by Peter Krass
5. Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 1, p. 37.
6. Carnegie, Autobiography, p. 21.
7. Ibid., p. 11.
8. Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 1, p. 23; Carnegie, Autobiography, pp. 9–10.
9. Simpson, pp. 52–53; Henderson, pp. 654–655.
10. Henderson, p. 652.
11. Dunfermline Journal, July 4, 1846.
12. Annie Aitken to Margaret Carnegie, May 30, 1844. ACLOC, vol. 1.
13. Carnegie, Autobiography, p. 12.
14. Ibid., p. 12.
15. Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 1, p. 37.
16. Thomas Morrison’s letter was published in Cobbett’s Political Register, December 21, 1833.
17. Carnegie, Autobiography, p. 6.
18. Dunfermline Journal, July 2, 1847.
19. Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 1, p. 36.
20. Murray, p. 23.
21. Carnegie, Autobiography, p. 24.
22. Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor: An Autobiography (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957), pp. 18–19.
23. Wall, Carnegie, p. 73.
24. Richard Woodman, The History of the Ship (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1997), p. 138.
25. New York Daily Tribune, May 11, 1902. There is a picture of the ship and a brief history.
26. William Doak, “A Scotch-Irish Emigrant Writes Home,” Pittsburgh History (Winter 1994–1995). His letter provides an excellent accounting of what a typical voyage was like.
27. Carnegie, Autobiography, p. 27.
28. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 456.
29. Ann Novotny, Strangers at the Door (Riverside, Conn.: Chatham Press, 1971), p. 43.
30. Page Smith, The Nation Comes of Age (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), p. 738.
31. Carnegie, Autobiography, p. 27.
32. Ibid., p. 27.
33. New York Herald, July 6, 1848.
34. Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress (New York: Hill & Wang, 1996), pp. 139, 141.
35. Carnegie, Autobiography, pp. 28–29.
36. Smith, The Nation Comes of Age, p. 767. The observation was made in 1847.
37. Stefan Lorant, Pittsburgh (Lenox, Mass.: Author’s Edition, 1980), p. 79.
38. David W. Lonich, “Metropolitanism and the Genesis of Municipal Anxiety in Allegheny County,” Pittsburgh History 76, no. 2, p. 80.
39. Jacqueline Sardi and Paul Roberts, introduction to William Doak, “A Scotch-Irish Writes Home,” Pittsburgh History (Winter 1994–1995), p. 172; Peter Chalmers, Historical and Statistical Account of the Town and Parish of Dunfermline, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: n.p., 1859).
40. Lorant, p. 103.
41. Carnegie, Autobiography, p. 29.
CHAPTER 3
$1.20 a Week
Mother Margaret again came to the rescue; as Andy recalled, “There was no keeping her down.”1 Two doors away lived Henry Phipps, an Englishman with two sons, John and Henry Jr., who were close in age to Andy and Tom, and the boys immediately became playmates and fast friends. Henry Sr. also happened to be a shoemaker, a trade Margaret knew well, and, with plenty of work, he paid her $4.00 a week to sew shoes for him. As his mother’s heroic proportions increased in Andy’s esteem for her, his father’s continued to fall. All the family needed to feed their four hungry mouths was a mere $7.50 a week, but they couldn’t manage it; so eyes now turned to Andy, who was thirteen years old. Schooling was a luxury that could no longer be afforded, but what could the undersized boy do to earn money? Any heavy labor was out of the question. One evening, Uncle Tom Hogan weighed in: he suggested that a basket be fitted for Andy to wear and then filled with knickknacks to peddle around the wharves. A considerable sum could be made!
Margaret sprung to her feet and shook outstretched hands in Tom’s face. “What! My son a peddler and go among rough men upon the wharves! I would rather throw him into the Allegheny River. Leave me!” She pointed at the door. Her boys would never linger among vagrants—death was better. It was not only love, but ambition that drove her decision; she wanted her boys to be among a better class of people, at any cost. Immediately regretting the outburst, Margaret broke into sobs and gathered her sons into her arms and told them not to mind her foolishness. Yet the strain of survival was becoming too much. Survival was consuming her spirit. For Andy, “the prospect of want had become to me a frightful nightmare.”2
The heated cotton mill strike finally broke in January, and Will Carnegie found work at a bobbin wheel at the Blackstock Cotton Mill on Robinson Street, which ran parallel to Rebecca Street three blocks to the south. Once on the job, Will discovered that the mill employed many boys to handle menial tasks, so he approached the owner, Mr. Blackstock, about finding a position for Andy. While the mill owner was a good capitalist, he was also a Scotsman and not without compassion for his fellow countryman. He offered Andy a position as a bobbin boy at $1.20 a week for twelve-hour days every day but Sundays. “It was a hard life,” Andy recalled, his usual enthusiasm suppressed. But he understood that “what I could get to do, not what I desired, was the question.”3 Bobbin boys scurried about the factory floor with supplies of bobbins to be loaded on the spindles; and then once the yarn was wound onto the bobbins, the boys removed them. While not physically stressful, the work was monotonous and the days long. The first winter was the worst: “In winter father and I had to rise and breakfast in the darkness, reach the factory before it was daylight, and, with a short interval for lunch, work till after dark.”4 No longer sheltered by a doting mother, Andy had joined the ranks of the children he had seen back in Dunfermline who were forced to work as colliers or in the textile mills. His childhood had been taken from him; life was now about being a man, a real man. He had no choice but to work; he had no freedom but to take a job. Slavery was more apt of a description, and Andy admitted as much.5 The silver lining, he said, was being a breadwinner and contributing to the family coffers. And if Will could keep his job, however distasteful to his artisan spirit, the family would be able to eat reasonably well.
Not long after, another Scotsman and a manufacturer of bobbins, John Hay, offered Andy a job at $2 a week. His factory was on Lacock Street, just one block south of Rebecca. Lured by the money, Andy found himself in his own inferno in the dark cellar of the bobbin factory, firing the boiler of a small steam engine that powered the machinery on the floor—the blocking saws, the boring machines, the roughing and finishing lathes. Woodchip refuse, not coal, was used in the fire, so the actual firing of the boiler wasn’t so bad; shoveling the woodchips was clean work, it was a warm burrow for the winter, and only carelessness resulted in flesh being seared. The monitoring of the boiler’s temperature and pressure struck terror into Andy, however. Blood-chilling nightmares denied him sleep and peace of mind: “It was too much for me. I found myself night after night, sitting up in bed trying the steam gauges, fearing at one time that the steam was too low and that the workers above would complain that they had not power enough, and at another time that the steam was too high and that the boiler might burst.”6 Although himself ready to explode, Andy never told his parents, keeping his troubles hidden and masking his emotions. Instead, he relied on the inspiring stories of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce to give him strength. And every single day, Andy looked for a way out.
The chance came when Mr. Hay, a poor penman and without a clerk, was struggling to write out some bills and decided to give Andy a test. Snuffy Martin’s schooling paid off, and Andy was given a reprieve from the factory bowels to handle the bills. The office work consumed little time, however, so now Andy was also charged with bathing the newly made bobbins in vats of oil. Confined to a small room, the stench of the oil overwhelmed him; it stuck to his fingers and clung to his clothing. Nausea often got the better of him, so that he regurgitated breakfast and lunch into a convenient pail, but the ever-ebullient Andy merely observed that he had all the more appetite for supper. All
the hours in solitary confinement—first in the fiery, satanic dungeon and then in the oil-laced cell—hardened the young man. The thirteen-year-old had passion, but began to lose compassion; the boy had a conscious, but began to lose a conscience. He was consumed with driving away the wolf of poverty.
For the rest of the year, Andy trudged to Lacock Street and back—alone. His father never adapted to factory work and quit Blackstock’s soon after Andy moved on. But at least on Sundays, Andy could meet new friends. He eventually became part of a group that called itself the Original Six; its members were like blood brothers to each other and developed lifelong loyalties. It included Andy, John Phipps, William Cowley, Thomas Miller, James R. Wilson, and James Smith. The Original Six took themselves quite seriously, with part of every Sunday reserved for debating the day’s issues—just as Grandfather Andrew had at Pattiemuir College, only without the whiskey. First glimpses of Andy’s idealistic, radical temperament flashed, echoes of his ancestors. Based on his experiences in the factory, where he realized that without labor there would be no material progress, Andy penned an essay that he read to the boys. He glorified the industrious and declared, “A workingman is a more useful citizen and ought to be more respected than an idle prince.”7 The respect he demanded for laborers would dissipate with time, however; and once he became the capitalist, his workers would be nothing but drones with an associated cost in the ledger books.
Together, the Original Six kicked through the ruins of Allegheny’s first great fire in July 1849, which striking firemen let burn. Together they loitered around the White Horse Tavern, which served as a meeting place for the borough council, and where the wide porch offered a produce stand for the surrounding farmers and the lawn a stockyard for cattle and horses. Together they explored the surrounding woods and the waterfront. Together they stood at the bridge spanning the Allegheny River to the great smoky city beyond, where they lost themselves in the billowing, black clouds, their minds conjuring up images of dragons and fire, knights and swords, power and riches. Yes, hidden behind the dark veil was treasure to be had. Feeding off one another’s enthusiasms, in the winter of 1849–1850, Andy, Tom Miller, and William Cowley decided to go to a Pittsburgh night school to learn double-entry bookkeeping. Considering Mr. Hay used the single-entry method, Andy hoped that he could permanently escape the oil vat room by acquiring more sophisticated clerical skills. Despite the inherent dangers posed by the smoky city, Margaret encouraged him. Always ready with a Scottish proverb, she knew gentility will never boil the pot. Her boy would have to cook up some attention for himself.
Every member of the Original Six gang was determined to rise above his humble beginnings. Sitting are Will Cowley, John Phipps, and Andrew Carnegie. Standing are Thomas Miller and James R. Wilson. Missing is James Smith. (Courtesy of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh)
Boys would not be boys without a few scraps in the street. The Original Six exchanged slurs and scrapped with the native Alleghenians—“the bottom hoosiers,” as they were called. The bottom hoosiers didn’t take kindly to Andy and his thick Scottish burr, hooting, “Scotchie! Scotchie! Scotchie!” Unfazed, Andy shouted back, “Aye, I am Scotchie, and I’m prood o’ the name!”8 There was little else he could boast of. With Andy’s father unable to keep the factory job, the family was now struggling to make the needed $7.50 a week, and life in America remained tenuous. During these first years, there were no letters of braggadocio written to Dunfermline—a true sign of the family’s desperate situation.
A shrewd and determined Yankee, David Brooks always enjoyed a keen game of checkers with his friend Thomas Hogan. One evening, Brooks, who was manager of a Pittsburgh telegraph office, casually mentioned to Hogan that the telegraph business was exceedingly good. Another telegram delivery boy was needed, he said, and did he know where a good boy might be found? Hogan thought of his fourteen-year-old nephew Andy, struggling to and from the Hay bobbin factory, living the life of an impoverished mole. The boy deserved better, but he was a wee laddie—would he measure up? Yes, Hogan answered, he knew a good boy, his nephew. Send him round tomorrow, Brooks said, for the position had to be filled immediately, no delay.
Later that night, a family council was held. Uncle Hogan explained that Andy would have to walk to Pittsburgh, to the corner of Fourth and Wood Streets, that the job involved delivering incoming telegraph messages to area businesses and residences, and that there’d be some night work, but that it paid $2.50 a week, amounting to a 25 percent raise. Andy hooted with joy; here was a chance to escape his dungeon! For Margaret, her brother-in-law had redeemed himself from the day he suggested Andy peddle wares down at the wharf, and she supported the move. But Will did not, thinking it was too much for his son. At $2.50 a week, he figured a larger and older boy was expected. And what of the night work? Pittsburgh was a den of exotic dangers. There were unlawful cockfights, dogfights, bare-knuckle prizefights, bowling and billiards, and horse racing through the streets that resulted in more than one oblivious citizen being trampled to death. Also, there were gamblers, thieves, killers, and disease. The city was coming to the end of a cholera epidemic, during which fumigating coal fires or pitch pots burned on many a street to beat back the disease. Another of Will’s concerns was ongoing labor violence. Just recently, Pittsburgh proper had been rocked with disorder when over twelve hundred ironworkers went on strike over wage cuts and then rioted when strikebreakers were imported from the east.
After considering the spectrum of dangers, Will concluded, “Ye better let weel enough alone.”9 He was outvoted, however, his authority long undermined. Hardly able to contain himself, the next day Andy dressed in his Sunday best—a white linen shirt, a jacket, and navy blue pants—and his father and he marched double time the two miles to the Atlantic and Ohio Telegraph Company office managed by Brooks. Determined to get the job himself, Andy asked his father to wait outside the two-story office. Secretly, the boy also feared his father’s broad Scotch accent would do more harm than good— Andy had purged his own burr to assimilate. Fate at hand, the boy walked up the seemingly endless flight of stairs to the operating floor where Mr. Brooks awaited, and then the bobbin factory worker made his case. “I took care to explain that I did not know Pittsburgh,” Andy recalled, “that perhaps I would not do, would not be strong enough; but all I wanted was a trial.”10 The opportunity the burgeoning telegraph industry offered could not be overstated.
The Atlantic and Ohio Telegraph Company, owned by Henry O’Reilly, had generated much excitement in 1846 when it opened for business. “Mr. Brooks was the object of special wonder as he patiently explained the mechanism, and the meaning of the sounds,” wrote James Reid, then a telegraph superintendent in Philadelphia. “A long-legged hoosier, who had gazed at the ‘crittur’ for some time, at last determined to turn his chance to practical account. So stepping over the barrier he walked rapidly up to the register, and placing his mouth very near the instrument, said in a kind of confidential and yet anxious tone, ‘I say, mister, can you tell me the price o’ corn?’”11 The telegraph evoked both wonder and fear—in 1849 it was even blamed for the spread of cholera.
As Andy’s interview drew to a close, Brooks said, “When can you go to work?”
“Right now!”12 Quick to pounce on every opportunity, Andy was certainly not going to leave the office for fear of another boy coming along who might be more suitable.
Brooks summoned his one other messenger, George McClain, who immediately set about showing Andy the ropes; meanwhile, poor Dad stood on the corner and wondered, until Andy finally remembered his father and dashed down to tell him the good news. It was a turning point in his life, made possible by an innocent game of draughts. “Upon such trifles do the most momentous consequences hang,” he reflected. “A word, a look, an accent, may affect the destiny not only of individuals, but of nations. . . . The young should remember that upon trifles the best gifts of the gods often hang.”13 A sense of destiny, the notion that perhaps the gods favored him, now took ho
ld in Andrew Carnegie—and that sense of Calvinistic predestination would strengthen.
The quality of Andy’s life changed dramatically: “I was lifted into paradise, yes, heaven, as it seemed to me, with newspapers, pens, and sunshine about me. There was scarcely a minute in which I could not learn something or find out how much there was to learn and how little I knew. I felt that my foot was upon the ladder and that I was bound to climb.” It was indeed the first rung in a ladder as high as Jack’s beanstalk.
Watching the telegraph operators, Andy was immediately mesmerized by “the tick of those mysterious brass instruments on the desk annihilating space and standing with throbbing spirits ready to convey the intelligence of the world.”14 As the steel pen embossed the dots and dashes of the Morse alphabet on a narrow strip of paper—an electric current moving the pen—the boy learned of international, national, and local happenings. Most important, at age fourteen, Andy was riding the wave of a new technology and privy to much business correspondence passing through the office. He learned which businesses were buying, which were selling, which were growing, and which were failing. He learned of deals for land, for resources, and for companies— all inside information that he eventually used to his benefit.
First, he had to keep the job: “My only dread was that I should some day be dismissed because I did not know the city; for it is necessary that a messenger boy should know all the firms and addresses of men who are in the habit of receiving telegrams. But I was a stranger in Pittsburgh.”15 At night, instead of dreaming of the satanic boiler, he closed his eyes and worked on memorizing the various firms in the order they lined the streets, and then he worked on knowing the businessmen and city leaders. Pittsburgh then was classified as a “walking city,” one in which people walked both to work and to conduct business, so it was not uncommon to meet the telegram addressee in the street. In that environment, Andy’s ability to greet respectfully the addressee by name often resulted in a small tip and definitely a good impression. B. F. Jones Jr., whose father was a wealthy iron mill owner, recalled that Andy “was fond of telling me whenever we met that his especial reason for liking the job of delivering messages to my father was because he always received a tip of a quarter of a dollar for doing so. He was a sharp and keen youngster and had an eye for business even then, as a result of which he was on the lookout for messages directed to Jones & Laughlins and was usually the first at the desk to obtain them and run out to deliver them.”16
