Carnegie’s Maid: A Novel

November 24, 1864

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

If I had been expecting a template, he had none to deliver. But my question yielded many afternoons with many answers. Whenever Mr. Carnegie was at Fairfield for the day—instead of his offices downtown or traveling—we met in the park on that same bench during my mistress’s afternoon rest. There, in thirty-minute increments, he offered me hope, for myself and my family.

I knew my route would not match his precisely. But if a poor Scottish immigrant could carve out a fresh, successful path for himself, maybe there was some way I could too. I began to believe this, even though I was a woman and the climb from one societal echelon to another had only been accomplished by men. And only very recently at that.

I listened. And I learned.

By working harder than anyone else, always at the behest of Mr. Scott, Mr. Carnegie had scaled the hierarchy of the Pennsylvania Railroad to reach his current position of division superintendent, which made him the man in charge of safely moving all rail traffic in western Pennsylvania. A heady height indeed for a small lad from Scotland, as he liked to tell me. But his true success came not from advancing rung by rung up that corporate ladder—a rare enough feat—but by investing in companies, a notion that had been novel to him. And to me.

“What do you mean by investing, Mr. Carnegie? Do you mean handing over money to a company founder? Like a loan?” We had developed an open dialogue in our park afternoons, where Mr. Carnegie tolerated, even encouraged, my many questions about the business world. Plainly, he enjoyed the role of teacher and orator as well as the freedom to share his actual thoughts and advice, not just the carefully crafted opinions he offered his societal and business acquaintances.

“No, Miss Kelley, an investment is not a loan, although banks and individuals certainly do loan money to companies. An investment is the opportunity to purchase ownership shares in a company. It gives you a piece of the company, if you like. When the company does well, the part owner receives a monetary payment called a dividend.” He laughed. “Money for doing nothing. It’s incredible.”

I laughed along with him. Coming from a society where nothing was earned except by the sweat of your own brow, unless you were part of the aristocracy, I understood the disbelief at the idea of money making money without a lick of personal effort. Dad would be shocked at the notion, and I could well envision similar astonishment on Mr. Carnegie’s face when, ten years earlier, Mr. Scott offered him a loan to buy two shares in the Adams Express Company, stock which had been made available to all Pennsylvania Railroad executives as quid pro quo for the lucrative contract into which Adams Express and Pennsylvania Railroad had just entered, and then, a mere month later, Mr. Carnegie received his first ten-dollar dividend check.

This dividend check was the first of many, he informed me. Initially, Mr. Carnegie made small investments based on Mr. Scott’s recommendations. But then Mr. Carnegie developed his own methodology: invest not just in companies but in a group of trusted people; only invest in companies he’d examined himself; and invest in companies that deliver goods and services for which the demand was growing. The most important factor in his decision-making, however, was the requirement that he had insider knowledge about the company and its dealings. This notion seemed illegal to me, but when I asked a gentle question about its propriety, Mr. Carnegie assured me of its legality, although neither one of us spoke of its morality.

Once he struck out on his own, he invested in oil companies capturing the crude bubbling beneath the ground throughout western Pennsylvania and in companies with contracts with the railroad companies to supply coal, wood, and iron, to build their bridges, and to manufacture their rails and cars. These were contracts about which he had insider information from his role at the Pennsylvania Railroad. When I pressed him for company names, he scratched his head and listed Pittsburgh Grain Elevator, Western Union, and Citizen’s Passenger Railway, claiming that his investments were so numerous, he couldn’t remember them all out of hand. I found this difficult to believe. But why would he bother keeping information from me, a harmless maid?

Key to his methodology was diligent research, he said. Mr. Carnegie had previously extolled the virtues of the free access that he—along with other working boys of Pittsburgh—had every Saturday evening to the private library of four hundred volumes owned by Colonel James Anderson, who had made money in the iron business. It was here, he claimed, that a poor Scottish boy was educated about the ways of the American business world. This library, he maintained, made him into a successful man.

“What if you don’t have access to the information like that you found in Colonel Anderson’s lending library?” I asked Mr. Carnegie. Aside from Colonel Anderson’s library, which the working-class men of Pittsburgh could enter freely only on Saturday nights and only with a letter vouchsafing their employment, I had never heard of a library open to the public without a hefty subscription fee.

“I can tell you exactly what I would do if I did not have access to a lending library. When I was a boy, Colonel Anderson’s library was only open to those boys and men who did manual labor. This did not include young men like myself, who were messenger boys or employed doing other sorts of lower-class labor not manual in nature. So I wrote a letter to a local newspaper petitioning Colonel Anderson to open his library on Saturday nights to ‘working boys’ who did not qualify as manual laborers. You can guess what happened.”

“You persuaded him.”

A broad grin spread across Mr. Carnegie’s face. “I did indeed. From that day forward, Colonel Anderson’s library opened to other employed young men, giving them—me—the ability to check out a book a week. Each Saturday night, I debated which of the many magnificent books I would take home. Would it be the inspirational Paul Allen’s American Adventure by Land and Sea, or the practical Robertson Buchanan’s Practical Essays on Mill Work and other Machinery? Should I pick the sentimental Sir Walter Scott’s History of Scotland, the useful Joseph Black’s Lectures on the Elements of Chemistry, or the classic Charles Darwin’s Natural History and Geology? Or would Alexander Dumas’s Progress of Democracy be the right selection? I can distinctly remember standing before those bookshelves and feeling inspired and overwhelmed by the opportunities found there. I would carry my book around with me the following week, reading it in breaks snatched from my work.”

“What a wonderful story.”

“It’s much more than a story, Miss Kelley. I cannot describe to you the impact that library had on my life and my success. It quite literally made me who I am today.”

“Countless other men undoubtedly shared your experience, Mr. Carnegie, and they have you to thank for it,” I congratulated him. Then almost to myself, before I really thought it through, I whispered, “Although your success wouldn’t have given me access to Colonel Anderson’s.”

“You needn’t worry about entrée into libraries, Miss Kelley. You know very well you can read whatever we have on our shelves at Fairfield.” His barrel-shaped chest puffed up a bit. “I’ve tried to secure a copy of nearly every book that Colonel Anderson had for our home library.”

What about men like my poor cousin Patrick, who had no way to elevate himself. He had not grown up with books and had no current access, as Colonel Anderson’s library had been closed since the onset of the Civil War. The impasse of his situation and that of his family troubled me. “How would the average person—man or woman—who wasn’t able to secure free passage into one of the rare lending libraries like Colonel Anderson’s that give access to the common man rise above his station? You’ve said that education—and research—were key to your success.”

His proud, expansive posture deflated a bit. “I suppose the average man would be at a disadvantage there. Although not all knowledge comes from books. Life presents its own education.”

“Not the sort to which you’ve been referring, Mr. Carnegie,” I said rather harshly, the inequity angering me a bit. The barb slipped out before I had a chance to soften it, and I instinctively put a hand to my mouth. I couldn’t risk angering him. These meetings, if discovered, would endanger my job, and I walked a very narrow road by continuing them.

He didn’t seem to notice my inflection. Perhaps a lifetime of pointed conversations with his mother inured him to hardness. “True, Miss Kelley. And a fair point at that. Perhaps there will be a way to rectify this inequity one day.”

I tried a different, softer tack to get my answer, the key to my own ascent. “How did your mother become so knowledgeable? As a woman, she never had access to the library or the business world, and yet I watch you consult her on all your dealings. She appears to be your most trusted business adviser.”

He paused. Had I gone too far? A lady’s maid, along with every other servant with access to the family, was meant to be oblivious to those they serve.

“Mother was always incredibly bright. While she didn’t receive any formal education, my grandfather Morrison, who, as I’ve mentioned, was a leader in the Chartist movement, which advocated that working men should be able to run for Parliament and make conditions better for the poorer classes, encouraged his daughters to be well read. Once we arrived in America, she devoured every book I brought home from Colonel Anderson’s library, studied every newspaper she could get her hands on, and gleaned nuggets of information from any source possible to achieve a deep understanding of our new world. Mother is the quickest study I’ve ever met, with the truest instincts.”

Perhaps the template I should have been following was that of my mistress, not Mr. Carnegie. But without a son to influence, a husband with whom to partner, or money to invest, how would I forge a path like hers either? How could a woman make the near-impossible climb from a lower class?

Distracting me from these practical troubles, Mr. Carnegie explained his larger plan, the manner in which he would knit his investments and ventures together to dominate various metals industries in the years to come. The scope of his vision astonished me, and I longed to play a role in his ambitious undertaking, although I knew it was an impossible inclination. “I see the connection between these businesses, Miss Kelley. I envision the ways in which I can make these industries more effective, more efficient, than anyone else. It was one reason why I elected to have someone serve in the army in my place. I knew I could serve the Union better by increasing production and meeting its demand for iron than fighting in the battlefield.”

I doubted that this proffered altruistic motivation fully explained his choice—I knew by now that his ambition played a powerful role in his decisions—but I was glad that a reason other than fear and selfishness was behind his conscription of a poor Irishman into the Union Army.

Church bells began to toll in the distance. “Your mother will be looking for me soon, Mr. Carnegie. I must excuse myself.”

He stood up alongside me, and together, we perambulated down the winding path toward the park gate. The air was heavy with the buzz of insects, awoken from their autumnal slumber by the unusually warm weather, and the only other sound was the crunch of our feet on the gravel path. We didn’t speak.

Startling me, he broke the silence between us by quickly turning toward me and saying, “Sometimes, I feel—” He shook his head. “I shouldn’t say it.”

“Say what, Mr. Carnegie?”

“Sometimes, I feel like you are the only person in the world I can talk to. The only one who knows and understands me, with whom I can have a frank conversation.”

I experienced the same feelings in his presence, although I tried to suppress those emotions. I had never met a man with whom I felt such kinship. The men I knew at home were farmers with minimal education and aspirations largely focused on their farms, and the men of my station I’d encountered in this country seemed cut from a similar cloth with a focus on mills or foundries instead of farms. I stared into Mr. Carnegie’s blue eyes, seeing the outline of my face reflected back at me. I wondered if I was simply a mirror for him. A place where he could practice telling the story that would become his narrative. Or whether he felt more.

He stepped toward me and reached for my hand. I knew I should be wary, but I allowed him to take my hand in his. Although both of our hands were gloved, his in butter-soft, black leather and mine in rough, brown cotton, a castoff from Mrs. Stewart, I felt the warmth of his palms.

“I think about you all the time, Miss Kelley. I have written you countless letters describing how my feelings for you have grown in these past months of our park meetings, but I have always thrown these letters out. They seemed such an inartful expression of the admiration and, dare I say it, adoration I carry for you. Is there any chance—” He paused.

I was not certain what would happen next, what I even wanted to happen, when I heard a distinctive voice.

“I say, is that you, Mr. Carnegie?”

I immediately recognized the voice as belonging to Miss Atkinson, the very worst person I could envision finding us together, alone, in the park. Pulling my hand away from his, I turned back into the park, walking briskly into a thicket of trees and losing myself in their interlocking branches.