Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War

By Tom Wheeler
Illustrated, charts, bibliography, index, 186 pp., 2006 HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd St., New York, NY 10022-5299, $24.95 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Walt Albro
Walt Albro is a magazine writer and editor who lives in Rockville, Md.

Review:
In a previous book author Tom Wheeler tried to make the Civil War accessible to business people by writing about the war's management lessons. He seems qualified to do so since he has served as the chief executive officer of several high-tech companies.

In this new volume, he attempts to make the war appealing to today's young technophiles by relating the history of a gadget - the telegraph - and examining how the North used this primitive version of e-mail to help organize victory. His main theme is that Abraham Lincoln learned how to adopt the new telegraphic technology and exploit it.

Wheeler starts out by exploring the fascinating story of the invention and early development of the telegraph. We learn that Samuel Morse, the reputed inventor, actually stole crucial elements of the technology from someone else without giving credit.

The invention initially seemed worthless. In the early part of the 19th century, there was no demand to send expensive "instant" messages. Morse resorted to bribing a congressman to secure federal funding for a demonstration line between Washington and Baltimore. Even after the famous first message, "What hath God wrought?" was sent over the wire in 1844, the technology proved to be a costly white elephant. During the first year of operation, the Washington-Baltimore line lost money, functioning at only 15 percent of capacity.

The situation turned around only as a result of happenstance. In the1840s a superintendent of the New York & Erie Railroad discovered that the telegraph was a convenient way to assist in managing rail traffic. This proved to be the "killer application" that the telegraph needed to survive.

The railroads and telegraph quickly developed a symbiotic relationship that bolstered the market demand for both services. Railroads gave the right-of-way along the rail lines to telegraph lines. In return, the telegraph gave "priority" to railroad messages. The demand for both services exploded after 1848.

By the time Lincoln was inaugurated in 1861, telegraph companies had strung 50,000 miles of wire throughout the country, mostly in the North and Midwest. The telegraph turned out to be one of the North's technological advantages. The Union's vast telegraphic network facilitated the rapid communication necessary for a new type of warfare in which troops, for the first time, were rushed to the battlefield by railroad. During the conflict, the North added 15,000 miles of telegraph wires to its infrastructure; the South, a mere 500 miles.

Wheeler suggests that Lincoln was among the first civilian or military leaders to recognize the potential of the telegram to rapidly and effectively manage troop movements and battles. The War Department was so technologically backward that, at the war's beginning, it was not even connected to a telegraph line. It had to have messages hand-delivered to a nearby commercial telegraph offices.

In time, Lincoln learned that by reading all the telegraphs that the War Department received, he could gather valuable intelligence concerning what was happening in the field. He spent hours almost every day wading through stacks of telegrams. At one point, he even had a cot set up in the War Department telegraphic room so that he could sleep there when necessary.

Wheeler does a competent job of summarizing the key events of the Civil War as seen through the lens of the telegraph's history. His writing style is reader friendly. However, don't expect any dramatic new insights. The central thesis seems a bit obvious, and it is neither new nor significant enough to merit the book-length treatment that it receives. It might have packed more punch as a shorter, magazine-length article.