Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
[A]lbert Chandler is remembered, when he is remembered at all, as being a prosperous telegraph executive who amassed a sizable fortune and in a fit of largesse donated a music hall to his hometown of Randolph. But to historians Chandler is appreciated for a job he held early in his career. In June 1863, at the height of the Civil War, when he was just 22 years old, Chandler became a telegraph operator for the U.S. War Department.
The position might sound like little more than a clerk’s job, but in reality Chandler was the last link between battlefield commanders and President Lincoln, with whom he spent countless hours. To historians’ great relief, Chandler had the presence of mind to keep a journal. (A collection of Chandler’s journals, minus the particularly valuable 1863 volume, sold seven years ago for $15,000.) Also, later in life, Chandler shared memories of Lincoln in an article for the Sunday Magazine, a now-defunct publication.
The telegraph office was the nerve center of the federal battle against the Confederates since the telegraph was the fastest way to learn the news from the front. If Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton wanted to feel the pulse of the war effort, they had to rely on Chandler and two other telegraph operators — nicknamed the “Sacred Three” — to record and decipher the coded dots and dashes coming across the wires.
The telegraph office was located in the War Department’s former library, a block from the White House. Lincoln visited regularly, particularly while large battles were raging. He couldn’t bear to wait for messages to be delivered to the White House. Lincoln frequently walked to the office alone, but was accompanied by bodyguards later in the war as word of assassination plots emerged.
Lincoln also often sought refuge in the telegraph office during quieter times in the fighting to hide from the steady flow of visitors — his “persecutors,” he called them — who always claimed they only needed a minute of his time. A minute, Lincoln said, only in the unlikely event he could hear their pleas and agree to their demands in that short a time.
One morning shortly after Chandler arrived in Washington, Lincoln walked into the office and was surprised to find Chandler in the same position he had been in when the president had left the night before. “Have you been sitting there all night?” an amused Lincoln asked. As was his habit, the president then sat down to read the dispatches to various offices, both military and civilian, that had come into the office overnight.
The Sacred Three deciphered each message and wrote it out in longhand, using a piece of carbon paper. The originals were dispatched to the appropriate offices and the carbon copies filed in a drawer in the order they arrived.
Lincoln kept abreast of all communications by reading the messages from the top down, in reverse chronological order. When he hit a message he had already read, Lincoln would say, “Well, I guess I have got down to the raisins.” When Chandler asked Lincoln what he meant, the president said it was the punch line of a story he’d heard about a girl who had overeaten one day. The binge had started with some raisins and ended with the girl becoming ill and starting to throw up. Eventually the girl exclaimed that her suffering was almost at an end, as she had “got down to the raisins.”
Lincoln often used stories to explain his thinking. Upon reading telegrams detailing U.S. Gen. Philip Sheridan’s defeat of Confederate forces under Gen. Jubal Early, Lincoln told a story about a man who had used explosives to kill a troublesome dog. After the explosion, Lincoln said, the man found parts of the dog everywhere, “but said the man, ‘as for the dog, as a dog, I was never able to find him.’” Similarly, Lincoln didn’t expect Early’s troops to reconstitute themselves into a fighting force ever again.
But Lincoln didn’t say everything ever attributed to him, as the president himself explained to Chandler. For example, Lincoln had supposedly responded to complaints of Gen. Ulysses Grant’s heavy drinking by asking where Grant, the Union’s most successful general at the time, got his whiskey, “because if I could find out, I would send a barrel of it to each of the other Generals.”
“That would have been very good if I had said it,” Lincoln told Chandler, “but I reckon it was charged to me to give it currency.” The story, Lincoln said, dated back to British King George II, who had been told that one of his generals was crazy. “Mad, is he?” said the king. “Then I wish he’d bite some of my other Generals.”
Lincoln often interrupted Chandler in his work with a message he urgently needed transmitted. These messages were to stop the executions of soldiers charged with sleeping while on sentry duty or similar offenses.
“I think I have known him to come over to our offices himself, alone, at least half a dozen times, in the night, with a message of reprieve for some poor fellow who was under the sentence of death which nothing but the President’s power could stay,” Chandler wrote, “and his solicitude would not allow him to intrust (sic) his message to any orderly or other messenger…”
Chandler, who worked beside Lincoln for nearly two years, noted the president’s habits, like talking to himself while walking to and from the telegraph office. In cold weather, Lincoln favored a large gray shawl instead of an overcoat. When he entered the office, the president would drape the shawl over the tall door leading to Stanton’s office. “(A) man of ordinary height could not place it (there),” Chandler commented. Once in the office, Lincoln would make himself at home, sitting with his feet up on a nearby desk, table or other chair.
The telegraph office offered Lincoln a place to write without interruption, and Chandler’s position afforded him the chance to watch the president draft some of history’s most important documents.
“While writing, as I have often seen him, sitting directly opposite me and at the same table,” Chandler recalled, “he was accustomed to look out of the window between his sentences, scratch his head, usually his right temple, for his sentences in his mind, often moving his lips in actual whisper of the words, and then write them out, rarely erasing, interlining, or correcting. … His style of composition was as peculiar and novel as himself, and always in simple, terse, and clear language. He sometimes read aloud, and in doing so would occasionally purposely mispronounce words and misplace inflection and accent, as if musing as he read.”
Chandler said that Lincoln seemed to be having a conversation with himself, carefully choosing his words and debating their meaning. Today, some of those well-chosen words are literally carved into stone in the memorial honoring him in Washington, D.C.
Corrections: An earlier version of this story misnamed British King George II and misidentified a document among those that Chandler watched Lincoln sign.
