by Peter Krass
Frick had finally been granted what he wanted—a partnership. Brother Tom’s death in October 1886 had forced Carnegie to change his position on making Frick a partner because he needed to bolster his management team. On November 1, while he and his mother lay sick in Cresson, he allowed Frick to purchase $184,000 in stock, a premium of $84,000 over the original par value of $100,000, to be paid for by future dividends. At the same time, Frick was given informal management duties within Carnegie Brothers to fill the void created by Tom’s death.
Carnegie stayed with his brother’s family on Cumberland Island, Georgia, the two-thousand-acre estate his brother had purchased, renovated over the years, and called Dungeness, and together they healed their wounds. He took walks and rides on the beach and played with his nephews. Via mail and telegraph, Carnegie and Louise planned their wedding for April 22, and he returned north that month. Throughout these mad months of illness and absence, Carnegie was fortunate that business took care of itself; the market was strong, and Edgar Thomson had all the orders it could handle.
He did have to deal with one disgruntled customer, which was a blessing in disguise. Collis Huntington, a railroad magnate who was one of the cofounders of the Central Pacific Railroad, complained he was paying too much for rails and not getting the service he deserved. As soon as Carnegie returned to New York, he told Huntington he would not sell rails for under $42 a ton and defended his people: “I hope, by the time this reaches you, you will be in your natural good humor, and satisfied that at all times, and under all circumstances, your alliance with us is under ‘the most favored nation clause.’ Let us know what we can do for you and it shall be done.” He added a postscript: “I had time to take a hurried look at your house as I passed through New York. It would suit me and I would give you cost for it, which you told me was $170,000, adding to this the amount you have expended upon it, paying you $100,000 in bonds of your splendid Steamship line, at par, and the remainder as you wish it, even if we have to give you rails for the remainder of what rails you wish this year at $41.”20 Even though Carnegie had first insisted he would not sell rails for under $42 a ton, he figured a few pennies out of his partners’ pockets was negligible if he could buy Hunting-ton’s magnificent mansion at Fifty-first Street and Fifth Avenue and present it to Louise as a wedding gift. He pulled it off for $200,000.
As the wedding approached, Carnegie resumed his hectic schedule. On April 14, he attended a talk by Walt Whitman delivered at the Madison Square Garden theater. He also took the time to send Whitman, via a mutual acquaintance, Richard Watson Gilder, money to help support the man who would become one of America’s most celebrated poets. Carnegie, a member of New York’s Author’s Club, considered himself not only a patron of the arts, but a patron of artists—as well as politicians and scientists, among others. His philosophy was that people making vital contributions to society should not have to worry about money so they could focus on their work. Eventually, over four hundred names would grace his private pension list. Whitman, who spent much of his later life impoverished, was touched: “Yours enclosing Mr. Carnegie’s magnificent contribution to me (& to the Lincoln memory lecture) of $350 has safely come to hand. I thank AC from my heart—The money, of course will help me every way & practically. It is appreciated for its source in kindest human good will. I thank you, too, dear friend—your faithful heart & voice—I wish this note sent to Mr. Carnegie with my gratitude and love.”21
He was so busy wrapping up business before his wedding that with just six days to go, he wrote from Pittsburgh to Louise’s pastor, Reverend Charles Eaton, requesting he perform the ceremony.22 He also had a prenuptial agreement drawn up, clarifying that he “intends to devote the bulk of his estate to charitable and educational purposes and said Louise Whitfield sympathizes and agrees with him in said desire and fully approves of said intention.”23 To guarantee Louise’s financial health, he gave her a bounty of over $300,000 in stocks and bonds, intended to provide her with $20,000 annual income.24
Andrew Carnegie and Louise Whitfield were married on April 22, 1887. The ceremony was held at eight o’clock in the evening at the Whitfield home. Reflecting Carnegie’s desire to respect his mother’s recent passing, it was a very modest, subdued affair, with no maid of honor and bridesmaids, no best man and ushers, and but thirty guests, all family and close friends, including Dod and his wife, the Phippses, the Kings, and David Stewart. The fifty-one-year-old Carnegie, his trim, spade-shaped beard fully gray, escorted Mrs. Whitfield to her seat, and then thirty-year-old Louise, in an elegant gray traveling gown and on the arm of her grandfather, George Buckmaster Whitfield, walked down the aisle. An hour after the ceremony found Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Carnegie being whisked by carriage away to the North German Lloyd pier to board the steamship Fulda, bound for England. Carnegie had arranged to commandeer the captain’s quarters and general officers’ rooms for their honeymoon suite.
The honeymooners’ first stop in England was Bonchurch, a beautiful resort on the Isle of Wight covered with fields of wildflowers and glorious views of the sea. Entranced, Carnegie and Louise started dreaming about the country estate they had leased in Scotland for the remainder of the summer. It was the Kilgraston House, located in the beautiful Highlands’ Valley of the Tay, near Perth. “We are already counting on the pleasure of selecting in London the things we may need for our Scotch home,” Louise wrote her mother, “thus having many things ready for 51st Street. I have been so amused, John [O’Hara, Carnegie’s footman] has just put tags on my trunks as follows: ‘Mrs. Andrew Carnegie, No. 5 W. 51st.’ I believe John is as delighted as we all are. Doesn’t it seem almost too good to be true?”25 Was it? Blissfully attendant to her still recuperating husband, Louise left herself no time to consider how good a husband Carnegie would be. There was such a self-serving disparity between his words and actions in the realm of business and social thought; would it be the same for his marriage? Did he love Louise as much as he professed? Would his relationship with his mother continue to haunt them? After all, he would nickname his wife Lou, echoing the perfunctory nickname for his mother—Mag. Carnegie was also not a negotiator, a critical element to a marriage, and he was not domesticated, having always worked in a man’s world.
No magnate’s honeymoon would be complete without some attention to work and politics. It was at this time that Carnegie’s labor treatises were being challenged as strikes in the coke industry strangled Edgar Thomson’s supply, and Frick was threatening to resign if he wasn’t given a free hand in dealing with the strikers. There was also a continuing conflict with his former newspaper partner Samuel Storey, who owed him money from the buyout, and Carnegie was forced to hire a solicitor to exact payment.26 While honeymooning, he even took time to read all of the speeches resounding through the House of Lords, and he dashed off a note to his Liberal friend Lord Rosebery, whose home ground was near Dunfermline, declaring his “the very best of all.”27
Their next stop was London, where they stayed at the Metropole Hotel, to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of the reign of Queen Victoria. “Have met more celebrities than I can count—the poet Robert Browning, and Edwin Arnold, writer John Morley—and spent the day with Lord and Lady Rosebery at their place at Mentmore,” Louise gushed in a letter to her mother on June 10. “Sunday we spent with the novelist William Black. . . . Am charmed with all I meet, they are all so delightful, but the constant rush confuses me and I sometimes scarcely know whether I am on my head or my heels. . . . Well, Mother Mine, we are in the whirl, nothing but a rush and a bang all the while. I begin to experience the realities of life now and oh! how I do long for Mother! I am not a bit homesick but I begin to realize how much a man wants and how important it is for a woman not to have any wants or wishes of her own.”28 So it began—the whirl of socializing—and the demands on Louise would only become more intense.
Finally, on June 22, the Carnegies started north, accompanied by James Blaine and his wife. On July 7, before they could settle into manor living,
they traveled to Edinburgh, where Carnegie laid the cornerstone for his second Scottish library, the result of his most generous benefaction to date— $250,000—and was presented with the city’s Freedom, akin to being given the key to the city. People lined the streets, cheering and saluting, as the Carnegies made their way by coach to the construction site. After the cornerstone ceremony, Lord Rosebery presided over the presentation of the Freedom, an event held in the great Synod Hall, with pipers piping gloriously. Once at Kilgraston, Louise wrote her mother: “Well the conquering hero is once more at home. . . . It is all right enough for Andrew but imagine me, who three months ago was not known, riding in the carriage with Mr. Blaine, who for once had to take a back seat. I had to bow right and left in response to the cheers with which we were greeted from thousands who lined the streets. . . . At every station crowds collected and cheered and then pressed up to the car window to shake hands with Andrew, one old man peering into his face and exclaiming, ‘Are you the real Andrew Carnegie?’”29 He was fast becoming a legend.
Once fearing her Andrew’s desire to live in Britain would separate them forever, Louise herself now fell in love with his Scotland. Particularly taken with bagpipes, she sweetly asked her husband if they could not have a piper at their temporary home, and the doting Carnegie hired one immediately. Over the summer months, visitors trooped in and out of the newlyweds’ Kilgraston home; apparently the consummation of the marriage and the honeymooning were officially over. Visitors included the Blaines, Matthew Arnold, and John Hay, among many other friends. Hay reported back to his friend Henry Adams that “we went to Andy Carnegie in Perthshire, who is keeping his honeymoon, having just married a pretty girl. . . . The house is thronged with visitors—sixteen when we came away—we merely stayed three days: the others were there for a fortnight.”30
Mrs. Blaine, writing her son, captured life at Kilgraston, each day beginning with a gillie in tartan waking them by playing the bagpipes. To serve their needs there were two cooks and twenty servants, some who were rather sly.
Andrew Carnegie may be little but his hoard and heart are great, and he is a happy bridegroom and rejoiceth as a bridegroom to have his happiness sure, so that we are enjoying, as only pilgrims and sojourners at hotels should enjoy, this oasis of home life. Yesterday we returned from an excursion of two days to Dunfermline. . . . As we drove in at an opposite direction from that on which we started out, we surprised all the servants dancing at the rear of the house. As English servants are always instructed to keep away from the master and mistress, they scurried to cover like rabbits, and when we drove around to the front door, there was the piper marching up and down imperturbably, playing “The Campbells Are Coming!”—the butler, the housekeeper, the lady’s maid waiting at the entrance, and all the housemaids carrying hot water to the various bedrooms. It was the funniest transformation scene I ever saw.31
Although he would have denied it, Carnegie, whom Mrs. Blaine found to be somewhat autocratic, was living the life of an English lord.
Lady of the house or not, twenty servants or not, Louise did not anticipate the invasion on her honeymoon and was overwhelmed. She felt oppressed, as though she was living a double life, and on July 17 she wrote her mother to “have a little chat” with her: “I miss the old sweet routine and the great change in my life comes over me more then than any other time. Andrew is sweet and lovely all the time but he is so very different from every other human being. There is not the first particle of pretense about him—he is so thoroughly honest.” If his wife found him startling at times, Carnegie must have really shocked those not accustomed to his outbursts.
Louise also lamented that the house was filled with fifteen guests: “I really have no actual care but it oppresses me to have so many people around. I see very little of them except at table and while we are driving but it all seems so very sudden; there has been no growth, no gradual transition. I seem to be leading two lives—outwardly I am the mature married woman, while inwardly I am trying to reconcile the old and the new life. I get awfully blue sometimes but I know it is very wrong to indulge in this feeling and above all to write to you, but, Mother dear, I feel so much better for it.”32 Carnegie, on the other hand, relished having so many visitors and began to search for a castle for the summers to come. Playing host to so many would become the one enduring conflict in their marriage.
When the lovebirds left their crowded Scotland nest to return to their spacious new home on West Fifty-first Street, they brought with them the Kilgraston housekeeper, Mrs. Nicoll, who remained with them for the next twenty-five years; the butler, George Irvine; and another servant, Maggie Anderson. The latter two had tenures almost as long as Mrs. Nicoll. The help, to whom Carnegie was relatively kind, found their master far more tolerable than his competitors and partners did.
The next summer, Carnegie leased Cluny Castle in the Highlands. To kick off the season’s festivities, he organized a seven-hundred-mile coaching trip from London to Cluny—a coaching trip long due Louise. Even though the United States was gearing up for the presidential election in the fall, the influential Republican James Blaine and his wife, Harriet, again joined the Carnegies. Blaine wanted to escape the coming political maelstrom, the Republican Convention, which would result in Benjamin Harrison being nominated for president and Levi P. Morton for vice president. Also joining them were the Blaines’ daughters; author Mary Dodge, who wrote under the pen name Gail Hamilton; Harry Phipps and his wife; Walter Damrosch, who was the dashing twenty-six-year-old conductor of Wagnerian operas at the Metropolitan; Charles Eaton, who had married the Carnegies; and Lord Rosebery. The highly detailed coach, with entwined American and British flags painted on the doors, that greeted them at the Metropole Hotel was a wedding gift from Lucy Carnegie.
A British newspaper described the primary characters as they climbed aboard:
Mr. Blaine, a gentleman of some sixty years, with whitey grey hair and sallow face, wearing a white hat and blue coat, jumped up to his seat by the whip with alertness of youth.
“The Iron Queen” [Louise] in a blue serge travelling costume, carrying a detective camera and a lovely bouquet of Marechal Neils, was assisted to her place at the back by Lord Rosebery, who, with his close shaven face and spruce attire, his bell shaped hat and the humorous smile which plays about his mouth, is the very ideal of a prosperous comedian.
Carnegie looked the picture of health and happiness, and as chirpy as a cricket, with a little serge suit, a white hat fixed well on his head, a red rose in his buttonhole. Up he climbed to his seat by the side of his charmingly pretty wife, who, like all American ladies, was not in the least ashamed of showing her keen enjoyment of the lively scene.33
Carnegie and Blaine’s growing friendship was attracting particular attention. They were, after all, two of the most charismatic icons of the Gilded Age, but their relationship also posed ethical questions as critics evaluated whether the politician and tycoon were too tight, and whether Carnegie had undue influence in the capital. The reporters hounded the coaching party every time they entered a sizable town, prompting one charioteer to remark, “We were annoyed by their constant presence, but, when they left us, felt a little lonesome and neglected.”34 Still, they enjoyed their tour northward through the cathedral towns of eastern England, “tracking the Roman roads, sleeping in the rooms of Tudor kings, lunching under yew trees that might have been ones that bothered Caesar.”35
The approach to Cluny took the charioteers through a pass in the Grampian Hills that was fifteen hundred feet high, and from there the beautiful Valley of Spey spread out before them, home to the turreted, white granite Cluny, a blue smoke of peat curling from the chimneys. A dark forest of larches, fir, and birch, concealing secluded burns and waterfalls, surrounded the castle, and nearby were the caves where Cluny MacPherson—Highland chieftain, Jacobite leader, and fugitive—hid himself for much of nine years. The interior of the castle reflected a violent past; it was decorated with guns, claymores (double-edged sw
ords), dirks (long daggers), and other nasty-looking weapons. The landscape inspired Louise, who was taking an active interest in photography, and she faithfully recorded their time there.
Carnegie relished the fishing and hunting available on the eleven-thousand-acre estate. Demonstrating a certain degree of insensitivity to one of his junior partners’ hard work, he wrote William Abbott that “60 trout caught yesterday by one rod in our own Burn—We have splendid grouse shooting also, everything there is Lochs—Burns, Moors and the Spey River all round us. Two trout streams run past the Castle one on each side. Waterfalls, Rustic Bridges over them. This is indeed a gem—I will have you all over in pairs year after year if you are good boys and don’t get into Beam Pools at a loss.”36 Although Louise and he hosted a castle full of guests, they did share some intimate moments, depicted by Louise: “From my little sitting room, steps lead right to the lawn, and Andrew’s business room opens from my sitting room; so we slip from each other’s rooms and out to the lawn with the greatest ease.”37
The King family, Dr. Dennis and his wife, and John Morley, among others, joined the Carnegies, but one character sorely missed at Cluny was Herbert Spencer, who declined to visit, citing poor health, an excuse he used on many an occasion.38 Between Blaine, Morley, and Carnegie, boisterous debates were a given, and when Carnegie was too loud or adamant, Louise would preen the front of her dress as a signal, and he would invariably say, “Oh! Lou thinks I’m talking too much.”39 Not the retiring type, he didn’t remain quiet for long as the festivities continued into the night. After a meal of roast lamb, cabbage, stewed rhubarb and cream, whiskey and water, and crackers and cheese, Damrosch gave singing lessons and played the piano to candlelight, while Blaine danced the Virginia reel on the front lawn. On July Fourth, flags were flying over Cluny, cannons fired in the morning, spectacular fireworks lit the sky at night, and Damrosch taught Cluny MacPherson, descendant of the Jacobite leader and now the castle’s owner, how to play “Yankee Doodle” on the bagpipe for leading them to dinner.40
