1. The Lightning 1 THE LIGHTNING he drilled through every plank and fitted them together, fixing it firm with pegs and fastenings. As wide as when a man who knows his trade Marks out the curving hull to build a ship. --Homer, The Odyssey , book 5, lines 246-2502 NOVEMBER 6, 1860 Abraham Lincoln was in the headquarters of the Illinois & Mississippi Telegraph Company, on the north side of Springfield''s public square, when he received the news that he was likely to win New York, and with it, the presidency.3 It began with a sound--the click-clack of the telegraph key, springing to life as the information raced toward him. A reporter for the New-York Tribune heard the returns begin to "tap in," audibly, with the first "fragments of intelligence."4 Then, a flood, as more returns came in from around the country, bringing news as electric as the devices clattering around the room. All wires led to Springfield that evening, or so it felt to John Hay, who wrote that Lincoln''s room was "the ear of the nation and the hub of the solar system.
"5 As dispatchers danced around the suite, Lincoln sat languidly on a sofa, like a spider at the center of an enormous web. That word had already been used to describe the invisible strands connecting Americans through the telegraph.6 Every few minutes, the web twitched again, as an electromagnetic impulse, transmitted from a distant polling station, was transcribed onto a piece of thin paper, like an onion skin, and handed to him.7 Not long after ten, one of these scraps was rushed into his hands. The hastily scribbled message read, "The city of New York will more than meet your expectations."8 Immediately after, he crossed the square to meet his rapturous supporters, when he was handed another telegram, from Philadelphia. He read it aloud: "The city and state for Lincoln by a decisive majority." Then he added his all-important commentary: "I think that settles it.
" Bedlam ensued.9 Lincoln elected! It was the headline of the century, and Americans sent it all night long, tapping out the Morse code for Lincoln as quickly as possible: the single long dash, for L , beginning the word that would be repeated endlessly through American history from that night forward. It was already so familiar that many just compressed his name to a single letter, especially when paying to send a telegram. " L and H were elected," James A. Garfield noted into his diary, omitting needless letters (the H stood for Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, Lincoln''s running mate). "God be praised!!" he wrote when he finally heard the news, wrested from the wires, in a rural Ohio telegraph station. The future president had driven his horse and carriage fifteen miles in the middle of the night, just to be connected.10 In newspaper offices, editors struggled to find type sizes big and bold enough to match the import of what they were hearing.
Across the country, crowds stayed up late, hoping to glean new scraps of intelligence from the wires that thrummed with the sensational news. In New Haven, Connecticut, people flat-out screamed for a full ten minutes when the result was announced.11 In Port Huron, Michigan, a thirteen-year-old boy, Thomas Alva Edison, was so eager to get the news that he put his tongue on a wire to receive its electric impulse directly. In Galena, Illinois, young Republicans held a spontaneous "jollification" inside a leather shop, where they were served oysters by the owner''s son, Ulysses Grant. Despite the fact that he leaned toward Democrat Stephen Douglas, the younger Grant seemed "gratified."12 In Springfield, it seemed like the entire town was out in the streets, as a crowd described as "10,000 crazy people" descended upon the square, "shouting, throwing up their hats, slapping and kicking one another." The last stragglers went home around dawn, after yelling themselves hoarse.13 But the news did not go to sleep; it traveled all night along the wires that stretched across the oceanic expanse of the United States.
The word telegraph derived from Greek, to connote "far writing," an accurate description of an American grid extending from the frigid wastes of northern Maine to tropical Florida. No one built them more quickly: not far from Troy, Kansas, an English traveler was astonished to see new lines racing across the prairie, six miles closer to the Pacific each day.14 Not everyone had welcomed the clunky overhead lines when they were first introduced; New York City had briefly refused, for fear that "the Lightning," as the telegraph was called, would attract real lightning.15 The wires were not always reliable in the early years; the news might vanish along the way, due to storms or atmospheric disturbances. A year earlier, at the end of August 1859, an intense solar flare known as the Carrington Event wreaked havoc on the grid, causing flames to shoot out, and machines to turn on and off, as if operated by witches. In a small Pennsylvania town--Gettysburg--a minister recorded his observation of "a mass of streamers," red and orange, streaking across the sky."16 In the years leading up to the election, the Lightning had become a part of the republic''s bloodstream. Readers thrilled to the "telegraphic intelligence" that filled newspaper columns, with hard information about stock prices, ship arrivals, and the movements of armies around the world.
They also enjoyed news that was not quite news, describing royal birthdays in Europe or the arrival of visiting "celebrities"--to use a term that was coming into vogue to describe people who were known simply for being known.17 But even if the Lightning could race across great distances, it could not bring Americans closer together. Some worried that it was actually driving them apart. In 1858, three days after the first Atlantic Cable connected New York and London, the New York Times asked if the news would become "too fast for the truth?"18 Two years later, as Lincoln ran for the presidency, hateful innuendoes were streaking from one end of the country to another, accelerated by the Lightning.19 Many observed that the first word in the country''s name-- United --had become a glaring misnomer. Things got so bad that the Architect of the Capitol, Benjamin Brown French, began to put quotation marks around it.20 Every day, the news made one side or the other angry. In the North, law-abiding citizens were sickened by the never-ending degradation of African-Americans, as the Slave Power stretched its tentacles into the other sections.
21 It was one thing to ignore slavery, as many Northerners were perfectly content to do. But when the federal government sent U.S. marshals into free states to find runaways, readers in the free states wondered what had happened to the moral purpose of the republic.22 Southern politicians never stopped asking for more : more slave states, more empire , to encircle the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. In their conclaves, they began to fantasize about a new kind of realm, modeled on the ancient Mediterranean, to be funded by the open plunder of Mexican silver and an inexhaustible supply of Africans.23 That did not sound much like the United States of America.24 But Southerners were no less wary of the news, particularly when they heard about John Brown''s bloody raid on Harpers Ferry or simply read the 1860 census returns that were already coming in.
Since 1850, the population of just one state, Lincoln''s Illinois, had shot up more than the combined increase of South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Virginia. Who were all these people? Were they even American? Could these two versions of the same country be reconciled? No one would ever expect a thoughtful answer from the White House. It almost seemed as if Buchanan''s regime was leasing the country''s name, as his friends enriched themselves and presided over a machinery of government that was lubricated with bribery, brandy, and insider deals. In New York, a lawyer, George Templeton Strong, wrote in his diary that he felt like he was reliving "the Roman Empire in its day of rotting."25 Younger Americans, especially, felt estranged. A few years earlier, in Brooklyn, a carpenter had poured out his feelings of rage in a language quite unlike the curious poems he sometimes published at his own expense. Walt Whitman brimmed with anger as he wrote of the "crawling, serpentine men" who held office in Washington, "gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people''s money."26 The Capitol had turned into a hiding place for nocturnal creatures ("bats and night-dogs") and swamp-dwellers ("lobbyers, sponges").
Instead of reporting on corruption, the administration''s pet journalists were "spani.