Carnegie Read online

  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’.13 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.’14 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.15

  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.16

  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.17

  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’.18 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.19

  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’.20

  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.21 Yet he was always proud to have been part of the Union defeat, which he believed was ‘a blessing in disguise’.22 It certainly stirred the Union to better efforts. He said, ‘I believed it was my duty to be on the field.’23

  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.24

  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:

  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 we
re 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.

  SEVEN

  BRIDGING GAPS

  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

  Carnegie 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: