[1] During the war, they were charged with maintaining communications between the federal government in Washington and the commanding officers of the far-flung units of the Union Army.

[2] The American Telegraph Company's lines occupied the entire region east of the Hudson River and ran all along the Atlantic coast down to the Gulf of Mexico.

From this main backbone, the American Telegraph Company's lines branched west to cities like Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati.

From these cities, the Southwestern Telegraph Company's lines occupied the rest of the South and Southwest, including Texas and Arkansas.

[4] Not long after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861 President Abraham Lincoln ordered seventy-five thousand troops to assemble in Washington, D.C. On April 19, 1861, Harpers Ferry, West Virginia (which was along the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad) was captured by Confederate troops.

These operators were David Strouse (who later became the superintendent of the Military Telegraph Corps), D.H. Bates, Samuel M. Brown, and Richard O'Brien.

[10] In June, 1863, Albert Brown Chandler joined the corps and began work at the War Department as a disbursing clerk, cashier, and telegraph operator.

[12][13] He developed ciphers for transmitting secret communications, and worked with Thomas Eckert and Charles A. Tinker as confidential telegraphers for Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.

Only supervisory personnel were granted military commissions from the Quartermaster Department in order to distribute funds and property.

[16] Also, because there was no government telegraph organization before the Civil War, there was no appropriation of funds by Congress to pay for the expenses of erecting poles, running cables, or the salaries of operators.

As the mule moved forward unwinding the wire, two men followed and hung the line on fences and bushes so that it would not be run over until it was propped up with pikes.

[22] Serving as a U.S. Military Telegraph Corps operators, whether in the field or in the War Office was a hard and thankless job.

They encountered the constant threat of being captured, shot, or killed by Confederate troops whether they were establishing communications on the battle front, sending messages behind during a retreat, or venturing out to repair a line.

By decoding the Confederate cipher codes, plots such as setting fire to major hotels in New York City were averted.