were gathered beside their train, all looking a little worse for the dust and heat, each offering his own polite, soft-spoken farewell to the Roebling family, and to Colonel Roebling in particular. One by one they stepped forward to shake his hand and to wish him well—Henry Murphy, Henry Slocum, Horatio Allen, Julius Adams, Thomas Kinsella, Demas Barnes, Colonel Paine, C. C. Martin, William Kingsley. Then as he and the rest of the family turned and walked back through the gate and up the path to the big house, the Jersey City train rolled out of Trenton, gradually gathering speed as it broke into open country.
There is no record of what was talked about during the return trip to Jersey City and that is a great shame. There was quite a lot to be discussed, obviously enough, and nearly everyone who should have a say was present, and with nothing better to do. It was the sort of opportunity a politician seldom lets pass, and since the majority of them were politicians in one way or other, it is hard to imagine the time being wasted.
They had all been together on the ride down that morning, of course, but then, with Roebling not yet in his grave, any open talk about getting on with his work would have been considered out of line. Now the atmosphere was quite different, no doubt, and it seems reasonable to assume that as their train went steaming along through the late summer afternoon a number of highly interesting conversations were being conducted.
Years later it would be said that Roebling’s death left everyone in a terrible quandary over who should take his place and that there were grave doubts about going ahead with the idea. “With its inspiration gone, the Brooklyn Bridge seemed impossible to build,” one biographer would claim. But the truth is there was never any doubt at all.
As William Kingsley would reveal, Roebling had long since talked to him and to Henry Murphy about his son replacing him eventually. Kingsley even said Roebling had wanted his son in charge from the start, but that he, Kingsley, and the others would have none of that. Be that as it may, the very day of Roebling’s death, Thomas Kinsella had stated in no uncertain terms on the editorial page of the Eagle that Washington Roebling would take up right where his father left off and that no man was better equipped for the job.
Not long since, before the accident, which led to his death, Mr. Roebling remarked to us that he had enough of money and reputation. And he scarce knew why, at his age, he was undertaking to build another and still greater bridge. His son, he added, ought to build this Brooklyn bridge—was as competent as himself in all respects to design and supervise it; had thought and worked with him, and in short was as good an engineer as his father.
As a matter of plain fact those numerous different parties who wanted the bridge built for their numerous different reasons had been left with little choice but to go ahead with the young engineer. Moreover, to their way of thinking there was no good reason why they should not, and he himself, years afterward, would say there were three very good reasons why they should:
First—I was the only living man who had the practical experience to build those great cables, far exceeding anything previously attempted, and make every wire bear its share.
Second—Two years previous I had spent a year in Europe studying pneumatic foundations and the sinking of caissons under compressed air. When the borings on the N.Y. tower site developed the appalling depth of 106 feet below the water level all other engineers shrank back…
Third—I had assisted my father in the preparation of the first designs—he of course being the mastermind. I was therefore familiar with his ideas and with the whole project—and no one else was.
He was also a very young man, which perhaps he ought to have added as reason four. He had that vitality his father prized so and that in his last years had come to be a thing only to hope for in the next life. “After your spiritual birth, did you feel like a new being,” he had asked the spirit of his dead wife, “young, energetic and full of life?”
And beyond that it seems Washington Roebling had struck just about everyone with a say in the decision as quite a solid individual in his own right. The consulting engineers could vouch for his professional abilities. He had been a soldier and an exceptionally good one, which was also taken to be much in his favor. And on a strictly personal level he was simply a whole lot easier to talk to than his father had been and would probably be a whole lot easier to work with.
Indeed, the gentlemen from Brooklyn must have been most favorably impressed with Washington Roebling, considering what they were about to risk on him. It was true, just as he said, that he was the one man—the one and only man—in the country capable of building the unprecedented bridge his father had designed, but that of course meant that everything depended on him alone. It meant that unlike his father, he had no one standing by ready to take his place should anything happen to him, or between him and his employers.
Still, if the matter of a successor was self-evident and already settled, the death of John A. Roebling had raised other complications that remained quite unresolved. There was, for example, the vital question of public confidence in the work. The older Roebling’s word had counted for something, among his peers as well as the general public, but even he had had to face a storm of protest. It had been necessary for him to resort to a committee of experts to testify to his judgment. How many more critics might surface now, now that he was no longer available to answer for his radical schemes? Public works of such magnitude demanded the smooth turning of many wheels, and wheels within wheels, a number of which were often carefully, cleverly concealed, and a collapse of public confidence could lead to all sorts of difficult, embarrassing complications.
John Roebling had known a great deal about the genesis of the bridge idea, about Brooklyn history and Brooklyn politics and who had the power. He also knew the role money played in getting things accomplished. Money had always been a secondary interest to him personally. He had made quite a lot of it, to be sure, but it had never been life’s chief objective and he had little time for anyone who thought it was. Nonetheless, he knew the lengths some men would go for it and he himself had never been adverse to playing to that side of human nature if it suited his purposes. When he called for the building of the Great Central Railroad in Pittsburgh, for example, he described how the West was “ready to pour rich treasure into our laps,” just as in Brooklyn he had pictured a toll bridge so lucrative that it would pay for itself—all six to seven million dollars—in just three years, which even some of his most ardent admirers in the Bridge Company recognized as foolishness. The bridge, after all, was to be built by a private corporation; it was a business proposition, just as the Allegheny River and Cincinnati bridges had been, and he took that as a matter of course.
But somewhere along the line he had found out more than he had known at the start, more perhaps than he had wanted to know about the ideas a few of his clients and their friends had for making money with his bridge—or at least so it appears from comments made considerably later by his son Washington. “…At the time of his death he was already arranging to retire and relinquish the work to me,” Washington Roebling would write privately to a correspondent. “…You may not be aware that this bridge was started by the infamous ‘Boss Tweed Ring’ for the sole purpose of using it as a means to rob the cities. When this fact began to dawn on my father’s mind he made up his mind to get out.”
The statement is not quite accurate—the bridge had not been “started” by the Tweed Ring, nor is there any indication that either Washington Roebling or his father ever wrote or said anything to the same effect back at the beginning of the work. Nor is it known how much Washington Roebling himself knew at the time of his father’s death, at the time he stepped into his father’s place.
But for a number of those who were speeding toward Jersey City that late July afternoon in 1869, the full story was very clearly known; Brooklyn and its dreams of a bridge were essential elements in their own life stories and dreams.
It is intriguing to note what Thomas Kinsella said in the Eagle the day after the funeral. Possibly his remarks had nothing to do with his feelings about things said on the ride to Jersey City, but then again, possibly, that may have been exactly what he had in mind.
“The great boast of this land,” he wrote, “is twofold—the political works of the [Founding] Fathers, and the material triumphs of science, of which Roebling was, with scarcely any exception, the greatest hero.” But the politician of the present, he went on, was nothing more than “a thing of tricks and dodges.” About all the modern-day politician could do was to undo “the grand creation of former days.” The politician’s words and deeds were as nothing, he said, when compared to the works of a man like John A. Roebling.
“One such life as Roebling’s was worth more than those of a whole convention full of jabbering and wrangling politicians.” Concerning politicians, Kinsella could speak with some authority, his Brooklyn readers knew, for he was one himself.