Ellsworth struck Greeley as possessing an “unusually fine physique,” “frank and attractive manners,” and “great intelligence.” The editor must also have been impressed by a letter of introduction from the president that Ellsworth showed him. It was dated two days after Sumter’s fall, and expressed Lincoln’s great esteem for his protégé as both a military man and a personal friend.87
Still, the young officer’s proposal may at first have startled even the idiosyncratic Greeley. He wanted to raise his own regiment. But its members, this time, would not be law clerks and shop assistants. Instead, he said firmly, “I want the New York firemen.” In Washington, Ellsworth explained, the military authorities were “sleeping on a volcano,” and while they dithered about organizing and training the various state militias, the forces of rebellion might blow them sky-high at any moment. “I want men who can go into a fight now.”88 Despite any skepticism Greeley may have harbored, he put an article detailing Ellsworth’s plan into the next morning’s Tribune.
Whatever else they may have been, the firemen of New York were certainly just what Ellsworth hoped for: ready for a fight. In fact, locals often remarked that they seemed less interested in battling fires than in battling one another. The city on the eve of the Civil War was not merely a rough-and-tumble place but “a huge semi-barbarous metropolis … not well-governed or ill-governed, but simply not governed at all.”89 As for the city’s firemen, they were not merely ungoverned, they were almost completely, and famously, ungovernable.
Since colonial times, New York had relied for its fire protection on volunteer companies, much as the nation relied for its defense on volunteer militias. It was a marvelously democratic system that became an utterly impossible mess—though admittedly a colorful and entertaining one, so long as your own house was not the one going up in flames. As the city grew, its warehouses and tenements spreading ever northward up the island, so did the number of hose, hydrant, and hook-and-ladder companies, ever dividing and proliferating. Their official names formed a kind of prose poem of American grandeur: Mohawk, Valley Forge, Eagle, Excelsior, Niagara, Pioneer, Empire, Lady Washington.
But the unofficial nicknames by which New Yorkers actually knew them told a different story: Screamer, Black Joke, Hounds, Old Nick, Shad-Belly, Bucky-Boys, Dry Bones, Old Turk, Mankiller.90
The contests between these companies were epic, hard fought, and often bloody: thirty years’ wars whose battlefields were the nighttime streets of Brooklyn and the Bowery, Greenwich Village and Five Points. The ringing of a fire alarm wasn’t so much a signal of emergency as the starting bell of a no-holds-barred decathlon. Companies raced one another to the scene of the fire, hurtling through the muddy, unlit thoroughfares, young runners sprinting alongside with torches as brawny firemen pulled hand-drawn engines weighing up to a ton each—and woe betide any unfortunate gentleman, groping his way homeward from late revels at a tavern or bawdy house, who might stumble into their path.91
As the engines pulled up in front of the blaze, another competitive event began, as companies vied to see who could pump the fastest; the volunteers stripped to the waist and worked until their breath came in choking gasps; the foremen stood atop the engines bawling orders through brass trumpets above the din. Sometimes they drove the wooden pump handles into such a frenzy that the flailing shafts might crush a man’s fingers or even break his arms if he momentarily lost his grip. Often, different engines had to connect their leather hoses to relay water from a hydrant or cistern, which meant that if one group pumped faster than the next one down the line, the water would burst out the sides of the rival company’s engine, spilling out over the ornate woodwork and polished brass in a spectacularly humiliating torrent known as a “washing.” Whether or not this calamity might interfere with the task of actually putting out a fire was wholly inconsequential: every company’s fondest hope was to “wash” its enemies.92
Not surprisingly, these rivalries often degenerated into all-out brawls. The Black Joke men once rolled out a howitzer loaded with bolts and chain links to defend their firehouse from a rival company’s attack, while Old Nick’s main engine was known to other companies as the Arsenal, for it was rumored to hold a cache of loaded revolvers. In their impatience to avenge defeats, the firefighters themselves sometimes set buildings aflame so as to hasten the opportunity for a rematch.93 For decades after the invention of horse-drawn, steam-pumped engines that carried their own water supply, New York firefighters refused to give up their inefficient machines, little changed since colonial times, since this would have taken all the sporting fun out of it.94
More genteel New Yorkers shuddered at press reports of nocturnal rampages, and agitated for reform, with little result. Not only were the companies an essential voting bloc for the city’s Democratic political machine, they had become folk heroes. Ordinary workingmen coined the fond nickname “b’hoys”—based on Irish immigrants’ pronunciation of “boys.” Down in the taverns of Five Points, people swapped tall tales of the ultimate b’hoy, a semilegendary figure called Mose the Fireboy, an urban Paul Bunyan who stood eight feet tall, could swim across the Hudson in two strokes, carried streetcars on his back, smoked a two-foot cigar, and drank wagonloads of beer at a sitting. When a brawl broke out against a rival fire company, Mose uprooted lampposts with his bare hands to smite his enemies. The character of Mose may have been a slight exaggeration, but the actual b’hoys were still impressive figures. Their fame spread throughout the nation thanks to a series of plays about Mose that began touring to great popular acclaim in the 1840s.95
The b’hoys became emblems not just of sheer physical strength but also of the workingman and the immigrant—of America’s rambunctious grassroots democracy, in all its vital, and sometimes brutal, force. Back in the 1830s, when Tocqueville toured the United States, he had celebrated it as a nation of “voluntary associations” (a category that might, indeed, have seemed to include the prewar Union itself). The post-Revolutionary era had been a time of few official decrees from on high, a time when federal authority and national politics were distant abstractions for most people—what mattered more were local loyalties and associations, the rough bands of tradesmen and farmers who paraded in the streets on Election Day or the Fourth of July. By 1861, the volunteer companies, each with its own storied victories and affectionate nickname, and their old engines, each meticulously hand-painted with elaborate historical and allegorical scenes—Jefferson penning the Declaration, Jupiter hurling his thunderbolts from Olympus—already seemed like quaint relics of a vanishing America. Like the colorful, ragtag local militia units to which the country had entrusted its defense, New York’s volunteer fire companies would be swept away on the war’s tide of modernization and consolidation. In 1865, two weeks before the surrender at Appomattox, a bill was passed creating a new Metropolitan Fire Department of paid and trained firefighters, using steam-powered engines, and under a set of strict regulations enforced by a citywide commissioner. The b’hoys were unceremoniously cashiered, along with Black Joke and Old Nick, Jupiter and Jefferson.96
In the first spring of the war, though, the old ways and the new still hung in fragile equipoise. So Ellsworth came to New York prepared to form a regiment after the model of the fire companies themselves: a free association of noble volunteers lending themselves to the Union cause. Moreover, he confidently assured Greeley, he could turn the recruits into proper Zouaves in as little as five days—after all, the b’hoys were the finest raw material the city or even the nation had to offer, combining Mose-like strength with the agility of those skilled at catwalking along rain gutters and swinging from ropes, the hardiness of those used to braving disaster at a moment’s notice, the esprit de corps of those accustomed to rallying around the standard of their firehouse and upholding its honor with blood if necessary.97 “The firemen of New York are renowned the continent over for their great qualities of endurance, hardihood, activity, and restless daring,” enthused a correspondent of the Chicago Tribune. “E
very man is a gymnast, and can run, jump, and climb like a catamount. There is no better material for Zouave soldiers in the world. We predict that Col. Ellsworth’s regiment will reap glory or find a grave.”98
IN LITTLE MORE THAN twenty-four hours after Ellsworth’s late-night arrival, posters appeared on walls and fences throughout the city, bearing a screaming American eagle across the top and the legend DOWN WITH SECESSION! THE UNION MUST AND SHALL BE PRESERVED! In smaller type, an appeal signed by Ellsworth called on members of the fire department to enlist at recruiting offices hastily organized at firehouses, meeting halls, and Republican Party clubhouses throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn.99 Ellsworth set up his regimental headquarters in the elegant Fifth Avenue Hotel on Madison Square—perhaps not coincidentally, the same place where Lincoln had stayed the year before when he visited New York to give his Cooper Union address.100
Volunteers were offered pay of thirteen dollars per month, plus food and equipment. Their uniforms, Ellsworth promised, would be of the most dashing Zouave cut, with a special flourish: bright red firemen’s shirts. The firemen answered his call; perhaps many of them had been in the crowd for his performance at City Hall the summer before. He asked for a thousand men, and by nightfall he had that many and more. Long lines formed at all of the recruiting offices. Engine Company 14 (Columbian), one of the finest organizations in the city, was rumored to have enlisted en masse, and made Ellsworth an honorary member while they were at it. Three hundred firemen from Brooklyn alone volunteered on the first day. Donations for uniforms and supplies poured in as well, including a handsome gift of one hundred dollars from Boss Tweed himself; less well-heeled citizens were invited to contribute fresh socks, towels, and underwear.101
On the day of departure for Washington and the battles soon to come, the Zouaves marched down Fifth Avenue to the cheers of thousands of spectators—chambermaids waving handkerchiefs from the sidewalks and tycoons leaning out the open windows of their brownstones. Mrs. Augusta Astor appeared in person to present a pair of silk regimental flags; the famous actress Laura Keene presented another. The most unusual fixtures in the military parade were the fire engines that rolled down Broadway alongside the ranks of marching men, gleaming with fresh paint and polished brass.102
Colonel Ellsworth and his men were already eagerly expected in the national capital. Just after their swearing-in, on the afternoon of the Union Square rally, he had telegraphed the War Department and the White House to let them know that the Zouaves were on the way. The news quickly reached the president and his staff. Before going to bed that night, John Hay jotted a note in his diary: “Much is hoped from the gallant Colonel’s Bloodtubs.”103
“The First Telegraphic Message from California,” Harper’s Weekly, 1861 (photo credit 5.2)
CHAPTER SIX
Gateways to the West
But these and all, and the brown and spreading land, and the mines below, are ours,
And the shores of the sea are ours, and the rivers great and small …
—WALT WHITMAN,
“Song of the Banner at Day-Break” (1860–61)
Lower Carson River, Nevada Territory, May 1861
THEY MUST HAVE GLIMPSED one another sometime during that week, at some unrecorded point along the Central Overland Trail. Perhaps it was here, at a bend in the sluggish stream. Perhaps the mule drivers paused in their labor and watched the thing coming toward them: a shimmer against the dull, flat sky that resolved itself, quickly, into a horseman. A horseman, truly; for what approached them seemed no ordinary rider and mount but a compound creature, a man-beast out of some bygone millennium. It rushed on in a clatter of hooves, nimbly dodging among stray boulders, headlong and heedless. In the instant it took to pass them, they could see the hunched man-shoulders and the rippling horse-shoulders, the two faces straining forward, nostrils flared, ghost-white with alkali dust from the flats farther east. And then the apparition was gone.1
The rider, for his own part, barely saw the sunburnt men, the straining mules, or their strange burden: pale, stripped carcasses of aspen and pine, hauled from some distant wooded place into this treeless desert. Mules, men, and tree trunks were obstructions, no more. For him there was only the trail ahead and the animal that strained and swerved between his clenching thighs, thighs that gripped a flat pouch of mail against the saddle as his mind gripped only one thought: westward.
That is how they may have met, two eras brushing past, never touching: the Pony Express and the Western Union Telegraph Company.
Never touching, at least, until a few miles farther on, at Fort Churchill. Here the rider slackened his pace, reining in as he passed the sentry and cantered through the main gate. This was a fresh-built fort, its adobe bricks barely dry. The army had constructed it the summer before, after an ugly clash between the white men and the Paiutes: a lonely outcrop of federal power in a lawless land. For the past few months, Fort Churchill had enjoyed another distinction: it was the Pacific Coast telegraph’s easternmost terminus, though it would not remain so for much longer.2
Now, at least, it was where the horseman handed his flat leather pouch to the operator, who quickly extracted its most precious contents and began tapping the key with his expert finger. In San Francisco, the next day’s headlines would begin with words familiar to every reader: BY MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH. BY PONY EXPRESS. LATEST EASTERN INTELLIGENCE. And then a terse summary of that leather pouch’s most important contents: Thirty-one thousand troops are now in Washington, ultimate destinations still unknown. All work on public buildings at the capital is suspended. In Baltimore, prorebel militia have seized six thousand muskets from the state armory. In St. Louis, an inquest convenes to examine the bodies of those killed in recent clashes.3
Without ceremony, the telegraphist handed back the pouch, the rider threw it across the saddle of a fresh mount, swung himself on top and was off again still westward, his precious cargo clutched again between his thighs: terse business letters from New York and Baltimore, minutely penned political dispatches from Washing-ton, reports on the latest Eastern prices of California bonds and California bullion. There was little room for anecdote or sentiment in a Pony Express pouch; each half ounce of mail cost its sender a five-dollar gold piece plus surcharges, and each rider could carry only ten pounds. Recipients slit open envelopes with a surgeon’s care and extracted leaves as thin as tissue paper, still smelling of sweat and dust and leather.4
Back up the trail at the river bend, the men and mules, too, had resumed their labor. Like the passing horseman, they had little time to spare. They carried with them, eastward, the promise of a future without ponies, without pouches, without onionskin paper. Only electrical impulses: weightless, instantaneous, smelling of nothing.
Congress had opened the way the previous summer, by enacting the Pacific Telegraph Act. This was guided discreetly to passage by a certain private gentleman from the East, Mr. Hiram Sibley of New York, who proved quite expert at ducking and running amid the legislative fusillades of sectional conflict, emerging safely downfield with the only major legislation of that entire miserable year.5 He had strong incentives to succeed. The final version of the act offered a federal subsidy of up to $40,000, along with other valuable considerations, to any company completing a transcontinental line within two years. Competing bids were invited; rival consortia formed. When the deadline for bids arrived in September, however, it appeared that all except one had been unexpectedly withdrawn at the last minute. That lone bid—asking the maximum subsidy, of course—happened to be in the name of Mr. Hiram Sibley of New York.6
Why all the competition withdrew was a mystery perhaps known only to Mr. Sibley and his business partners. These were not men who felt particularly constrained by the rules of gentlemanly fair play. Indeed, they were exactly the type of hard-fisted Yankees that Southerners were always complaining about. Several years earlier, for instance, they had set their eye on the New Orleans & Ohio line, the most profitable in the South. One of Mr. Sibley’s associat
es had shown up in Louisville, the northern terminus, and word quickly spread among the N.O.&O.’s owners that this Yankee interloper was scouting out the terrain, pricing poles, wiring coded messages to New York—in other words, clearly laying the groundwork for a rival line. In a cold panic, the Southerners signed a contract with Sibley for a relative pittance, effectively ceding him control of their company. It emerged later that the coded messages to New York had been mere gibberish; the whole “rival line” a ruse. And thus the N.O.&O. network had, like so many others, tumbled into the omnivorous maw of the Western Union.7
Still, whatever else you might say about Hiram Sibley and his ilk, they certainly knew how to get things done. Within weeks of receiving the Pacific telegraph contract, he had agents fanning out across the West. Lincoln had been elected; the South had seceded; Sibley barely noticed, except insofar as these developments might aid or impede his business plans. Via stagecoach and mule, his envoys set out to secure the friendship of useful men along the planned route: Brigham Young, Chief Sho-kup of the Shoshones, the governor of California. (These agents offered the Mormons lucrative contracts for supplying poles, along with a generous personal loan to Brother Brigham; they offered the Shoshones gifts of food and clothing. What they offered the governor of California, if anything, is unclear.)8
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