7
On motion of Mr. Jenks, it was resolved that Col. Washington A. Roebling be appointed Chief Engineer; that the Executive Committee have power to fix his compensation, and that he have power to employ such assistance as he may deem proper, subject to the approval of the Executive Committee.
—From the minutes of a
meeting of the Directors of the
New York Bridge Company,
August 3, 1869
HE HAD KNOWN times like this during the war, when nothing much appeared to be happening, but every day counted, when a dozen plans had to be gotten up and decided on without delay, contingencies considered, countless little details seen to and orders given, any one of which might determine the whole course of events to follow. “There must be someone at hand to say ‘yes’ or ‘no,’” he liked to comment, “and it often makes a great difference which word they use.”
Until the first of the year, when the site for the Brooklyn tower would finally become the legal property of the Bridge Company, no work could be started of the sort the public had been anticipating. But behind the scenes innumerable matters had to be settled. And from early August, when he was named Chief Engineer, until March of 1870, when he would launch the first of the great caissons, Washington Roebling was an exceedingly busy young man.
Specifications had to be drawn up and agreed on—for such basic supplies as piling, lumber, cement, coal tar, blasting powder. All kinds of special equipment and machinery had to be ordered—air compressors, hoisting engines, stone derricks, clamshell scoops, rock drills, air locks for the caissons—most of which had to be designed from scratch and custom-built. The production capacities and workmanship of various manufacturers had to be evaluated, usually by personal inspection. Job applicants had to be interviewed, the beginnings of a labor force assembled.
Roebling had had a good deal of experience in this sort of planning, working with his father and in the Army, and the business of organizing big construction projects was William Kingsley’s specialty. At a meeting of the Executive Committee on October 14, Kingsley would be appointed General Superintendent. Kingsley also, along with the Executive Committee, was to decide on the awarding of contracts. Roebling had been instructed by Henry Murphy that he was to have nothing to do with that. How Kingsley was to be reimbursed for his services was something of a mystery.
Roebling’s own staff, as of the end of August, consisted of six: Colonel Paine; C. C. Martin, who had been Kingsley’s choice; Sam Probasco, another Kingsley man; and three new men, all quite young, whom Roebling had hired soon after his father’s death. They were Francis Collingwood, Jr., George McNulty, and Wilhelm Hildenbrand.
Collingwood had been a friend at Troy. He had been two years ahead of Roebling and finished first in his class, but in the time since, he had been working in the family jewelry business in Elmira and had not had much engineering experience. Had it been up to John A. Roebling, Collingwood probably would not have been hired, but the new Chief Engineer knew his man, he thought, and had written to Elmira to ask Collingwood to join him in Brooklyn. Collingwood agreed, on the condition that he would serve one month only (the jewelry business was prospering it seems). When he arrived in Brooklyn in mid-August, Roebling put him to work helping Paine with plans for the Brooklyn caisson.
McNulty, the youngest of them, was barely twenty, a New Yorker and a graduate of the University of Virginia. He had done a little surveying, but that was about the sum of his experience and he had been turned down when he first applied for a position. Then he offered to serve without pay and Roebling had been so impressed by his manner that he took him on, with pay, as an assistant to Martin.
Of the three new men, Hildenbrand was the only proved quantity. A strapping, smooth-faced young German who had arrived in the United States only a few years before, he was a draftsman of exceptional talent. Earlier he had done a number of finished drawings of the bridge for John A. Roebling, including a big panoramic rendering with clouds sweeping above the towers, which was the one three-dimensional view the engineers had to show how the finished bridge would look. More recently he had worked for Vanderbilt’s architects on the new Grand Central Depot and was in fact the man who had designed, at age twenty-two, the great arched roof over the train shed. Hildenbrand would spend most of his time in the office, computing stresses in various parts of the bridge, and producing the finished drawings. But he would also go to Maine to supervise the cutting of the granite and his primary responsibility would be to keep the plans well in advance of the work. He was to be a most valuable man.
Charles Cyril Martin, C. C. Martin as he was known, was second-in-command after Roebling, with a salary of five thousand dollars a year. Older than Roebling by six years, he had a big, plain, manly face, handsome except for the ears, which were extremely large, and he wore his whiskers clipped trim, in the manner made popular by Grant—as Roebling would too now, after his father’s death. Martin was another Rensselaer graduate. He had been a class ahead of Roebling, but already twenty-three when he first arrived at Troy, he had been regarded as an old-timer even then. By this time he had been married ten years, was the father of four children, and had worked for William Kingsley on three different reservoirs. He had put down Brooklyn’s new water main and was head engineer in charge of building Prospect Park. (The actual design of the park had been worked out by the noted landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who had done Central Park, which they considered the lesser work of the two.) Martin had even named one of his sons Kingsley Martin. So if experience dealing with Kingsley or a knowledge of Brooklyn politics were to count for anything, Martin had added qualifications.
Martin was to concentrate on supplies and the hiring of the work force, Kingsley’s chief interests. He was, for all practical purposes, to be the executive officer for the bridge. For help he had Probasco and young McNulty.
The average age of the engineering staff, Roebling included, was about thirty-one. Paine, who was forty-one, was the senior member.
The men were all new to the job and to one another. The job itself, they all recognized, was going to be unlike anything attempted before. A little later, a salty and resourceful character named E. F. Farrington, who had worked on the Cincinnati Bridge, would be named master mechanic. But for now the only one who had had any previous experience building a Roebling bridge—or a suspension bridge of any kind—was the Chief Engineer and not even he had had working experience with some of the problems presented by this particular bridge.
Still he would be the one with the final say. And however much staff help he got, every important decision would be his in the end, and at this stage there was seldom any sure way to know which decisions, of all that had to be made, might turn out to be the important ones in the long run. Roebling, too, would be the one to deal with the Board of Directors and the all-powerful Executive Committee, with public officials from both cities, with old Horatio Allen, the high-paid consultant who had never built a suspension bridge, who knew little about the subject, but who had a reputation to throw about if he chose to.
Roebling would be the one to answer the sort of criticism from other overnight experts that the newspapers and a few of the professional journals liked to give space to. His father had been dead only a short time when a crackpot named Samuel Barnes B. Nolan was crying out in the pages of Scientific American that the grade of the bridge was too steep for wagons in slippery weather, that the central span was going to sag, that the whole work would be a “dead failure.” The claims were absurd, Roebling knew, but one such article could mean hours lost explaining why to some influential politician or overly conscientious board member.
To get what he wanted, and particularly if it was a departure from the original plan—or seemed to be—he would have to present his recommendations formally, in writing. As the work progressed, he would have to account for each and every step along the way, explaining his every decision in lengthy reports addressed to the Executive Committee. These would have to be quite explicate, thorough, candid, yet in language his nontechnical peers could understand. Every report would also become a public document, he knew, and so, come what may, each would also have to be convincing enough to maintain public confidence not only in the work itself but in the man in charge of it. If things went wrong, if materials proved shoddy, if equipment broke down, if the work fell behind schedule, if some part of the structure itself failed, if accounts were juggled or costs got out of hand, if there were mistakes in judgment by any of his subordinates, if there were accidents, he would be the one held accountable. In time, there would be nearly a thousand men under his command.
Most important of all, the plans he had to work with at this point were only of the most general sort, “the details not having been considered” by his father.
It was a responsibility of monumental proportions and there were older men in the profession, men with proved abilities, who might not have felt up to it. But there is nothing to indicate that Washington Roebling had even a moment’s hesitation. He had never had the full charge of a bridge before, the absolute final say, that is, except for two military bridges.
As yet he had done nothing to earn the confidence of his subordinates or any of the private parties connected with the enterprise. He was where he was strictly on his father’s say-so and because the men who wanted the bridge built had been left with no other choice. Moreover, as he doubtless sensed from the start, anything he did would be measured against what his father might have done. He would be forever compared to the old man and held accountable for things said or promised by him. And however well he might succeed, however much of himself he might put into the work, the odds were it would always be John A. Roebling’s bridge. If there were failures, they would be all his.
The great question now, of course, was whether he would prove to be the man his father had been.
Washington Augustus Roebling, at age thirty-two, was much like his father in a great many ways, but also quite different. John Roebling was a European, a European intellectual to be more exact, a perfectionist at heart and by training, and an aristocrat if one accepts his own belief in an aristocracy of ability. He was painfully proper, vile-tempered, and widely regarded a genius.
His eldest son was an even-mannered, informal, kindly man and, as he himself would say, just a little lazy by his father’s standards. Others in the family would say he was more like his mother. He had her patience with people, her calm, as they said. He was extremely bright, but not brilliant. He was not a genius. Nor did he have his father’s creative vision, which was among the main differences between them. Still, as his wife, Emily, would write, he was a man of “very versatile attainments.” He was a first-rate classical scholar, a good linguist, and a fine musician. He was also quite articulate when need be and a great deal more open-minded than his father had been. He was considerably more interested in his fellow man, in the flesh rather than the abstract, and though he never managed his father’s commanding presence, he was really far better at working with people. He was, everything considered, much more of a human being.
Professionally, he was as good as they came. Quick at mathematics, a superb draftsman, extremely thorough about details, he had his father’s passion for perfection and, like his father, he had a very great deal of physical courage. But he never considered himself a creative genius and nowhere along the line did he have any airs that might have given anyone that impression. His wife called him “rather indifferent to matters of courtesy.” And while he had the Roebling pride, he had inherited almost none of his father’s vanity, and this, in his view, greatly reduced his chances of ever attaining comparable fame. “History,” he would write, “teaches us that no man can be great unless a certain amount of vanity enters into his composition…For a man to be important it is also necessary to have a good opinion of one’s self, even if for no other purpose than to impress others.”
At first glance he seemed a rather silent but pleasant person, relaxed, unassuming, attractively modest. Indeed, apart from his name, there appeared, on first meeting, to be nothing much out of the ordinary about him. He was not impressive, the way his father had been. His father, on top of everything else, looked like a great man.
But in this they were quite the same: they had an absolute, total confidence in their ability to do the job at hand.
Washington Roebling was a great believer in heredity and the part it played in determining one’s “composition.” He would write of what he called “a peculiarity of the Roebling mind,” which he saw as a fixed determination to do things as one thought they ought to be done, no other way, asking little advice of anybody, and generally refusing it when offered. This “overweening self-reliance” was a family streak, he held, something much more serious than ordinary “Dutch” stubbornness and as much a handicap as a virtue. But he also wrote, “It might be argued if a man inherits everything he deserves no credit for it. That would be so in a life of universal monotony, but with each generation in turn totally different conditions and environments arise. These have to be met by the new individual who must develop his powers to adapt himself to them; to overcome them and use them as his tools.”
As a “new individual,” starting, say, from about age six on, he had neither grown up in an ancient walled city nor filled himself with philosophy nor dreamed of future liberation in some distant utopia. He had grown up an American and perhaps the most obvious, important difference between Washington Roebling and his famous father was just that. Furthermore, he had been through those two most characteristic and influential experiences for American men of his generation: he had spent his boyhood in the rural backwaters, where the frontier was recent history and there were still comparable privations; and he had been through the war. Unlike his father he had been both an American farm boy and a soldier and those two experiences had played a profound part in determining his own “composition,” as he called it.
And there was something else: he had grown up with John A. Roebling as his father.
Washington Roebling’s passport, dated May 27, 1867, and signed by William H. Seward, offers the following physical description. “Age, 30 years; Stature, 5 feet 9 inches; Forehead, broad; Eyes, light grey; Nose, short; Mouth, small; Chin, square; Hair, light; Complexion, fair.”
A passport issued some years later has him an inch taller and according to some accounts his eyes were blue, but in any case a more memorable picture was put down in one of the wartime letters of a Union Army colonel named Theodore Lyman, who served on the staff of General George Meade.
Roebling is a character…He is a light-haired, blue-eyed man, with a countenance as if all the world were an empty show. He stoops a good deal, when riding has the stirrups so long that the tips of his toes can just touch them; and, as he wears no boots, the bottoms of his pantaloons are always torn and ragged. He goes poking about in the most dangerous places, looking for the position of the enemy, and always with an air of entire indifference. His conversation is curt and not garnished, with polite turnings.
What’s that redoubt doing there? cries General Meade. “Don’t know; didn’t put it there,” replies the laconic one.
Contrary to general belief, he had not been named for George Washington. It would be said that as an idealistic young immigrant John Roebling “reverently chose” for his first-born son “the name that had most inspired him in the history of the young republic.” But the son himself told a different story. He had been named for Washington Gill from Richmond, Virginia, a surveyor his father had hired to help lay the railroad line over the Allegheny Mountain. “They were sitting on top of the mountain when the news of my arrival came,” Roebling wrote, “and Mr. Gill begged that I be named after him. The Gill was dropped but Washington I have struggled with ever since.”
He was born on May 26, 1837. If ever he considered his father’s absence at the time a slight or a prophecy in any sense, he never said so. Nor was he troubled by the absence of clergy at his christening. “I was…baptized by the postmaster, Mr. Shilly, there being no preacher as yet—have received no ill effects therefrom.” When he was six, his father would describe him as a “well-built, sturdy, quiet boy.”
Across the street, catty-corner from the house, was the church his father had built, and beyond that were orchards planted by the first settlers, great stretches of open farmland, but still, also, big stands of virgin forest—black oak in the main—and woods of smaller second growth that were full of game. “As late as 1845 a black bear walked down Main Street,” he wrote, adding, “he got away.”
The social life was decidedly German and Monongahela rye was considered the staff of life. For entertainment, people put on plays or small parties and dances, at home. “Bernigau played the violin; Wickenhagen the violincello; Neher the cornet; Roebling the flute and clavier.”
The native Pennsylvanians called them Latin farmers, meaning they knew more of Latin than farming. There had never been a dearth of interesting conversation, Roebling would recall. Next door lived Ferdinand Baehr, a wool carder from Mühlhausen, who had a splendid library and a brother-in-law named Eisenhardt who had been at Waterloo, in the regiment that held the Château Hougoumont against the French attack. Baehr took a great interest in Washington Roebling and the little boy became a daily visitor, listening to Eisenhardt tell over and over how the French bullets had rattled like hail against big oak doors that never failed.
A year or so before the Civil War, when he was living in Pittsburgh, working with his father on the Allegheny River Bridge, Roebling had gone back to Saxonburg to visit his grandmother Herting. His father had refused to go. For Washington it had been a terribly disappointing experience and he wished with all his heart he too had never returned. As a child, he said, it had seemed the finest place in the world.
Being the “Roebling boy” I had the entree to all houses, to wonder over the many heirlooms the people had brought over—curious old clocks, old Bibles and books, quaint pictures, novel utensils of copper, brass or china, long German pipes. My grandmother Herting had a wooden travelling-box with a carved top inside of which a picture of the battle of Navarino was glued, showing the burning of the Turkish fleet; that was a treat. A similar picture depicted Marshal Blücher driving the French over the Katzbach.
There were farms not very distant where the old Indian trail to Venango could be plainly seen. Delawares, Shawnees, Senecas, and Muncies had used it for nobody knew how long. George Washington himself had traveled it by foot. An old blacksmith named Glover, the first known settler in Butler County, was still alive then and a subject of immense respect. He had been at Valley Forge. And probably the most famous person in the whole county was an old woman over in Buffalo township whose story was part of the pioneer folklore Washington Roebling had grown up with. Her name was Massy Harbison. In 1792 she had been captured by Senecas and Muncies, who murdered two of her children before her eyes, then set off on a terrifying forced march through the forest, driving her and her one remaining child, an infant, before them. But she had managed to escape and made an unbelievable run for her life, traveling for four days through the wilderness, still carrying her baby. When she reached Pittsburgh, scarcely half alive, it was recorded on good authority that more than 150 thorns were extracted from her feet.
Saxonburg was on the route of the annual flight of the passenger pigeons to Canada every spring, and the sight of them filling the sky was something he would talk about all his life. Fearful thunderstorms shook the little town, and once, in 1843, everyone poured out into the night to see the great comet, “with its head at the foot of Main Street and tail above the church.”
Roebling was twelve when his mother, who was again pregnant, moved the family to Trenton, traveling without her husband, who was “tied down” to work in the East. The boy was put into the Trenton Academy, along with his brother Ferdinand, and seems to have gotten by well enough for the next five years. He took up the violin, developed an interest in astronomy and mineralogy, and decided on an engineering career, although it seems unlikely that he ever had much choice in the matter.
Once, in the winter of 1853, he went up to New York with his father. Work on the Niagara Bridge had closed down until spring and his father was seeing to other business. They went over to Brooklyn for some unknown reason and in the process spent several miserable hours on board an icebound ferry. For a man of his father’s temperament, it was doubtless an infuriating experience, to be so at the mercy of such elementary forces. But as a result, the story goes, John A. Roebling, his son at his side, “then and there saw a bridge in his mind’s eye.”
At seventeen Washington Roebling was sent off to Troy to get his training, his father having concluded Troy was the place for him.
The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at Troy was a new kind of school, the first in America established for the specific purpose of providing an education in “Theoretical and Practical Science.” It had been started some twenty years before by Stephen Van Rensselaer, the Hudson River patroon and politician, who held that the “aspiring energies of youth” had for too long been “chained down to a kind of literary bondage,” and who made Amos Eaton, the distinguished geologist, its first head. By the time Washington Roebling came along, it was a small assembly of brick buildings set on a steep hill overlooking Troy and the Hudson River and one of the very few institutions in the country offering courses in civil engineering. There were just over a hundred students in all and the prescribed attire was a dark-green cloth cap and a velvet-collared frock coat to match.
There is a picture of Roebling taken at Troy. He was nineteen at the time, a very handsome, sturdy-looking youth, with his father’s jaw and a rather intense stare. He himself thought he looked altogether too boyish and tried without success to grow a mustache.
“In regard to the mustache you covet so,” wrote his sister Laura from Trenton, “I can only recommend something which will favor the growth of the desired article, namely, shave every day, and apply some Guano on the desired place and no doubt soon a luxuriant crop will spring up.”
The work itself was extremely difficult. Once in a letter to Charles Swan he mentioned swimming the Hudson, but otherwise he seems to have done little else but study, which is not surprising, considering what was expected of him at home and what was required by the institution. His senior thesis was to be on “Design for a Suspension Aqueduct,” but in three years’ time he had also to master nearly a hundred different courses, including, among others, Analytical Geometry of Three Dimensions, Differential and Integral Calculus, Calculus of Variations, Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis, Determinative Mineralogy, Higher Geodesy (the mathematical science of the size and shape of the earth), Logical and Rhetorical Criticism, French Composition and Literature, Orthographic and Spherical Projections, Acoustics, Optics, Thermotics, Geology of Mining, Paleontology, Rational Mechanics of Solids and Fluids, Spherical Astronomy, Kinematics (the study of motion exclusive of the influences of mass and force), Machine Design, Hydraulic Motors, Steam Engines, Stability of Structures, Engineering and Architectural Design and Construction, and Intellectual and Ethical Philosophy.
A century later, D. B. Steinman, a noted bridgebuilder and professor of civil engineering, would write, “Under such a curriculum the average college boy of today would be left reeling and staggering. In that earlier era, before colleges embarked upon mass production, engineering education was a real test and training, an intensive intellectual discipline and professional equipment for a most exacting life work. Only the ablest and the most ambitious could stand the pace and survive the ordeal.”
Roebling, however, would take a different view when he came to appraise the system long afterward. He saw no virtue whatever in what he called “that terrible treadmill of forcing an avalanche of figures and facts into young brains not qualified to assimilate them as yet.” “I am still busy,” he said, “trying to forget the heterogeneous mass of unusable knowledge that I could only memorize, not really digest.” The strain was terrific. Of the sixty-five students who started out in his class, only twelve finished. And among those who did not finish there had been some rather severe breakdowns, it appears, and one suicide.
The suicide was Roebling’s first real experience with tragedy. It is not entirely clear what happened, but in the late fall of 1856, during his final year at Troy, a classmate killed himself and apparently it was because of his feelings for Roebling. All there is of the incident in the written record is a letter Roebling wrote to Emily during the war, and two desperate notes written by the unfortunate young man shortly before he did away with himself, all three of which Emily saved.
“My candle is certainly bewitched,” he wrote to her from Virginia, nearly ten years after the incident, “every five minutes it goes out, there must be something in the wick, unless it be the spirit of some just man made perfect, come to torment me while I am writing to my love. Are any of your old beaus dead? If I wasn’t out of practice with spiritual writing I would soon find out.
“There is only one friend whose spirit I want to communicate with,” he continued, “you have his picture with mine; he committed suicide because he loved me and I didn’t sufficiently reciprocate his affection; I advised him to find someone like you for instance, but he always said no woman had sense enough to understand his love.”
And that is all Roebling seems to have written on the subject, just one small paragraph in his neat copperplate hand that leaps out of the last page of a love letter written late at night in Virginia, after he had been “building bridges and swearing all day.”
The first of the other two letters was in German and written on the evening of October 5, 1856, which was apparently after Roebling had rejected his friend’s proposal for some sort of formally declared bond between them. The writer pleads for Roebling to understand the nature of his affections and his misery, and asked Roebling to “make allowances.” “Our temperaments are so very different, that something which appears only natural to me may perhaps appear incomprehensible or ridiculous to you.” And again he begged Roebling to declare his own affections for him, and for him alone. The letter is signed “Your friend,” but the name has been erased, whether by Roebling or the young man who wrote it is not known. Roebling was still quite unwilling to agree to what was being asked of him.
The next letter was written on Thanksgiving Day. There is only a copy of the first part of it, written from memory by Roebling later that day. The young man, it seems, had taken to using chloroform as a narcotic and explained to Roebling how to bring him out of an overdose, should Roebling find him in that condition (“…pour cold water over my head, then breath air from your mouth into my lungs and if there is no success get Dr. Bonetecon and tell him to cup me in the neck; as ultima ratio you may try Electro-Magnetism….”). Then he wrote, “If your efforts should prove fruitless do this: Keep of my things whatever you like, it is all yours!”
Roebling noted on the letter, “At this moment he suddenly staggered in, asking why I did not stay with him. Accordingly I went to his room—he took the letter afterwards so that I had no opportunity to copy it. The rest was merely an inventory of his property, together with some parting words of love.”
Just when the young man died, or how, remains unknown. But the whole pitiful affair was a dreadful experience for Roebling, an unpleasant memory ever after. It may also account in large measure for the bitter feelings he later expressed about the prescribed regimen at Rensselaer. Even the few who did graduate, he wrote, “left the school as mental wrecks,” which was an exaggeration clearly, his own case being the most obvious evidence to the contrary.
It was the summer of 1857, the time of the great panic, the year his father first proposed an East River bridge, the same year William Kingsley moved to Brooklyn, and the same summer Henry Murphy sailed for the Netherlands, that Roebling finished college and returned home to Trenton, his boyhood over.
His first job was in the mill, and it seems he was actually running things there, entirely on his own, almost immediately, his father and Charles Swan both being away on other business. Then in the spring of 1858, he was on his way to Pittsburgh to work with his father on the Allegheny River Bridge. His salary was eight hundred dollars a year.
Pittsburgh was home for the next two years and he developed a great attachment to the place, writing his family that he regretted the day when he would have to leave. “Pittsburgh is getting along quite smart now,” he informed Charles Swan. “I doubt if there is a lazy man in it, your humble servant perhaps excepted.” Already he had ten times as many friends as in Trenton, he said. He kept a small notebook that he titled “Lists of Persons I have been introduced to in Pittsburgh, Pa.” and scattered among the names of contractors and ironmongers were a Miss McClure, Miss Carr, Miss Mendenhall, Miss Blake, and a Miss Molly Smith of Chambersburg.
He lived in a boardinghouse on Penn Street, worked hard, played chess with the other boarders, went to the opera, argued with his father about invariably starting the work day at six thirty in the morning, recovered from a series of severe abdominal attacks (the cure was his father’s vile concoction of raw eggs, warm water, and turpentine), and he wrote home at length, describing with spirit and humor, as his father never would, what was happening in the world about him, apart from work.
He had been to hear Edward Everett at a celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the taking of Fort Duquesne. He described the iron buildings going up everywhere (“There is a perfect mania here for improvements…”), a storm that nearly took part of the bridge away, and “dark, cloudy, smoky afternoons, when the sun doesn’t shine and the gas is lit at 4¼.” One letter he began this way:
This is my first letter to you in 1860 and consequently I shall make it very short, because it is always a good rule to make a small beginning, but a big ending, and since I don’t expect to be here towards the end of the year, you may always expect small letters. Cousin Henry from Cincinnati was here yesterday; he is a very fine young man now, a perfect beauty; he was raising a goatee, containing 11½ hairs, just about as I would have if I were to attempt it.
That fall of 1860 he finished up on the Allegheny River Bridge and returned to the wire mill. The following spring he was in uniform, marching up and down a dusty drill field in Trenton.
“My enlistment was rather sudden,” he said later, recalling the night his father had driven him from the house. It would be said by others that the break with his father was so angry and unpleasant that the two neither saw each other nor communicated in any fashion for the next four years. But there is nothing to this. Roebling returned to Trenton several times during the war, and while his letters to his father were customarily quite formal, and answered in kind, he had more to say to him than to anyone else, until he met Emily.
He enlisted on April 16, 1861, as a private in the New Jersey State Militia. Two months later, fed up with garrison duty, he resigned to enlist in New York, again as a private. In January of 1865, the war nearly over, he resigned from the Army, a lieutenant colonel, age twenty-seven, and a veteran of Second Bull Run, South Mountain, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and the Crater at Petersburg.
The letters he wrote during the war years number in the hundreds and provide not only an extraordinary personal footnote to the history of the Campaign in Virginia, but reveal much about the young man himself. During the years of the bridge, with Emily with him constantly, with his father dead, his brothers and sisters scattered and living their own adult lives, there would be little call for personal letter writing.
Except for promotions and some moving about, his first year at war had been uneventful and disappointing. “Loafing in the camp seems to be the principal occupation,” he wrote from Washington. Later, from Harpers Ferry, he told Elvira, “This is a mean little town about the size of Morrisville, presenting a deserted, sleepy appearance, like most Virginia towns. John Brown was hung in a cornfield next to us. The site of the gallows are marked by a cornstalk and pieces of the gallows sell at $1 per lb.”
But even when the fighting began, he would have little to say about that side of soldiering. “This artillery business is very hard work,” he wrote, and that was about as far as he would ever go.
He was made a sergeant after four months and spent his first winter at Budd’s Ferry, Maryland, on the lower Potomac, where his battery was supposed to protect shipping from Confederate batteries over on the Virginia shore, but where nothing much happened. He was billeted in a tent housing “ten choice sports” and about the only memorable event had been “a musical soiree at the widow Mason’s house, down on the river bank.” The music consisted of singing, piano, guitar, and Roebling on the violin. A supper was served (“Very creditable for this part of Maryland”) and a couple of Confederate shells landed in the yard but failed to go off. Years later one of the other musicians wrote that Roebling “could make a violin talk.”
He was elected a lieutenant in February and the next month he was at Hampton Roads in time to witness the battle of the Brooklyn-built Monitor and the Confederate counterpart, the Merrimac. Then he was designing and building his own first bridge—substituting for his father. He had been transferred to McDowell’s staff and was ordered to put a suspension bridge across the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg. “My father being too old to rough it, I was selected.” He had no experienced help to work with, no proper tools, no material except for some reels of Roebling cable that had been sent down from Trenton. At times the enemy was only five miles away.
The bridge he designed was more than a thousand feet long, longer than the Niagara Bridge, in other words, but broken up into some fourteen short spans. He hired contraband Negroes, trained them as they went along, had his lumber sent on from Alexandria, smoked up a box of Plantation cigars, and had the bridge built in a month.
Almost immediately he was ordered to Front Royal to build another one, over the Shenandoah. With no boats available to cross the river to make his measurements, he jumped in and swam over with the tape in his mouth. But when he and his work party had the bridge about halfway up, the Confederates under Jackson drove them off. Another bridge at Waterloo shared the same fate, and in the meantime General Burnside, retreating from Fredericksburg, blew up Roebling’s bridge there. It had lasted about as long as it had taken to build.
That had ended his bridge engineering for the time being. He was assigned next to a cavalry expedition, spent some ten days on the move, scarcely ever out of the saddle, and once, at about five in the morning, surprised Jeb Stuart at his breakfast and very nearly captured him.
Second Bull Run followed after that and Roebling was with McDowell, as a staff aide, through all of it. Less than a month later he came very close to being killed at the hideous bloodbath at Antietam. Then he was back at Harpers Ferry, building another suspension bridge and writing to tell his father how young General Slocum had come along and taken away fifty of his best men. But by December he had it finished. “The bridge has turned out more solid and substantial than I at first anticipated,” he told Charles Swan; “it is very stiff, even without a truss railing, and has been pretty severely tested by cavalry and by heavy winds.” It was the last bridge he would do on his own until he got to Brooklyn, but as he wrote later, “The Harpers Ferry bridge met the same fate as the others. When Lee came up for Gettysburg the suspenders were cut and [the] floor dropped into the river, but I rebuilt it completely and the army in parts marched over it. The following year [General Jubal] Early destroyed it absolutely.”
Roebling rejoined the Army of the Potomac in February 1863 back at Fredericksburg, where he was quartered late one night in an old stone jail, from which he would emerge the following morning with a story that would be told in the family for years and years to come. The place had little or no light, it seems, and Roebling, all alone, groping his way about, discovered an old chest that aroused his curiosity. He lifted the lid and reaching inside, his hand touched a stone-cold face. The lid came back down with a bang. Deciding to investigate no further, he cleared a place on the floor, stretched out, and went to sleep. At daybreak he opened the chest to see what sort of corpse had been keeping him company through the night and found instead a stone statue of George Washington’s mother that had been stored away for safekeeping.
It was shortly after that when he was reassigned to the staff of General G. K. Warren. Then came Chancellorsville, where Hooker was facing Lee with more than twice the men Lee had and seemed to have forgotten anything he ever knew about commanding an army. At one point Roebling found himself leaning against the same post as Hooker, just as it was about to be split in two by a cannon ball. For years afterward, he would speculate on how history might have been altered had he not shouted a warning when he did. “Fighting Joe” Hooker would have been fighting no more, Roebling reasoned, and with another man in charge his army might have won the battle.
In the weeks after Chancellorsville, Roebling began going up in a reconnaissance balloon every morning at daybreak to see what the enemy might be up to and it was he, on one such flight, who first discovered that Lee had started to move again, toward Pennsylvania and Gettysburg.
That was in early June. On the 24th he was handed orders from Warren to proceed at once to Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia if necessary, to find the best available maps of Maryland and the southern border of Pennsylvania. Warren happened also to be on his way to Baltimore to get married, so Roebling accompanied him that far, the two of them riding all night. Then he went on to Philadelphia and to Trenton, where his father, he knew, had one of the best and latest maps of Pennsylvania.
He startled everyone in the big house with his sudden appearance there after dark. His father especially was very much alarmed. He stayed all of an hour. By the evening of June 29 he was back in Baltimore with the maps, only to find that Warren had already left to rejoin his army. The whole city was in a state of panic. The following morning, every bell was ringing an alarm as he headed west on horseback, toward Frederick.
He did not find Warren until he reached Gettysburg, on the second day of the battle. After that, events followed swiftly.
Through the whole war Roebling said very little about battles in his letters and next to nothing about his own exploits. But he seems to have had a great gift for being on the spot when needed. Long after the war, at the request of a friend who was also at Gettysburg, he gave this account of what happened:
At Meade’s headquarters I found General Warren. After making myself familiar with the situation and looking around, Meade suddenly spoke up, and said Warren! I hear a little peppering going on in the direction of that little hill yonder. I wish you would ride over and see if anything serious is going on, and attend to it. (This is verbatim.)
So we rode over…Arriving at the foot of the rugged little knob, I ran up to the top while Warren stopped to speak to General Weed. One glance sufficed to note the head of Hood’s Texans coming up the rocky ravine which separates little and big Round Tops. I ran down, told General Warren, he came up with me and saw the necessity of immediate action.
…waiting for General Sykes’ approval, who was some distance ahead, Warren ordered these troops to face about and get into line, covering little Round Top and the adjacent ground. Firing began at once. It was deemed very important to get a section of artillery up there [on Little Round Top].
Hazzlitt’s battery was nearby, it started up the hill, but the horses could not pull it up, so all hands took hold of the wheels and tugged away. I strained at one hind wheel, and you, my dear Sir, at the other hind wheel, until we reached the summit, and some shots were fired. They had a great moral effect, as the enemy supposed the hill to be unoccupied.
The safeguarding of Little Round Top would be viewed by many historians as the turning point of the war. Warren, understandably enough, got nearly all the credit and would be remembered as one of the heroes of Gettysburg. But later on, speaking generally of his young aide-de-camp, Warren said, “Roebling was on my staff and I think performed more able and brave service than anyone I knew.” Roebling himself would be characteristically laconic and self-effacing. “I was the first man on Little Round Top. There is no special credit attached to running up that little hill, but there was some in staying there without getting killed.”
Roebling’s morning on Little Round Top would be the thing people would talk most about when describing his war record. But he had also been near Sickles when that flamboyant figure lost his leg. He helped engineer the tunnel under the Confederate lines at Petersburg, the daring scheme that so very nearly worked, but resulted in the disastrous Battle of the Crater. Once, before the great blast went off, before dawn, with the moon still up, he and Warren had crawled on their stomachs to the very edge of Lee’s works.
Later, he would also write this memorable description of Abraham Lincoln:
…I was in the Civil War for four years and saw Lincoln on two occasions—the first in May 1861, when he spoke a few words of welcome from the rear portico of the White House to the newly arriving soldiers, one of whom I was, and secondly about April 1, 1864, when he came down to Culpeper County to review the army previous to the Battle of the Wilderness. I was at that time major and aide-de-camp to General Warren, commanding the 5th Corps, and joined the cavalcade.
The President was mounted on a hard-mouthed, fractious horse, and was evidently not a skilled horseman.
Soon after the march began his stovepipe hat fell off; next his pantaloons, which were not fastened on the bottom, slipped up to his knees, showing his white homemade drawers, secured below with some strings of white tape, which presently unraveled and slipped up also, revealing a long hairy leg.
While we were inclined to smile, we were at the same time very much chagrined to see our poor President compelled to endure such unmerited and humiliating torture. After repairs were made the review continued…
As the war dragged on, Roebling, like thousands of others on both sides, grew increasingly despondent, wondering if ever there would be an end to the killing days, as he said. “They must put fresh steam on the man factories up North,” he told Emily, “the demand down here for killing purposes is far ahead of the supply; thank God however for this consolation that when the last man is killed the war will be over.”
The real heroes, he said, were the privates in the line, but then added bitterly, “When I think sometimes what those men all do and endure day after day, with their lives constantly in danger, I can’t but wonder that there should be men who are such fools, I can’t call them anything else. And that is just the trouble we are laboring under now—the fools have all been killed and the rest think it is about played out to stand up and get shot.” It was only a matter of time, he believed, before he too would be dead.
Off duty he played cards, picked fleas, smoked cigars, drank whiskey whenever he could get it, cursed the heat and tried to think of Troy, New York, in the winter of 1856, when the thermometer outside his bedroom window had marked 20 below. Like others about him, he developed increasing sympathy for the people he was working so hard to defeat. He wrote again to Emily, “…the conduct of the Southern people appears many times truly noble as exemplified for instance in the defense of Petersburg; old men with silver locks lay dead in the trenches side by side with mere boys of 13 and 14; it almost makes me sorry to have to fight against people who show such devotion for their homes and country.”
Emily had come into his life on the evening of February 22, 1864, at the Second Corps Officers Ball, which had been held in a huge wooden hall especially built for the occasion under his supervision. “In point of attendance,” he had written to Elvira, “nothing better could have been desired; at least 150 ladies graced the assemblage, from all quarters of the Union, and at least 300 gentlemen from General Meade down to myself.” The occasion was a grand success.
Our supper cost 1500 dollars and was furnished by parties in Washington. The most prominent ladies of Washington were present from Miss Hamlin, Kate Chase and the Misses Hale down. Last but not least was Miss Emily Warren, sister of the General, who came specially from West Point to attend the ball; it was the first time I ever saw her and I am very much of the opinion that she has captured your brother Washy’s heart at last. It was a real attack in force. It came without warning or any previous realization on my part of such an occurrence taking place and it was therefore all the more successful and I assure you that it gives me the greatest pleasure to say that I have succumbed…
They wrote to each other almost daily after that and met again, two or three times, at General Warren’s wife’s home in Baltimore, and at camp, when Emily and young Mrs. Warren came to visit the general. At about the time Lincoln made his visit, Roebling was writing to his father to tell him he planned to be married, expecting all kinds of arguments in return. But the letter from Cincinnati was not what he expected and represents one of those rare instances when John A. Roebling revealed his affection for his oldest son, as well as his total confidence in his judgment.
MY DEAR WASHINGTON,
Your communication of the 25th came to hand last night, and I hasten to reply. The news of your engagement has not taken me by surprise, because I had previously received a hint from Elvira in that direction. I take it for granted, that love is the motive, which actuates you, because a matrimonial union without love is no better than suicide. I also take it for granted, that the lady of your choice is deserving of your attachment. These two points being settled, there stands nothing more in your way except the rebellion and the chances of war. These contingencies having all passed away, you and your young bride, as you know beforehand, will be welcome at the paternal house in Trenton. Our house will always be open to you and yours, and if there is not room enough, a new one can be built on the adjoining ground, or one can be rented.
As to your future support, you are fully aware, that the business at Trenton is now suffering for want of superintendence, and that no increase or enlargement can be thought of without additional help. Of course I do not want to engage strangers, and it is you therefore, who is expected to step in and help forwarding the interests of the family as well as yourself individually…
Should you be in want of money at any time, let me know.
I conclude with the request that you will assure your young bride of my most affectionate regards beforehand, and before I shall have the pleasure of making her personal acquaintance.
Your affectionate father,
She had gone to Trenton herself after that. His father had met her in New York and they had taken the train to Trenton together. “I like her very much and have not the least doubt that your union with her will be a happy one,” John Roebling informed his son. And Washington wrote to her at Trenton, “I dare say you could not sleep the first night on account of the water in the raceway making such a terrific noise…. Be sure and tell me all about your impressions…what do you think of Tilton the Bridgetender or Mitchell the lockkeeper or Mrs. Reilly that keeps the Irish tavern across the canal?”
Thereafter his days seemed endless. Little was happening and the boredom was unlike anything he had ever known, as he tried to describe for her:
This day might be signalized as one of the most uneventful ones I ever passed. I wrote perhaps two hours, fooled around for two more, walked for one, and that besides eating and drinking was the end of it. The programme at night is still more stupid, as it is chiefly spent shivering, turning over fifty times and occasionally dreaming of you. My mind is no longer as imaginative as it was 10 years ago, many of my dreams at that period are still vivid in my recollection. Had a great time hunting for a button tonight, finding none after all my search, and as I write the string at the bottom of my drawers comes off; that will be another sewing job before I go to bed.
He worried about his mother, who was failing rapidly, and not the least of her troubles, his father wrote, was concern over his safety. He thought about the future, worried that he had forgotten everything he ever knew about engineering, puzzled over where he and Emily might settle once the war was over. He pondered the possibility of not following in his father’s footsteps. Trenton had no appeal, despite his father’s generous proposals. “The town is horribly dull,” he told her, “and I always get tired of it after being there a week.” When he daydreamed of home, it was nearly always of Saxonburg. “I have now more lasting memories of the first eight years of my life there, than I have of the intervening twenty,” he wrote. But there could be no going back to Saxonburg.
He grew a beard, changed the way he combed his hair to suit her, adopted two stray dogs, a family of kittens, a lizard, and took to sleeping with the blanket pulled over his face to keep off the flies, his feet sticking out at the bottom, a pose that inspired a fellow officer to do a pencil sketch, which Roebling included in one of his letters to Emily. In another letter, he told her, “I have been solacing myself all evening by playing on a fiddle, had a great time getting it, borrowed a bow from another man and stole the rosin from a sick horse; it did me good and so I played until the tips of my fingers began to ache…”
In November of 1864 his mother died and he hurried back to Trenton for the funeral; “…the greatest giver of us all [is] gone,” he told Emily. Then, at the end of the year, the war, for him, was over. He was commissioned lieutenant colonel, by brevet, as of December 6, for gallant conduct during the campaign before Richmond. By Christmas he was home to stay. In January, at Cold Spring, New York, he and Emily were married.
They lived in Trenton at first and he went back to the wire mill. But that lasted only a few months. In the early spring of 1865, just before the war ended, he left for Cincinnati to join his father on the Ohio River bridge and once he found a place to live, she came on. By the time the bridge was completely finished, they had spent nearly two years in Cincinnati, and his father had been back in Trenton the better part of that time.
In early 1867, when it appeared that the East River bridge at last had some serious support, his father had written to say he wanted him to go to Europe the following summer to make a study of pneumatic caissons, that Emily ought to go too, and that he would pay all their expenses. “Your kind offer…I accept with pleasure,” Washington Roebling wrote in answer; “Emily is especially delighted, to her the idea of going to Europe is something exceedingly grand.”
They sailed at the end of June, when Emily was a few months’ pregnant. They were in England for a number of weeks, then France later, and Germany, where the baby was born. In London they visited St. Paul’s, Parliament, Westminster, the Zoological Gardens. From their window at the Royal Hotel, he had watched construction of the Blackfriars Bridge and made a drawing of it to send his father.
He made flying visits to Telford’s bridge over the Menai Strait and Brunel’s bridge at Clifton, for a long time considered the most beautiful suspension bridge in the world. He did not think Telford’s towers very handsome, he wrote to John Roebling. The floor, very light in weight, had no strengthening truss. There was a stiff breeze blowing as he walked out on it and the vibrations were very strongly felt, he said. The towers for the Clifton Bridge he called remarkably ugly.
They visited Manchester and he spent several days looking over the noted steelworks of Richard Johnson & Nephew, where the wire for the Cincinnati Bridge had been made. They went to Birmingham, Sheffield, Newcastle, then on to Paris to see the Exposition, but left after a week because they were running low on money. One lady costs twice as much in Paris as two men, he explained to his father. The fair was considered the greatest international exhibition ever and among the American Commissioners was his Trenton neighbor and competitor in the wire business, Abram Hewitt. But Roebling thought little of the fair, nothing but “a great advertising show,” he said.
At Essen, Germany, to his astonishment, he was given the grand tour of the Krupp works, as though he were visiting nobility. On first arriving in Essen he had been told by several townspeople that an outsider had virtually no chance of visiting the works. He had spent one long night drinking wine with some of the young engineers employed there, hoping to win a friend who would open a few doors, but he had received only long faces whenever he mentioned the subject. Finally, figuring he had nothing to lose, he went directly to the main office, expecting to get nowhere and finding instead that they were eagerly awaiting his arrival. The management, he discovered, was well aware of the forthcoming East River bridge, knew all about his trip to Europe, and had already made up a sample eyebar for his personal inspection.
In all three countries he talked to bridgebuilders, wire manufacturers, visited iron works, filled his notebooks and letters with tens of thousands of words and hundreds of tiny freehand drawings and diagrams. He had an almost uncanny gift for observation and could commit vast quantities of information to memory, yet he never gave any sign of making a special effort along those lines. He would walk about a construction site or through a mill listening politely to his host, paying, it would appear, only the most casual attention to what he was being shown. Then he would return to a hotel room and write down a full description of what he had seen, with the most extraordinary memory for detail and great critical analysis.
After his return from Europe, for instance, while stopping over in Pittsburgh, he was invited to take a walk through Andrew Carnegie’s new Keystone Bridge works and that night, in private, at the Monongahela House, he had written his father a complete report of the entire Keystone operation, describing the different machines in use and how they worked, the production patterns followed, the personnel involved, the various products turned out and his opinion on their relative merits. The letter went on for pages, even in his minute hand, and it was all put down directly, with no apparent hesitation, no erasures or editing, and, apparently, with no special effort. At the close, after remarking that he found Carnegie and his brother “very pleasant people,” he told his father, “I could fill another letter of 20 pages to describe all I saw—still I keep it all in mind.”
The value of such a son was not lost on the father, and as the young man made his way across Europe, he sent off one letter after another, each taken up almost entirely with technical matters—on wiremaking, on the latest developments in metallurgy, Bessemer steel making in particular, and on caissons, which he spelled “cassoons” for some reason—and everything was set forth with the sort of clarity and thoroughness demanded by the exacting mind back in Trenton. By the time he and Emily and the baby were on their way home across the Atlantic in March of 1868, he knew more on the subject of pneumatic caissons than any American engineer.
The success of the bridge at Brooklyn, he and his father knew, would depend on the caissons. Everything hung on their success. If they could be sunk beneath the river properly and to the required depths—and they would have to be bigger by far than any caissons ever constructed before—then there seemed little doubt that the bridge could be built. If not, there would be no bridge, or at least not the one John Roebling had described with such persuasive language in the fall of 1867, when, as it happens, his son was still in Europe trying to determine just how the thing could best be done.
After returning home, Roebling busied himself at the Trenton mill, waiting for the New York politicians to settle their affairs. In 1868 his father finished the basic plans for the caisson, while he made another long tour at his father’s request, this time through the hard-coal regions of eastern Pennsylvania to see how wire rope could be used in mining operations. He and Emily were staying in the big house temporarily. His father had remarried. Ferdinand too was married by this time. Laura came visiting from Staten Island with her children. By fall the baby was walking.
When the word came from Brooklyn that the bridge was all set to go, he and Emily packed up and moved to the house on Hicks Street.
In the months immediately following his father’s death, Roebling spent much of his time away from Brooklyn. He made repeated trips to Trenton, where he had his father’s estate to settle, as well as the wire business to look after. There were long family gatherings in the big house. It was agreed that Ferdinand would take charge of the business eventually and that Charles would come in with him as soon as he finished at Troy. But for the time being Washington would make the major decisions. Nobody foresaw any problems with that, but not very long afterward, at a time when Washington was having troubles enough in Brooklyn, a full-scale family fight developed over what to do about Charles Swan. Ferdinand did not want Swan made a partner, as his father had requested in his will. Washington said he should be. Swan quit and went off somewhere, leaving no word behind; plainly furious. But things were patched up eventually and Swan returned to work, on generous financial terms, but not as a partner.
It was also agreed, after some difference of opinion, that Washington was to be Eddie’s guardian. Roebling felt he had more than enough to cope with as things were, building his father’s bridge and looking after his own small family, without trying to be the father his father had never been to his troubled little brother. But the others felt differently, it appears, and so Eddie was packed off to Brooklyn, where Emily had a room prepared for him.
For Roebling, there was still more traveling to be done. He spent a day with Horatio Allen in Port Chester looking at dredging gear. He went to Albany to look at the black limestone and granite going into the foundations of the new state capitol, which had been engineered by William Jarvis McAlpine. He stopped at Kingston to visit a limestone quarry and to talk to the people there. He filled his small black leather notebook with pages of names, addresses, and reminders. “Find out where they get the broken stone at the Post Office…. Find out all about calcium light…. Find out who makes derrick forgings.” He went to Niantic, Connecticut, to look at granite and to Hallowell, Maine, to inspect the quarries of J. R. Bodwell. The infamous Tombs prison had been built of Bodwell’s stone, as had the coping of the huge new reservoir in Central Park, some of which had been built by William C. Kingsley. The quality of the granite, Roebling wrote in his notebook, was “very fine, very durable…the whitest granite known.”
His most vital concern, however, was the first giant caisson. In mid-August, immediately after Collingwood reported for work, Roebling had handed him rough drawings and a long written account of what was wanted, and Collingwood, Paine, and Hildenbrand had set to work on final plans, figured down to the last inch. The only one who could handle such an order, it was decided, was a shipbuilder, and on October 25, 1869, the contract was awarded to the firm of Webb & Bell, whose yards were up the river at Green-point. And if a date were to be picked to mark the beginning of the building of the bridge, it probably ought to be that one.
The caissons were the foundations of the great work, quite literally and figuratively, as everyone working with Roebling in Brooklyn was aware. There were also some among them who appreciated something that would be overlooked by most everyone as time passed—that it was Washington Roebling, more than his father, who was the closest thing to an expert on caissons and who had concentrated on how that part of the job ought to be handled. And perhaps this helped compensate some for the very obvious fact that he had never actually worked with a caisson before and that there were only two or three American engineers who had, McAlpine being one of them. In St. Louis Captain James B. Eads had just completed the first caisson for his bridge over the Mississippi. Still, to all but a handful of engineers, even the word “caisson” was unfamiliar.
With absolute, unqualified conviction John A. Roebling had proclaimed that his bridge would be the greatest in existence, the greatest engineering work of the age. All his son had to do now was build it.