October 24, 2006
The Transcontinental Telegraph Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:15 PM EST A few days ago, I noted the anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase and suggested that one of the unintended consequences of Jefferson’s attempt to secure an “elusive republic” (as the historian Drew McCoy once put it) of agrarians and small mechanics was the growth of a massive transportation system. More land created more population dispersal, which in turn required better means of linking people together, which in turn spurred economic modernization that doomed Jefferson’s entire project.
Today marks another milestone in this process. On this date 145 years ago, the first transcontinental telegraph cable was completed, rendering obsolete the famed Pony Express, an overland delivery service that had only been in existence for about a year and a half, and whose legend would soon outstrip its brief accomplishment. Together with America’s first transcontinental railroad, which was completed in 1869, the transcontinental telegraph allowed for the quick flow of information from one coast to the other, setting the stage for the massive wartime and postwar expansion that transformed the country. The territories west of the Mississippi, which Walt Whitman had once called “vast, trackless spaces,” quickly became integrated into the nation’s burgeoning economy. Their timber, mineral, and agricultural resources fueled the east’s massive industrial fires.
“In April 1861,” James Garfield later remarked, “there began in this country an industrial revolution . . . as far-reaching in its consequences as the political and military revolution through which we have passed.” Garfield wasn’t referring to the transcontinental telegraph, specifically. But he might as well have. After 1861 the world in which he had been born passed quickly into memory.
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