by Simon Schama
“Is all this to end in order that slavery not freedom may have greater sway?
“Is slavery stronger than freedom? Or does the Almighty who punished Israel for desiring a king punish us for boasting of freedom yet encouraging yet upholding or tolerating even, slavery? My heart grows sick as I think of this prospect.”
On 4 March 1861, the recalled and vindicated Meigs watched Abraham Lincoln sworn into the office of the presidency by Chief Justice Roger Taney on the east portico of the Capitol. The facade was still covered in the scaffolding of Meigs’s reconstruction. Like the Union itself, Lincoln was in danger from the moment he mounted the steps, protected by guards supplied by General Winfield Scott. Tall, gaunt, and gawky, Lincoln seemed an unlikely man for the hour. Until that moment Meigs had no great opinion of the congressman from Illinois. Like most of the family, he had voted for Lincoln’s old rival, Stephen Douglas, who had run on the northern Democratic ticket and was, they all thought, evidently the superior man. But Lincoln’s great speech confirming that while the federal government would forbear from interfering with the “property” of slavery, it would not tolerate the “destruction of our national fabric” made a deep impression on Meigs. After the wretched temporizing of the Buchanan administration, it was astonishing to hear from the mouth of a politician an acutely philosophical intelligence, summoned at the behest of all possible crises, resolute in setting before the people exactly what was at stake: the life or death of the American democratic experiment. Though the new, abolitionist Meigs might have wished Lincoln more forthright on the ultimate incompatibility of slavery with that democratic Union, he agreed wholeheartedly with Lincoln’s premise that “the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects this does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism.” Meigs was also won over by the classical eloquence of Lincoln’s modesty, two qualities not usually in tandem; together with the moral craft by which he plainly set responsibility for the outcome before his fellow citizens: “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow citizens and not in mine is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it.”
For months Meigs had been yearning for a leader who, while avoiding belligerence, would not shrink from war to save America. In Lincoln’s soaring peroration evoking “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart all over this broad land,” hoping for the return of “the better angels of our nature,” he heard the echo of the Meigs family instinct to see American democracy in the long arc of its history. “It was a noble speech,” he wrote to his father in Philadelphia, waxing almost Shakespearean himself as he was buoyed up by the solemn integrity of Lincoln’s words. “No time was wasted in generalities or platitudes but he grappled at once with his subject and no man could doubt that he meant what he said. No point was omitted…but the disease of the body politic was analysed, its character and remedy pointed out and each sentence fell like a sledgehammer driving in the nails which maintain states. Kind and conciliatory, it still left no loophole for treason. War, I fear will come but it will be conducted humanely…If they bite they will bite against a file. He will defend and protect the public property…enforce the laws…and once more will freedom of speech and liberty of person be the rule of all our land and not the exception…The people about me applauded each sentence…some looked darkly and retired. Treason shrank out of sight and loyalty sat in the sunlight.”
From that moment Meigs was Lincoln’s devotee, restive to serve, but unsure in which capacity he might give his best. For more than a decade he had been that most anomalous thing, a Washington soldier, and one of scant rank, too, still plain Captain Meigs, for promotion was excruciatingly slow in the Corps of Engineers. But his official rank was the only inconsequential thing about Meigs. He had spoken directly to three presidents, was about to be the confidant of a fourth, carried substance in Congress and in Cabinets, and more important than any of this, had become the personification of public virtues that were in short supply in the capital and that, if worst came to worst, would be badly needed: integrity, competence, and resolution. He knew money, he knew metallurgy, and—this had suddenly become very important—Montgomery Meigs knew forts, North and South. He had built them, manned them, armed them, inspected them, defended them. As more and more states voted to secede from the Union, forts were very much on the new administration’s mind. The status of Sumter in Charleston Bay was as close as anything to being a casus belli. South Carolina had been the first to depart from the Union but even before secession in late December, its congressional delegation had demanded the evacuation of the federal garrison. While the equivocating Buchanan, whose last speech to Congress had castigated Northern “fanatics” in much the same tones as Henry Meigs, was still in office, some sort of accommodation over Sumter seemed possible. A meeting produced an informal standoff arrangement by which the South Carolinians agreed to abstain from shelling the place into submission provided no attempt was made to reinforce it. But in January 1861, the garrison commander Robert Anderson had imported seventy-five men from another Charleston stronghold, an action the Carolinians decided to take as a violation of the standoff. It would take 20,000 men to hold it, the aged commander of the Union army, General Scott, concluded, and prepared for an evacuation.
The humiliation was passed to the incoming president. For Lincoln the status of Sumter and the other southern forts that would pass to Confederate control—Pickens on the Floridian island of Santa Rosa near Pensacola, Jefferson on the Tortugas, and Fort Taylor on Key West—was as much a matter of national symbolism as military strategy. He would have liked to have reinforced all of them if he could, since a naval blockade of the South was very much part of General Scott’s “Grand Strategy” for a war of encirclement and strangulation. Scott’s gloomy assessment persuaded him that ultimately Sumter was going to have to go. Lincoln made it clear that he was not about to cede the rest as if the United States simply accepted the fait accompli of its division. At issue was more than national amour propre. The Confederacy was now a fact with ten states already seceded and Virginia likely to follow. In February Jefferson Davis had been elected provisional president and had taken a host of West Pointers with him.
If Sumter had to go, Lincoln was determined that Pickens would stay with the Union. William Seward, Lincoln’s new secretary of state, aware of Meigs’s expedition to the Tortugas, asked his advice. Meigs, raring to go, freely gave it in a meeting with Seward and Lincoln—a relief expedition to Fort Pickens that would land men and blockade the harbor against boat attack from the mainland. But because Washington was so insecure, crawling with spies and both the army and navy beset by daily defections to the Confederacy, the mission, Meigs thought, would have to be kept secret if it was not going to trigger a preemptive Confederate raid on Pickens. Lincoln wanted Meigs to be there in person, which gave Montgomery an opportunity to point out the indelicate matter of his lowly rank for such a trust. Promotion was put in the works.
After years of being an office officer, Meigs was excited by this call to immediate secret action. He kept the information from his wife, Louisa, who was told merely that he was on a trip to New York. Once there Meigs commandeered a steamer from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to act as warship and sailed south on a requisitioned civilian vessel. Keeping the mission from the Department of the Navy made trouble but none that Meigs couldn’t cut his way through. His own ship overtook the warship and arrived off Santa Rosa Island by the second week of April. In short order he managed to station a garrison of a thousand, with another thousand standing by, the harbor now blockaded and barred against boat r
aids. But there was nothing Meigs could do to prevent Confederate artillery on the mainland from lobbing shells. As he was preparing to sail back to New York, he heard the sound of their fire opening up on the fort. It gave him no joy. “The opening of a civil war is not a thing lightly to be seen and though I saw my duty plainly in reinforcing this beleaguered fortress & rescuing my countrymen shut up here from the hands and power of rebels and traitors, I could not [see] the opening of the fire without great regret. It must soon come however & God protect the right.”
6. Father and son
“The country is in flame,” wrote Meigs in a one-line entry in his diary. So was he; passion unloosed. Louisa, who still had misgivings about the conflict, wrote to her son John that she was not enthusiastic about siding with the “extreme North…and such fraternity” who seemed to be dragging the country into chaos for some sort of righteous satisfaction. Nor did Louisa know what to make of the change in her familiar, dependable “Mont.” First he disappeared off to who knew where without so much as a by your leave or any explanation. And then he had become fearsome to live with. “His soul seems on fire with indignation at the treason of those wicked men who have laid the deep plot to overthrow our government…He looks so dreadfully stern when he talks of the rebellion that I do not like to look at him.” Certainly civil engineering no longer sufficed to assuage the storm of outrage that swept through Meigs when he considered what had become of his country; and what, especially, had befallen the institution to which he was most deeply attached and to which he had entrusted his eldest son: West Point. A full quarter of living West Point graduates had thrown in their lot with treason, and in the bitter spring of 1861 he felt their enmity, the collapse of their collegiate esprit de corps, everywhere he went. The commander of the battery that had fired on Fort Pickens was Braxton Bragg, just one year behind Meigs at West Point and thus well known to him in that little world. Joseph Johnston (class of ’29, the same as Lee) had traded in the honor of quartermaster general of the United States for the same office in the Confederacy. And Johnston and Pierre Beauregard, the superintendent of West Point, were in command of regiments that were mustering in Virginia to threaten Washington itself; West Point traitors poised to swarm over his Washington, to camp on the Capitol Park, drink from the fountains he had created to slake the thirst of good republicans! Meigs took all this personally. And then there was Lee, for whose affected gallantry, honor, and all the rest Meigs had the utmost contempt, but whose shadow pursued him every day. Lee’s house was on the Heights of Arlington, which if captured by Johnston and Beauregard would be able to fire directly on Washington and indeed on the President’s House! A dwelling connected inseparably with the memory of George Washington would be commandeered as the citadel of treason for the express purpose of destroying what the greatest of the Founding Fathers had so painfully made: a union of the free. Compared to Washington, what was Lee? Someone who had fouled his nest. On 22 April 1861, a week after Lincoln had called for 75,000 volunteers, Lee accepted the invitation to command the Confederate forces. Meigs was implacable. Any of the officers who had violated their solemn vows taken at West Point or at the naval academy at Annapolis (founded in 1845) should be permanently deprived of civil rights, subject to the confiscation of all their property and deported. But for the renegade leaders like Lee, Johnston, Bragg, Jefferson Davis, and Beauregard, this would not be enough. They bore personal responsibility for leading the people of the South into fire and slaughter. They would forever have blood on their hands. They “should be put formally out of the way if possible by sentence of death, executed if caught.”
A good piece of Meigs burned to take this fury into the field. But he also knew that it was not any reputed mastery of tactics that had recommended him as adviser to the president. Men like Seward and Lincoln both sensed in Montgomery Meigs the makings of a type that had never yet existed in the history of the United States—a war manager. However long the conflict lasted, it would take place on a scale unimaginable to the generation of Washington and Return Jonathan Meigs. The Confederates had planned for an army of 100,000, had enlisted almost that number by May, and under Joseph Johnston, their new quartermaster general, were expecting to have to establish a command economy capable of laying hands on every asset in the eleven states. When Forts Sumter and Pickens were fired on, the Union had ambitious plans laid out by Winfield Scott for seizing control of the Mississippi, cutting the Confederacy in two in the west, blockading Charleston and Savannah, but that was about all it had. Artillery and ammunition had been siphoned off south by the disloyal; customs houses, arsenals, and docks in the South had been seized. There were almost no uniforms, tents, blankets, rations, or, most important of all, animals: the mules that must pull wagons; horses for the cavalry and artillery; cattle to serve as beef on the inevitable long marches. Everything needed creating, virtually from scratch.
What was it about Meigs that made him seem the man who could rise to the challenge? He could be depended on to take no nonsense from the profiteers who were lining up to exploit the Union’s predicament: syndicates who would buy ships and river transports on the cheap and lease them to the government at exorbitant rates; railroad men who would put a premium on the shipment of men and munitions; even horsetraders who would sell the army broken-down nags at extortionate prices. Meigs, it was thought, would give these rogues as short shrift as he had the contractors in Washington, call them to a severe account. He understood the engineering of war like few others: bridge-building, road-cutting, tunneling, fortification. But there was something else that Seward and Lincoln sensed in Montgomery Meigs: righteous anger translated into cold efficiency; someone who had suddenly lost all patience with the childish affectations of military gallantry; someone who seemed to know what was coming, four years before Sherman actually said it.
Not everyone shared this opinion. The secretary of war, Simon Cameron, for example, was against Meigs’s appointment. For Cameron, Meigs was a jumped-up major who liked throwing his weight around; a nobody who had played with fountains and had pointlessly made enemies in pragmatic Washington. He was not someone who understood business. Cameron was overruled by the president and the cabinet. On 13 June Meigs was formally appointed to take Joseph Johnston’s vacated place as quartermaster general of the Union. He was forty-six years old, and the hard work of a life was about to begin.
Meigs was a brigadier general now, but still without direct experience of fire. That was about to change. By July there were more than a quarter of a million men in the Union army and the new quartermaster general was scrambling to procure them uniforms. Any color would do—brown, blue, green, gray. (Many of the first federal soldiers went to battle wearing the identical gray as their Confederate foes.) Boots, blankets, tents, and guns were desperately needed. In every way, the Confederates seemed better prepared. Montgomery’s brother Henry was supplying Southern troops with coats and shirts from his own factory in Columbus, Georgia! So the two brothers were in a uniform race. The older would win, but that conclusion was not foregone in 1861. No wonder, then, that Meigs was against any precipitous offensive into the South that might take the Union armies far from supply lines and depots that had barely begun to be constructed. Let the rebels rather come to us, he counselled Lincoln (who, surprisingly, began the practice of periodically asking his quartermaster general for strategic advice). But with Joseph Johnston established in the Shenandoah Valley with 12,000 and Beauregard less than thirty miles from Washington with another 20,000, a largely hostile Maryland to the north, and the Confederate press noisily looking forward to chasing Lincoln and the government from the capital, irresistible popular and political pressure built on Lincoln to stop the rebel offensive in its tracks. The editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, the most influential newspaperman in the country, urged a quick march, convinced that Confederate soldiers were an undisciplined rabble who would hardly survive their first contact with a real army. But the commander assigned to the task, Irvin McDowell,
knew his opposite number well. He and the Confederate brigadier general had been exact contemporaries at West Point, and McDowell was in no hurry to advance. The troops are green, he told the veteran Winfield Scott. Theirs are green too, came the reply.
They didn’t come greener than John Rodgers Meigs. On 2 July he had come home to Washington on furlough from West Point after two years at the academy. All along it had been a struggle. Montgomery recognized in his eldest son exactly the same qualities that had led his own father the obstetrician to pack him off to West Point, hoping to channel the unkempt energy into constructive achievement. It worked. But John Rodgers was, as his pa had been before him, a handful, rowdy, raucous, so resistant to family discipline that Montgomery resorted to the usual brutalities of the nineteenth-century home: tying his son to the legs of a wardrobe and denying him supper, and then whipping him when he managed to get loose. But the fact that he saw, without question, in his awkward boy the earlier version of himself only deepened the love-bond which was undeniably there. It mattered, then, for John to be admitted to West Point, and when news of the admission came through, Meigs felt his own vindication as well as his son’s.