When Judd reached the end of Phillips’s deposition, he informed Judge McLean that his principal witness of the day was not ready to take the stand, and he asked for an adjournment until the afternoon session. Wead told McLean that he had seen “partial and incorrect reports” about the trial in some of the newspapers and asked McLean to caution the jury against reading them. McLean did so and then adjourned the trial to half past two o’clock.2
Judd opened the afternoon session by calling one of the most interesting witnesses of the entire trial to the stand. Seth Gurney was a fifty-one-year-old New Englander who lived in the wooden house on the upper end of the long pier of the Rock Island Bridge. His position was variously described as superintendent or caretaker, for it was his duty to operate the bridge turntable, close it when trains were about to cross the span, and keep it clear and open at all other times so boats and barges could freely pass through. Before beginning his duties at the bridge on April 19, 1856, Gurney had been employed making turntables for bridges and railroads. Before that he had been a millwright.3
Gurney was not on the bridge when the Effie Afton struck. “I got on to the long pier at about the time that the bridge fell,” he said. But he was a witness to almost everything else that had happened at the bridge since he began his duties there. Following the Effie Afton disaster, the bridge was rather quickly repaired; by August 4, 1856, repairs were so far along that steamboats were once again confined to the draw space when passing through the bridge. Ice closed the river to navigation about November 29, but it opened again in the spring. “The twenty-fifth of March, I think,” Gurney told Judd, “was the first boat that went through.”
Gurney’s principal value as a witness lay in the detailed written record he kept of all boats and barges that passed through the bridge from August 4, 1856, through September 10, 1857, and in the irascible, almost cantankerous manner with which he answered questions. Asked by Judd how many boats had passed in that period, Gurney answered, “According to my record, carefully kept, there have been 958 passages.” “How many boats of that 958 have been injured?” Judd asked. “To the best of my knowledge,” Gurney answered, “the number injured is seven.”
Judd produced a model of the bridge that helped Gurney explain how the span was built and how the turntable operated. The seven boats that, according to Gurney’s record, had mishaps while attempting to pass through the bridge were the Lucie May, which ran straight into the upper end of the turntable pier on April 6, 1857; the Rescue, which came up the river from Rock Island in a gale of wind and snow and struck the bridge on April 10, 1857; the Tennessee Belle, which collided with the short pier on May 11, 1857; the Arizonia, which entered the draw “very much sideways” from upriver on May 31, 1857, and broke its guard when it struck the bridge; the General Pike, which suffered some damage while coming downriver on June 7, 1857; the Mansfield, which came down the river on June 26, 1857, heading directly toward the long pier and struck it; and the Ben Coursin, which came down the river on September 7, 1857, towed by a tugboat, and struck the upper corner of the long pier.
The newspaper reports of Gurney’s testimony suggest that he was a strong-minded witness with a touch of quirkiness and not at all intimidated by the attention that was being focused on him. He was determined to answer the questions put to him, and answer them in his own way. Several times he refused to give his recollections of the circumstances under which boats struck the draw pier, explaining that he had recorded that information in his record book. “It would be remarkable,” he said, “that of a thousand boats I could remember all the circumstances of all the boats.” When questioning him about one boat’s contact with the bridge, Judd asked Gurney, “Have you a memorandum of it, made by yourself?” Gurney answered, “I have an account of it, made by myself at the time. Therefore, I did not charge my memory with the circumstances.” When, during his cross-examination, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers asked Gurney a series of questions about the draw of the bridge, he snapped, “I say, are you not heating up a bit?” “No, not a bit,” the attorney replied. “If I do we will blow off.” To which Gurney retorted, “What is the use of telling you anything. I will tell the jury.”4
If Gurney was a cantankerous witness, he was also an effective one, for he spoke with an air of authority mixed with a New Englander’s frankness, and his handwritten record of the steamboats that had successfully passed through the bridge spoke volumes. It showed very clearly that in less than a year, almost one thousand boats had successfully passed through the bridge that the plaintiffs’ lawyers were now calling a “material obstruction” to navigation of the river.
Gurney was followed to the stand by Daniel L. Harris, a Massachusetts-based civil engineer who had been engaged in bridge building for the previous ten years. Among other things, Harris was the owner of Howe’s bridge plan (the plan that had been used to build the trusses at Rock Island) for three New England states. “I have built half the bridges erected in New England during the past ten years,” Harris told the jurors. Harris saw the Rock Island Bridge for the first time soon after it was disabled but returned for another examination about May 27, 1857. “It was mere curiosity that led me to go,” he said. “I went there to see and ascertain whether what I had been informed by newspapers and reports was true.”
Harris’s examination of the bridge persuaded him that it was located differently than he would have located it. “Still, in the place where it is,” he said, “it could not be bettered. On the Rock Island side, the current, after entering the draw, passes on uniformly straight, so far as I could judge by looking at it; I saw nothing to indicate aught but that.” He explained that, if the upper end of the pier faced straight into the river current, cross-currents would form on both sides of the pier. Because the pier was located at a slight angle, however, the current on the Illinois side was improved. In the end, Harris saw nothing at Rock Island that would adversely affect the navigation of a steamboat.5
Benjamin B. Brayton of Davenport, the engineer who located, designed, and supervised the building of the Rock Island Bridge, was the next witness. Recognizing Brayton’s importance in the construction of the span, the Missouri Republican introduced its account of his testimony with a title reading, “The Bridge Itself on the Stand.” This seemed to signal a turn in the testimony away from the travails of particular steamboats and toward a new focus on the span. The owners and pilots of the steamboats clearly wanted to bring the bridge down, although the only method now available to them was to blame it for the Effie Afton’s loss. Now the jury would learn the essential characteristics of the span, how it was built, and how it operated.
Brayton’s testimony combined authority with some welcome modesty. “I was the engineer in the building of this bridge,” he told the jurors. “I suppose I am responsible for it to a certain extent. I made the survey and location and then submitted it.” Using diagrams, the engineer gave the precise dimensions of the piers and the openings between them, explaining that, because the piers sloped up slightly from their bases to their tops, the openings became wider as the water level rose. At low water, the river was 1,322 feet wide, but only 10.5 percent of the water surface was obstructed by the piers. When the water rose, only 8.5 percent of it was obstructed. Brayton testified about the rapids above the bridge, identifying the chains and the channels by the familiar names navigators had given them: Sycamore, Campbell’s, Rock Island, Davenport’s. He gave their dimensions and the speed of the water that flowed through them, and he explained the difficulties that steamboats encountered when they tried to navigate through them. The rapids were, it seemed, an even greater obstruction to navigation than the Rock Island Bridge.
On cross-examination, Brayton denied that he had had anything to do with the bridge after it was finished, although he admitted that he had taken a new position as engineer of the Mississippi and Missouri Railroad, an affiliate both of the Railroad Bridge Company and the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad. (If Brayton had had a present pecuniary inter
est in the bridge, he would be unable to offer any testimony, and the testimony he had given up to that point would have been stricken, for a rule of evidence similar to the one that made the owners of the Effie Afton incompetent witnesses would have applied to him. Witnesses with a pecuniary interest in the subject matter of a suit were also incompetent to testify in the suit.)6 Also on cross-examination, Brayton admitted that he made a mistake when he originally located the long pier of the bridge. It was not in the exact center of the draw, he explained, so the opening on one side was five feet wider than on the other. The error was not discovered until the work was well along, and instead of starting all over with the construction of a new pier, it was decided to leave the pier in place and center the turntable to one side of it. This equalized the length of the spans atop the turntable pier, although the openings on either side were unequal. Brayton explained that at low water the opening on the Iowa side was 111 feet wide, while that on the Illinois side was 116 feet.
An important part of Brayton’s testimony was devoted to an explanation of the tests he had conducted on the river currents using floats. “Mr. E. H. Tracy assisted me in these tests,” he said. Floats were typically pieces of wood with attached rods that projected down into the water from two to twelve feet.7 Brayton estimated that he and Tracy and the men working for them had “put out 500 to 800 floats” and said that the floats helped them understand how the currents flowed through the bridge openings. “On the Iowa side there is an eddy,” Brayton said, “but none on the Illinois side.” Brayton had seen between fifty and one hundred steamboats pass through the draw, and he had run two hundred to three hundred floats by the same point. His observations and tests had persuaded him that there were no problems in the currents that passed through the Illinois side. “The current below the bridge runs uniformly toward the Illinois shore at Rock Island,” he said.8
Brayton’s testimony was followed by that of John B. Jervis, potentially one of the most powerful witnesses in the trial. Jervis’s formidable reputation as a civil engineer was based on his nearly forty years of canal, railroad, and aqueduct building in New York and adjoining states.9 He had been president of the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad from late 1851 until 1854, but during that time he managed the railroad’s business and did not act as engineer on either the railroad or the bridge construction.10 Jervis had gone to Rock Island in September 1856, and again in May 1857, to inspect the bridge and observe its operations. “I got a man to throw blocks into the current from the head of the pier,” Jervis said. “I stood on the bridge and observed that they passed directly through. . . . I did not notice that they varied any towards the pier.” Jervis thought that the Rock Island draw was wide enough “for the ordinary purposes of navigation” and that the bridge was placed “as well as it could be, in view of all the circumstances.” In fact, he said, “I do not see how the draw could be better placed.”11
William D. Gilbert followed Jervis to the stand. He had been a railroad engineer for twenty-six years, for most of that time in New York, but most recently in Wisconsin, where he was the engineer of a railroad being built from the St. Croix River to Lake Superior. Gilbert testified that he had made four passages through the draw of the Rock Island Bridge, two going up and two going down, and that he had paid close attention to the currents. He came down the river on May 17, 1857, on the steamboat Arizonia, which was damaged when it struck the bridge. He saw the Arizonia’s two pilots shortly after the accident and thought that they were intoxicated. One pilot in particular, Gilbert said, was so badly intoxicated “as to put me on my guard.”12 Gilbert’s other trips were made on the Rock Island and Galena packets. “The long pier is clearly at an angle with the current,” he said. “The effect is that a direct current is forced on the Illinois side. On the Iowa side it forms an eddy, represented by an angle to the short pier on the Iowa side. Had the pier been straight with the current, a cross-current would have been caused on both sides of the pier, which is now obviated, I think.”13
Edward H. Tracy testified on Thursday morning, September 17, the ninth day of the trial. Tracy’s background included work both as a mechanical and a civil engineer, and he had experience on the Chenango Canal, the Croton Aqueduct, and the Canandaigua Canal in Canada. He was now the chief engineer of the Des Moines River improvements in Iowa. He had helped to make the model of the Rock Island Bridge that was shown to the jury and used in explaining the span’s structure and functions. “It is as near certain and accurate as we could make it,” he said. “The scale is fifty feet to an inch.” Working with Benjamin Brayton, Tracy had run floats in the water beneath the bridge to determine if there were any cross-currents. “The angling of the pier improves the Illinois side of the draw to the disadvantage of the Iowa side,” Tracy said. “Placing the pier at an angle,” he said, “improves the Illinois channel and makes the Iowa one worse.”14
Roswell B. Mason did not take the stand until the late afternoon of Friday, September 18. A native of New York, Mason had been a civil engineer for more than thirty years, during the course of which he had worked on canals and railroads in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Illinois. He had also been the principal engineer in the building of the great Illinois Central Railroad, then perhaps the single most extensive engineering project in the western states.15 Like Brayton and Tracy, Mason was commonly addressed as “Colonel,” more as a reflection of his status as a gentleman than as a military officer. Nobody in the courtroom when Mason began his testimony could have known that, thirteen years later, he would be elected mayor of Chicago and that he would be in that office when the great fire of 1871 swept through the city, causing hundreds of deaths and destroying, among other things, all of the official records of the trial they were now attending. If anyone could have foreseen that dire tragedy, interest in what Mason had to say would have been even more intense than it was on the tenth day of the Effie Afton trial.
Mason told the judge and the jury that he had been at the bridge when floats were put in the water some two thousand feet above the draw and allowed to float down in the current. All of them passed through except one, and as he watched them, he could not discover any cross-current. The angle of the pier differed from the straight flow of the river current by only seven degrees, Mason said, and he thought that a boat doing eight miles per hour would have no difficulty in passing safely through the draw. On cross-examination, he admitted that he “never knew of a bridge before this one that was not built, or intended to be built, straight with the current,” but he did not think the angle of the Rock Island Bridge was a serious problem. “My impression is that the location of the Rock Island pier is as favorable for navigation as though it was straight with the stream.”16
Patrick Gregg, who was called to testify on the same day as Edward Tracy, was a physician who had lived in Rock Island City for twenty-one years and was then serving as its mayor. Gregg’s long residence at Rock Island had made him familiar with the river currents. He testified that the draw of the bridge stood “pretty near in a direct line” with the chute of the Rock Island Rapids, “where steamboats pass and have passed during the past twenty-one years.” “The water passes through the draw piers straight and evenly as possible,” Gregg said. “There is no cross-current. . . . I feel very confident the bridge is not any material obstruction.”17
Fifty-three-year-old John Deere of Moline, who took the stand on Thursday, September 17, was one of the most interesting witnesses in the case, not because of the testimony he gave but because he was already on his way to becoming one of the most successful industrialists of the Middle West—in fact of the entire country. Deere had come to Illinois from his native Vermont while still a young man to practice his trade as a blacksmith. Learning how difficult it was for farmers to till the sticky clay of the western prairies with the crude cast-iron plows then commonly in use, he had invented a self-scouring plow with a curved blade made of polished steel. He sold ten of his plows in 1839, forty in 1840, and seventy-five
in 1841.18 By 1855, he was selling as many as ten thousand every year.
Deere’s Moline residence was two and a half miles from the Rock Island Bridge, and it gave him a good view of the Rock Island Rapids. He had seen steamboats as they came through the rapids on their way to the Rock Island Bridge, and he had also seen some of the floats that were put out in the river to test the currents. Deere said that he “could not from the tests seen, discover any cross-current.” Asked why some witnesses said that boats commonly “laid by” (i.e., stopped and waited) when they approached the river from the direction of the rapids, Deere answered, “I suppose the lying by spoken of was because of obstructions above the bridge and not because of any at the location of the bridge.”19
Two more witnesses who were familiar with the river at Rock Island were called to describe the location where the bridge was built. David Barnes was a Rock Island lumberman who had been through the draw on boats fifteen to twenty times and testified that the current ran “straight through the draw.”20 Henry Decker was a Rock Island–based pilot who had worked on the Upper Mississippi for twelve years. He had been through the draw of the bridge some forty or fifty times with barges, and once on the Resolute, a stern-wheel steamer built for towing. “I have gone through the draw oftener than any other boat except the Galena packets,” he said, adding that he “never saw any cross-current.”21
The defendants’ lawyers called several witnesses who had been present when the Effie Afton crashed into the bridge and had some startling information to impart. George D. Talcott of Minneapolis was a passenger on the Afton at the time of the disaster. He was standing next to Captain Hurd on the hurricane deck when the Afton was in the draw and swinging around against the piers. One of the passengers asked why the boat was swinging, and Hurd said that it was “because the engine was disabled. The crank pin or strap connected with a rod had given out, and he did not know which.” Talcott said there were a half-dozen passengers on the hurricane deck when Hurd made the statement. “There was considerable confusion among them,” Talcott added. “The captain was frustrated as well as the rest.”22
Lincoln's Greatest Case: The River, the Bridge, and the Making of America Page 16
