The Quartermaster

by Robert O'Harrow

  Lincoln said he wanted to keep control of federal fortifications in Charleston Harbor and the Gulf of Mexico. He did not know whether the small standing army had enough men, and he did not want to provoke South Carolina into an open fight. Lincoln and Seward both feared that President Jefferson Davis would respond to any move on Fort Sumter with an attack on Washington. The president asked Meigs whether Fort Pickens could be held. Meigs was blunt, something Lincoln appreciated. “Certainly,” Meigs told him, “if the navy would do its duty and had not lost it already.” Lincoln asked if Meigs would be willing to lead a secret mission to make it so. Meigs said he was only a captain and could not command more senior officers who would be involved in such an endeavor. He said the president would need to select someone of higher rank. Seward jumped in.

  “Well, I understand how that is, Captain Meigs. You have got to be promoted.” Meigs would not grant the point, a matter of honor, even to the president. “That cannot be done. I am a captain, and there is no vacancy.” Seward suggested that as the nation’s commander in chief, Lincoln could make it happen without too much fuss. Leaving the question open, Meigs promised he would provide cost estimates as soon as possible. Lincoln then told a story about British Prime Minister William Pitt’s decision to take Quebec, Canada, during its Seven Years’ War (also known as the French and Indian War) with France in the mid-eighteenth century. Pitt did not send an old general, the president said, but instead called on a young man to take on the job. The comparison resonated with Meigs as he walked home with Seward.

  On Easter Sunday, Meigs was about to go to church when an army colleague appeared at his front door. It was Lieutenant Colonel Erasmus Keyes, the military secretary to General Scott. He told Meigs that Seward wanted to see him immediately. Meigs learned that General Scott was more pessimistic than ever about keeping the forts in Union hands. Scott’s mood that morning was due to Keyes, who had earlier explained at length the apparent impossibility of moving heavy guns and ammunition onto the beaches of Santa Rosa Island, where Fort Pickens stood. General Scott felt that Keyes had put into words all his fears about such an excursion. He had handed Keyes a rolled-up map of Pensacola and ordered him to go to Seward’s home and repeat everything he had said.

  Keyes did as he was told. Seward offered a terse response. “I don’t care about the difficulties,” the secretary of state said. “Where’s Captain Meigs?” Seward ordered Keyes to retrieve Meigs and return immediately.

  When the officers arrived, Seward told them to make a plan for reinforcing Fort Pickens, brief General Scott, and then deliver the plans to the White House at three o’clock. Keyes and Meigs went directly to an army office. They made lists of supplies, calculated the weight and size of weapons, mapped out sailing directions, and drafted requisitions. They arrived at the Executive Mansion with no time to spare. They found Lincoln sprawled out, one leg resting on a tabletop, the other on a chair. His hands were clasped behind his head. During the meeting, Lincoln shifted his position constantly. Keyes thought that he had never seen “a man who could scatter his limbs more than he.” When the president asked if they were ready to report, Keyes hesitated. They had not had time to consult with General Scott, and Keyes was worried about operating outside the chain of command. Meigs had no qualms. “I’m not General Scott’s military secretary, and I am ready to report,” he said. He focused on the engineering logistics. Then Keyes joined in after all, describing the gunnery. Lincoln suggested no changes before telling them to see General Scott and launch the effort without delay. “I depend on you gentlemen to push this thing through.”

  * * *

  The next week was filled with precedent, improvisation, and intrigue. Whenever possible, orders were given verbally to avoid disclosure to secret turncoats still employed by the government. The two officers spent hours at Scott’s office and at the White House, refining their plans. There was much discussion about who should command the expedition. Scott confirmed that Meigs was right about his own status as an officer. He could not leap up in rank. Scott commiserated with Meigs, saying it was unfair he should have to leave the prominent projects at the Capitol and aqueduct for such a risky assignment, all on a captain’s pay. Seward, who understood Meigs better than most, told the captain that “fame would come from Pickens as well as from the Capitol, and the Capitol might stop; there was no use in a Capitol unless we had a country.” Meigs assured Seward that he was “ready for any duty, in any place, in any capacity, at any pay, so long as it was in my country’s service.”

  He and Keyes decided that Meigs would serve as chief engineer. They selected Colonel Harvey Brown as leader. A veteran of the Mexican and Seminole Wars, Brown was known for his bravery and his administrative skills. Meigs began working closely with the new president. He drafted orders for Lincoln’s signature, including one directing Navy Lieutenant David D. Porter to go to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and take any vessel suitable for the mission. Lincoln signed something of a carte blanche that said: “All officers of the Army and Navy, to whom this order may be exhibited, will aid by every means in their power the expedition under the command of Col. Harvey Brown, supplying him with men and material and co-operating with him as he may desire.”

  Over the next several days, they prepared secretly for what one historian called “that astonishing affair.” Organizers gathered nearly five hundred men and tons of material at the Navy Yard. They chartered several fast vessels, including the steamships Atlantic, Illinois, and Philadelphia. And in Washington, Meigs finalized the administrative details, including obtaining the cash for the mission, which had to be extracted from the federal bureaucracy discreetly. There was no secret service budget in the army or navy. So Lincoln directed Seward to give Meigs $10,000 from his department funds. The effort to maintain secrecy created problems when one of the navy’s most formidable warships, the USS Powhatan, was called for on two separate missions, one to Fort Pickens, the other to Fort Sumter. The commander of the Navy Yard in New York, meanwhile, was ordered not to tell his superiors about Porter’s plan to take command of the Powhatan. Because even Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles had been kept in the dark, he ordered Powhatan to join three other steamers in an effort to resupply Fort Sumter. Armed with Lincoln’s orders, Meigs convinced authorities in the harbor to ignore Welles, and the ship left port at noon on April 6. That led to fireworks in Washington. After Seward told Welles about the scheme, Welles went to the president. Lincoln, sitting at his desk, looked up and said, “What have I been doing wrong?” When Secretary of War Simon Cameron caught wind of the mission, he claimed that Meigs was absent without leave and threatened to have him arrested and court-martialed.

  Meigs sailed before dawn the next day aboard the Atlantic. He was joined by almost four hundred others, including companies of sappers, and light artillery. They took seventy-three horses with them. Following the Atlantic was the Illinois, carrying extra supplies. Meigs’s enthusiasm bubbled over now. During the voyage, he drafted a dispatch to Seward that suggested a purge of aging leaders of the army and navy. They were excellent and patriotic men, he said, but they clogged up the chain of command. And he exhorted Seward to rise to the demands of the war, reminding him that it took England six months to mobilize for its two-and-a-half-month war in Crimea against Russia, and four months for the United States to get to Monterrey during the war in Mexico. “Let us be supported,” Meigs told Seward.

  * * *

  The trip south was an adventure in itself. The Atlantic ran into a violent gale at Cape Hatteras. With waves pounding the steamer, the crew struggled to keep the men and horses from being washed overboard. Meigs thought he had “never seen so magnificent a sight as this roaring, raging sea.” The ship was forced to slow its engines and veer nearly one hundred miles off course. Meigs was impressed with his ship and already thinking ahead to the logistics and costs of the coming war. He told Seward the federal government should buy it and the other leased steamers as soon as possible. The expedition had chartered the Atlan
tic for a month at $2,000 a day. The government would do much better, he said, to pay the $750,000 value of the ship outright. He was almost giddy about the stealth of the mission and the confusion he believed it would cause secessionists. “The dispatch and the secrecy with which this expedition has been fitted out will strike terror into the ranks of rebellion,” he wrote Seward. “All New York saw, all the United States knew, that the Atlantic was filling with stores and troops. But now this nameless vessel, her name is painted out, speeds out of that track of commerce to an unknown destination. Mysterious, unseen, where will the powerful bolt fall?”

  The enthusiasm of the men on the mission also moved him. No one was sad or complaining, despite the fact that none had been told where they were going or exactly what they were to do. “This loyalty and devotion is beautiful,” he wrote. “At this time, the republic has need of all her sons, of all their knowledge, zeal, and courage.”

  On April 16 the expedition anchored off Pensacola, near Fort Pickens. The trip had taken it to the Florida Keys and the Dry Tortugas, where the Atlantic picked up more howitzers, ammunition, and twenty black mechanics—some of them slaves said to be owned by former Florida senator Stephen R. Mallory, now secretary of the Confederate navy. The friends Meigs had made during his stint on the island had given him three cheers for returning. Meigs launched the operation just before midnight. A small fleet of boats went in a line to the beaches, and he directed them where to deploy. Meeting no resistance, they managed to get scores of men into the fort that morning. Over the next two days men, weapons, and horses poured into the fort. Then the other ships arrived, bringing to almost 3,200 the number of men occupying Fort Pickens. The Union would maintain control of the fort through the end of the war.

  Meigs heard about the siege and loss of Fort Sumter only after the fact. Robert Anderson had surrendered a week earlier after enduring a thirty-four-hour bombardment from secessionist forces. The president issued a call for seventy-five thousand volunteers to serve for three months. It was official: the Civil War had begun. As he sailed home, Meigs worried. Would Washington be in Southern hands by the time he got there? He was confident, however, that the country would survive. He wrote in his journal: “I see a bright future in which this great land under a strong and united government will at length again be free and happy, when traitors will have received due punishment for their crimes, and the sin of slavery wiped out by the hands of an avenging God.”

  CHAPTER 18

  A Soul on Fire

  Meigs arrived back at New York on May 1, proud of the mission’s success. He and his colleagues had received little news on the voyage back. All they knew for sure was that communications with Washington had been cut and that federal troops en route to the capital had been blocked from passing though Baltimore by secessionists. At the boat landing, he gathered up newspapers and learned that thousands of men had made it to the capital, many of them traveling by steamboat to Annapolis and then by rail to the city. He followed that route and reunited with Louisa at home on May 2, the couple’s twentieth wedding anniversary. The next day was his forty-fifth birthday.

  Washington was already a different place. Troops marched on the streets. Several thousand camped in the Capitol’s House and Senate chambers, and around the derrick’s base under the dome. It was a chaotic arrangement that included all the hijinks expected from green soldiers. The stench of human waste became unbearable. A long-serving doorkeeper was beside himself. “[It] almost broke my heart to see the soldiers bring armfuls of bacon and hams and throw them down upon the floor of the marble room. Almost with tears in my eyes, I begged them not to grease up the walls and the furniture.”

  Enemy forces also had collected nearby, and their sentries could be seen patrolling in Virginia at the ends of the three Potomac bridges. Panic had spread after Scott warned of an imminent attack on the capital several days earlier. That fear had given way to jubilation on the arrival of soldiers. Meigs went to the State Department and met with Seward, who sent him to Lincoln. The president was in a meeting with his Cabinet, and they invited Meigs to brief them about his adventure. Though he was cordially received, Welles and Cameron were still smarting at their exclusion from the mission’s planning. Welles thought the assignment put the government at risk. “The extraordinary powers and authority with which Captain Meigs and Lieutenant Porter were invested in the spring of 1861 would have alarmed the country and weakened the public confidence in the administrative capacity of the Executive had the facts been known,” Welles recorded in his diary.

  Meigs had dinner later with Seward and learned more about the government’s plans to raise an army. The secretary assured Meigs he would play a prominent yet undetermined role. He pined for promotion even as he worried about the corrosive effects of his ambition. He believed he should not pursue it too boldly. He told Montgomery Blair, the new postmaster general (and older brother of Francis Preston Blair Jr.), “I prefer in time of peace the place of Captain of Engineers, to any other on earth. But I am always at the service of the US in any place or position be they ordered.”

  The next few weeks were a blur for Meigs—and for almost everyone in official Washington. He attended to administrative matters, including paying back the Treasury the remainder of the secret service funds Seward had given him for the Fort Pickens mission. He accounted for it down to the penny, returning $6,229.55, with the rest having been spent on supplies, weapons, and informants. At Seward’s request, he wrote memos regarding Florida and the wisdom of an offensive in Virginia. In them, he counseled a firm hand in Florida and urged caution about rushing on the offensive. He said the new army would need seasoning before confronting Southern troops. Seward gave the reports to Lincoln, who agreed with Meigs’s assessment.

  All seemed on track for Meigs until he learned that the Cabinet had decided to commission him a colonel, not a general. This was a blow after all he had been told about his chances. Apart from vanity, he felt that he could not serve the country very well as an infantry colonel. Better to remain a captain and serve as chief engineer of “any forward movement.” Meigs thought his highest good might be to take on the job of quartermaster general, a post that opened when Joseph E. Johnston followed his native Virginia into the Confederacy.

  As quartermaster general, Meigs thought, he would be able to apply his experience as a manager. He also could continue to be a scourge to the corruption that flourished in the military’s vulnerable procurement system. He thought the post would be the second most important behind the commanding general, or at least that’s what he wrote to his father that spring. He could barely stand the wait to learn what might come his way. Senator John Sherman of Ohio and his allies had been pressing to secure the appointment for his brother, William Tecumseh Sherman, then working as president of a streetcar company in St. Louis. For his part, W. T. Sherman did not think himself qualified to lead the department. “The only possible reason that would induce me to accept my position would be to prevent its falling into incompetent hands,” he wrote his brother. “The magnitude of interest at issue now, will admit of no experiments.”

  It was all too much for Meigs. He decided to decline the Cabinet’s appointment as colonel. Blair, his friend and admirer, said he understood. Blair was disgusted about how the promotion had been handled and had begun lobbying his Cabinet colleagues to award a more suitable post. He confided in Meigs there was still a chance he would be named quartermaster general. If it were offered, Blair told him, take it. On May 15 Meigs was on horseback, supervising the filling of a new reservoir, when he received a summons from Seward. It told him to go to the State Department immediately. Filled with pent-up excitement, Meigs turned his horse toward the city and let him run with abandon. Seward told him that Lincoln was troubled at the Cabinet’s offer. The president apparently thought that it demeaned Meigs. Seward persuaded Meigs to accept the colonelcy as a step toward something greater. In the coming weeks, the new colonel of the Eleventh Infantry confronted a familiar hurdle: tr
ouble from a slippery secretary of war.

  A drizzle was falling on Washington when a note arrived from the White House. Despite the weather, it said, Lincoln wanted to follow through on plans to ride with Meigs to Great Falls and see the aqueduct. The president needed to get away from his burdens and enjoy a relaxing excursion in the woods. Meigs and Lincoln, joined by Seward, rode at an easy pace along the Potomac, chatting about the war, engineering, and diplomacy. Seward asked Meigs’s opinion about a dispatch he had drafted for Charles Francis Adams, the lawmaker whom Lincoln had appointed foreign minister in London. The document urged Adams to cut off communication with Britain if its diplomats engaged in talks with the Confederates.

  Meigs may have been pleased to be included in such lofty circles, but he burned to become more actively engaged in war preparations. He also yearned to punish those who had betrayed the federal government. Louisa wrote to her mother that she knew of no one who “seems inspired by the same ardor” to protect and avenge the Union. Meigs wanted the rebellion snuffed out and its leaders hanged. “His soul seems on fire with indignation at the treason of those wicked men who have laid the deep plot to overthrow our government and destroy the most noble fabric of freedom the world has ever seen,” Louisa wrote.

  “I tell him that the old Puritan spirit shines out in him,” she continued. “I tell him he looks so dreadfully stern when he talks of the rebellion that I do not like to look at him—but he does not look more stern and relentless than he feels.”

  One of the “wicked men,” of course, was Robert Lee. He also rued the coming of war, and with a more melancholy spirit than Meigs. In a letter to a young Northern girl who had asked for a signed photograph, Lee wrote, “It is painful to think how many friends will be separated and estranged by our unhappy disunion. May God reunite our severed bonds of friendship, and turn our hearts to peace.” Lee went on: “Whatever may be the result of the contest, I foresee that the country will have to pass through a terrible ordeal, a necessary expiation, perhaps, of our national sins.”