Jesse Bunnell – Civil War Telegrapher

Soon after Confederate forces fired the first shots of the Civil War in April 1861, when they attacked Fort Sumter, 17-year-old Jesse H. Bunnell joined up with the Union Military Telegraph Service. He and his young counterparts were civilians, underpaid at $60 a month and constantly in harm’s way, dodging, in Union Army parlance, “doses of hot lead.” Even so, peril came with the job: Getting the message through, sometimes from the Commander-in-Chief himself to his generals on the battlefield.

Jesse was born in Ohio a year before Samuel F. B. Morse in 1843 successfully sent the first telegraph message from the Supreme Court chambers in Washington, DC, to his assistant in Baltimore, Maryland. “What Hath God Wrought,” it read — words that could apply to Jesse’s life and what he had seen.

At age 11 he was delivering telegraph messages and two years later had become a skilled telegraph operator (), working at offices in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. At age 17, he was copying American Morse at