The man who established the Federal military telegraph system amid the
first horrors of war was to become one of the world's foremost advocates
of peace. As the right hand man of Thomas A. Scott, Assistant Secretary of
War, he came to Washington in '61, and was immediately put in charge of
the field work of reestablishing communication between the Capital and the
North, cut off by the Maryland mobs. A telegraph operator himself, he
inaugurated the system of cipher despatches for the War Department and
secured the trusted operators with whom the service was begun. A young man
of twenty-four at the time, he was one of the last to leave the
battlefield of Bull Run, and his duties of general superintendence over
the network of railroads and telegraph lines made him a witness of war's
cruelties on other fields until he with his chief left the government
service June 1, 1862.