This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, including your stories.

Send them to our American Stories.com.

There's some of our favorites. Christopher

Klein is the author of four books and is a frequent contributor to the History Channel.

You've heard Chris tell the story of how Johnny Carson saved Twister and how Mark Twain helped

Ulysses S. Grant complete his memoir that saved his wife from destitution. He's back with another.

Here's Christopher Klein with a story of how Abraham Lincoln used the Telegraph to help win

this civil war.

Nearly 150 years before the advent of text, tweets, and email, President Abraham Lincoln

became the first wired president by embracing the original electronic messaging

technology, the telegraph. The 16th president may be remembered for a 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.

The federal government had been slow to adopt the telegraph after Samuel Morse's first

successful test message in 1844.

Prior to the Civil War, federal employees who had to send a telegram from the nation's capital

had a wait in line with the rest of the public at the city's central telegraph office.

Days after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, Andrew Carnegie, the future industrialist, who at the time was superintendent of the Pittsburgh Division of the Pennsylvania Railroad, sent the following order to the railroad superintendent of telegraphs.

Send four of your best operators to Washington at once, prepare to intergovernment telegraph service for war.

Those four men would be the first of the 1500 called into service in the newly created U.S. military telegraph corps.

Using wire coils borne on the backs of mules, the Corps undertook the dangerous work of crossing battlefields to lay more than 15,000 miles of telegraph wires on poles, fences, and bushes.

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