by Simon Schama
Six months later, in Virginia, Meigs wandered among scenes of extreme distress at Fredericksburg, the town that had been designated by General Meade a collection center for the wounded. With the idea of grinding Lee down, making his deprived and exhausted army incapable of defending Richmond, the Confederate capital, Ulysses S. Grant had done the opposite of McClellan: had sought engagements wherever he could; had attacked frontally with superior force and suffered terrible casualties. Those from the savage battles at Spotsylvania Court House and the Wilderness, at least 14,000 of them (Meigs put it more like 20,000), had overwhelmed the meager capacity of hospitals and had been thrown on the streets, where they lay with dirty bandages and raw, sometimes suppurating, stumps. Cornelia Hancock, one of the extraordinary “angels of mercy” who tended the wounded, and who thought the aftermath of Gettysburg had inured her to the worst, nonetheless gagged on the horror at what she saw in Fredericksburg in the spring of 1864. “It seems like the Day of Judgment. I went into a dark loathsome storehouse, the floor smeared with molasses, found about twenty wounded who had not had their wounds dressed for twenty-four hours and had ridden some fifteen or twenty miles. O God! such suffering never entered the mind of man or woman to think of.” Private houses were desperately needed to get the sick and wounded off the streets, and to contain infections, but much of the population of the town had disappeared on the arrival of federal troops, and those who had stayed barred their doors out of fear or hatred. Horrified by the scale of the suffering, Clara Barton, the leader of the nurses (and founder of the American Red Cross) and Senator Henry Wilson (the commander of the 22nd Massachusetts Volunteers) went to Lincoln to ask him to send Meigs directly to Fredericksburg to make the situation more tolerable and get food to men who might as easily die of starvation as gangrene.
So there Meigs was, doing what he did well: commandeering houses for the wounded, if necessary turning inhabitants out of doors if that’s what it took, using churches as hospitals, finding food other than hardtack and tea for the sick. He had seen American war from the remoteness of his office, had coolly inventoried its wants and its damage; had come close to fire at Bull Run and the fog-girt Lookout Mountain. But now, in Fredericksburg, its appalling truth confronted him: maggots half an inch long crawling in open wounds; men screaming as they were jolted into town aboard one of Meigs’s two-wheel ambulances; women, brave beyond any imagining, opening the mouths of the wretched for water or—more safely—lemonade; men crying for their wives and mothers or for death. All of that Cornelia Hancock could bear just so long as they did not ask her to write home. That she could not manage without tears.
Through all this, Meigs found himself thinking, from time to time, about his son. Since his return to West Point after the battle of Bull Run, John Meigs had continued his eventful career at the academy. While slaughter was proceeding in Maryland and Virginia in 1862, John managed to get himself arrested and court-martialed for fighting with a fellow cadet who, he told his father, had insulted him with dishonorable remarks. Not only that, but John had compounded the first offense by exploiting his father’s closeness to Abraham Lincoln, turning a moment intended for the exchange of courtesies into an attempt to have the president of the United States, then visiting the academy, commute his sentence of summer detention. John even had the cheek to thrust a prepared card at Lincoln which read: “the punishments of Cadets J. R. Reid [a friend who had been involved] and J. R. Meigs are remitted.” Lincoln was all considerateness, turning him down in the gentlest way: “Well Mr Meigs, I should be very glad to do so if it would not be interfering with the authorities here.” Surprisingly, the father does not seem to have berated the wayward son that severely, since both he and Mary Meigs made a point of visiting the delinquent during his detention. They were rewarded for their faith by John Rodgers Meigs graduating first in his class.
By late June 1863, the twenty-one-year-old brand-new Lieutenant John Meigs was directing fortifications for a major part of Baltimore, then threatened by Lee’s advance north into Union territory. He was barely out of the academy when he showed himself very much his father’s son, suggesting modifications of armored railroad cars, designed to protect the line, so that fieldpieces could be mounted inside them. Meigs then had his own little fleet of five of those ironclads with which he patrolled the lines, taking the fight to enemy raiders with his howitzers, rebuilding track, telegraph, and even bridges that had been destroyed as he went. Each of the cars had pet names given by John after Union victories—Vicksburg, Antietam, and so on—and some of them he had disguised as unarmed store wagons. “When Johnny Reb comes up to them and sees the little shutters drop out of their ports and the whole thing suddenly transformed into an inapproachable blockhouse, I think he will be astonished,” the excited engine-riding Johnny Meigs wrote to his father.
8. John Rodgers Meigs, the Shenandoah Valley, summer and fall 1864
Just a year since he had worn the smoke-gray uniform of the cadet! Just a year. He could scarcely believe it. Even in that very little span John had noticed changes in the men. “At the beginning of the war,” he wrote to his mother, “soldiers wrote letters to their friends and made little arrangements about their watches etc. before going into action. Now they march upon an expected battlefield with little more emotion than an ordinary parade ground.” Had he himself become hardened, impassive? He had seen, done, pretty much everything the war could throw in the way of a young lieutenant of the Engineers. It had not just been joyrides aboard his iron railroad cars, howitzers at the shutters. John Meigs had become, just like his father, indispensable: the man to go to, for scouting terrain and topography; mapmaking, fort-building, bridge-building (or destroying), path-clearing, road-making. His reputation grew apace. Ulysses Grant asked for him in the slogging campaign to Richmond, something that delighted Montgomery, but he was told he absolutely could not be spared.
Like his father, John let it be known when the generals missed opportunities. Or worse. He was at the rout at New Market in the Appalachians and thought it had come about through General Franz Sigel’s “poor management of his troops.” He had been in hand-to-hand combat; had come close to capture when his scouting company had been ambushed in the West Virginia woods. He had lost his horse, had sprinted through the undergrowth for his life. He could act the man very well, the managing engineer; the “Lieutenant General” as the soldiers jokingly called the twenty-one-year-old with the tousled hair. “Hand full of maps and head full of plans always,” his proud father wrote in his diary. When John’s blood was up he could be every bit as fearsome as Montgomery. During the debacle at New Market, John had tried to rally troops fleeing to the rear and a Virginian Union soldier (there were some) saw the stocky little lieutenant “cut down a straggler with his sabre” when the trooper refused to fight. But he was also the boy who needed to hear from home; who survived on letters as much as rations. “You have not written to me since last April though I have sent several letters to you,” he upbraided his father in a wonderful role reversal (Montgomery having been suddenly busy with commanding the defenses of Washington). Every contact with home was emotional bonus rations. One day his maternal uncle Robert arrived with his regiment “or the remains of it” at Harpers Ferry in West Virginia looking, John drolly reported, “as the saying is ‘demoralized’ that is as if he had not shaken hands with the paymaster for some time.” Just as the son reproved the father, the nephew offered the uncle money to spruce up a bit, “but he said no he had borrowed $10 and was alright for a while.” The two of them lay flat out on buffalo hides on the ground in the gloaming and spoke of “the dear ones at home,” John throwing his arm around his uncle’s neck as they lay there or taking his hand as they went through all the aunts and brothers and sisters and girls and chums who had laughed their way through the parlor in Washington. “The song you have often heard commencing ‘Do they think of me at home,’” he wrote to his mother, “expresses a feeling which we often experience. It sometimes seems not improbable that th
e constant danger to which we are exposed may make our friends as it does ourselves forget that we are running such terrible risks.”
So while he was capable of saber-slashing a coward or putting the torch to farms and barns, riding rebels down, and—a great satisfaction to a West Pointer—burning and sacking the rival Virginia Military Institute (from which John extracted a bust of Washington to be sent to his old academy as a trophy), John Meigs kept his tender streak. It was the women and children who moved him most. He hated the way the Confederates used “curly-haired” children as pickets to scout for Union soldiers, taking advantage of their high spirits to put them in harm’s way. Then there was the “poor mother” who had come all the way from Boston to Virginia to find her thirteen-year-old boy who had enlisted with a regiment, though too young to serve. (The Confederates in their extremity filled ranks with fourteen-and fifteen-year-olds.) Meigs helped the mother to find the officer who had recruited the “child” and get him arrested. But there was no happy ending for her. On the eve of taking him home he “slipped off to another regiment and in his last letter informed her he was having a splendid time.” On the Monocacy battleground in July he found a mother and daughter, “Miss Alice, a lovely and accomplished girl,” who had taken to their cellar in the thick of a terrible firefight. Alice—for whom John evidently felt something—“declares she did not feel very badly frightened though the muskets were popping out of the windows and the balls rattling against the walls,” until a shell crashed through the wall of the dining room and burst just over their heads with only a thin flooring between, the first of seven to hit the house.
The more he saw, the more John felt, and what he felt most keenly was the mystery of survival or immolation; the peculiar randomness of death’s choice. He deeply admired the ferocious Sheridan and the affection was evidently returned, the bond of two short heroes. Sheridan was known as “little Phil” to his men so in no time the general called his chief engineer and aide-de-camp “little Meigs.” But John thought Sheridan and General Tolbert, his second in command, altogether too reckless in exposing themselves to danger; always discussing maneuvers right behind the skirmishers who usually were the first to advance. Near Charlestown, a Dr. Rulison on Tolbert’s staff was having just such a talk with the general. John was watching, and in his way, half man half boy, was worrying. It was late August, Dog Star days and harvest moons. The discussion was taking place in a grassy field, when John saw a man walk right before them “so coolly I thought he must be one of our men who was wounded.” And then that same man “stopped…raised his gun and fired.” John caught the whistle of the bullet as it came past and its stop as it struck something, someone. He looked hard at Tolbert and Rulison. For a moment there was silence, so John supposed the ball must have hit one of their horses. “But then I saw the doctor put his hand to his side and someone cried out that he was wounded.” “I’m shot through,” Dr. Rulison said in John’s hearing, with the same incredulity any target of gunshot might have. “My God my God I’m dying.” In less than an hour, John told his father, “he was dead.” It was all such a mystery.
Two weeks later on 18 September, John was preparing for battle the next day and as usual felt the need to write to his mother. Sometimes when he had finished everything he meant to say, he felt he must carry on anyway. “I still feel like writing on and talking a little while longer.” That was it. It was like talking.
“We are going to have a terrible fight tomorrow and will have to be up at two o’clock in the morning. I feel that the chances are in our favor and if our troops behave well we must win the day and a glorious victory it will be.
“Still God only knows what the result will be and if it is not for us I am afraid it will fearfully be against us.
“Give my love to all.”
9. Montgomery Meigs and Louisa Rodgers Meigs, October 1864–December 1865
“SEND MONTGOMERY HOME. HIS BROTHER IS DEAD.” So read the telegram, bald and brutal, that the quartermaster general sent on 4 October 1864 to his brother Emlen in Philadelphia, with whom Monty Jr., the third Meigs son, was then staying. Struggling with his grief, attempting to see in the killing the unanswerable will of the Almighty, Meigs attempted to take solace in making an inventory of his firstborn’s virtues: courage, resourcefulness, selfless patriotism; the usual list. There had been deaths in the family before, the two little boys in 1853, a stillborn girl. When Louisa’s cousin George died in a naval attack on Charleston Harbor, Meigs had written philosophically: “and so goes on the work; one after another the nation’s dearest jewels are laid upon the altar of sacrifice.” But as many deaths as Montgomery Meigs had reckoned in his office, this one was inexpressibly terrible. He dug deep for composure; managed it by trying to discover exactly how his son had met his end.
There was no doubt at any rate about how he had been found. An orderly who had escaped the attack had made it to General George Custer’s headquarters on the morning of 4 October. A major sent to the Swift Run Gap Road had discovered “the body of my son,” Meigs wrote in his unnaturally calm, official voice, “where he had fallen un-rifled, the left arm raised (as if he had got off a shot), the right extended at his side. He lay upon his short cape or cloak, a bullet through the head”—just below the right eye in fact—“and another through the heart.” And this much more was agreed on: that John and two orderlies were riding along in the autumnal rain, making their way back toward camp. Ahead of them they saw three other riders dressed in raincoats that covered their uniforms. Meigs and the two orderlies rode on in file, assuming the men were Union troops. But when they reached the unknown men, who were riding abreast across the road, according to the orderly the men suddenly wheeled around, grabbed the bridles, and opened up, firing the shots that killed John Rodgers Meigs. This happened, so the orderly said, in spite of young Meigs surrendering in a loud voice. The conclusion, accepted by Sheridan and by Montgomery Meigs, was that John had been “bushwhacked”—killed in cold blood by disguised Confederate partisans, probably irregulars belonging to John Singleton Mosby’s band, famous for their brutality in the Shenandoah Valley. Sheridan believed this enough to order the burning of every farm and barn within a five-mile radius of Swift Run Gap Road. For a while, the fate of Dayton itself hung in the balance. Sheridan wanted vengeance for “little Meigs.” But he spared Dayton.
Three days later John’s body was brought to the Meigs house in Washington. A day after that he was taken with full military honors to Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown. Both Abraham Lincoln and Edwin Stanton stood, hats removed, heads bowed, as he was laid in the chapel. On 10 October, a week after he was shot in the Virginia rain, John was buried beside his two younger brothers and the infant who had been too little to acquire a name when she died. Attending this second ritual were just father and mother, young Monty, and Louisa’s brother William. “We planted an ivy at the foot of the oak under which he lies & left him alone in his glory,” wrote Montgomery in his diary.
But the quartermaster with the fine high dome of a head and stately beard could not leave matters there. Convinced his son had been murdered in cold blood, he hired a detective, Lafayette Baker, to try to verify the orderly’s story and put out a reward of $1,000 for information leading to the Confederate killer’s capture. But the more the sleuths dug, the shakier the first account seemed to be. When eventually it was safe for the men who rode abreast that evening to emerge from nervous obscurity, they told a different and more credible story about the last minute or so. They were, in any case, not bushwhackers but Confederate soldiers whose uniforms were simply hidden by their raincoats. Trying to get back to their own camp, they realized that these Union soldiers were between them and safety, briefly talked it over and decided to attempt a capture by surprise. But, so one of them said, taking his pistol from beneath his poncho meant revealing the telltale gray at which point John, who always kept his own revolver handy, aimed a shot at this George Martin. It struck him, and it was the shots that were got off in return that
killed the young lieutenant.
Who knows? But reading John’s letters so full of gumption, the Confederate story rings truer than the one that had him surrender right away. And why should his father not want to believe a version that had his son gunned down fighting for his life and his country? But Meigs believed the Confederacy capable of anything and preferred the “cold blood” story. From time to time, after the war was over, he would get letters from the wives of his West Point comrades before the fall—especially from Varina Davis, imploring his intercession with the government for the release of her husband. Iron had entered Meigs’s soul. As far as he was concerned Robert Lee, Jefferson Davis, Braxton Bragg, Pierre Beauregard, and Joseph Johnston had all killed his boy with the murder and mayhem they had unloosed on the republic. And they had murdered his beloved friend and president to boot.
For on Good Friday, 14 April 1865, after going to church and writing in his diary that the country was “drunk with joy” at the peace, Meigs returned home. Around ten in the evening he was told that Secretary Seward, his mentor, had been the victim of a savage knife attack. Seward’s house was just three blocks away. By the time Meigs got there, blood was everywhere and Meigs held his hand to the wound to staunch the flow. Astonishingly, Seward would survive; Lincoln of course did not. It was while he was attending to Seward that the horrifying news of what had happened at Ford’s Theater arrived. Meigs went from one horribly wounded man to another. Lincoln, who had been taken from the theater to a house across the street, was already unconscious when Meigs arrived. Giving himself something to do in the dumb horror, Meigs made himself the gatekeeper, deciding who should and who should not gain admission. He himself kept vigil as Abraham Lincoln lay dying, expiring at 7:22 in the morning. At the funeral five days later, Meigs rode at the head of two battalions from the quartermaster general’s department.