1861 (38 page)

On the day of departure for Washington and the battles soon to come, the Zouaves marched down Fifth Avenue to the cheers of thousands of spectators—chambermaids waving handkerchiefs from the sidewalks and tycoons leaning out the open windows of their brownstones. Mrs.
Augusta Astor appeared in person to present a pair of silk regimental flags; the famous actress
Laura Keene presented another.
The most unusual fixtures in the military parade were the fire engines that rolled down Broadway alongside the ranks of marching men, gleaming with fresh paint and polished brass.
¹⁰²

Colonel Ellsworth and his men were already eagerly expected in the national capital. Just after their swearing-in, on the afternoon of the Union Square rally, he had telegraphed the War Department and the
White House to let them know that the Zouaves were on the way. The news quickly reached the president and his staff. Before going to bed that night, John Hay jotted a note in his diary: “Much is hoped from the gallant
Colonel’s Bloodtubs.”
¹⁰³

“The First Telegraphic Message from California,”
Harper’s Weekly
, 1861 (
photo credit 5.2
)

—W
ALT
W
HITMAN,
“Song of the Banner at Day-Break” (1860–61)

T
HEY MUST HAVE GLIMPSED
one another sometime during that week, at some unrecorded point along the
Central Overland Trail. Perhaps it was here, at a bend in the sluggish stream. Perhaps the mule drivers paused in their labor and watched the thing coming toward them: a shimmer against the dull, flat sky that resolved itself, quickly, into a horseman. A
horseman,
truly; for what approached them
seemed no ordinary rider and mount but a compound creature, a man-beast out of some bygone millennium. It rushed on in a clatter of hooves, nimbly dodging among stray boulders, headlong and heedless. In the instant it took to pass them, they could see the hunched man-shoulders and the rippling horse-shoulders, the two faces straining forward, nostrils flared, ghost-white with alkali dust from the flats farther east. And then the apparition was gone.
¹

The rider, for his own part, barely saw the sunburnt men, the straining mules, or their strange burden: pale, stripped carcasses of aspen and pine, hauled from some distant wooded place into this treeless desert. Mules, men, and tree trunks were obstructions, no more. For him there was only the trail ahead and the animal that strained and swerved between his clenching thighs, thighs that gripped a flat pouch of mail against the saddle as his mind gripped only one
thought:
westward.

That is how they may have met, two eras brushing past, never touching: the
Pony Express and the
Western Union Telegraph Company.

Never touching, at least, until a few miles farther on, at
Fort Churchill. Here the rider slackened his pace, reining in as he passed the sentry and cantered through the main gate. This was a fresh-built fort, its adobe bricks barely dry. The army had constructed it the summer before, after an ugly clash between the white men and the Paiutes: a lonely outcrop of federal power in a lawless land. For the past few months, Fort Churchill
had enjoyed another distinction: it was the Pacific Coast telegraph’s easternmost terminus, though it would not remain so for much longer.
²

Now, at least, it was where the horseman handed his flat leather pouch to the operator, who quickly extracted its most precious contents and began tapping the key with his expert finger. In San Francisco, the next day’s headlines would begin with words familiar to
every reader:
BY MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH. BY PONY EXPRESS. LATEST EASTERN INTELLIGENCE.
And then a terse summary of that leather pouch’s most important
contents: Thirty-one thousand troops are now in Washington, ultimate destinations still unknown. All work on public buildings at the capital is suspended. In Baltimore, prorebel militia have seized six thousand muskets from the state armory. In St. Louis, an inquest convenes to examine the bodies of those killed in recent clashes.
³

Without ceremony, the telegraphist handed back the pouch, the rider threw it across the saddle of a fresh mount, swung himself on top and was off again still westward, his precious cargo clutched again between his thighs: terse business letters from New York and Baltimore, minutely penned political dispatches from Washing-ton, reports on the latest Eastern prices of California bonds and California bullion. There was little room for anecdote or sentiment in a Pony
Express pouch; each half ounce of mail cost its sender a five-dollar gold piece plus surcharges, and each rider could carry only ten pounds. Recipients slit open envelopes with a surgeon’s care and extracted leaves as thin as tissue paper, still smelling of sweat and dust and leather.
⁴

Back up the trail at the river bend, the men and mules, too, had resumed their labor. Like the passing horseman, they had little time to spare. They carried with them, eastward, the promise of a future without ponies, without pouches, without onionskin paper. Only electrical impulses: weightless, instantaneous, smelling of nothing.

Congress had opened the way the previous summer, by enacting the
Pacific Telegraph Act. This was guided discreetly to passage by a certain private gentleman from the East, Mr.
Hiram Sibley of New York, who proved quite expert at ducking and running amid the legislative fusillades of sectional conflict, emerging safely downfield with the only major legislation of that entire miserable year.
⁵
He had strong incentives to succeed. The final version of the act offered a federal subsidy of up to $40,000, along with other valuable considerations, to any company completing a transcontinental line within two years. Competing bids were invited; rival consortia formed. When the deadline for bids arrived in September, however, it appeared that all except one had been
unexpectedly withdrawn at the last minute. That lone bid—asking the maximum subsidy, of course—happened to be in the name of Mr. Hiram Sibley of New York.
⁶

Why all the competition withdrew was a mystery perhaps known only to Mr. Sibley and his business partners. These were not men
who felt particularly constrained by the rules of gentlemanly fair play. Indeed, they were exactly the type of hard-fisted Yankees that Southerners were always complaining about. Several years earlier, for instance, they had set their eye on the New Orleans & Ohio line, the most profitable in the South. One of Mr.
Sibley’s associates had shown up in Louisville, the northern terminus, and word quickly spread among the N.O.&O.’s owners that this Yankee interloper was scouting out the terrain, pricing poles, wiring coded messages to New York—in other words, clearly laying the groundwork for a rival line. In a cold panic, the Southerners signed a contract with Sibley for a relative pittance, effectively ceding him control of their company. It emerged later that the
coded messages to New York had been mere gibberish; the whole “rival line” a ruse. And thus the N.O.&O. network had, like so many others, tumbled into the omnivorous maw of the Western Union.
⁷

Still, whatever else you might say about Hiram Sibley and his ilk, they certainly knew how to get things done. Within weeks of receiving the Pacific telegraph contract, he had agents fanning out across the West. Lincoln had been elected; the South had seceded; Sibley barely noticed, except insofar as these developments might aid or impede his business plans. Via stagecoach and mule, his envoys set out to secure the friendship of useful men along the planned route:
Brigham Young,
Chief Sho-kup of the Shoshones, the governor of California. (These agents offered the
Mormons lucrative contracts for supplying poles, along with a generous personal loan to Brother Brigham; they offered the Shoshones gifts of food and clothing. What they offered the governor of California, if anything, is unclear.)
⁸

The new line would follow an established route, the Central Overland Trail. It was the exact route, in fact, of the
Pony Express, across the desert wastes and mountain passes of
Utah and Nevada and over the
Sierra Nevada into California. Not many years earlier, this country had been considered impassable wilderness. In the winter of 1844, the great Pathfinder
himself,
John C. Frémont, was hailed as the first white man to cross the Sierra when he and his band of explorers turned up, famished and half naked, on the western side. Two years later, the Donner party met its gruesome fate trying to follow in his tracks, and for a decade after, few others dared to try. But at the very end of the 1850s, private entrepreneurs and military engineers laid out and graded a new trail. By 1861, it had become
a busy highway, the quickest and shortest overland route to California. Where frontiersmen had died in a trackless desert, fast stagecoaches now rumbled to
and fro, carrying passengers, mail, and even a few tourists. Emigrant wagons passed by the thousands, their occupants pleasantly surprised to find the route lined with trading posts, grog shops, army hospitals, post offices, even hotels. Bridges and ferry crossings spanned the newly tamed rivers.
⁹

That was how things were in the West as the Civil War began. Everywhere, it seemed, the Hiram Sibleys and their money were rushing in, along with throngs of lesser entrepreneurs—all those sutlers, tavern keepers, stagecoach owners, and ferrymen. Together, these ruthless and ambitious seekers were changing the continent, connecting city to city and town to town, drawing lines across the blankness of the country.

Indeed, Sibley’s own ambitions went beyond the continent, beyond even the hemisphere. His transcontinental telegraph was only the beginning. Soon, he hoped, he would continue the line up the Pacific coast, through Russian
Alaska, and across Bering’s Strait, where he would connect with the czar’s engineers running their own line east from Moscow. Beyond Moscow: Berlin, Paris, London. Hiram Sibley was going to wire
the world.
¹⁰

And so it was that on May 27, 1861, a train of more than two hundred oxen, twenty-six wagons, and fifty men set out from Sacramento, onto the Central Overland Trail and across the Sierra, laden with coils of high-grade copper wire and crates of glass insulators shipped from back East. Hundreds of contractors had preceded them—those mule drivers along the Carson, for instance—to scour remote valleys for pole material. The route itself was mostly treeless,
but they dragged trunks dozens or even hundreds of miles to it: the mighty Western
Union bringing Birnam Wood to Dunsinane.
¹¹

A few weeks later, at
Fort Churchill, they raised the first pole, to the top of which they had nailed an American flag. Tossing hats into the air, the men hailed this moment with a chorus of huzzas: three cheers for the
telegraph and three cheers for the Union.
¹²

“T
HERE ARE GRAVE DOUBTS
at the hugeness of the land and whether one government can comprehend the whole.”
¹³

So wrote
Henry Adams in 1861, fretting over whether the sundered Union could—or even should—be restored. But young Adams, though he may have been to
Naples and dined with Garibaldi, had never seen Nevada or supped with the likes of Hiram Sibley, let alone with sutlers and stagecoach drivers. (He had rarely been west of Cambridge, Massachusetts,
actually.) He and many
other Easterners knew little, really, of what the Union was—of what it had become. It had grown and changed too quickly. And a large share of that growth and change was happening beyond the Mississippi.

The West was also the chessboard in the Great Game between North and South. For decades, each new
expansion of the country had set off a flurry of tactical moves: advances, flanking maneuvers, sometimes grudging withdrawals. Each new line across the map—whether territorial boundary, national road, railway, or telegraph route—threatened to redraw the entire board, or so it often seemed. Sometimes the slave-state interests
advanced; sometimes the free-state. More often, as with so much in the antebellum years, each set of moves ended in a carefully negotiated stalemate.

Recently, however, the game had seemed to tilt decisively toward the North. Eighteen sixty was a federal census year, and the results had begun coming in early that autumn—with exquisitely poor timing, as far as Southern paranoia was concerned.
¹⁴
Preliminary figures confirmed what many suspected: that immigration and westward expansion were shifting
the country’s centers of population and balance of power. Since the last count, in 1850, the North’s population had increased an astonishing 41 percent, while the South’s had grown only 27 percent. States like
Michigan,
Wisconsin,
Iowa, and
Illinois would each be gaining multiple seats in Congress;
Virginia,
South Carolina, and
Tennessee would be losing some. Tellingly, the statistical center of national population had shifted for the first time not only west of the original thirteen states but also from slave territory into free: from Virginia to
Ohio. (The
New York Herald
did find at least one source of comfort for the South: the
paper’s statistician declared it “very certain” that the nation’s slave population would reach fifty million by the year 1960.)
¹⁵