The Great Bridge (12 page)

Very little is known about the new Mrs. Roebling, except that she was the former Lucia Cooper of Trenton and that their wedding had taken place in February of 1867. He had presented her with two gold bracelets and a painting by Rembrandt Peale and in his cashbook he entered $125 as the cost of the wedding trip, about which he made no other notation that is known of. Two years later she had still not been fully accepted by the family, nor would she be. Washington Roebling would write that after the summer of his father’s death, he never saw her again.

And finally, there was Charles Swan, who, in a photograph taken some years later, sits in a stiff, upholstered chair, looking quite well upholstered himself as he focuses directly and amiably on the camera, every inch the solid, kindly, dependable man, it would appear, John Roebling’s sons would say he was. That Roebling also appreciated Swan for what he was and all he had done seems clear, despite the cold formality of their working relationship. For when he sat down to write a new will in 1867, after he remarried, he included twenty thousand dollars for Swan and the clearly stated wish that his sons take Swan into the business as a full partner.

The contents of the will would not be made public for several days, but for the family its general outline had been known for some time. In addition to the money for Swan, Roebling had left some eighty thousand dollars for distant relatives and several charities. The bulk of his estate he had split eight ways, between his new wife and his seven children—except that he deducted from each child whatever money had been advanced to him during his lifetime. Year by year, in a private ledger, he had carefully itemized his expenditures for his children, down to the penny, and now in his last summing up he docked them each accordingly.

The wire business he left to his four sons, requesting that they keep the name John A. Roebling’s Sons.

At eleven sharp the house was opened to the public and the crowd started moving for the front door. For the next two hours the town was permitted to pay its respects. The people passed through the dim front parlor in slow single file, in dark Sunday dress and funeral veils, the men with hats in hand, moving with almost no sound at all up to the rosewood casket with its huge silver handles, then on out through the back way, most of them glancing this way and that, trying to see as much as possible without appearing disrespectful.

Nearly everyone thought the Brooklyn undertaker had done extremely well. The body did look emaciated, it was agreed, and the massive brow stood out more even than in life, but when they considered the horrible way the old man had died, and the July heat, most of those who filed by thought he looked quite himself, perhaps even at peace, which was what seemed most unlike him of anything. For the majority of the people in line, it was a chance for a first real look at the man close up.

At one o’clock the front door was closed again. Then shortly after one, as the crowd regathered under the shade trees, the quiet was suddenly shattered by the shriek of a train whistle. People later described it as the most dramatic moment of the day.

Up the tracks crept a special train from Jersey City, five cars long. Like the one the night before that had brought Roebling’s body home, it steamed slowly to the front gate and stopped. Then down stepped the delegation from Brooklyn and New York, some fifty or sixty men, most of them in high, shiny silk hats. They stood about in a cluster beside the train, squinting against the sunshine, until the last of them had gotten down. Then they started up the front walk in a body, the crowd making way for them. At the front door Washington Roebling stood waiting to usher them inside.

The services began at two, on schedule, the family sitting in the upstairs hallways, the guests crowded into neat rows of chairs set before the casket. The heat was terrific, fans were going at a great speed in gloved hands as four ministers—one Presbyterian, one Lutheran, two Episcopal—took turns with the services at the foot of the stairs. There was little out of the ordinary said. The Lutheran spoke in German.

Of the eight pallbearers who took the casket out the front door, four were Trenton men; the others were all associated with the New York Bridge Company—Julius Adams, Horatio Allen, Andrew H. Green, and Henry Cruse Murphy. That a large part of the funeral expenses would also be met by the New York Bridge Company, or more specifically by William Kingsley on behalf of the New York Bridge Company, was privileged information at this point.

The clergy and immediate family led the procession to Mercer Cemetery, riding in special carriages. The Brooklyn delegation came rolling along after, followed by the Board of Trade in still more carriages. Two hundred men from the Roeblings’ rolling mill had marched up from South Trenton and they fell in behind, while the men from the wire mill walked two by two alongside the carriages. Estimates were that fifteen hundred people joined in the march, counting all the professional and trade associations, the orphans, and the singing societies. With everyone under way the whole procession stretched out more than a mile and a half and along the entire line of march—out Green Street, East Street, State and Clinton—sidewalks and doorsteps were thick with silent onlookers.

By four it was all over. John Augustus Roebling had been committed to eternity, beside Johanna Roebling and two of their children. Again the distinguished visitors from Brooklyn and New York were gathered beside their train, all looking a little worse for the dust and heat, each offering his own polite, soft-spoken farewell to the Roebling family, and to Colonel Roebling in particular. One by one they stepped forward to shake his hand and to wish him well—Henry Murphy, Henry Slocum, Horatio Allen, Julius Adams, Thomas Kinsella, Demas Barnes, Colonel Paine, C. C. Martin, William Kingsley. Then as he and the rest of the family turned and walked back through the gate and up the path to the big house, the Jersey City train rolled out of Trenton, gradually gathering speed as it broke into open country.

There is no record of what was talked about during the return trip to Jersey City and that is a great shame. There was quite a lot to be discussed, obviously enough, and nearly everyone who should have a say was present, and with nothing better to do. It was the sort of opportunity a politician seldom lets pass, and since the majority of them were politicians in one way or other, it is hard to imagine the time being wasted.

They had all been together on the ride down that morning, of course, but then, with Roebling not yet in his grave, any open talk about getting on with his work would have been considered out of line. Now the atmosphere was quite different, no doubt, and it seems reasonable to assume that as their train went steaming along through the late summer afternoon a number of highly interesting conversations were being conducted.

Years later it would be said that Roebling’s death left everyone in a terrible quandary over who should take his place and that there were grave doubts about going ahead with the idea. “With its inspiration gone, the Brooklyn Bridge seemed impossible to build,” one biographer would claim. But the truth is there was never any doubt at all.

As William Kingsley would reveal, Roebling had long since talked to him and to Henry Murphy about his son replacing him eventually. Kingsley even said Roebling had wanted his son in charge from the start, but that he, Kingsley, and the others would have none of that. Be that as it may, the very day of Roebling’s death, Thomas Kinsella had stated in no uncertain terms on the editorial page of the
Eagle
that Washington Roebling would take up right where his father left off and that no man was better equipped for the job.

As a matter of plain fact those numerous different parties who wanted the bridge built for their numerous different reasons had been left with little choice but to go ahead with the young engineer. Moreover, to their way of thinking there was no good reason why they should not, and he himself, years afterward, would say there were three very good reasons why they should:

He was also a very young man, which perhaps he ought to have added as reason four. He had that vitality his father prized so and that in his last years had come to be a thing only to hope for in the next life. “After your spiritual birth, did you feel like a new being,” he had asked the spirit of his dead wife, “
young, energetic
and full of life?”

And beyond that it seems Washington Roebling had struck just about everyone with a say in the decision as quite a solid individual in his own right. The consulting engineers could vouch for his professional abilities. He had been a soldier and an exceptionally good one, which was also taken to be much in his favor. And on a strictly personal level he was simply a whole lot easier to talk to than his father had been and would probably be a whole lot easier to work with.

Indeed, the gentlemen from Brooklyn must have been most favorably impressed with Washington Roebling, considering what they were about to risk on him. It was true, just as he said, that he was the one man—the one and only man—in the country capable of building the unprecedented bridge his father had designed, but that of course meant that everything depended on him alone. It meant that unlike his father, he had no one standing by ready to take his place should anything happen to
him,
or between him and his employers.

Still, if the matter of a successor was self-evident and already settled, the death of John A. Roebling had raised other complications that remained quite unresolved. There was, for example, the vital question of public confidence in the work. The older Roebling’s word had counted for something, among his peers as well as the general public, but even he had had to face a storm of protest. It had been necessary for him to resort to a committee of experts to testify to his judgment. How many more critics might surface now, now that he was no longer available to answer for his radical schemes? Public works of such magnitude demanded the smooth turning of many wheels, and wheels within wheels, a number of which were often carefully, cleverly concealed, and a collapse of public confidence could lead to all sorts of difficult, embarrassing complications.

John Roebling had known a great deal about the genesis of the bridge idea, about Brooklyn history and Brooklyn politics and who had the power. He also knew the role money played in getting things accomplished. Money had always been a secondary interest to him personally. He had made quite a lot of it, to be sure, but it had never been life’s chief objective and he had little time for anyone who thought it was. Nonetheless, he knew the lengths some men would go for it and he himself had never been adverse to playing to that side of human nature if it suited his purposes. When he called for the building of the Great Central Railroad in Pittsburgh, for example, he described how the West was “ready to pour rich treasure into our laps,” just as in Brooklyn he had pictured a toll bridge so lucrative that it would pay for itself—all six to seven million dollars—in just three years, which even some of his most ardent admirers in the Bridge Company recognized as foolishness. The bridge, after all, was to be built by a private corporation; it was a business proposition, just as the Allegheny River and Cincinnati bridges had been, and he took that as a matter of course.

But somewhere along the line he had found out more than he had known at the start, more perhaps than he had wanted to know about the ideas a few of his clients and their friends had for making money with his bridge—or at least so it appears from comments made considerably later by his son Washington. “…At the time of his death he was already arranging to retire and relinquish the work to me,” Washington Roebling would write privately to a correspondent. “…You may not be aware that this bridge was started by the infamous ‘Boss Tweed Ring’ for the sole purpose of using it as a means to rob the cities. When this fact began to dawn on my father’s mind he made up his mind to get out.”

The statement is not quite accurate—the bridge had not been “started” by the Tweed Ring, nor is there any indication that either Washington Roebling or his father ever wrote or said anything to the same effect back at the beginning of the work. Nor is it known how much Washington Roebling himself knew at the time of his father’s death, at the time he stepped into his father’s place.

But for a number of those who were speeding toward Jersey City that late July afternoon in 1869, the full story was very clearly known; Brooklyn and its dreams of a bridge were essential elements in their own life stories and dreams.