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 the 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 to 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 to 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, prepared 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

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