The Great Bridge (58 page)

It would be said of him later, by numerous people who knew him, that he was notably gentle and kindhearted for a soldier. The distressing thing about Indian fighting, he had said, was that quite often one shot women and children and when it came time to tend to their wounds one found them to be not at all unlike other women and children. In the West he had been known as “the good Lieutenant.”

When his father died, the year he began teaching at the Academy, G.K. assumed most of the responsibility for his younger brothers and sisters, looking after their interests and health with uncommon care and faithfulness. For Emily, then just sixteen, he was much more than a brother only, and it seems his influence had much to do with her orderly ways and subsequent interest in science, and in botany in particular. Like a number of other celebrated soldiers before and after, he was passionately fond of flowers.

He was also an engineer with a particular interest in bridges, he seemed to have no fear of physical danger, and he had an obvious contempt for pretense of any kind, all qualities he valued in his young aide, Roebling, and which she too must have recognized soon enough after their first meeting at the Second Corps Officers Ball.

The Warrens were not wealthy people by Hudson River standards, but were considered gentry. Cold Spring had become a gathering place for a small but distinguished group of artists and literary people and the young Warrens were part of that society. Once, during the war, the artist Thomas R. Rossiter painted a hypothetical
Picnic on the Hudson,
which would one day be considered among the finest works of the Hudson River school. It is supposedly a representative portrait of Cold Spring elite, twenty ladies and gentlemen gathered with picnic hampers on Constitution Island, just down from Cold Spring. Dressed in elegant summer attire, bathed in sunlight, they pose formally beside the great river, sailboats and Storm King in the distance. Among the group are Gouverneur Kemble, looking very robust for his years; Julia Fish, daughter of Hamilton Fish; Robert Parrott, inventor of the gun; Robert Weir, the painter; and old white-bearded George Pope Morris, editor of the New York
Mirror
and author of
Woodman, Spare That Tree.
In the center foreground, looking rather stiff and self-conscious in a half-reclining pose, is G. K. Warren, the trousers of his uniform providing the only splash of bright red in the composition. But in the background, on the left, there is a young woman in a big flowered straw hat who has never been identified for certain, but who is probably Emily Warren.

Roebling’s first encounter with Cold Spring and her family was brief and apparently went very well. “I think we will be a pair of lovers all our lifetime,” he wrote to her soon after returning to Virginia.

They were married on January 18, 1865, in a little brick church on Main Street. It was a double ceremony, with her brother Edgar Washburn Warren, a major in the cavalry, marrying Cornelia Barrows of Cold Spring. There was a good-sized crowd gathered in the cold outside her house when she and Washington came out the door at the end of the reception, and years later old women in Cold Spring would tell how as children they had seen Emily Warren come down the steps on her wedding day, as though they had witnessed an occasion of state.

But even in January of 1879, for Emily all that seemed a long time back. Her stricken husband was in constant torment, his work a nightmare instead of the inspiration and source of pride it had once been for them both. Any chance for a normal life together was now beyond recall if she was to believe what the doctors were saying.

She had seen her husband all but destroyed before her eyes, his spirit as well as his body. And by uncanny coincidence, she had seen much the same thing happen to her beloved brother.

Only a few months after she was married, Gouverneur K. Warren’s brilliant career had run into a puzzling, tragic snag at Five Forks, the last decisive battle of the Civil War. The strain of war had begun to tell on the young general. Always fussy about details, he had grown increasingly engrossed in things he should have left to subordinates. He was taking a little longer with everything, and quite a little longer than Grant, for one, thought acceptable at this stage. Grant was in a great hurry. Warren was then commanding the V Corps, one of the most famous infantry units of the Federal Army, and Grant had put the V Corps and Warren entirely under the flamboyant Phil Sheridan, a cavalryman. Grant also told Sheridan to remove Warren if he saw fit. Grant never quite explained his reasons for this and historians still differ on who was right or wrong or to blame for the outcome.

After receiving conflicting orders on which route to take, Warren had marched his men all night through pitch-black, rain-flooded country to give Sheridan the support he needed, but he had arrived a little late. An attack planned for that morning had to be called off until afternoon. When the fighting started, Warren was again not where Sheridan wanted him. Warren had done his best, but that had not been good enough for Sheridan, who in a violent rage suddenly ordered that Warren be relieved of his command.

Warren’s subordinate officers were incredulous, furious, and would defend his reputation for the rest of their days. Roebling, who was out of the Army by then, would always feel things would have gone differently for Warren had he been there. He and Emily were both people of “decided temper,” as they said, but on this particular subject they were quite decided indeed, never seeing but one side of the argument.

“Just imagine Sheridan sitting on a fence, sending a staff officer every five minutes to Warren to hurry up and save him and his cavalry from being captured by Lee’s troops,” Roebling would write indignantly. “And when Warren does come (after wading through an icy creek up to their middle), saves Sheridan and wins the battle, then Sheridan turns on him and cashiers him.”

After Five Forks, Warren was put in command of defenses at Petersburg. Later he went to Memphis to command the Department of Mississippi. When the war ended, he decided to stay in the Army, serving as an engineer on the upper Mississippi and as a member of the commission assigned to examine the Union Pacific Railroad. He was also in charge of the survey of the Gettysburg battlefield, where he and his young brother-in-law had had their day of glory.

But in 1869, when Roebling was getting started on the Brooklyn caisson, Warren had been put in charge of building a bridge over the Mississippi at Rock Island, Illinois, where before the war an earlier railroad bridge had been the issue in a historic lawsuit involving Abraham Lincoln. In 1856 a new steamboat called the
Effie Afton
rammed into a pier of the Rock Island Bridge, caught fire, went down, and left part of the bridge burning. The bridge, a big timber truss belonging to the Rock Island Railroad, was repaired quickly enough, but the steamboat people decided they had a case and went to court. Lincoln represented the railroad, arguing that the east-west “current of travel has its rights as well as that of the north and south.” The fact that the jury failed to make up its mind on the matter was taken as a signal victory for railroads, for bridges, and for the notion that the manifest pattern of American commerce and growth was to be east-west.

But the new Rock Island Bridge was meant to satisfy the river interests as well, and Warren had labored so hard over it, between 1869 and 1870, that his health broke and in all the time since he had never quite recovered. Moreover, he kept struggling to clear his name of the Five Forks incident, repeatedly and futilely requesting a board of inquiry to examine the case. His duties never lessened; he continued with river and harbor work, on the upper Mississippi, along the Atlantic coast, on the Great Lakes. He served on Humphreys’ review board during the Eads bridge controversy, and just that October of 1878, he had been put on the advisory council of the Harbor Commission of Rhode Island. But overwork and exposure at Rock Island and the refusal of official Washington to grant him a hearing had all but broken him physically and drained his spirits. Pale, hollow-eyed, he looked more like sixty than forty-eight.

His problem was that in Washington the men implicated in his version of Five Forks were the ones in power now, and apparently he wanted more than just his name cleared.

“I have heard men like Humphreys and others say that Grant was inclined to give Warren an investigation,” Roebling wrote, “but that Warren demanded that Sheridan should be publicly reprimanded for having done a cowardly and unsoldierlike act—and in choosing between the two he finally shielded Sheridan. Grant was then at the height of his popularity and could do what he liked.”

The restoration of his honor had become an obsession with Warren. He refused steadfastly to admit defeat, and the effort was costing him dearly, financially as well as in other ways. Never a man of wealth, he had come out of the war all but penniless. Quietly, on occasion, his sister and brother-in-law were providing financial help as well as moral support.

For Emily it was a heartbreaking thing to see the men who mattered most in her life victims of such dreadful misfortune. It must have seemed as though the two of them, with their pride and decency, their old-fashioned sense of duty, were somehow out of step with the times and paying an awful price for it. Everywhere about her, lesser men, witless, vulgar, corrupt, men of narrow ambition and the cheapest of values, were prospering as never before, grabbing up power, money, or just about anything else they hungered for. This Gilded Age, as Mark Twain had named it, seemed to be tailor-made for that sort. It was the grand and glorious heyday of the political bribe, the crooked contract, the double standard at every level. It seemed the old verities simply were not negotiable any longer. Good and brave men who had a legitimate claim to honor, respect, position—at least according to every standard she had been raised by—were somehow in the way now and so got swept aside.

But if ever she let such thoughts plague her for long, or get her down, there is no suggestion of it in the record. And like the men she so loved and admired, she quite bluntly refused to give in. More, she seemed to gather strength as time passed and gradually she began exerting a profound and interesting influence in bridge matters.

There would be all kinds of stories told about her later and the part she played, and quite a number of them were perfectly true. She did not, however, secretly take over as engineer of the bridge, as some accounts suggest and as was the gossip at the time.

But it is not at all surprising that the stories spread. As was apparent to everyone who met her, Emily Warren Roebling was a remarkable person. And since every piece of written communication from the house on Columbia Heights to the bridge offices was in her hand, there was, understandably, a strong suspicion that she was doing more than merely taking down what her husband dictated. At first she was credited only with brushing up his English, which may have been the case. But by and by it was common gossip that hers was the real mind behind the great work and that this the most monumental engineering triumph of the age was actually the doing of a
woman,
which as a general proposition was taken in some quarters to be both preposterous and calamitous. In truth she had by then a thorough grasp of the engineering involved. She had a quick and retentive mind, a natural gift for mathematics, and she had been a diligent student during the long years he had been incapacitated.

Trustees grumbled over her reputed influence. Newspapers made oblique references to it. And the fact that she had assumed such importance was often used as a basic premise for the argument that Roebling was not right in the head.

Even Farrington was said to be partly her creation. Farrington had been giving a number of highly popular lantern-slide lectures on the bridge at the Brooklyn Music Hall and at Cooper Union (several thousand people had turned out to see and hear the illustrious master mechanic) and the New York
Star
remarked, “It is whispered among the knowing ones over the river that Mr. F’s manuscript is in the handwriting of a clever lady, whose style and calligraphy are already familiar in the office of the Brooklyn Bridge.” Maybe this was so. In any case a very great many people took it to be the truth and that was the important thing.

She had also become so adept at shielding her husband from visitors that many of them went away convinced she knew as much about the technical side of the bridge as any of the assistant engineers. When bridge officials or representatives for various contractors were told it would be acceptable for them to call at the Roebling house in Brooklyn, it was seldom if ever the Chief Engineer who received them. She would carry on the interview in his behalf, asking questions and answering theirs with perfect confidence and command of the facts. Most of them left quite satisfied that her husband would be correctly apprised of everything said. But so impressed were some that they went out the door convinced they had met with the Chief Engineer after all and their future correspondence would be addressed directly to her.

At one point in 1879, for example, a controversy developed over the honesty of an important contractor, the Edge Moor Iron Company. Ugly insinuations were traded back and forth in the papers and it began to look as though there might be still another drawn-out investigation. To assure the engineering department of their honesty and good intentions, the firm addressed a formal written statement to that effect, not to the Chief Engineer, but to Mrs. Washington A. Roebling. And there was no mention in the letter of conveying any of its contents to her husband, or to ask for his health or to solicit his response or opinions.