Carnegie (10 page)

He was certainly one of the most homely men I ever saw when his features were in repose; but when excited or telling a story, intellect shone through his eyes and illuminated his face to a degree which I have seldom or never seen in any other. His manners were perfect because natural; and he had a kind word for everybody, even the youngest boy in the office. His attentions were not graduated. They were the same to all, as deferential in talking to the messenger boy as to Secretary [of State, William Henry] Seward. His charm lay in the total absence of manner. It was not so much perhaps what he said as the way in which he said it that never failed to win one. I have often regretted that I did not note down carefully at the time some of his curious sayings, for he said even common things in an original way. I never met a great man who so thoroughly made himself one with all men as Mr Lincoln . . . He was the most perfect democrat, revealing in every word and act the equality of men.
²⁵

Carnegie was to be involved emotionally in another aspect of the war, with the added fear that he would be classed as an enemy alien. On 8 November 1861 Captain Charles Wilkes of the Union warship
San Jacinto
ordered the seizure of two Confederate envoys, erstwhile Southern senators James M. Mason and John Slidell, travelling from Havana, Cuba, on the unarmed British mail-steamer
Trent
bound for Southampton. Their mission was to plead the Confederate cause in Britain and France. Wilkes acted entirely on his own initiative. However, his seizure of two lawfully travelling passengers on a neutral vessel travelling between two neutral ports, although approved in general by the Union interests, was a clear breach of international law which the mission of the envoys could not justify. Carnegie realised that the vast majority of public opinion in Britain was pro-Confederacy; even his relatives back in Dunfermline were sympathetic to the South. Carnegie was bewildered by their stance. How could the radicals of Dunfermline, in particular, support the slave-owners of the South? Scotland’s response was both economic and emotional; the Union was blockading the southern markets for imported goods and the Scots tended to favour the underdog in conflicts. Nevertheless, Carnegie was deeply disturbed; his prosperity and future progress could be destroyed if Britain went to war, and he might not even be welcome back in Dumfermline if he had to flee.

Thomas A. Scott, as Assistant Secretary of War, was privy to Lincoln’s Cabinet talks on the matter, so Carnegie was in the position of knowing what was happening. He privately emphasised to Scott that Britain would fight for the neutrality of her ships. Like many Americans past and present, Scott knew little about foreign affairs and favoured the Lincoln line of defying Britain. Carnegie kept on that this policy would mean war.
²⁶

Britain sent troops to Canada and the Liberal government of Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston, prepared a bellicose note of protest. The wording of the note was modified by the Prince Consort – constitutional protocol required that the note be sent to Queen Victoria – but pressure was put on Lincoln’s administration because the French supported the British stance. At length Secretary of State William Henry Seward persuaded Lincoln that the British would go to war; Lincoln and his administration backed down, releasing Mason and Slidell from prison in Boston. Carnegie breathed a sigh of relief: his life and career were safe. British opinion, though, remained embittered.

By early September 1861 Carnegie was back in Pittsburgh putting into practice the rail improvements necessitated by the war. He worked, too, on crew roster administration to encourage more efficient working practices and brought in a range of reduced passenger fares on new lines. Carnegie’s ideas were very much in tune with the current spirit in Pittsburgh, whose entrepreneurs were keen to make capital out of the war. The military machine demanded ever more iron products, and more goods were being transported by rail. Herein Carnegie forged a set of commercial systems that would create his own road to success: to make work more efficient, to discount charges and to reduce overall costs. Meanwhile another developing industry caught his eye.

Oil was being drilled in increasing quantities north of Pittsburgh at Oil Creek, a tributary of the Allegheny River, and Pittsburgh’s businessmen were beginning to see rich opportunities. One of the investors in the Titusville oil fields near Oil Creek was Carnegie, who bought 1,000 shares for $11,000 in the Columbus Oil Co., founded by one of his Homewood neighbours, William Coleman. In his first year Carnegie clocked up a dividend return of some $17,868.
²⁷
By this time Carnegie was physically and mentally exhausted, for he had driven himself hard these past months. What he needed was a breath of Scottish air.

Andrew Carnegie belonged to that great race of nation builders who have made the development of America the wonder of the world.

Elihu Root (1845–1937), US Secretary of War

C
arnegie consulted his physician. Out in all weathers, in rail yard and oil field, he had not eaten properly nor slept well for months. He had not given himself enough time to recuperate from his sunstroke and he was debilitated. He told the doctor that he had not had a holiday for fourteen years. Diagnosing the symptoms of exhaustion, the physician advised rest and recreation; overwork would kill him, the doctor warned. Carnegie listened, thought and realised for the first time that he could afford a lavish holiday. All he needed now was some time. An application was made for leave to the president of the Pennsylvania Railway J. Edgar Thomson. On 26 May 1862 Carnegie received the required sanction and he wrote that evening a euphoric letter to his cousin Dod:

Ten minutes ago I received glorious news. The dream of a dozen years is at last on the very threshold of realisation. Yes I am to visit Scotland, see and talk with you all again! – Uncles, Aunts and Cousins, my schoolfellows and companions of my childhood – all are to be greeted again. The past is to be recalled. I shall once more wander through Woodmill Braes, see a hundred other spots that have haunted me for years till Dunfermline and its neighbourhood has grown to be a kind of ‘Promised Land’ to me. And all this is six short weeks from now. I can scarcely believe my senses and yet I’m sure I have just been notified that our Company grants me three months leave of absence to date from July first. Hurrah! Three cheers for this! There is nothing on earth I would ask in preference to what has just been given me. The exuberance of my joy I find is tempered by a deep feeling of thankfulness for the privilege vouchsafed. . . .

I shall miss one I longed much to see, my only school teacher, Mr Martin. Would he were now alive. Surely Aunt Charlotte will be to the fore when I arrive. . . .

We will make a bee line for Dunfermline. I won’t turn my head to look at anything until I see Bruce’s Monument [i.e. the tower memorial to Robert Bruce at Dunfermline Abbey]. I remember that was the last thing I saw of Dunfermline and I cried bitterly when I could see it no more. I intend to remain in Dunfermline until I’m glutted with all it can give and then I will take a run over the Continent as far as the Rhine perhaps. Can’t you go along? You must at least arrange to go through Scotland with me sure. We must spout Roderick Dhu [a character in Sir Walter Scott’s
The Lady of the Lake
, 1810] on his own ground. I haven’t forgotten my part, get to work at yours. I count upon Uncle giving us a good part of his time. If any of the friends intend visiting London I would like them to postpone and we will be of the party. Uncle Tom and Aunt Morrison always intended visiting Yankeeland; they had better come over with us. We have everything now to render such a visit desirable; besides I want to show Uncle Tom what the ‘great Glorious and Free’ is. But of this more when we meet. Four weeks and I’m afloat, six and I’m in ‘Dunfarlin Town’. Whew! that’s about enough to make one jolly, isn’t it? I confess I’m clean daft about it. I fancy I look like an ardent lover who has just obtained a flattering ‘yes’. I’m wreathed in smiles and couldn’t be cross if I should try my very best. . . .

And now My Dear Dod good night. Tell all our friends we expect to meet them soon; that we look forward to that long wished for day with an intensity of desire felt only by exiles from home, and with feelings of the warmest friendship for all connected with us in dear old Scotland. Good bye. Let’s pray for the early meeting of Dod and Naig. Truly your affectionate Cousin. . . .
¹

On 28 June 1862 the Carnegie party set off. Carnegie and his mother were joined by his old friend Thomas N. Miller, now a railway executive. Brother Tom was left behind to take care of family business; he was disappointed and disgruntled. First-class passages were booked aboard the Inman Line passenger steamship
Aetna
for the two-week Atlantic crossing.

From Liverpool they travelled to Scotland by the LNER railway to Edinburgh. From South Queensferry they crossed the Firth of Forth on the line of saintly Queen Margaret’s royal ferry to North Queensferry, and thence to Dunfermline. It was an emotional return for the Carnegies; Margaret was tearfully triumphant as she caught her first glimpse of the abbey tower; her American gamble had paid off and they had exchanged poverty for prosperity. ‘For myself,’ said Carnegie, ‘I felt as if I could throw myself upon the sacred soil and kiss it.’
²

Carnegie visited all his old haunts with great eagerness. His birthplace in Moodie Street, his Rolland Street school, the old well, the abbey, the glen, the royal palace were all the same . . . yet there was something different:

The High Street, which I had considered not a bad Broadway, uncle’s shop, which I had compared with some New York establishments, the little mounds about the town, to which he had run on Sundays to play, the distances, the height of the houses, all had shrunk. Here was a city of the Lilliputians. I could almost touch the eaves of the house in which I was born, and the sea – to walk to which on a Saturday had been a considerable feat – was only three miles distant. The rocks at the seashore, among which I have gathered wilks [whelks] seemed to have vanished, and a tame flat shoal remained. The schoolhouse, around which had centred many of my schoolboy recollections – my only Alma Mater – and the playground, upon which mimic battles had been fought and races run, had shrunk to ridiculously small dimensions. The fine residences, Broomhall, Fordell and especially the conservatories at Donibristle, fell one after the other into the pretty insignificant.
³
What I felt on a later occasion on a visit to Japan, with its small toy houses, was something like a repetition of the impression my old home made upon me.
⁴

Even the people had changed. Although the old women still sat at their doors in mutches (close-fitting caps) and black dresses, where were the weavers of old, with their webs over their shoulders? And there was a silence too; no clacking of looms. A lot of the poverty seemed to have gone; working folk had better dwellings, the middle classes were building new houses at Abbey Parks and there were new industrial sites like St Leonard’s Works in Bothwell Street (demolished in 1984). Carnegie’s head buzzed with the changes. And then there were the friends and relations. The Morrisons and the Lauders clamoured for news; Aggie Gibson, a childhood sweetheart, was greeted with delight; Ailie Ferguson Henderson, who had loaned them the £20 needed to emigrate, was embraced. And cousin Dod, now a civil engineer, lapped up the details of Andrew’s new life in America; should he up sticks and go too? And Aunt Charlotte Drysdale – who had also criticised them for going to America – was in her element. She regaled the company with reminiscences of Carnegie’s childhood when she had nursed him. In her enthusiasm she turned to her nephew and said: ‘Oh, you will just be coming back here some day and
keep a shop in the High Street
.’
⁵
She also added more embarrassing tales of how Carnegie had screamed as an infant if he were not fed with two spoons one after the other.
⁶
As he walked through his childhood haunts one particular thought formed in Carnegie’s mind. Much as he loved his native land and birthplace, he could never have prospered here. There was in his relatives a deadening lack of ambition and limitation of thought; if he stayed here longer than a holiday his drive would be inhibited.

Despite the delights of family reunions and old haunts revisited, conversations with friends and relations soon turned sombre for Carnegie. Dunfermline was suffering because of the war in America. Linen exports had declined, and local opinions were largely against Abraham Lincoln and the Union cause. Carnegie was depressed by the Dunfermline folks’ attitude, yet he found one supporter in Uncle George Lauder. Still a comparatively young man, George Lauder followed every phase of the war, charting its progress carefully on maps marked with battles from the early conflicts at Fort Sumter, and Wilson’s Creek, Missouri (10 August 1861), to the more recent Pea Ridge, Arkansas (7–8 March 1862), and Glorita Pass, New Mexico (26–8 March 1862). He particularly revelled in Carnegie’s personal story about the fight at Bull Run.

Uncle George went further in his support. He handed over to Carnegie what amounted to the whole of his savings to invest in US Federal Bonds. ‘Invest this for me as you think best,’ he said to his nephew, ‘but if you put it into United States bonds it will add to my pleasure, for then I can feel that, in the hour of her danger, I have never lost faith in the Republic.’
⁷
The bonds were a risk, the Bank of England regarding them as ‘untrustworthy’. Later Carnegie made this assess-ment: ‘Three times the value of [Uncle Lauder’s] gold was remitted, and double the value of his patriotic investment since, has rewarded his faith in the triumph of democracy.’
⁸

During Carnegie’s absence, Uncle Tom Morrison’s influence had grown in Dunfermline and Fife in general. He was now one of Dunfermline’s six town councillors but the fire of his radicalism still burned bright. After the Reform Bill of 1832 Dunfermline was in the constituency of Stirling Burghs. The sitting Member of Parliament, (Sir) James Caird of Baldoon, an agriculturalist who had toured Canada and the United States in 1858–9, was more than familiar with Morrison’s opinion. Indeed, Morrison remained a thorn in the side of local and national politicians until his death, still in municipal harness, in 1879. Carnegie and his uncle had many a walk by Woodmill Braes reminiscing and discussing a wide range of topics; in particular they compared notes on oratory. Carnegie revelled in the speeches he gave to the various societies of which he was a member and constantly sought ways to improve his public speaking style. He told his uncle: