Telegraph spread news of Civil War…and then some

In 1858, Daniel Worth had two important jobs in the village of Company Shops in Alamance County, N.C. 

He was the postmaster and the station manager for the North Carolina Railroad (NCRR).

The late Walter Whitaker, an author and Alamance County historian, wrote: “Company Shops was a quiet, complacent little village until the telegraph came through (in late 1850s).”

Telegraph lines were installed parallel to the 223-mile NCRR line between Charlotte and Goldsboro as well as along the 96-mile extension known as the Atlantic & North Carolina Railroad that connected Goldsboro and Morehead City.

The telegraph lines in North Carolina were built and owned by private companies like the Washington and New Orleans Telegraph Company (later absorbed by Western Union Telegraph Company).

Daniel Worth and the other railroad station managers assumed additional duties as telegraphers, requiring them to learn the dots and dashes of Morse code.

 

“Citizens began to drop in at the Company Shops railroad office to inquire about the news. Gradually, in 1861, they became aware of the trouble that was brewing in the outside world – the gathering of war clouds,” Whitaker said.

“Abraham Lincoln had become president. South Carolina and several other Southern states seceded from the Union.”

 

“Then…on a quiet morning in April 1861, the clanking telegraph instrument brought an ominous message,” Whitaker said. “Fort Sumter (S.C.) had been attacked…the Civil War had begun.”

 

From the outset, it was clear that the Union forces held the upper hand with the new technology offered by the telegraph, and it helped in a major way to determine the outcome of the conflict.

At its peak in 1865, the Union forces were served by more than 15,000 miles of line that were operated and maintained during the war by about 1,200 telegraphers and linemen who were part of the United States Military Telegraph Service (USMT). They were civilian employees rather than soldiers.

The USMT operation reported directly to Secretary of War Edwin McMasters Stanton and President Lincoln, rather than to the military command structure. This was by design to “safeguard civilian control over military operations.” 

Stanton relied on the military telegraph to monitor the actions of his generals in the field.

 Author Christopher Klein (shown below) said President Lincoln was so taken with the telegraph’s rapid messaging capability that he “sometimes slept on a cot in the telegraph office (located in the War Department Building adjacent to the White House in Washington, D.C.) during major battles.”

 

He referred to the room as “his sanctuary.” Essentially, Lincoln was America’s first “wired president” – embracing the original electronic messaging technology, Klein said.

Lincoln wrote nearly 1,000 bite-sized telegrams during his presidency. “They helped win the Civil War by projecting presidential power in unprecedented fashion,” Klein wrote.

For Lincoln, “the telegraph was both his ‘Big Ear,’ to eavesdrop on what was going on in the field, and his ‘Long Arm’ for projecting his leadership,” commented historian Tom Wheeler.

 

Klein remarked: “The telegraph allowed the president to act as a true commander-in-chief by issuing commands to his generals and directing the movement of forces in nearly real time. For the first time, a national leader could have virtual battlefront conversations with his military officers.”

“The paucity of interstate telegraph lines in the South precluded Confederate President Jefferson Davis from doing the same,” Klein commented. Clearly, the Confederates were seriously at a disadvantage in the communications department.

As the war progressed, Union navy warships blockaded southern ports, so vital telegraph industry supplies like wire, insulators and battery acid became even harder for the Confederates to obtain. 

As Union armies advanced southward, they commandeered the telegraph network.