TELEGRAPHING FOR THE ARMIES

ANDREW CARNEGIE

The man who established the Federal military telegraph system amid the first horrors of war was to become one of the world's foremost advocates of peace. As the right hand man of Thomas A. Scott, Assistant Secretary of War, he came to Washington in '61, and was immediately put in charge of the field work of reestablishing communication between the Capital and the North, cut off by the Maryland mobs. A telegraph operator himself, he inaugurated the system of cipher despatches for the War Department and secured the trusted operators with whom the service was begun. A young man of twenty-four at the time, he was one of the last to leave the battlefield of Bull Run, and his duties of general superintendence over the network of rail-roads and telegraph lines made him a witness of war's cruelties on other fields until he with his chief left the government service June 1, 1862.