Almost 150 years before the advent of texts, tweets and emails, President Abraham Lincoln became the first “wired president” by adopting the original electronic messaging technology – the telegraph. The 16th President is remembered for his burgeoning oratory that stirred the Union, but the nearly 1,000 bite-sized telegrams he wrote during his presidency helped win the civil war by projecting the presidential power in an unprecedented way.
The federal government had been slow to adopt the telegraph after Samuel Morse’s first successful test message in 1844. Before the Civil War, federal employees who were to send a telegram from the National Capital had to wait in line with the rest of the public at the central telegraph office of the city. After the outbreak of war, the all-new US Military Telegraph Corps undertook the dangerous job of laying more than 15,000 miles of telegraph wire on the battlefield, which transmitted information almost instantly from the front lines to an office. a telegraph that had been set up inside the old War Department Building library adjacent to the White House in March 1862.
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Lincoln slept on a cot at the telegraph office during the pivotal battles
Lincoln, who had a keen interest in technology and remains the only US president with a patent, spent more of his presidency in the War Department’s telegraph office than anywhere else outside the White House, writes Tom Wheeler in Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails: How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War. As a thirsty president, he traveled a well-worn path across the lawn of the executive mansion to the War Department to monitor the latest information coming in dots and dashes.
David Homer Bates, one of the first four members of the US Military Telegraph Corps, said in Lincoln in the Telegraph Room that several times a day Lincoln sat down at a telegraph office near a window overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue and scanned the new stack of incoming telegrams, which he called “lightning messages”. As the telegraph keys chatted, he looked over the shoulders of operators who were scribbling inbound messages converted from Morse code. He visited the office almost every night before turning around and slept on a bed during the pivotal battles.
According to Wheeler, Lincoln sent just over one telegram a month in the first year of his presidency, but that changed as he became more and more frustrated with the progress of the war. He used emerging technology to take greater control of the war effort after sending a burst of telegrams on May 24, 1862, which ordered his generals to immediately move against the forces of Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.
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View of members of the US Military Telegraph Corps, formed in 1861 following the outbreak of the American Civil War, at Wilcox Landing, Virginia, circa 1864.
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Lincoln sees Telegraph Office as both command center and sanctuary
The telegraph allowed the president to act as a true commander-in-chief by giving orders to his generals and directing the movement of forces almost in real time. For the first time, a national leader could have virtual conversations on the front lines with his military officers. The shortage of interstate telegraph lines in the South prevented Confederate President Jefferson Davis from doing the same.
Lincoln did not hesitate to intervene and affirm his thoughts on the telegrams which were not even addressed to him. “The telegraph was both his big ear, to listen to what was happening on the ground, and his long arm to project his leadership, now informed by the newly gathered information,” writes Wheeler. When General Ulysses S. Grant rejected General Henry Halleck’s suggestion to withdraw troops from the siege of Petersburg in 1864, the President lent his support after reading their communications: “Hold on with a handful of bull dogs, and chew and choke as much as possible. ”
For Lincoln, the telegraph office was not only a command center of the 19th century, but a sanctuary against the crowds who descended daily on the White House in search of jobs and favors. “I’m coming here to escape my persecutors,” Lincoln joked to telegraph operator Albert B. Chandler. Telling tales and jokes, the president became friends with the office’s telegraph operators. “He would relax from the tension and care still present at the White House, and while waiting for new dispatches, or while they were being deciphered, would make ongoing comments, or tell his inimitable stories,” Bates wrote. When news of Vicksburg’s capture of Grant by Mississippi arrived by wire in 1863, Lincoln flouted the rules and bought beer for the operators, drinking a tasty toast with the general’s telegram in hand.
On April 8, 1865, Lincoln himself wired the City Point, Virginia office with news of Richmond’s capture of Grant. A week later, the telegraph office announced the devastating news of Lincoln’s assassination to the nation by spreading the message that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton wrote from the President’s deathbed opposite Ford‘s Theater: “Abraham Lincoln died 22 minutes after Seven this morning. “
