© Mark Ollig
Abraham Lincoln was the first US president who used a communication technology similar to today’s email.
He transmitted and received secretly coded telegraph messages with his generals out on the field during the Civil War.
Telegraph Mail or T-Mail is the term coined by one book author to describe President Lincoln’s use of the telegraph during the Civil War.
In 1857, Abraham Lincoln first encountered the telegraph while visiting the Tazewell House in Pekin, IL.
Lincoln intently watched a young telegraph operator, Charles Tinker, send and receive telegraph messages using the Morse keying device.
Becoming very curious, Lincoln asked Tinker to explain how the telegraph worked. Lincoln learned messages are transmitted using Morse code by pressing interrupted dots and dashes on a telegraph transmission key. A battery powers the key and connects to a telegraph wire attached to poles running for miles to a distant telegraph station operator who receives and decodes the message.
Three years later, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States.
In 1861, the US military’s telegraph office was called “the wire room.”
During the Civil War, President Lincoln spent a significant amount of time in the wire room office overseeing his messages transmitted by telegraph and reading the received telegram messages.
From the wire room, Lincoln telegraphed encouragement to his generals and commanders in the field.
“Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War,” is a book written by former Federal Communications Commissioner Chairman Tom Wheeler.
His book reveals many of the “lightning messages,” or telegrams, sent by President Lincoln during the Civil War.
Wheeler explains how Lincoln, wanting to send quick messages or “rapid responses” to his generals out in the field, would spend hours during the day and most nights in the war department’s telegraph office.
Lincoln used the telegraph to supplement his preferred forms of communication; face-to-face meetings and handwritten letters.
The telegraph gave North’s Union Army an advantage because they communicated over telegraph wires much faster than anything else available at the time.
President Lincoln’s messages, converted into electrically transmitted dots and dashes, sped over the telegraph wires to their destinations much quicker than the fastest horse rider could deliver official papers.
Lincoln communicated with the generals on the battlefield in nearly real-time via “mobile telegraph stations.”
Telegraphy was the modern communications technology of the period; Lincoln embraced and capitalized upon it.
His use of the telegraph directly from the White House helped push its development and growth westward across the country.
President Abraham Lincoln was not unfamiliar with technology, as he is the only US president to hold a patent.
Abraham Lincoln received a US patent to lift boats over shallow waters using an expandable floating chamber device under air pressure.
Lincoln obtained US Patent No. 6,469 for “Buoying Vessels Over Shoals,” May 22, 1849. You can see this patent at https://bit.ly/3bBVP9b.
It was in 1838, when Samuel F.B. Morse successfully demonstrated a battery-operated electromagnet telegraph device.
Funds for constructing a telegraph pole line between Washington, DC and Baltimore, MD were granted shortly after Morse’s demonstration.
May 24, 1844, Morse, before members of Congress, keyed this telegraph message, “What hath God wrought?” from the US Capitol in Washington. The statement, sent by wire, was received nearly instantaneously by the telegraph operator located almost 40 miles away at the B&O Railroad station in Baltimore.
An 1853 map detailing the geographic routes of telegraph lines and station depot routes along the eastern United States is viewable on The Library of Congress’s website: https://bit.ly/2jl1sgI.
By October 1861, the US west and east coast telegraph networks became connected.
Although Abraham Lincoln never visited Minnesota, he was the first United States president Minnesotans elected to office.
Lincoln easily won the state of Minnesota’s four electoral votes during the United States presidential elections of 1860 and 1864.
In 1860, Minnesota transmitted its first interstate telegraph message from the state capitol in St. Paul to New York, NY.
The message addressed to the former New York Governor, and current New York US Senator William H. Seward said in part, “we are enabled to send this, the first message ever transmitted by lightning from St. Paul to the East.”
Seward sent the following reply: “You have grappled New York – now lay hold on San Francisco.”
An Aug. 14, 1864, telegraph message President Lincoln sent to Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant is viewable here: https://bit.ly/2jozd0B.
In 1865, the same military telegraph office where President Abraham Lincoln had spent so many hours reported the news of his assassination.
Personal, political, and Civil War telegraph messages sent and received by President Abraham Lincoln are stored and viewable from the National Archives website: https://bit.ly/2rcnSVo.
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| Aug. 14, 1864, telegraph message President Lincoln sent to Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant |
Office U.S. Military Telegraph
WAR DEPARTMENT
Washington, D.C.
August 14 1864.
Lieut. Genl. Grant
City-Point, Va.
The Secretary of War and I concur that you better confer with Gen. Lee and stipulate for a mutual discontinuance of house-burning--- and other destruction of private property, the time and manner of conference, and particulars of stipulations we leave, on our part, to your convenience and judgement.
A. Lincoln