The $60,000 Telegram That Helped Lincoln End Slavery

Ainissa Ramirez in her book The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another talks about how the telegraph helped Lincoln end slavery - here's a fascinating excerpt: 

But, Lincoln thought about the weekly military reports that tallied the thousands of Civil War casualties. “It is easier to admit Nevada,” he told Charles Dana, his Assistant Secretary of War, “than to raise another million soldiers.” The math was simple in Lincoln’s mind, for a new state could cast three electoral votes, votes he needed for reelection. “It is a question of three votes,” said Lincoln, “or new armies.”

Nevada, he reasoned, was his best chance to vote for him and his Republican party. While Nevada wasn’t as populated, it was pro-Union, since many of the residents came from the North, and it was also pro-Republican in the truest sense of the word: It believed that power resided in the federal government, and that the federal government should intervene with economic policies. Nevada had also been a team player. It guarded the Overland Mail route, which allowed the East to communicate with the West via stagecoach, and also Nevada contributed hundreds of millions of dollars from its mines, offsetting the cost of the Civil War.

To help the birth of the state, an Enabling Act was approved by Congress to start the process of putting this largely uninhabited territory on equal footing with more populous states, like New York. The requirements for statehood were clear: The territory should not have slaves. (This was straightforward, since Nevada had at most 360 blacks.) A territory should tolerate various religious sentiments. (This was ignored, for Nevada was fashioned from a disdain for Mormons.) And, the territory should relinquish unappropriated public land. (This was simple too, for the region was vast.) The other stipulation of this Enabling Act was the state constitution had to be ratified and a copy had to be on the president’s desk (with enough time for elections in early November of 1864). That requirement was not going to be easy.

[---]

One common way of getting a long document across the country was by boat. After a courier reached the Pacific Ocean at San Francisco, which took a couple of days, they would board a ship that headed to the Isthmus of Panama. They then crossed it by mule, and then continued on by boat up to Washington, D.C. The other way to get a document across was the stagecoach. In the 1850s, the Overland Stagecoach was created. It took over 20 days to reach the Missouri River from the West; from there a message could be carried by train, taking about a week. Nevada’s Territorial Governor Nye sent several copies of the document both by land and by sea, and waited to hear the good news from Lincoln with a proclamation of statehood.

[---]

The document that Hodge and Ward had to send contained 16,543 words. The message began with, “His Excy Abraham Lincoln. Official — The Constitution of the State of Nevada…,” followed by what would be equivalent to 40 single-spaced pages of text. The work was onerous, but this was Nevada’s opportunity to join the world stage, and also influence it. Opportunity knocked with the pitter-patter of telegrapher fingers.

The tapping went on for 12 hours, with Hodge, who was on the second shift, finishing at 5:30 the following morning, before the sun rose. Except for finger fatigue, there was no trouble sending the message. However, there was trouble on the receiving side. There was no direct line between Carson City and Washington, D.C., so the message had to be sent to three different relay stations on its way East where the dots and dashes were translated into words and then converted back into dots and dashes and then sent to the next leg.

In Salt Lake City, the telegrapher did not expect such a deluge and got tired after a while. One person substituted for him, but didn’t last long, and then another sat in, and then a third, before the first operator returned and finished the work. Once the dots and dashes were received in Salt Lake City, they were copied down and then sent 1,400 miles to Chicago, and then 800 miles to Philadelphia, before finally reaching Washington, D.C., 150 miles away. Thousands of dots and dashes marched across the country inside metal telegraph wires with the mission to help Lincoln abolish slavery in the land.

When these electrical impulses finally reached the last leg of their journey, they were sent to the telegraph office of the War Department. This transmission was of such importance that intelligence from the warfront was put on hold for five hours to make way for Nevada’s telegram. Hodge’s and Ward’s message took two days to get to Lincoln and the cost of sending the message was $4,303.27 ($60,000 today). Nevada’s electric constitution reached Lincoln on the evening of October 28 and he proclaimed it a state on the 30th. On the 31st of October, Nevada officially celebrated its statehood, which gave it the right to participate in the election a week later on November 8.