1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [250]
10. The projected Russian-American telegraph ended up reaching only as far northwest as Hazelton, British Columbia. Work stopped abruptly in 1867 after Sibley’s rival, Cyrus W. Field, opened the first successful transatlantic line. The project, however, was an important factor in the United States’ acquisition of Alaska. Cf. John B. Dwyer, To Wire the World: Perry M. Collins and the North Pacific Telegraph Expedition (Westport, Conn., 2001).
11. Gamble, “Wiring a Continent.” The actual work on the western portion of the line was undertaken by a new firm, the Overland Telegraph Company, in which various California lines participated but with Sibley as the controlling investor. As soon as construction was completed, the short-lived company—along with all the previously autonomous California ones—was absorbed into Western Union. Alvin F. Harlow, Old Wires and New Waves: The History of the Telegraph, Telephone, and Wireless (New York, 1936), pp. 311–12.
According to one account, President Lincoln met with Sibley early in 1861 and told him that the planned Pacific line was a “wild scheme” and that it would be “next to impossible to get your poles and materials distributed on the plains, and as fast as you build your line the Indians will cut it down.” George A. Root and Russell K. Hickman, “The Platte Route, Part IV, Concluded: The Pony Express and Pacific Telegraph,” Kansas Historical Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 1 (Feb. 1946), p. 66.
12. Klise, “The First Transcontinental Telegraph,” p. 52.
13. Geoffrey C. Ward, The Civil War (New York, 1990), p. 17.
14. The 1860 census has been largely ignored by historians as a source of Southern anxiety during the secession crisis. For detailed early census results, see, e.g., New York Herald, Sept. 13, 1860.
15. Philadelphia Inquirer, Apr. 2, 1861 and Feb. 9, 1861; New York Herald, Sept. 6, 1860.
16. See David Haward Bain, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (New York, 1999), esp. pp. 48–51, for Davis’s role; Adam Arenson, The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), p. 69.
17. Jessie Benton Frémont, “A Home Lost, and Found,” The Home-Maker, February 1892; JBF to Elizabeth Blair Lee, June 14, 1860, in Pamela Herr and Mary Lee Spence, eds., The Letters of Jessie Benton Frémont (Urbana, Ill., 1993), pp. 229–30.
18. Selections of Editorial Articles from the St. Louis Enquirer (St. Louis, 1844), p. 5, quoted in Henry Nash Smith, “Walt Whitman and Manifest Destiny,” Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 4 (Aug. 1947), pp. 378–79 n. Benton’s vision, of course, did not account for the Spanish colonists, who had long since reached the Pacific—let alone for the Native American children of Adam who had been settled along its shores for millennia.
19. Elbert B. Smith, Magnificent Missourian: The Life of Thomas Hart Benton (Philadelphia, 1958), pp. 47–48, 63–64, 68–69; Tom Chaffin, Pathfinder: John C. Frémont and the Course of American Empire (New York, 2002), pp. 80–81.
20. It later turned out that the place where Frémont planted his famous flag—the tallest peak in the Wind River Range—was not, in fact, the highest point of the Rockies, though he believed it to be at the time.
21. Sally Denton, Passion and Principle: John and Jessie Frémont, the Couple Whose Power, Politics, and Love Shaped Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 2007), p. xi; Pamela Herr, Jessie Benton Frémont: A Biography (New York, 1987), pp. 82–83, 110–11; Jessie Benton Frémont, Souvenirs of My Time (Boston, 1887), p. 186. The question of how large a hand Jessie Frémont had in her husband’s books has been a point of contention almost since they were published. Many people believed then that she was the sole author. The most careful recent historians conclude that the reports