Roebling Bridge and the Civil War
The Roebling Suspension Bridge and the Civil War
By Dr. Don Heinrich Tolzmann
CCSBC Historian
An 1866 illustration of the Roebling Suspension Bridge shows the newly constructed bridge spanning the Ohio River. It appeared late in the Civil War in Harper’s Weekly and then was reprinted in Harper’s Pictorial History of the Great Rebellion in 1866. It shows the Ohio River filled with steamboats making their way up and downstream. It reminds us that work continued on the bridge during the War Between the States.
Completed in late 1866, the bridge was officially dedicated on 1 January 1867. Begun in 1856, work came to a standstill in 1857 due to the financial panic of that year, but the outbreak of the Civil War played a key role in kick-starting the project.
Cincinnati occupied a strategic location as the Queen City of the West and its conquest would have been a great coup for the Confederacy. Raids by General John Hunt Morgan in July 1862 and July 1863 raised great concern in the region, but the real threat came in September 1862 with the Siege of Cincinnati.
Confederate forces numbering 15,000 troops under the command of General Kirby Smith advanced through northern Kentucky. General Lew Wallace, who was in charge of the defense of the area, placed Cincinnati, Covington and Newport under martial law on 4 September 1862.
Union troops and artillery lined the hills of northern Kentucky and the so-called squirrel hunters flocked to defend the area. It immediately became clear that a major obstacle was dealing with the problem of getting troops across the Ohio River. A temporary pontoon bridge was patched together consisting of barges lined up side by side across the river.
Col. Gustav Tafel, commander of the 106th Ohio Vol. Infantry, a German regiment from Cincinnati stationed in northern Kentucky, wrote that General Smith “found the area west of the Licking River, which commanded the approaches to the city, entrenched and peppered with cannons…Only one serious attempt was made by the enemy to break through at Lexington Pike, but it failed. A great and pressing danger for Cincinnati was thereby avoided. The 106th held a position south of Covington and got a whiff of gun smoke stationed as it was in the foreground of the city of Cincinnati.”
The threats posed by Smith and Morgan highlighted the need to complete the bridge on the Ohio River. John A. Roebling himself wrote: “The great exigencies of the war, by the movement of troops and materials across the river, made the want of a permanent bridge all the more felt.”
In 1863, work began anew, with Roebling returning to the area. Additional help came from his son Washington who had just completed a three year stint in the Union Army (1861-64), and joined his father in Covington in mid-1865. In a year and half, they had the job done.
Had it not been for the threat of Confederate forces during the Civil War, the bridge might not have been completed till after the war.
