The Great Bridge (6 page)

In April of 1845, a month before the aqueduct was opened, more than half of Pittsburgh burned to the ground. “The progress of the fire as it lanced and leaped with its forked tongue from house to house, from block to block, and from square to square was awfully magnificent,” wrote one observer. Among the victims was an old covered bridge over the Monongahela at Smithfield Street and as a result Roebling got the chance to build his first real bridge, which was also to be the first bridge on the tour he was about to lead.

In 1848 he began four more suspension aqueducts, these on the Delaware and Hudson Canal, linking the hard-coal fields of eastern Pennsylvania with the tidewater of the Hudson. In the meantime he wrote articles on his theories and in 1847 presented a twelve-thousand-word paper before the Pittsburgh Board of Trade (it was read at two sittings) calling for the immediate establishment of “The Great Central Railroad from Philadelphia to St. Louis.” Like a magic wand, he said, the railroads were going to work a transformation over the land. A new nation was about to emerge and this would be the greatest of all railroads, “a future highway of immense traffic.” It was another of his visionary proclamations. As it was, the Pennsylvania would not be completed to Pittsburgh for five more years, which was longer than John Roebling could wait.

It is not known when he first began thinking seriously about leaving Saxonburg, but by 1848, the year after his “Great Central Railroad” speech, with no such railroad in sight, he had concluded that Saxonburg would not become the center of the universe in all likelihood, and that in any event it was no location for a wire business. Having analyzed the problem as thoroughly as he was able, he decided to relocate in the old colonial town of Trenton, New Jersey, which then had a total population of perhaps six thousand people.

So he had departed from Saxonburg, leaving friends, relatives, everything they had struggled for so many years to build, and went east, against the human tide then pouring across Pennsylvania bound for the still-empty country beyond Ohio. His wife and children were to follow on their own. “He was disgusted with Saxonburg,” Washington Roebling wrote, “and never revisited it. He was seized with a horror of everything Dutch and never alluded to it.” In Saxonburg it would be said, “The dumb Dutch stayed behind.”

It was a very changed man who was about to return now over that same route to Pittsburgh, to retrace his footsteps as it were, and review the best of his life’s work. The bridges had made him famous in the time since, world-famous, and the wire business had made him rich. The John A. Roebling who stood on the station platform that April evening in 1869 was worth more than a million dollars, as his will would subsequently reveal. But other things had happened, private things, of which only his immediate family and one or two others knew anything, and these had affected him more than either notoriety or wealth, both of which, one would gather, he always had every expectation of attaining.

In the decade before the war, his most productive time as an engineer, he had grown increasingly distant and impersonal in manner whenever he was home, which was seldom. One April, while writing to tell him how green and lovely everything looked about the house, his young daughter Elvira suddenly realized that never in her memory had he been home during the springtime. The day-to-day running of the mill he had left largely to Charles Swan, a German from Pittsburgh who had worked on the Allegheny aqueduct and who had shown such promise that Roebling brought him to Trenton. Swan had the “happy faculty” of being able to get along with Roebling, “an important matter,” as Washington commented knowingly. Swan also appears to have had no end of patience with his employer’s mania for detail and his essential distrust of anyone’s judgment other than his own. Time and again the two of them would ride down to the Trenton depot together, Roebling on his way to Niagara Falls or Cincinnati or some such place, and telling Swan as they went along how he was to have full authority to decide things. But it had never worked out that way. Swan heard regularly, almost daily, about what he was to do or not to do, and was expected to keep Roebling fully informed by return mail. Everything had to be done to the most exacting standards. If Roebling was dissatisfied with a clerk’s handwriting, Swan would hear about it (“He must take pains to improve and examine attentively well written letters which you receive and which may serve him as patterns…”) and a demonstration of the proper way to address a letter would be included. (“The direction should never be put up high in the upper part of the envelope, but rather below the center, else it looks uncommercial-like.”) Appearances were exceedingly important.

The letters to Swan numbered in the hundreds as time passed and were always strictly business communications. Despite all the years Swan had been with him and all that Swan had come to mean to the family, never once did John Roebling write a line to suggest there could possibly be a bond of friendship between them. If he was meeting interesting people in his travels, there is no mention of it. If he had feelings for the places he went, he said nothing of them. If ever he had a sense of humor, there is not a trace of it.

His preoccupation with work became almost beyond reckoning. He was living in a time characterized by extraordinarily industrious men, when hard work took up most of everyone’s life and was regarded as a matter of course; but even so, his immense reserves of nervous energy, his total devotion to the job at hand, whatever it might be, seemed superhuman to all who came in contact with him. If metaphysics was his only dissipation, as was said in Trenton, work seemed his one and only passion. Once, quite unwittingly, he revealed the extraordinary and rather ludicrous limits such preoccupation could reach. On New Year’s Day, 1855, his wife had been delivered of still another child, but this apparently came as a great surprise to the bridgebuilder when the news reached him at Niagara Falls. “Your letters of the 2nd and 3rd came to hand,” he wrote quite formally to Swan. “You say in your last that Mrs. Roebling and the child are pretty well. This takes me by surprise, not having been informed at all of the delivery of Mrs. R. Or what do you mean? Please answer by return mail.” Swan was to waste no money on a telegram, in other words.

The war and Lincoln’s murder had been terribly hard on Roebling. “I for my part wished the blacks all good fortune in their endeavors to be free,” he had written when he first arrived in America. Slavery was “the greatest cancerous affliction” in an otherwise ideal land. When Lincoln called for volunteers after the attack on Sumter, Roebling had sat gravely silent at his end of the dinner table, then turned abruptly to his son Washington, “Don’t you think you have stretched your legs under my mahogany long enough?” And the young man had enlisted the very next morning. “When a whole nation had been steeped for a whole century in sins of inequity, it may require a political tornado to purify its atmosphere,” he wrote in his private notes. But as the years of the war dragged on he had worried incessantly about his son and the news of Lincoln’s death fell on him like a massive personal tragedy. Bitterly he wrote, “We cannot close our eyes to the appalling fact that the prominent events of history are made up of a long series of individual and national crimes of all sorts, on enmity, cruelty, oppression, massacres, persecution, wars without end.”

But the most shattering blow had been the death of Johanna Roebling in the final year of the war. In the years since Saxonburg they had seemed ill-matched. From her wedding day until the day she died, she served him faithfully and with love, but he had become increasingly preoccupied with his studies, his books, his work. She had had almost no education and understood very little about the things he considered so important. He was away most of the time, traveling always “in the first society.” She went nowhere. Her world was scarcely broader than what she could see from her doorstep. Only in her last years would she feel enough at ease in English to get along in the most ordinary daily conversation.

“A purer-hearted woman or one gifted with warmer affections than my mother you will seldom meet,” Washington Roebling had written in a letter to Emily Warren, who was shortly to become his wife. “It is therefore plain to you that before long my father outstripped Mother in the social race and she was no longer a companion to him in a certain sense of the word. A gifted woman like yourself would no doubt have suited him better from 40 to 50, but upon the whole he could not have had a better or truer helpmate for life. A man of strong passions and impulses he could only get along with a yielding and confiding woman.”

That Johanna Roebling never understood, and therefore never fully appreciated, the range and fertility of her husband’s mind or the extraordinary beauty of what he built seemed self-evident to almost everyone who did have a feeling for such things. But as his children knew full well, the failure of appreciation worked both ways, until it was too late. He was in Cincinnati when she died, but after the funeral the Man of Iron had taken down the family Bible and on a single blank page wrote the following:

Always intensely philosophical, he now began filling hundreds upon hundreds of sheets of lined blue paper with his own private visions and speculations on man, matter, truth, and the nature of the universe. The words slanted across the paper as though in a tremendous hurry, heavy on the downstrokes, leaving no margin at all. Truth, he said, was “harmony between object and subject” and “the final idea, the absolute idea, which includes all other ideas.” Truth was something that should appeal to every man “whose inner Self-consciousness is not yet worked out, whose spiritual manhood and mental integrity are yet asserting supremacy.” He declared, “Existence has a cause.” Life itself he saw in terms of a torrential, twisting stream “rolling along, ever driven by its own gravitating tendency towards the great Ocean of Universality.”

The words sounded most impressive, but what he was getting at was sometimes very hard to tell, and apparently the few people he permitted to read his “Truth of Nature” and other essays found them extremely rough going. The afterhours philosopher seemed such a far cry from the clear, precise, no-nonsense person they knew. It was as though some impenetrable Teutonic mysticism had surfaced from a deep recess in his past. One friend of the family said he had never been invited to read any of John Roebling’s philosophy, but from what he had heard, he prayed he never would be.

Still there were moments of great clarity. “We are born to work and study,” he wrote at one point, which fitted him perfectly. “True life is not only active, but also creative,” he asserted. And another time: “It is a want of my intellectual nature to bring in harmony all that surrounds me. Every new harmony is to me another messenger of peace, another pledge of my redemption.”

Not for years had he taken an active interest in organized religion. Raised a Lutheran, he had joined the Presbyterians after arriving in Trenton, but for some time now the Roebling pew had been used as the visitors’ pew. He made an appearance every so often, accompanied by one or more of his sons, and all eyes would be on them as they came down the aisle. But he held that spiritual communion with the Creator was more likely to be achieved through a vigorous life of the mind. “Human reason,” he wrote, “is the work of God, and He gave it to us so that we can recognize Him.”

He had been swept up by the teachings of Swedenborg, the brilliant Swedish physicist of the previous century, who rejected the dogma of original sin and eternal damnation and wrote of a spiritual evolution for the individual. And like Swedenborg he had embraced spiritualism.

For some twenty years and more, spiritualism had been gaining converts among educated people on both sides of the Atlantic. The Fox Sisters and their much-publicized “Rochester Rappings” had marked the start of it in America. And in the time since, it had become an intensely serious body of beliefs that had a strange, powerful appeal to a surprising number of intensely serious people. For those of a doubting analytical turn of mind, it seemed to offer proof of the existence of a spiritual realm. To practical men of learning, whose faith in traditional doctrine had been shaken by the revelations of science, it seemed at least an alternative. Why Roebling turned to it he never explained. But in the final years of his life he believed devoutly in a “Spirit Land” and in the possibility of mortal communication with its inhabitants. Specifically, he believed in the afterworld described by Andrew Jackson Davis, “The Poughkeepsie Seer,” a pale, nearsighted son of an alcoholic shoemaker, who in Roebling’s estimate was one of the great men of all time.

Davis had become a clairvoyant, healer, and overnight sensation in 1844, at age seventeen, when he took his first “psychic flight through space” while under hypnosis in Poughkeepsie, New York. For the next several years he traveled up and down the East delivering hundreds of lectures, taking his own attendant hypnotist along with him—to “magnetize” him for each performance—as well as a New Haven preacher who took down everything he uttered while under the spell, all of which was turned into books. (One such book ran to thirty-four editions.) His preachments were a strange mixture of occult mystery, science, or what passed for science, progressive social reform, intellectual skepticism, and a vaulting imagination. For Roebling the impact of all this was momentous. It was as though he had been struck by divine revelation. He wrote at length to Horace Greeley, proposing the establishment of an orphanage in which a thousand children would be “perfectly educated, physically and mentally” according to the Davis vision of the good life. An “earthly paradise” was still possible after all.