Carnegie (9 page)

The Carnegies launched themselves into a new society of well-heeled neighbours, and Benjamin and John Vandervort particularly became their firm friends. As Carnegie rubbed shoulders with such men as the octogenarian former US Minister to Russia the Hon. Judge William Wilkins, whose brother-in-law was George W. Dallas, Vice-President of the USA under President James K. Polk, he perfected his social graces and conversational skills on a new range of topics of the day; there were Vandervort musical evenings, skating parties, theatre visits and squirrel hunts, and games in Wilkins’s parlour. One subject that became taboo was politics. Judge Wilkins and his wife Matilda were ardent Democrats and racists. The fact that negroes were even admitted to the military academy at West Point dismayed Mrs Wilkins. On one occasion the abolitionist Carnegie could not hold his tongue and addressed her directly: ‘Mrs Wilkins, there is something even worse than that. I understand that some [negroes] have been admitted to Heaven.’ There was a pregnant silence, and with a fluttering of her fan Mrs Wilkins replied: ‘That is a different matter, Mr Carnegie.’
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Around this time Andrew Carnegie met at the Wilkins’ house one Leila Addison, the daughter of a prominent Pittsburgh physician, originally an emigrant from Edinburgh. The Addisons were well-heeled literary folk and Leila had been a pupil of Thomas Carlyle when the famous man was living at 21 Comely Bank, Edinburgh, before his move away from the city in 1828. From Leila, Carnegie said he learned to enjoy the English classes and how to be better spoken and better dressed; he also acquired better table manners and ‘better behaviour’.
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Although there was no romance – Leila was probably too old for him – Carnegie was always appreciative of her influence and much later secured some lucrative investments for her.

In addition to altering his manners and dress, Andrew Carnegie also did something about his youthful appearance. At 5ft 3in and of baby-faced mien, Carnegie was often treated with disrespect by those employees who did not know him. Quoting a letter from George Alexander to Thomas Miller of 12 May 1903, biographer Joseph Frazier Wall notes that Carnegie was once seized by a large Irish railway worker who shoved him aside saying: ‘Get out of my way, you brat of a boy. You’re eternally in the way of the men who are trying to do their job.’
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The Irishman was greatly abashed when he found out that the ‘brat’ he had dismissed so rudely was his boss. Nevertheless, in an attempt to look older Carnegie grew a curious fringe-beard; alas, it did not have the desired effect and he still looked vulnerably youthful.

Carnegie was anxious to stand on his own feet. No longer did he have the crutch and protection of being ‘Mr Scott’s Andy’. His attempts to be more assertive and in command of his job made him more officious, interfering and workaholic. Of this he remarked:

At one time for eight days I was constantly upon the line, day and night, at one wreck or obstruction after another. I was probably the most inconsiderate superintendent that ever was entrusted with the management of a great property, for never knowing fatigue myself, being kept up by a sense of responsibility probably, I overworked the men and was not careful enough in considering the limits of human endurance. I have always been able to sleep at any time. Snatches of half an hour at intervals during the night in a dirty freight car were sufficient.
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He also began to fill jobs around him with people he could trust. He appointed his American friends David McCargo as superintendent of the telegraph department and George Alexander, whom he had met when living in Rebecca Street, as conductor. His cousin Marie Hogan became a freight station telegraph operator and his brother Tom became his secretary. Carnegie regularly boasted in company that he was the first man in America to employ a woman as a telegraph operator, yet this was to be a shrewd move as women would soon take on prominent new roles following the coming disaster that would push 620,000 men into the jaws of death.

Ever since the party had been formed (in its modern sense) in 1854, Carnegie had been a staunch Republican. The Dunfermline socialist rebel had, by his 25th birthday, become a devout capitalist, and the Republican party appealed to him. A strange mixture of political philosophy formed in Carnegie’s mind; his socialist idealism gleaned at Dunfermline had been interlarded with American business opportunism to evolve a new political animal. The Tory and Liberal landed aristocracy of Scotland and England, which a youthful Carnegie had learned to hate, had been replaced in his new home and his conscience by the slaver–planter aristocracy of the southern United States.

To challenge Democrat President James Buchanan, a former Minister to Great Britain, the Republicans chose as their candidate a man who greatly interested Carnegie. Abraham Lincoln, born at Hardin County, Kentucky, on 12 February 1809, had grown up in ignorance and poverty in the wilderness of the frontier, and had risen through self-education to be a surveyor, a postmaster, a member of the Illinois Legislature, a lawyer and a member of Congress. He was just the kind of man Carnegie admired. Now in possession of the US franchise, Carnegie cast his vote for Lincoln in 1860; Lincoln was inaugurated as President on 4 March 1861 and almost immediately had to get to grips with a growing crisis.

Almost from the birth of the American Republic on 4 July 1776, rivalry and sectional differences had separated the North and South. By 1860 slavery and secession divided America into two hostile camps whose differences could ultimately be solved only by war. Lincoln had fought his election from an anti-slavery standpoint; he had triumphed in the North, but in ten states of the South he received not a single vote. On 20 December 1860 the South Carolina Legislature at Charleston decided to secede from the Union, to be followed by other states. In the early hours of 12 April 1861 the first shots of the Civil War were fired by the new Southern Confederacy batteries at Charleston, under Brigadier General P.G.T. Beauregard, against the brick bastion of Fort Sumter, a Federal (Northern) offshore garrison defended by Major Robert Anderson. After nearly 3,400 missiles had rained down on Fort Sumter during a 34-hour cannonade, Major Anderson surrendered on 14 April 1861. Four years of vicious slaughter had begun.
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On the evening of the attack on Fort Sumter the telegraph clacked the war message to Pittsburgh. The city’s militia contingents were organised and a military camp set up near the Allegheny River. Pennsylvania was to live up to its nickname of the Keystone State, through its stalwart contribution to the Union war effort. Out of a population of 2.8 million whites and 56,373 free blacks in 1860, Pennsylvania contributed 315,017 white and 8,612 black soldiers to the Union armies. It ranked second only to New York in total population and men under arms. Pennsylvania witnessed more military action than any other Northern state, and the largest battle of the entire war was fought on its acres at Gettysburg, on 1–3 July 1863, between Major-General George G. Meade’s Army of the Potomac and Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Lincoln’s inspired address at the dedication of a national cemetery at Gettysburg on 19 November 1863 brilliantly captured the enduring meaning of the war. But all this still lay in the future. Carnegie realised that the railroads would play a vital part in the coming conflict. By 1860 Pennsylvania had nearly 2,500 miles of the 30,000 miles of track completed in America, and the whole east coast had rail links from Portland, Maine and the Canadian border in the North, to Jacksonville in Florida in the South. In 1862 President Lincoln was able to authorise the construction of the Union Pacific Railway, running west from Omaha, Nebraska, and the Central Pacific and running east from San Francisco.

As the war clouds darkened Carnegie was in no doubt about his personal position. He was a patriot, yet he hated the concept of war and despised militarism; nevertheless he looked upon it as ‘justifiable’. As a schoolboy in Dunfermline, Carnegie had been awarded a penny prize for a Burns recitation by visiting statesman John Morley (1838–1923, later Viscount Morley of Blackburn), and later he would be a friend and correspondent of Morley’s, but now Carnegie echoed Morley’s attitude to the American Civil War:

An end has been brought to the only war in modern times as to which we can be sure, first, that no skill or patience of diplomacy could have averted it, and second, that preservation of the American Union and abolition of negro slavery were two vast triumphs of good by which even the inferno of war was justified.
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The war would make Carnegie, along with the likes of the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts and the Harrimans, a representative figure of the age. But in 1861 what was he to do? He was ready to ‘support the flag’. Soon after the Confederate success at Fort Sumter, Thomas A. Scott was contacted by Lincoln’s Secretary or War, Simon Cameron, and requested to journey to Washington to work for the War Department as a transport administrator. Scott was relieved by both the Pennsylvania Railroad Co. and from his post as new aide to Governor Andrew Gregg Curtain at Harrisburgh. Without much delay, and with the agreement of railroad president J. Edgar Thomson, Scott summoned Carnegie to Washington ‘to act as his assistant of the military railroads and telegraphs’.
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He was also to set up a force of railwaymen on war alert.

Communications between Washington and Baltimore, where Union troops were assembling, had been threatened with several inflammatory events, including a riot in Baltimore when a pro-secessionist mob attacked the 6th Massachusetts Regiment. Washington itself was being threatened as the armies of the Confederacy were advancing through Southern states. The northern regiments were desperately needed in the federal capital, as Maryland became increasingly hostile. Carnegie’s first job was to facilitate the passage of Major-General Benjamin F. Butler’s troops to the south. The severed line at Annapolis Junction was repaired, and a train bearing General Butler, his staff and members of the 8th Massachusetts Regiment plus their impedimenta set off with Carnegie riding on the lead engine. Even before they sighted their destination a problem developed. Carnegie recounted:

Some distance from Washington I noticed that the telegraph wires had been pinned to the ground by wooden stakes. I stopped the engine and ran forward to release them, but I did not notice that the wires had been pulled to one side before staking. When released, in their spring upwards, they struck me in the face, knocked me over, and cut a gash in my cheek which bled profusely.
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Looking back later, Carnegie boasted that he ‘entered the city of Washington with the first troops’, and added that he was ‘among the first’ to ‘shed blood for my country’.
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The capital was duly secured, and Maryland, despite its divided allegiances, stayed in the Union. At Scott’s instruction Carnegie now set about organising the telegraph communications and railroad south to Virginia; the Union target there was Richmond. Carnegie summoned the best telegraphers he knew, with the help of his old friend David McCargo, now superintendent at Altoona.

By July 1861 Carnegie had made his headquarters at Alexandria in Virginia, a key area for repelling any attack on Washington. Virginia had been the first state in the Upper South to leave the Union, and after Carnegie’s move Richmond and Virginia were often in the cockpit of national drama. One-fifth of the Confederacy’s railroad mileage was in Virginia and the state ranked first in wealth, population and (white) manpower as well as having massive mineral and munitions potential.

Carnegie was at Alexandria during the First Battle of Manassas (known as Bull Run to the Union forces), on 21 July 1861. For the Union Brigadier-General Irvin McDowell organised the largest army ever assembled in North America, some 35,000 strong. Their immediate goal was Manassas Junction, a village of important military and railway significance. Carnegie’s maps showed that the railroads leading to and from Washington, the Virginia Piedmont and the Shenandoah Valley all joined up here. The whole was defended by Confederate Brigadier-General Pierre Gustave T. Beauregard and 22,000 ill-trained citizen-soldiers camped behind the meandering stream known as Bull Run. They were to be joined by 12,000 more rail-transported soldiers from Brigadier-General Joseph E. Johnston’s 1st Brigade Virginians led by Brigadier-General Thomas J. Jackson. Carnegie saw at first hand the crucial importance of railroads in war.

The tide of battle ebbed and flowed. At length Beauregard won the day at a cost of some 5,000 casualties on both sides. Based at Burke’s Station, some 5 miles from the battlefield, Carnegie rushed to gather all the railway stock he could find to ferry out the 2,700 Union wounded. He himself emerged unscathed on the last train out of Alexandria, except for a bout of ‘thermic fever’ contracted by too much work out in the Virginian sun. Thereafter he always avoided open sunny areas.
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Yet he was always proud to have been part of the Union defeat, which he believed was ‘a blessing in disguise’.
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It certainly stirred the Union to better efforts. He said, ‘I believed it was my duty to be on the field.’
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The railroad men of Carnegie’s division also emerged unscathed and his telegraphic team were all accounted for. On his return to Washington, Carnegie was engaged in setting up a ferry to Alexandria and extending the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad track in Washington across the Potomac River, with the rebuilding of the Long Bridge across its width. The whole was accomplished in seven days.
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After the events at Manassas/Bull Run Thomas A. Scott was appointed Assistant Secretary of War and asked Carnegie to stay in Washington as his assistant. From time to time Abraham Lincoln would visit Scott’s office, and it was here that Carnegie first met and conversed with him. Now aged 52, President Lincoln was of striking appearance, just as George P.A. Healy had portrayed him, and Carnegie left this personal assessment of him: