Eckert, Thomas Thompson, 1825-1910

Chief of the War Dept. Telegraph Office, 1862. Sucessively General Manager, President, and Chariman of the Board of Western Union.

Eckert served as head of military telegraph headquarters in the United States War Department during the Civil War.

U.S. Brigadier General.

Thomas Thompson Eckert (1825-1910) had begun his career as an operator in the Morse Telegraph Company; in 1852 he became the head the Chicago Branch of the Union Telegraph Company. In the fall of 1861, Eckert was appointed Assistant General Superintendent of the United States Military Telegraph. The Telegraph was organized from the Western Union Company as an expressly civilian service, subordinated directly to the Secretary of War and the President. The service remained under the civilian control, despite numerous attempts to put it under the command of the Signal Corps. In February 1862, Eckert was put in charge of all telegraphic operations of George B. McClellan's Army of the Potomac. He remained with McClellan throughout the Peninsula campaign, supervising construction and operation of field telegraph offices in Virginia and Maryland. In April 1863, when the General Superintendent of the Military Telegraph Anson Stager moved his office to Cincinnati, Ohio, Eckert was recalled to Washington and appointed the head of the Military Telegraph office at the War Department. In addition to managing the Telegraph Washington office, Eckert was entrusted with important political, intelligence and diplomatic missions. In March 1865, he was promoted to the rank of Brigadier General, and on July 1866 became Assistant Secretary of War. He held this position until he resigned from the War Department in February 1867. In the post-war decades, Eckert managed first the Vanderbilt family's Western Union and then its chief competitors, Jay Gould's Pacific Telegraph Company and the then American Union Telegraph. From 1893 to 1900. he was the president of Western Union, and then served as chairman of the company's board of directors.