The telegram6/6/2023 ![]() Lincoln’s T-Mails: How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War. Lincoln, who had a keen interest in technology and remains the only American president with a patent, spent more of his presidency in the War Department’s telegraph office than anywhere else outside of the White House, writes Tom Wheeler in Mr. READ MORE: 10 Things You May Not Know About Abraham Lincoln Lincoln Slept on a Cot in the Telegraph Office During Pivotal Battles Military Telegraph Corps undertook the dangerous work of laying more than 15,000 miles of telegraph wire across battlefields that transmitted news nearly instantaneously from the front lines to a telegraph office that had been established inside the old library of the War Department building adjacent to the White House in March 1862. After the war’s outbreak, the newly created U.S. Prior to the Civil War, federal employees who had to send a telegram from the nation’s capital needed to wait in line with the rest of the public at the city’s central telegraph office. The federal government had been slow to adopt the telegraph after Samuel Morse’s first successful test message in 1844. The 16th president may be remembered for his soaring oratory that stirred the Union, but the nearly 1,000 bite-sized telegrams that he wrote during his presidency helped win the Civil War by projecting presidential power in unprecedented fashion. ![]() Nearly 150 years before the advent of texts, tweets and e-mail, President Abraham Lincoln became the first “wired president” by embracing the original electronic messaging technology-the telegraph.
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