The Great Bridge

by David McCullough

  The town dock at Cold Spring stood at the foot of Main Street. In summer when the “up” boats from New York stopped—the Mary Powell, the Emeline—it was always a grand occasion. And at night, from her bedroom as a child, she could hear the steam whistles of the great side-wheelers trailing off through the Highlands.

  She had grown up on that part of the Hudson where, for some fifteen miles, it cuts a deep narrow channel through thickly wooded mountains, the most picturesque and fabled part of the whole valley. She could still see part of the river now, just the very broad leadgray final end of it, emptying into the Upper Bay, beyond the tip of Manhattan. And now, as then, she could stand at her window and watch the afternoon sun go down and the lights come on across the water. The sun set earlier in Cold Spring than it did here, and with the mountains crowding all around, the evening skies had never been so spectacular as these. Then, the lights had been few, from West Point only. Still and all there was enough that was the same to make her feel very much at home here.

  The house stood at a prime spot on the Heights. It was tall, stately, spacious, built before the war in the Greek Revival style, and it was located at the northern end of Columbia Heights, the street running parallel to the river, about half a mile from the bridge. The address was 110 Columbia Heights, in the block between Pineapple and Orange Streets, on the west side of the street, the side with the view. Like nearly every house on that side, it had a deep garden in back, extending out over the top of a carriage house and stable built below the brink of the bluff, fronting on Furman Street beside the wharves. Moses Beach, the publisher and a pillar of Plymouth Church, lived next door. Henry Bowen, who had done much to stir up the Beecher scandal and whose deceased wife was said to have been another paramour of the famous divine, lived just up the street in a colossal white mansion with a two-story Corinthian portico, and Beecher himself lived in the next block.

  From her front windows, overlooking the street, she could see the old Turkish baths that John Roebling had patronized and directly across the street stood a row of three-storied brick houses with beautifully arched doorways and long, polished plate-glass windows, much like her own. The houses fronted directly on to the brick sidewalk, as hers did, giving the street a nicely balanced, orderly look. With the sun casting tree shadows on the pink brick walls, everything looked secure and private, as in a courtyard. But from the back of the house, from the big bay windows on every floor, the whole of the harbor, the river, the bridge, and the city beyond were spread before her.

  For six years in all, this would be the center of her universe. She was anything but a recluse by temperament, and unlike her husband she could come and go at will, but when she did it would be for his sake nearly always and for his sake she would do everything in her power to keep this place of theirs both private and utterly tranquil, like the eye of a storm.

  She was thirty-five years old now. She had been married for fourteen years. For nearly ten of those years her husband had been working on the bridge and for more than half that time he had been an invalid, for a long while very close to death and always greatly dependent on her.

  Their son now was nearly an adolescent and apparently she had known for some time that there would be no more children. She had had a bad fall in Germany shortly before he was born, and afterward had bled for nearly a month in the little inn in Mühlhausen, her husband calling in one German doctor after another. The trip home across the Atlantic had been an agony. But she seems to have kept in almost perfect health thereafter, despite everything she had on her shoulders. And she seems to have made an enormous impression on everyone she met.

  One newspaper article said, “Mrs. Roebling is a tall and handsome woman, strikingly English in style and shows not only in her face, but in her graceful carriage, an aristocratic ancestry.” She was considered an exceptional horsewoman and known for both her “scientific bent of mind” and decided opinions on many subjects.

  Among the best physical descriptions of her is one Washington Roebling wrote during the war, in a letter to his sister Elvira:

  I would send you a little tintype [of Emily] if it didn’t happen to be a horrid picture, not doing a particle of justness to the subject. Some people’s beauty lies not in the features but in the varied expression that the countenance will assume under various emotions, etc., etc…. She is dark-brown eyed, slightly pug-nosed, lovely mouth and teeth, no dimples in her cheeks, like Laura the corners of the mouth supply that, and a most entertaining talker, which is a mighty good thing you know, I myself being so stupid. She is a little above medium size and has a most lovely complexion…

  He would never be satisfied with any photograph of her no matter how many times she tried. They gave no idea of her “peculiar grace of carriage,” he said.

  Six weeks after he had met her he had bought a diamond ring and gone off on a flying visit to Baltimore, where she was staying with her sister-in-law, the general’s wife. He had never had any second thoughts about her and apparently her feelings were the same. By April he was addressing his letters, “My good Mrs. Wash,” and telling her, “You know, darling, that your presence always made me feel so good, a kind of contented feeling pervaded me if you were only near. It was not necessary to say anything, perfect silence was as much companionship as the liveliest chatter.”

  She had written him steadily through the rest of the war, long, affectionate letters full of the everyday details of her life. But he had destroyed them all, almost as soon as he read them, telling her they made the separation that much more difficult for him. She, however, had saved everything he wrote, more than a hundred letters from the front in less than a year’s time.

  “This full moon evening would be delightful if I only had someone to enjoy it with,” she read in a letter from Virginia, shortly before the Battle of the Wilderness. “In fact I would not care how the evening was if I only had you with me. I do wonder which of us two can be called the most lovesick; I am disposed to yield the palm to you because you used to consider such a thing so utterly impossible in your case. How long will it be before we shall get tired of each other, in other words what is the length of the honeymoon among people raised around Cold Spring, just ask your friends about it and tell me dearest.”

  He told her about the things he loved, dogs, astronomy, Thackeray. He told her about a Trenton girl named Gussie Laveille, who, he warned, was coming down to visit his camp if she did not. He told her about the boredom and futility of war, and it seemed he had an infinite number of names for her. “Dearest Emmie,” he called her, or “Sweet Em” or “My good Emily” or “Dearest Girl,” “My dear old woman,” “My charming Miss Warren,” “My loved one,” “My Darling,” “My darling Emmie,” “My Lazy Darling,” “My own particular Darling,” “My own Emily,” “Sweetest Love.”

  “After all, dear Emmie, pray tell me what is love,” he asked. “Is it kissing each other, is it tickling, hugging, etc. one another? Is it writing billy duxes, kicking each other’s shins under the table? That must be it I think—the shins!”

  “Look for a big thief next winter,” he wrote in July, “he proposes to steal the only valuable thing in Cold Spring and intends to escape detection by changing the name of the stolen article which will render identification impossible.”

  “Does the Mary Powellrun when the river is frozen?” he asked later. “When I visit you at Cold Spring I am supposed to fly on wings of love so anything short of the railroad will be too slow. Isn’t it curious that although I was nearly four years at Troy and traveled ever so many times up and down by rail and boat I should recollect every place except Cold Spring. I dare say I must have seen you often when the train passed, rolling a hoop along the street in short frocks.”

  She had gone down to Staten Island soon after that to meet some of his family for the first time—his sister Laura, her Mr. Methfessel from Mühlhausen, and their children. Apparently the experience was something of a cold bath for her, as he learned soon enough, to his great pleasure. />
  Your letter describing the visit to all the Dutch uncles and cousins, etc., was very amusing to me; your heart must have sunk within you as you seem to take it for granted that your life henceforth was to be spent in a Dutch atmosphere. The tone of your letter is one of sad resignation and even your Wash seems of scarcely sufficient weight to counter-balance the scale. And well might it be so if your life were doomed to be spent among that Dutch crowd on Staten Island…. However you must take heart my dear; all of our family is as much American as you could wish with the exception of Mother and she never had the opportunity. And again my dear you must remember that in course of time you will be the one to take the lead and be at the head of the home circle.

  It was after that that she made her first trip to Trenton to see the “home circle” where she was expected to “take the lead.” Then his two brothers had gone to Cold Spring before he did, at her invitation. They were all looking each other over. Ferdinand especially had taken a great liking to her, a little too great, Roebling wrote to her, and only partly in jest one suspects.

  “When the two hopefuls of the house of Roebling come I hope you will take good care of them and keep them out of temptation and danger,” Washington kidded her. “Their youthful minds are just at that stage now that their visit to you at Cold Spring will never be effaced from their minds as long as they live.” How many days would he be expected to stay at her house before the wedding took place he wanted to know. He hoped one would do.

  “I still entertain a lively remembrance of the promise you exacted of me to stay in my own room the first night, but I forget whether I assented or not—how was that?”

  He had come to Cold Spring on leave, in the fall, when the weather had turned suddenly sharp and raw. She had met him at the depot, just back from the boat wharf, and they had driven up Main Street, a straight steep climb back from the river. He was in uniform and if there had ever been a handsomer couple seen in Cold Spring nobody could remember when.

  Everybody in the little town knew her. The Warrens were one of the prominent families in the county. Her grandfather was John Warren, who, according to one of the old Putnam County histories, “aspired to no higher distinction than that of a plain, practical farmer, which he was. The purity of his motives, and the honesty of his heart, were never questioned; and in all the relations of life he never gave just cause of offense to his neighbor…. His children, so far as we know them, inherit his virtues.” Her father, Sylvanus Warren, had been the youngest of old John’s seven children, a distinguished, learned man and a close personal friend of Washington Irving’s. Her mother had been Phebe Lickley before she married.

  Old John had kept a well-known tavern that was still standing on the Albany Post Road and he had prospered until steamboats began plying the river and the Post Road was no longer the fastest route north and south. Her own father had also provided well for his big family, having invested in the famous West Point Foundry, an ordnance works and Cold Spring’s sole industry, which stood by the river’s edge. With the foundry testing its Parrott guns, and officers coming and going from West Point, the war had never seemed quite so far removed to Cold Spring people as it had to most Northerners. Often as she sat at her desk writing to Washington, she could hear the big guns pounding away. In a yard beside the foundry they were loaded to full capacity, then fired at the rocky face of Storm King Mountain on the far side of the river, upstream. The shells, when they hit, threw up enormous masses of earth and stone and the impressions made in the side of the mountain would be plainly visible for years to come.

  The most notable member of the family, however, was her brother, the general, G.K. as he was called, who had been named after Gouverneur Kemble, an erudite, convivial Cold Spring man who had started the foundry. There had been twelve Warren children, but only six had survived beyond childhood, of whom G.K. was the oldest. He was nearly fourteen years older than Emily, who was next to the youngest, and for her there was no more dashing heroic figure. Except for Hamilton Fish, Grant’s aristocratic Secretry of State, who kept a country estate in nearby Garrison, General Gouverneur Kemble Warren was Putnam County’s most famous citizen.

  His graduation from West Point had been a momentous event in the Warren family, but Emily had been too young to remember much of it. When he had entered the Academy at sixteen, he had gone with a lofty admonition from Gouverneur Kemble: “We expect you to rank, at graduation, not lower than second.” And he had done just that, finishing number two in a class of forty-four. For the next ten years or so he had returned home only rarely. He had been assigned to the Mississippi Delta first, to work on flood control projects, then to the West. He fought the Sioux under General Harney and mapped Nebraska and the Dakotas. When he came home again, in 1859, to become an assistant professor of mathematics at West Point, he was known as the first explorer of the Black Hills, a slim, black-haired, deeply tanned young man, who, except for his mustache, looked remarkably like an Indian himself, and who to his younger brothers and sisters seemed to have stepped from some exotic other world.

  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 recepti
on, 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.