by Simon Schama
“It is astonishingly hot here,” Lee wrote to his wife—ninety-seven in the shade. Hot or not, there were the two lieutenants, Lee and Meigs, paddling their dugout canoe on the deceptively sluggish stream, sketching its capricious course, and taking soundings while being devoured by mosquitoes. Lee’s report recommended blasting a way through the upper reaches of the river and building dikes made from pilings enveloped in stone and brush, which would sieve much of the debris without forcing the current too far from its regular course. A small dam diagonal to St. Louis would push away some of the silt, scouring a deeper channel for the boats to navigate when the river was low. Fastidious, beautiful maps were drawn; data collected; recommendations made for a little fleet of “snagboats” that periodically would cleanse the passages made. The two men—of markedly different tempers, the handsome, swart-bearded Lee even then rather grand in his manner; Meigs, nine years his junior, six foot one in his boots, pale and high-browed, energetic to the point of bumptiousness—were forced into close and constant proximity. They shared log cabins, talked with the Chippewa, made do in reeking rooms in St. Louis, where moldy whitewash hung in limp strips from the wall, mysterious odors defeating the cologne that the elegant Lee had brought in his traveling bag. Though the intense, inexhaustible Meigs made Lee uneasy, a fellowship was born. Though Lee thought the whole area, “winning women” apart, “bloody humbug,” he sportingly adjusted to it, and the two comrades shot wild turkey from horseback, Missouri-fashion, and caught whiskery catfish “almost three feet long,” monstrously ugly but fine eating.
Even someone as self-assured as Lee could not help taking careful stock of Montgomery Meigs, whom he declared, wryly, to be “a host [of men] in himself.” After graduating fifth in his class from West Point in 1836, Meigs had been briefly assigned to the artillery but had then been transferred into the Army Corps of Engineers, regarded in every way as the military elite. He was twenty-one, still smooth-faced, but with the imperial brow and dark eyes that were to be the bane of lesser mortals rash enough to get in the way of the public virtues that necessarily came with the old name of Meigs.
The chronicle of the Meigs dynasty tracked the history of America. The patriarch, Vincent Meigs, had sailed from Dorset, England, with his wife, Elizabeth, in 1636 to the territory that would become Connecticut. It must have been the radical politics of English religion that had sent them across the Atlantic, for thirty years later, Vincent and Elizabeth took in Puritan regicides who had voted for the execution of King Charles I and who were subsequently being called to account by the Restoration courts. Montgomery’s great-grandfather had been the first Return Jonathan Meigs, a name which colored the Christian sobriety of the family with a little harmless romance. In the early eighteenth century, in Middletown, Connecticut, a young Meigs had been repeatedly rebuffed by the object of his ardor, a demure Quaker. Mournfully resigned to his fate, he was mounting his horse when, as was her prerogative, the lady abruptly changed her mind, recalling him with a cry of “Return Jonathan Meigs.” Embedded in his heart as the phrase that had altered his life, he felt compelled to call the first fruit of his happy union Return Jonathan, who, bearing a moniker requiring daily explanation to strangers, had no choice, really, but to become a hero.
In 1777, two years into the revolution, Return Jonathan Meigs marched to Quebec with Benedict Arnold (still the bright star of the Continental Army rather than its detested turncoat as he became in 1780). But his American regiment failed to dislodge the British and take Lower Canada. Arnold’s star suddenly dimmed, and Lieutenant Return Jonathan was taken prisoner. Liberated in an exchange, Meigs lost no time vindicating his fortunes by leading 170 men in an amphibious raid on a British redoubt at Sag Harbor on Long Island in May 1777. It was the kind of guerrilla action that was the stuff of Revolutionary War legends but which, in cool reality, seldom came off as planned. The rare success of the raid on Sag Harbor enhanced the young officer’s reputation while that of his erstwhile general Benedict Arnold collapsed into infamy. But the Meigs fame was richly deserved. In retaliation for the redcoat burning of Patriot farms in Danbury, Connecticut, Return Meigs had gathered together an enthusiastically angry company of local militiamen, among whom were scouts knowledgeable about the swift waters of Long Island Sound as well as the woods and fields that lined its shores. To this troop Return Jonathan added his own company of trained volunteers, and the little force rowed across the Sound in small boats, taking the British napping (in some cases literally). Twelve of His Majesty’s vessels were burned and eighty prisoners taken with no loss to the Americans. A grateful Continental Congress and General Washington presented Return Jonathan with a sword of honor for his welcome demonstration of both tactical competence and personal courage. Meigs was affected enough by this official vote of confidence to take his name seriously, returning to the fray, commanding a regiment under “Mad” Anthony Wayne and storming the British breastworks at the battle of Stony Point in July 1779.
Return Jonathan Meigs was, then, a paragon of all-action American patriotism, which, once peace came, was bound to make him restless. Unsuited to the steady round of the seasons as a Connecticut farmer, he rode northwest to pioneer in Ohio, where he planted a new branch of Meigses and became important enough to lay down the first homesteading regulations for incoming settlers, posted, it was said (for the Meigses were fond of these kinds of stories), on an ancient oak by the Ohio River. But RJ was not yet done. In 1801 he was appointed by President Jefferson as government agent to the Cherokee Nation in their ancestral homeland in what is now eastern Tennessee and west Georgia. He never moved again, though the Cherokee, as we shall see, were not so fortunate.
Inevitably there was a Return Jonathan Meigs Jr. who did what he could both to live up to his father’s dashing reputation and to make the family name as dependable as possible, first by fighting, and then by treating with, the Indians. The rewards for his more orthodox manner of making his way in federal America were handsome, and Return Jonathan Jr. became, in succession, prospering Ohio attorney, state legislator, justice of the Ohio Supreme Court, governor (responsible for defending the border against the British in the war of 1812), United States senator, and finally—not a job to sniff at in the early days of stagecoaching—postmaster general of the United States.
His younger brother, Josiah, took a more cerebral turn, teaching math, astronomy, and “natural philosophy” at the local college, Yale, before publishing the Connecticut Magazine, principally, one suspects, to oblige old classmates like Joel Barlow and Noah Webster who had literary pretensions, an enterprise that swiftly and predictably brought Josiah to the edge of ruin. Turning to the law, where his brother had done so well, Josiah took another wrong turn by defending privateers taken by the British in Bermuda, a move that got him indicted for treason, and that understandably made the quieter life of a mathematics professor seem suddenly attractive. Yale took him back, gave him years of assiduous respectability, out of which he walked yet again, migrating south to become the second president of the new University of Georgia in the town of Athens by the Oconee River, not far from the Meigs-friendly Cherokee.
So there were now Meigses north and Meigses south, and in the way of following the destiny of the nation this generous geographic distribution would lay up trouble for the future peace of the clan. Josiah’s son, Charles, our Montgomery’s father, was born in Bermuda during his father’s misplaced advocacy of the maritime desperadoes, but he was educated like a good Jeffersonian democrat in Athens. Schooled in medicine at Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania, Charles Meigs then moved back south to Augusta, Georgia, to establish a practice in obstetrics, not a conventional course for a young physician but one in which he evidently found his vocation, for between anatomizing the uterus he wrote several volumes of practical midwifery. Whatever use to the public Charles’s work might have been, it must have done no harm to his own family for ten Meigs children were born, and it may be that Charles stood midwife to the birth of his own son Mon
tgomery in 1816. Unfortunately the doctor’s own constitution was prone to suffer from “bilious fever,” which aggravated a predisposition to romantic melancholy.
But there was a southern malady that Charles’s wife, Mary Montgomery, could not herself abide: slavery. In deference to his wife’s strong opinions, the obstetrician and his wife moved their family back north to Philadelphia, where Monty was raised in a learned but rambunctious family home on Chestnut Street. Of the eight boys and two girls in the family, it was Monty who in every way seemed to displace more than his own weight. Large, ungainly, obstinate, he was said (by his own parents) to be “tyrannical to his brothers, very persevering in pursuit of anything he wishes, very soon tires of his playthings, destroying them appears to afford him as much pleasure as his first possession; is not vexed with himself for having broken them…very inquisitive about the use of everything, delighted to see different machines at work, appears to understand their different operations when explained to him and does not forget them.” In short, as Lee would later indicate, Monty Meigs was, from the start, a regular handful and for all his curiosity into things mechanical, “not very fond of learning.” Neither the Franklin School nor a brief spell at the University of Pennsylvania managed to rein in the persnickety temper. As an old man Meigs claimed not to see in this description anything he recognized of himself. He was wrong. What Montgomery needed, so his desperate mother and father thought, was an institution that would convert all that uncoordinated energy into patriotic usefulness. Which sounded very much like the United States Military Academy at West Point. For there was nowhere quite like it for harnessing the fidgeting of the young to the solid work of building continental America.
When Montgomery Meigs arrived in 1832, West Point, sitting 200 feet up on the west bank of the Hudson Highlands, was a scattered collection of brick two-story barracks, their conventional roof pediments the only concession to classical ornament; plus a few separate houses for the instructors. There was a small parade ground and at the edge of the cliff a gun emplacement where light cannon pointed toward the river. It was that position that had determined West Point’s location and its significance. Fifty miles upstream from Manhattan, it was sited at the point where the river narrows and makes a sharp bend. The place was, and despite the nuclear reactor visible downstream at Indian Point, still is, pretty enough to get painters out of bed early on spring mornings as the pearly valley light comes up. America’s first recognizable “school” of radiance-drunk artists adopted it as their very own Yankee Rhine Romance, complete with bosky islets and pairs of red-tailed hawk riding the thermals. Before the full impact of the Erie Canal had been felt, hauling livestock and foodstuffs from Ohio, the lower Hudson Valley was a region where old forests of white ash and chestnut leaf oak had been cleared for sheep and cattle pasture. In the shade of the second-growth forest that sprouted over their ruins, you can walk the lines of the drystone walls that are all that remain of that long-gone grazing and droving world. When Meigs came to West Point, modest market towns like Cold Spring were beginning to multiply churches, schools, inns, stores. Their docks were full of sailing barges and the odd belching steamboat, and their little world was hectic with America’s business.
Up on its hawk roost, West Point was more or less impregnable, a fact that had not gone unremarked during the Revolutionary War. Commanding the narrow neck of river meant that its guns controlled the passage between New York and the mid-Atlantic and upstate New York, Lake George, and the route to Canada. Domination of the Hudson Gorge, though, also delivered the potential of cutting off New England from points south. Whichever side held the fort on the hill could control the destiny of America. Acutely aware of its strategic importance, George Washington posted an “Invalid” Regiment: men whose wounds or infirmity made them unfit for battle combat but who could man guns; so that the first military occupation made the place as much a convalescent hospital as fortress. Thwarted at Saratoga from cutting the American resistance in two, the British needed somehow to take West Point, and from 1779, the turncoat general Benedict Arnold, in return for a cool £20,000, offered to hand it on a plate to His Majesty’s forces. In 1780 Arnold, the fabled veteran of campaigns, whose loyalty no American generals doubted, secured command of the post and would have realized his plan and perhaps succeeded in ending the revolution, had he not been exposed by the capture of the British spy Major André along with documents revealing his intentions.
The first United States Military Academy was, then, built on a site heavy with patriotic memory; one which looked to the past to create a national future. Young Meigs could not help but be aware of that during his first year as a “plebe.” That was also the last year of the superintendence of Sylvanus Thayer (class of 1808), who had done more than anyone to give West Point its character as a forcing house of scientific and technical distinction. Between reveille and dusk, between the first drill parade and lights out, the days of the cadets were remorselessly filled with instruction on mathematics, chemistry, engineering, mechanical drawing, and even a little geology and history. French was mandatory but not so the cadets could steep themselves in the Pléiade or Racine but to memorize the textbooks that Thayer had imported from the École Polytechnique in Paris.
“Duty, Honor, Country” was the college credo, and for the most part the cadets embraced all three, except when they escaped from the mess-hall fare of bread, potatoes, and fat-pork beans, to Benny Havens’s establishment at Buttermilk Falls a mile south. There they could enjoy a tankard of hot flip and flirt with the country girls. Sometimes both were smuggled into the school, which led Thayer, in a rash moment after a wild 4 July celebration, to ban alcohol with the predictable result. On Christmas Eve 1826, an eggnog party in which a young Mississippian, Jefferson Davis, was the rowdiest ringleader, was broken up by the Officer of the Day. If he was serious, Davis and his bucks warned, they would have to shoot him.
Davis and his fraternity had violated the honor code, which exhorted the cadets to selfless virtue. By “Country” was meant the Union, even for the likes of Davis, who may already have felt his true country was the South. The college was often known as the “School of the Union” and its cadets the “Band of the Union.” But it was the first article of the oath that was most loaded with West Point’s particular ethos. For “Duty” meant the duty to respect the Constitution of the United States, to which its graduating officers swore an oath of loyalty, which unlike that taken elsewhere was not to the person of a sovereign prince. That constitutional obligation to subordinate the military to the civilian guardians of the democracy was inculcated in each and every cadet, and it still is. It’s why there may have been eggnog rebellions at West Point but never the hatching of military plots. Throughout much of the world—in Europe, Asia, and Latin America—military-school solidarity has led officers to believe in their collective superiority over civilian politicians. Not in the United States. Though there were plenty of American soldier-presidents in the nineteenth century, many of them West Pointers, they left their swords and their uniforms (though not their war stories) behind them when they went on the hustings. John McCain, an Annapolis naval cadet, would do the same. For two centuries West Point has been a sentinel against, not on behalf of, martial power. But then that was exactly the intention of the man who founded it in 1802, and who in 1811 declared that “peace has been our principle, peace is our interest and peace has saved to the world this only plant of free and rational government now existing in it.”
That same man, tall, angular, and equipped with an elegant mind, stood in the spacious hall of his Virginia villa and challenged his guest, not quite so tall but equipped with an equally elegant mind, to a guessing game. Pointing to the three busts of Worthies that lined one wall, Thomas Jefferson asked Alexander Hamilton if he recognized the identity of “the trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced.” There was a long pause, during which one imagines Jefferson smiling as he often did when he felt superior. Preempting Hamilton’s
failure, the host then revealed that they were Bacon, Newton, and Locke, the patriarchs of the Enlightenment to which he had nailed his own intellectual colors. Asked who he thought was the greatest of the great, Hamilton took his time before replying, with pointed insouciance, “evidently…Julius Caesar.”
Jefferson’s West Point was founded to deny the United States its Caesars (of whom, Jefferson suspected, Colonel Hamilton might aspire to be the first) and to ensure the permanent victory of liberalism over militarism. Only one of its greatest, Douglas MacArthur, superintendent after World War I, has ever flirted with martial power to the point of disregarding civilian orders, or so his president, Harry Truman, suspected. It was MacArthur who introduced systematic political discussions into the early morning curriculum at the academy, so he had only himself to blame if his students read well enough to know that a victorious general had to defer to the civilian commander in chief. Much more typical has been the other kind of West Point graduate, Dwight Eisenhower, commander of a liberation invasion, president of Columbia University before president of the United States, and who warned his country against the threat posed by the “military industrial complex” to the liberties enshrined in the Constitution. When I went to West Point to deliver a lecture not long after the beginning of the war in Iraq, the cadets and I talked about Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. The intense debates that preceded the fatal expedition to Syracuse that mark the great cautionary climax of the work had made a deep impression. No one in that classroom wanted to be Alcibiades, the vainglorious warrior who led the Athenian Empire into self-destruction. It struck me then that West Point was perhaps the only military academy in the world programmed to have such conflicted feelings about war. But its identity as a Jeffersonian enterprise of national education—the school that imprinted itself on the young and impressionable Meigs—only came about from a fierce battle between Hamilton’s and Jefferson’s contending notions of the role that military power ought to play in the life of the American nation.