Telegraph

The Civil War was the first military conflict in which long-range communications played a major role. The telegraph was developed and refined by a series of inventors during the first few decades of the 19th century. The most well known is Samuel F. B. Morse, whose main contribution was his development of Morse code in 1841. Morse code uses a series of long and short tones, called dots and dashes, to communicate messages one letter at a time. Morse also played an important role in arranging the financing to build a national telegraphic infrastructure. to his efforts, and to those of other businessmen, the United States had many thousands of miles of telegraph wire when the Civil War started, 90 percent of it in the North.

Given the Union’s advantage, telegraphy played a critical role in its war effort. Before the technology could be fully utilized, however, a number of logistical issues had to be overcome. The most significant was the establishment of a bureaucracy to operate the North’s telegraphs. Initially, the American Telegraph Company, a private business concern, was placed in charge of the Union’s telegraphy operations. Many leaders on the Union side were uncomfortable with this arrangement, however, and in October 1861 the government stepped in and formed the U. S. Military Telegraph Service, under the command of Col. Anson Stager. Although Stager and a handful of his subordinates were commissioned officers, most of the Telegraphic Service’s 1,300 employees were civilians, because Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton did not want them to be subject to the orders of field officers. The Telegraphic Service worked with the Army Signal Corps to maximize the value of the North’s telegraphic system, and ultimately they enjoyed a great deal of success. More than 1,000 miles of telegraph lines were laid, and more than 6 million messages were transmitted over Union telegraphs during the course of the war.

Security was another concern with which Northern authorities had to contend. Telegraphs can be easily tapped by enemy spies or by enterprising reporters looking for items for the newspaper. One solution to this problem was censorship, and Telegraphic Service employees had the authority to censor anything they deemed problematic. Another, more effective solution was encoding messages, a technique utilized by both the Confederacy and the Union. By the middle of the war, virtually all messages dealing with military matters were encoded in one way or another.

Like the Union, the Confederacy depended on telegraphy during the Civil War. The Confederates were not able to use the technology as much as they would have liked, however, due to lack of materials. It proved difficult to keep all of the South’s telegraph lines in working order, and it was almost an impossibility to provide telegraphic services at the actual sites of battles, a privilege enjoyed throughout the war by Union commanders. Dr. William S. Morris, placed in charge of the South’s telegraph lines, did his best to be innovative despite short supplies and the

Drawing of telegraph machine and operator at Fredericksburg, Virginia, by Alfred R. Waud, 1862 (Library of Congress) fact that the Confederacy never established a bureaucratic counterpart to the Union’s Military Telegraphic Service. Morris did an effective job, keeping information flowing at a high rate until the final months of the war.

In addition to the critical role telegraphy played in military operations, telegraphs were also important to newspapers. People on both the HOMEFRONT and the war front hungered for news of the war, and journalists were happy to comply. Before the Civil War, news stories would take a week to be printed. With the telegraph, the news could be communicated instantly and printed within a day or two. Civilians were well informed about war-related events. By the end of the Civil War, newspapers would have a permanent role in shaping public opinion.

Telegraphic communication would continue to be an important tool in the postwar era. Business leaders increasingly embraced the technology as a means of keeping up to date on the prices of stocks and commodities. By the 1870s more than 80 percent of telegrams dealt with business matters. Meanwhile, military leaders across the world took heed of the lessons taught by the U. S. experience in the Civil War. By 1875 every major European military power had established a telegraphic corps. The telegraph also became the basis for Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, which began to supplant the telegraph in the 1880s and 1890s.

See also JOURNALISM.

Further reading: David Homer Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph Office: Recollections of the United States Military Telegraphic Corps during the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1995); William R. Plum, The Military Telegraph during the Civil War in the United States (New York: Arno Press, 1974); Charles Ross, Trial by Fire: Science, Technology and the Civil War (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane Books, 2000).

—Christopher Bates