by | 18 March 2025 · 6:25 am

Chinese Gold Rush Destinations

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 14-15:

GOLD MINING IS famously risky, with high stakes, often compared to gambling. Driven by the desire for wealth, gold seekers took great risks that were explainable only by the potential for reward. Gold fever drove daring, hard work, technological invention, and political experimentation, as well as violence against humans and against the environment. The cold calculus of business, banking, and geopolitical interests harnessed gold fever for profit and advantage. For companies and nation-states, the desire for gold led to enormous expenditures of capital for digging and operating deeper and deeper mines. But the deeper the ore, the scarcer it was and the lower its grade, such that more and more rock had to be excavated for smaller and smaller yields of the precious metal. In the Witwatersrand gold mines in South Africa, for example, in 1905 it took on average 2.3 tons of ore to yield one ounce of gold worth $20.67. Hence the relentless drive for cheap labor in order to make gold mining payable.

Thus, at the turn of the twentieth century, South Africa recruited sixty thousand indentured Chinese mine laborers to work in highly capitalized and industrialized, deep underground mines. Their indenture marked an important difference in experience from that of the independent prospectors who went to North America and Australasia. But there were also broad similarities in the patterns of Chinese workers’ culture and resistance. This book tracks the migration of Chinese gold seekers to California, to the Australian colony of Victoria, and to the deep mines of the Witwatersrand. It considers how their experience and reception contributed to the evolution of their identity as “Chinese,” to China’s identity as a nation, and to their identification in the West as a global racial danger.

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by | 17 March 2025 · 6:03 am

Chinese Empire Demand for Silver

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 9-10:

AT THE TIME OF the gold rushes, China was already in the grip of European colonialism. China was never directly colonized by a Western power; in fact, by the mid-eighteenth century the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) had built an empire of its own, having expanded China’s boundaries to the west, most notably by annexing Tibet and Xinjiang. But in the mid-nineteenth century China was battered by European aggressions: the opium trade, gunboat diplomacy, and the forced opening to Western trade and missionaries. China’s humiliation stood in stark contrast to the position it had once held, even relatively recently.

For two hundred years, from 1550 to 1750, China had been arguably the most important economic actor in the world. It was not only the single largest domestic economy; it was also at the center of global trade, both with its Sino-centric tributary and trading networks in East and Southeast Asia and as the premier destination market for silver produced in Spanish America and Japan. Europeans shipped silver to China not as “money” but as commodity arbitrage: the Ming Dynasty’s (1368–1644) demand for silver for fiscal and commercial purposes fetched the highest silver prices in the world, double its price in Europe. China was the world’s great “silver sink” that not only drew but also stimulated its production in the New World.

Through the seventeenth century, Europeans traded silver for luxuries, including gold. For example, the British East India Company’s first direct transaction with China in 1637 exchanged 60,000 Spanish dollars for sugar, silk, spices, porcelain, and “loose gould.” Chinese traders also made handsome profits by buying low and selling dear, earning gross profits of 100 to 150 percent on silk and silk textiles sold to Europeans. Economic historians Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giràldez describe these late sixteenth-century dynamics of global trade as “multiple arbitrage.”

Europeans began trading silver for tea in large quantities in the early eighteenth century. Like silk, tea was a luxury item in Europe, but it had greater potential for mass consumption. The creation of a mass market for tea in Europe coincided with the rise in consumption of sugar from the plantation-slave colonies of the Caribbean in the late seventeenth century. Indeed, tea and sugar, along with tobacco, undergirded a global trade in stimulants—“food drugs”—based on a symbiosis of colonialism and slavery, on the one hand, and new mass-consumption economies in European metropolitan societies, especially Britain, on the other.

By 1800 silver’s arbitrage advantage in China had ended. The British, now hooked on tea, looked for a different means of exchange. The East India Company had already drained India of much of its silver to sell in China; now it turned to India for the mass production of opium for export to China.

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by | 16 March 2025 · 2:52 pm

Chinese Gold Rush Emigration

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 2-4:

THE CHINESE WHO WENT to the gold rushes were part of an expanding population of Chinese living abroad in the nineteenth century. Since at least the thirteenth century of the Common Era, people from China’s southeastern coastal provinces had traded in Southeast Asia, from Indonesia and the Philippines to Vietnam and the Malay Peninsula to Thailand. But in the nineteenth century they traveled much farther from home, spurred by both need and opportunity. A quarter-million Chinese went as indentured laborers to European plantation colonies in the Caribbean as part of the notorious coolie trade that exploited Chinese and Indian workers after the abolition of slavery.

An even greater number of Chinese, more than 300,000, went as voluntary emigrants to the United States and to British settler colonies in the nineteenth century, attracted first by the gold rushes. The Chinese gold seekers were not, of course, the first to cross the great ocean—that distinction is held by the Polynesian peoples whose seaborne migrations began over one thousand years BCE. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Spanish ran a yearly galleon trade between Acapulco and Manila, the long middle leg of a journey that traded New World silver to China for silks, porcelain, and other luxuries for Europe. By the early nineteenth century, a budding U.S.-China trade of northwestern American furs and pelts and Hawaiian sandalwood drew new routes across the ocean.

But the gold rushes were of another order. They exploded the early modern Pacific maritime world. Vibrant new routes and networks of trade and migration were established, nourished by gold first in California, then in Australia. Three new and lasting nodes of the transpacific rose to prominence: Hong Kong, San Francisco, and Sydney.

The goldfields were international contact zones on the frontiers of Anglo-American settler societies. The rushes attracted gold seekers from around the world—from the eastern and southern United States; from the British Isles and Continental Europe; from Mexico and Chile and Hawaii; from Australia and China. The gold seekers’ arrival to the frontiers of white settlement made them participants, to one degree or other, in the elimination of indigenous peoples and in the formation of new communities and nations. How would these new polities reckon with the diverse character of the goldfield populations? Who would be included and who would be excluded? And who would decide, and by what means?

The gold rushes occasioned the first mass contact between Chinese and Euro-Americans. Unlike other encounters in Asian port cities and on Caribbean plantations, they met on the goldfields both in large numbers and on relatively equal terms, that is, as voluntary emigrants and independent prospectors. Race relations were not always conflictual, but the perception of competition gave rise to a racial politics expressed as the “Chinese Question.”

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by | 15 March 2025 · 8:17 am

Inspecting Ust Kara Mines, 1885

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 166-169:

Greek mining engineers advised Peter the Great in the late seventeenth century that mineral wealth lay underground in the regions east of Lake Baikal. Hard labor convicts were soon digging down to the silver veins in the vicinity of Nerchinsk. Gold mining began later near the Kara River, a name derived from a Tatar word meaning “black.” The Nerchinsk Mining Region, as it became known, eventually stretched over thousands of square miles from the eastern shore of Lake Baikal to the Chinese border.

In late October 1885 Kennan and Frost rode their horses through the valley of the Kara River to the prison complex at Ust Kara, or Kara mouth, the first of the prisons, convict settlements, and open placer gold mines stretching twenty miles up the valley. In addition to Ust Kara, there were the Lower Prison, the Political Prison, the Lower Diggings, Middle Kara and Upper Kara convict settlements, and the Upper Prison. Their total exile population was around twenty-five hundred, of whom two-thirds were hard-labor convicts and the rest women and children who had accompanied their husbands and fathers to the mines. Many of the political convicts in Eastern Siberia were held at Kara.

…

Kennan and Frost went directly to the prison commandant’s residence where they were greeted by Maj. Potuloff, who was in charge of Kara’s common-law convict prisons. Potuloff, a tall, cordial man in his fifties with a bushy beard and soldierly bearing, explained that he had been alerted by telegram to expect Kennan and Frost, but he never thought that the two would make it through from Stretinsk at this time of the year. He laughed when Kennan inquired where they could find a place to stay for the night. Other than the accommodations for criminals, he explained, the only place to stay was in his home, which they were welcome to do. Kennan and Frost had no alternative than to accept his offer “and in minutes [we] were comfortably quartered in a large, well-furnished house, where our eyes were gladdened by the sight of such unfamiliar luxuries as long mirrors, big soft rugs, easy-chairs, and a piano.”

They found themselves effectively under twenty-four-hour surveillance in Maj. Potuloff’s home. He never left them alone, in fact, he seemed to have relinquished his official duties during Kennan and Frost’s stay in order to keep an eye on them. Once, when Kennan moved in the direction of his overcoat, Maj. Potuloff asked, “Where are you going?”

“Out for exercise.”

“Wait a minute and I will go with you.” Kennan’s bedroom, which was on the ground floor across the front hall from the sitting room, had no door but only a thin curtain. The sentries posted night and day outside the house could even look in his bedroom through its curtainless windows.

Under Maj. Potuloff’s watchful eye, Kennan inspected prisons that were the now-familiar “perfect hell[s] of misery,” from the impossible overcrowding to the filth and vermin to the lack of any bedding for the inmates. “Civilized human beings put straw even into the kennels of their dogs.” But no matter how many Siberian prisons Kennan inspected, he always marveled at the unendurable smell. His descriptions of prison odors steadily grew more vivid and literary the farther east he went. Of the air in the Ust Kara prison, which Maj. Potuloff readily acknowledged was repulsive, Kennan later wrote, “I can ask you to imagine cellar air, every atom of which has been half a dozen times through human lungs and is heavy with carbonic acid; to imagine that air still further vitiated by foul, pungent, slightly ammoniacal exhalations from long unwashed human bodies; to imagine that it has a suggestion of damp, decaying wood and more than a suggestion of human excrement—and still you will have no adequate idea of it.”

During Kennan’s prison inspections, convicts complained to Maj. Potuloff and even approached Kennan on the assumption that “I must be an inspector sent to Kara to investigate the prison management.” Several convicts pleaded with Maj. Potuloff that they had been imprisoned for months but still did not know what they were charged with. Another insisted that he had already finished his sentence. One man explained that he had gotten drunk on the exile march and exchanged names with another convict and ended up at Kara serving a hard labor sentence when, had he kept his name, he only would have been sent to a settlement as a forced colonist.

Bartering names for food, drink, or clothing was a common practice among the exiled convicts and not easily detected since the convoy and prison guards could hardly familiarize themselves with the faces of hundreds of convicts. The exchange, which the artels ruthlessly enforced, invariably improved one barterer’s position to the distinct disadvantage of some hapless exile who had spent his money or gambled away his clothing, and thereby gotten himself, as Kennan explained, “into such a condition that for five or ten rubles and a bottle of vodka he will sell his very soul.” Maj. Potuloff ignored the convicts and their complaints.

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by | 14 March 2025 · 4:46 am

Early Siberian Exile System

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 121-124:

The Siberian exile system was not planned to be loathsome and vile. For much of its existence, little planning went into it. The system was the product of imperial ambitions, bureaucratic incompetence, corruption, and inadequate funding; Siberia’s vast size and harsh terrain and climate; and the extraordinary Russian capacity to inflict and endure suffering. Centuries of grotesque penal evolution had spawned disease-ridden prisons, exile parties driven like cattle, virtual enslavement, and lunacies like the punishment of the Bell of Uglich [by Boris Godunov]. Other countries have exiled their criminals, but none on the scale of the Russian exile system. Between the 1780s and 1860s, the British transported about one hundred and sixty thousand convicts to Australia. In the last half of the nineteenth century, the French overseas penal population was between five and six thousand. Russia stands out because between 1801 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, the tsarist regime exiled more than a million of its subjects to far-flung destinations within its own vast borders, creating what has been called “an enormous prison without a roof.”

As Siberia’s vast natural resources became apparent, the regime began employing the penal code as a tool for supplying Siberia with a labor force because too few Russians would go voluntarily. The offenses punishable by Siberian exile grew to include not just common-law crimes but political offenses, religious dissent, army desertion, and vagrancy. In 1753, the death penalty was formally abolished, and instead of being hanged, capital offenders underwent a public mutilation followed by “eternal penal labour” in Siberia. The death penalty would reclaim a place in the Russian judicial system in the nineteenth century, most notably in cases involving assassination plots against tsars.

…

For centuries convicts began marching to Siberia from Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other cities in European Russia, often starting their march on the Vladimirka road. At the first post station, which was called Gorenki, from the word gore, meaning grief, family members who were not accompanying a convict to Siberia could get a last glimpse of their loved one. In his iconic Vladimirka, the Russian artist Isaac Levitan painted the view ahead of a marching exile: a dirt road stretching to the horizon under a vast sky. By the time of Kennan’s investigation, trains and then barges transported convicts into Siberia but many of them still had to march more than halfway across a continent to their final destinations in parties of three hundred or more guarded by Russian soldiers on foot and by mounted Cossacks.

The sight of an exile party stunned travelers in Siberia. In January 1828, a young woman making her way through Siberia in subzero temperatures to join her exiled fiancé heard a strange noise from her carriage. “It was the noise of the fetters … an entire party of people was in chains—some were even chained to a metal pole. These unfortunates were a terrible sight. To protect their faces from the cold they had covered them with some dirty rags into which they had cut holes for their eyes.” On an overcast morning in 1856, an English traveler observed, beneath a double row of birch trees on the Great Siberian Post Road, “a long line of drab-clad figures marching in the same direction as ourselves. We instinctively know what it is but can still hardly believe that a story so sad, so strange, so distant, is being realised before our eyes.” Kennan never carried out his plan to march with an exile party, possibly because he was denied permission but equally likely because he had observed the experience of the exile parties to be so dreadful.

No one seemed to question or care whether, after a forced march of thousands of miles, cold-blooded killers and an assortment of thieves, incorrigibles, misfits, malcontents, and regime enemies could become productive workers in the Siberian mines and factories. In fact many of the convicts who reached Eastern Siberia, according to one report from local authorities, “arrived exhausted, prematurely enfeebled, having contracted incurable diseases, having forgotten their trades, and having grown quite unaccustomed to labour.” Local Siberian officials regularly commandeered the healthiest convicts from the marching parties to meet their own needs, which further aggravated the shortage of able workers.

So many exiled convicts died on Siberian roads that the peasants, who had to dispose of the bodies, protested to the government in St. Petersburg, which only sent back orders to the local authorities to pay for the burials. Some convicts took years to reach their destinations but their time on the journey did not count as part of their sentence. One convict was on the road for eight years, but his eight-year sentence did not start until he finally entered a prison factory in Irkutsk. The authorities did not want the convicts to run out their sentences by feigning illness or otherwise finding ways to delay their arrivals at the prisons, factories, and mines.

Notwithstanding the human wastage, enough productive convicts reached their destinations to justify the exile system to the St. Petersburg and Siberian bureaucracies. As Kennan wrote, “One is surprised not that so many die but that so many get through alive.” Factories, salt works, distilleries, farms, and mines in Siberia continued to demand more workers and the regime continued to send them by, for example, allowing landowners and monasteries to turn over their troublesome serfs to the state for exile. Siberia became the jewel in the Romanov crown and played a role in the rise of the Russian Empire comparable to that of India in the ascension of the British Empire.

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by | 13 March 2025 · 5:44 am

Siberian Postal System, 1880s

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle p. 121:

The Siberian postal system was well organized. Carriages plied the Siberian roads between cities, villages, and towns carrying leather pouches filled with mail. Each day Irkutsk, the largest city in Siberia, received mail from Moscow, which was twenty-six hundred miles away, and delivered it back three times a week. The system allowed Kennan’s and Frost’s wives and friends to send them letters care of the post offices in larger Siberian cities, based on their expected itinerary, and for them to send letters back to the United States. Kennan mailed a letter to Century publisher Roswell Smith reporting that their success in gaining access to the Tiumen prison was “beyond my expectations” and that Frost had made numerous sketches and taken many photographs despite the balky equipment. Kennan had seen the prison in its “every-day aspect” and was confident that “nothing was fixed for my inspection” because “such a prison as that cannot be temporarily fixed.”

Overall, it was a positive report but for a note of self-doubt. Kennan described the forwarding prison as “the worst” he had ever encountered and, if it turned out to be representative, “I shall have to take back some things that I have said and written about the exile system.”

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by | 12 March 2025 · 5:24 am

U.S.–Russia Tensions, 1880s

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 95-96:

Alexander’s assassination at first drew the United States and Russia even closer because of the still traumatic American memory of Lincoln’s assassination. The US Senate passed a resolution of sympathy for Russia emphasizing the “relations of genuine friendship that have always existed between the people and governments of Russia and of the United States.” Former president Grant recalled fond memories of his 1878 meeting with the late tsar. The New York Times ran an editorial attacking the “Nihilism” of the assassins as the “chief foe of the liberty of the Russian people.” The Russian government reciprocated the sympathy when Charles Guiteau mortally wounded President Garfield a few months after Alexander’s assassination.

But the policies of the new tsar, Alexander III, managed to blunt the American sympathy for Russia generated by his father’s assassination. A foreign diplomat anonymously reported that the tsar and his advisers were preparing to “adopt rigorous repressive measures, having no example in Russian history.” Among the measures was a decree allowing the regime, without a trial, to jail or exile to Siberia anyone whose presence in Russia was deemed “prejudicial to the public order” or “incompatible with public tranquility.” A former head of the Department of the Police remarked that the decree caused the fate of the “entire population of Russia to become dependent on the personal opinions of the functionaries of the political police.”

Simultaneously with political repression, Alexander III tolerated, if not encouraged, a wave of brutal pogroms against Jews in European Russia. In some places Russian soldiers, mobilized to restore order, joined the mob in ransacking Jewish homes and businesses, and raping Jewish women. As historian Edward Crankshaw observed, “it was under Alexander III, and thanks to Alexander III, that anti-Semitism in Russia became institutionalized, respectable—and violent.” Influential Americans began to debate the true nature of the Russian regime. Harper’s Weekly, which previously had run issue after issue with festive illustrations of Russian life, editorialized that there is “no question as to the existence of the most cruel, arbitrary and oppressive despotism in Russia.”

Just as he had defended Russia’s role in the Great Game in Central Asia several years earlier, Kennan again came to Russia’s defense. He publicly addressed only the emerging criticism of the Siberian exile system, and not the pogroms, but privately he expressed the belief that the Russian government had been “grossly misrepresented” in the reports of the mistreatment of Jews even though he did not then have “the facts” to prove it. In a widely publicized lecture in 1882 at the American Geographical Society, Kennan argued that while the exile system was hardly without flaws, “whatever exile may have been in the past, it is not now, in any just sense of the words, a cruel or unusual punishment,” but on the contrary should be regarded as a “more humane punishment than that inflicted upon criminals generally in other European states.”

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by | 11 March 2025 · 6:40 am

Siberian Transit Before Rail

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 54-57:

The first leg, to Yakutsk, took Kennan and his companions through a wilderness of mountains and evergreen forests inhabited by the Tungus, a nomadic tribe. The Russian government paid the Tungus in tea and tobacco to set up camps at intervals between Okhotsk and Yakutsk to supply government mail carriers, and the occasional private traveler, with food and transportation. At their first stop at a camp, where wolfish-looking dogs gnawed on the severed heads of reindeer, the Tungus stocked Kennan’s sleighs with reindeer meat, replaced their dogs with reindeer, and took over as drivers. On November 16, after twenty-three days of nonstop travel, Kennan sighted columns of smoke rising from the chimneys of Yakutsk and slept that night in a Russian merchant’s house. “The sensation of lying without furs and between sheets in a civilized bed was so novel and extraordinary that I lay awake for an hour, trying experiments with that wonderful mattress.”

The Russian government had set up a remarkably well-organized transportation system that operated year-round in Siberia. Ten thousand horses, several thousand drivers, and seven thousand sleighs and horse-drawn carriages were stationed at more than three hundred and fifty post stations. Typically, post stations were the homes of local villagers who earned money by keeping and feeding the horses and furnishing lodging and food to both drivers and travelers. Unlike the American stagecoach network, the sleighs and carriages did not depart and arrive at fixed times. Depending on the season, the traveler simply bought or hired a sleigh or carriage, changed fatigued horses and drivers at the post stations, and went as slowly or rapidly as the condition of the roads and the traveler’s physical endurance allowed. Kennan planned to travel day and night.

In Yakutsk, Kennan purchased two pavoskas, partly enclosed traveling sleighs resembling a “burlap-covered baby carriage on runners.” He and Price put their luggage at the bottom of their sleigh’s passenger compartment, which had no seats, spread on top of the luggage a seven-foot-long, two-person, wolfskin sleeping bag and soft feather pillows, and stowed their food under the driver’s seat. After a farewell toast of vodka and champagne with their merchant host, Kennan, Price, and the two Russians, dressed head to foot in thick furs, climbed into their sleighs. The drivers snapped their whips, and, in clouds of snow kicked up by the three-horse teams each pulling a sleigh, they raced out of Yakutsk to the merry jingle of the large bells hung from the wooden arches suspended over the middle horses in each team. The primary purpose of a sleigh’s bell was not musical but to warn other sleighs at night or in a snowstorm of its oncoming presence. A short distance past Yakutsk, the two sleighs descended a gentle slope and turned onto the frozen Lena River, which would be their road for nearly a thousand miles.

The Lena, one of the world’s longest rivers, flows twenty-seven hundred miles north to the Arctic Ocean from its mountain pond source near Lake Baikal. Traveling upriver, the party stopped every two or three hours at post stations on the riverbanks to change horses. “Boys! Out the horses! Lively!” the drivers shouted as the sleighs pulled up to the post stations. Kennan crawled out of his warm fur bag and went into the station. He displayed a padarozhnaya, a travel pass he had purchased in Yakutsk that directed post station masters to provide his party with fresh horses and drivers and, if needed, food and lodging. The nights were clear and cold, sometimes minus forty or minus fifty degrees Fahrenheit, and the snow-covered ice was smooth and fast. Kennan lay in his fur bag listening to the jingling bell and watching the moonlit silhouette of the river’s forested shoreline as it flew by.

…

On December 13, 1867, leaving their two Russian companions behind in Irkutsk, Kennan and Price set out in a single sleigh on the Great Siberian Post Road, a central Siberian road extending three thousand miles from the Ural Mountains to the Amur River. Their sleigh overtook and passed slow-moving westbound caravans of two hundred sleighs loaded with tea from China and convoys of Cossacks transporting gold from Siberia. From the opposite direction came marching exile parties of convicts on their way east to hard labor prisons and mines. Their circumstances would become of intense interest to Kennan when he returned to Siberia eighteen years later, but now he paid them not much more attention than he did the white Yakut ponies in the fields pawing at the snow to uncover grass. They crossed the Ural Mountains, and on January 7, 1868, Kennan reached Nizhny Novgorod, which was then the eastern end of the Russian rail network. Kennan and Price sold their sleigh and boarded a train. Two days later, having traveled nearly six thousand miles since leaving the Sea of Okhotsk and changed horses, reindeer, and dogs two hundred and sixty times, they stepped off the train in St. Petersburg to behold a dazzling, snow-dusted, golden-trimmed fairy tale of a city, part architectural confection, part Potemkin village.

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by | 10 March 2025 · 3:12 am

First Transatlantic Telegraph Cable

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 52-54:

The failure in 1865 to lay the Atlantic cable hardly deterred the directors of the Atlantic Telegraph Company. With the bitter learning experience of the earlier failed attempts, the engineers improved both the cable’s design and manufacture and made modifications to the gargantuan cable-laying ship, the Great Eastern, which sailed on June 30, 1866, from the Thames Estuary. Day after day, for the most part in calm waters, the Great Eastern steamed west, steadily paying out its cable. The ship anchored in late July in Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, in sight of the wildly cheering inhabitants of the flag-draped hamlet of Heart’s Content. The Great Eastern trailed two thousand miles of undersea cable, which was spliced into undersea lines that ran to mainland Canada. “All well. Thank God, the cable is laid and is in perfect working order,” went the telegraphed message from Heart’s Content, which set off worldwide celebrations.

With the benefit of hindsight, some newspapers criticized Western Union for spending millions of dollars based on the “mere conviction” that the Atlantic cable would never be successfully laid. For a time the Western Union directors insisted publicly that they would not abandon the overland route through Siberia, but they had every incentive to do just that. The month before the Great Eastern reached Heart’s Content, Western Union had hedged its investment in the Russian-American telegraph line by merging with the American Telegraph Company, one of the backers of the Atlantic cable. If the cable was successfully laid, Western Union would receive a share of the profits. In effect, Western Union had put down a bet against its own men in the Siberian wilderness.

Almost as an afterthought, Western Union dispatched a company ship to Siberia, the Onward, which arrived off Gizhiga on July 15, 1867. “We have come up to carry all the employees home,” said the captain. Kennan found it heartbreaking to close a project to which he had devoted nearly three years of his life and endured all possible hardships, but his thoughts were also of home. Maj. Abaza went by an overland route to St. Petersburg, where he hoped to persuade the Russian government to complete the line through Siberia. Kennan spent August cruising along the Siberian coast aboard the Onward to gather up the telegraph line working parties. In September the Onward put in at Okhotsk, where a letter from Maj. Abaza directed Kennan to come to St. Petersburg. The Onward, with almost all the American telegraph workers on board, prepared to sail to San Francisco. On the day of the Onward’s sailing, Kennan and Dodd were both on the edge of tears. “He could only wring my hand in silence.”

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by | 9 March 2025 · 4:51 am

U.S. Military Telegraph Corps, 1860s

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 35-37:

Kennan never attended college because the Rebellion, as it was called in Norwalk [Ohio], broke out in 1861 and “turned all my thoughts, hopes and ambitions into a new channel.”

He was elated by the martial electricity in the air. “Patriotic by inheritance and training, and naturally adventurous, I was completely carried away by a desire to take part in the momentous struggle.” But he was too young to enlist without his father’s permission, which John Kennan was unwilling to give. He could only watch as friends joined the 55th Ohio Regiment, which mustered out in Norwalk in the early days of the war. In a festive atmosphere the ladies of Norwalk offered coffee, pies, and sweet cakes to the young soldiers of the 55th in their light blue trousers, dark blue jackets, and forage caps. Trains left Norwalk taking boys, who not long ago had been playing two-old-cat, to be cut down on battlefields from Second Bull Run to the Carolinas campaign.

Still anxious to prove his courage, George Kennan sought the equally dangerous position as a field operator in the newly formed United States Military Telegraph Corps. Despite the word “Military,” the Corps was a civilian unit whose superintendent reported to the secretary of war. By the end of the war, the Corps had built fifteen thousand miles of telegraph lines and transmitted over six million telegraph messages, which gave the Union a significant communications advantage over the Confederacy with its more limited telegraphic resources. President Lincoln was among the first to grasp the capacity of the telegraph to give him command and control from Washington over his forces in the field, a power no political leader had previously possessed without being on the battlefield.

Throughout the war Lincoln haunted the War Department’s telegraph office. He personally sent nearly one thousand telegrams to his commanders, some asking about troop dispositions in ongoing battles. “What became of our forces which held the bridge till twenty minutes ago, as you say?” Lincoln telegraphed during one battle. The incoming telegrams filled the telegraph office with blood and gore. “The wounded & killed is immense,” a field operator telegraphed to the War Department, where Lincoln paced anxiously during the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862. “The battle rages furiously. Can hardly hear my instrument.”

From the War Department a vast network of telegraph wires stretched to every theatre of the war and onto battlefields. Before a battle, field operators weighed down with telegraphs, relays, and sounders; mules loaded with rolls of telegraph wire; and covered wagons crammed with nitric acid batteries, moved into position. They set up their instruments on hard-tack boxes beneath tent flys, and in just hours men had strung five or six miles of wire along poles, fence posts and tree branches, and sometimes over rivers to connect brigades or divisions with the commanding generals. A field operator once held the ends of a severed wire together in his bare hands and read a transmission from his tongue, which felt the shocks of the incoming dots and dashes.

Field operators were shot, blown up by artillery shells, and, when captured by Confederates, at risk of being executed as spies since they wore no military uniforms. Kennan could not entirely convince himself that he had the courage to be a field operator, but his doubts only made him more anxious to put his nerve to a supreme test. “Had I not camped out many a night—or at least many a morning—in the Big Woods?” he asked himself. “And was I not quite as familiar with firearms as most of the volunteers who were then going to the front?” He wrote Anson Stager, the superintendent of the Military Telegraph Corps, whom Kennan had met before the war when Stager was a senior Western Union official, asking to join as a field operator. Stager was too busy to respond and instead Kennan received a letter from another official advising him to defer joining the Corps and “wait and see what would happen.”

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