The Great Bridge (22 page)

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

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.

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.

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:

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.”