The Quartermaster

by Robert O'Harrow

  In late May Lincoln resolved to make Meigs quartermaster general, a move that was opposed by Simon Cameron, the secretary of war. Cameron was a shifty and wealthy lawmaker from Pennsylvania, a former Know-Nothing adherent who followed a loose set of ethical principles. He had not been Lincoln’s first choice. He landed the War Department post as a result of Republican Party horse trading during the nominating convention. It was well known that Cameron often arranged patronage for friends, some of them thoroughly corrupt. Lincoln once asked Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania his opinion about Cameron’s honesty. Stevens, one of the Radical Republicans who wanted no compromise in the fight against slavery, joked that he was confident that Cameron’s dishonesty had its limits. As the story goes, he told Lincoln, “Well, I do not think he would steal a red hot stove.” Cameron wanted nothing to do with Meigs, who was well known for being both hotheaded and honest. He made it clear he would block the newly minted colonel from becoming quartermaster general, despite the president’s wishes. Lincoln was insistent, pressuring his team to persuade the war secretary, offering evidence of his uncanny talent for managing his unruly Cabinet, a group that historian Doris Kearns Goodwin refers to as Lincoln’s “team of rivals.” On June 5 he turned to General Scott, writing:

  My dear Sir,

  Doubtless you begin to understand how disagreeable it is to me to do a thing arbitrarily, when it is unsatisfactory to others associated with me.

  I very much wish to appoint Col. Meigs Quartermaster General, and yet Sec. Cameron does not quite consent. I have come to know Col. Meigs quite well for a short acquaintance, and so far as I am capable of judging, I do not know one who combines the qualities of masculine intellect, learning, and experience of the right sort, and physical power of labor and endurance so well as he.

  I know he has great confidence in you, always sustaining so far as I have observed, your opinions against any differing ones.

  You will lay me under one more obligation, if you can and will use your influence to remove Sec. Cameron’s objection. I scarcely need tell you I have nothing personal in this, having never seen or heard of Col. Meigs until about the end of last March.

  Your Obt. Servt,

  A. Lincoln

  Scott said he would be happy to comply, noting that Meigs had a “high genius” for science, engineering, and administration. The next day, newspapers carried stories predicting that Meigs would be appointed. Still, Cameron continued to delay. Finally, the president wrote a terse note on June 10 to the secretary of war: “Please let Col. Montgomery C. Meigs be appointed Quarter-Master-General.”

  Meigs soon received word that Cameron wanted a meeting. The secretary said he had resolved the difficulties in the way of Meigs’s appointment as brigadier general and quartermaster general of the Union army. Cameron asked Meigs to remain quiet about the post until he could mollify others in the War Department who thought they deserved the job. After the meeting, Meigs prayed that “God will give me strength and wisdom for its duties so that I may discharge them with credit to myself and profit to my country.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Building an Army

  There might have been no man in the country better prepared than Meigs to be quartermaster general. Yet all his training as a soldier, builder, and manager fell short of the demands he faced in the spring and summer of 1861. The army’s rapid growth was unprecedented. Only two months before, when Lincoln first appealed for volunteers, the standing force had been, by some estimates, as few as fourteen thousand men. Now more than three hundred thousand men occupied camps across the North. This outpouring triggered amazement and joy in the North that spring, “surpassing in unanimity and spirit the most sanguine expectation,” as Lincoln put it. It also swamped the tiny government.

  The pressure to use this force grew by the day. Many in the North demanded a swift attack, confident that the war could be won quickly. “On, to Richmond!” Horace Greeley’s influential New-York Daily Tribune shouted. Mountains of practical problems lay in the way, such as how to feed and shelter the force. Patriotic Northerners and state governments had donated some $10 million in cash and goods, buying Meigs a little time. But those outlays had been lavish and uncoordinated and could not be sustained. The army quickly faced shortages. The new force needed a logistical machine that could feed and clothe and arm and move an unprecedented number of men for an unknown amount of time. To create that system, Meigs had to engage in what one historian has called the “art of defining and extending the possible” to provide “three big M’s of warfare—materiel, movement, and maintenance.” That would require improvisation, bold schemes, and perhaps most of all, imagination.

  Meigs was occupied by the most basic questions. What clothing did the army have? What about boots, blankets, and tents? How would he acquire the horses and wagons needed to carry the food, guns, and ammunition? How to reconcile the need for speedy decisions against the obligation to prevent fraud and contracting abuses? And as he contemplated the army’s strategic aims, Meigs thought about technology that might help win the fight, including a new kind of gunboat that could be used on the rivers in the West.

  Secretary Cameron did not help much in all of this. He did not have the right experience, and Meigs did not trust him, in part because the war secretary seemed to calculate how his decisions could benefit him politically or his friends financially. Cameron was disorganized, often forgot details, became flustered, and gave too much room to untrustworthy associates, who would soon face accusations of corruption and profiteering. Meigs asserted himself and convinced Cameron to call on factories to produce rifle-muskets and 300 cast-iron cannons, 200 of them rifled. The government alone could not provide these essentials. Meigs told Cameron that, for now, speedy production was more important than quality, “the second best being good enough for practical purposes.”

  Like all the leading soldiers of his generation, Meigs’s views on war had been shaped by Baron Henri de Jomini, a Swiss-born military thinker who served under Napoleon in France and Alexander I in Russia. He defined logistics as “the practical art of moving armies” and keeping them supplied. Meigs knew that wagons would win the war—along with trains, boats, and other means of transporting men and supplies swiftly over long stretches of difficult terrain. That meant that Meigs had to find horses, mules, and oxen. He sent telegrams around the country to order what the army needed, only to discover that defectors had absconded with most of the army’s stock of animals.

  * * *

  Near the end of June 1861, Meigs began participating in the White House’s war council. Lincoln wanted to decide whether the army could begin campaigning and, if so, when. Meigs joined the president, his Cabinet, Scott, and Brigadier General Joseph Mansfield, commander of forces in Washington. Scott outlined the circumstances facing them. Federal forces included perhaps fifty thousand men on either side of the Potomac in the vicinity of Washington and up to sixteen thousand more upriver, closer to the Shenandoah Valley. Confederate general Pierre G. T. Beauregard, who had unleashed the cannon attacks on Fort Sumter, commanded about twenty-four thousand men and two thousand cavalry spread across Northern Virginia in Manassas Junction, Centreville, and Fairfax. Scott said the federal recruits had better equipment than the Southerners, who faced shortages of food, money, and clothing. He said the rebel army had more experienced and disciplined soldiers, and warned that the Union’s untested recruits would be susceptible to panic. They could be turned into heroes, he said, but for now, they ought to hold back.

  The rest of the Cabinet disagreed. Scott asked Meigs how many men it would take to drive Beauregard out of Northern Virginia. The quartermaster put the figure at about thirty thousand, if they had a full supply of artillery. Scott asked what a full supply would be. Meigs suggested that more than usual would be better, say, three pieces for every thousand men, about ninety in all. Scott responded that was significantly too high and that fifty pieces manned by well-drilled soldiers would be enough. When the meeting bro
ke up, Cameron asked Meigs to walk with him. Meigs praised the secretary for following through on an earlier suggestion to order new cannons. When Cameron acknowledged that he had not acquired the carriages to move the weapons, Meigs lectured him “that it was a time when someone must take the risk of being blamed, must act, and get guns, materials of war.” Cameron claimed he would do whatever Meigs advised. Despite the initial resistance from Cameron, the men had found they could work well together.

  The war council reconvened at the White House a few days later. This time it included Brigadier General Irvin McDowell, who had been named to lead the fight against Beauregard. The meeting did not go well at first, at least in Meigs’s view. Scott rehashed the general circumstances, adding little to their understanding, and then renewed his case that the army should remain inert for now. Scott wanted to give his so-called Anaconda Plan—to squeeze the South by blockading her harbors and commerce on the Mississippi River—time to take effect. But the rotund old general appeared overwhelmed. He confessed that he no longer trusted his insights. He certainly did not want to bear responsibility for the direction of the war. The council rejected his caution. McDowell, Mansfield, and Seward called for action. They asked Meigs what he thought. In his journal, the quartermaster general spelled out his position:

  I did not think that we would ever end this war without beating the rebels, that they had come near us. We were, according to General Scott’s information . . . stronger than they, better prepared, our troops better contented, better clothed, better fed, better paid, better armed. That here we had the most violent of the rebels near us; it was better to fight them here than to go far into an unhealthy country to fight them, and to fight them far from our supplies, to spend our money among enemies instead of our friends. To make the fight in Virginia was cheaper and better as the case now stood. Let them come here to be beaten.

  The council decided the army would move as soon as it could. The group asked Meigs when he could arrange sufficient transportation. He said he would secure enough horses and wagons to support a move to Manassas on July 8, a brash prediction that he would soon regret.

  * * *

  As the army prepared for its move, Meigs learned how deceptive appearances could be. At first, everything in his world seemed well. His son John had returned home on furlough from West Point with the welcome news that he was at the top of his class in math and third overall in general merit. The president and Seward favored Meigs with a visit one morning to discuss several recent skirmishes between Federals and rebels. The capital hummed with excitement, as visitors filled the hotels and supplies arrived at the rail yards and wharves. The din of wagons, carriages, and marching troops resonated from the cobblestones. New technology added to the sense of novelty. Telegraph wires now connected various government departments in a new communication network. Overhead, a balloon aeronaut in an experimental craft could be seen taking practice flights to observe the enemy.

  On Independence Day 1861, thousands of New York troops marched crisply by the White House as Lincoln and his Cabinet looked on. Meigs saw promise in the force, saying it was “a striking exhibition of the zeal of the people.” That same day, the president went before Congress to make his case for all-out war. Lincoln said secessionists had forced the Federals’ hand by attacking Fort Sumter without provocation. In “this act, discarding all else, they have forced upon the country the distinct issue, ‘Immediate dissolution or blood.’ ” Lincoln called on the North to “go forward without fear and with manly hearts.” He asked Congress to appropriate $400 million and give the government at least four hundred thousand fighting men. Lawmakers responded with enthusiasm, voting to give the president enough money for an army of a half million men.

  In the following days, Meigs discovered that he had been too optimistic about his ability to muster animals to support the offensive. He had ordered six thousand horses and mules, but they could not get to Washington. Railcars filled with supplies jammed the depots in Washington. The quartermaster also discovered an acute shortage of wagons. Some nine thousand soldiers heading to the Shenandoah Valley could not go beyond Hagerstown, Maryland, because the army did not have enough wagons to move their supplies from a train depot into the mountains.

  Meigs worked nearly nonstop, spending so much time in his office that he often slept on a cot he had installed there. McDowell’s Army of Northeastern Virginia finally began moving from Washington on July 16, heading toward the rolling hills about thirty miles southwest of Washington. Everything seemed to go well enough at first. General McDowell reported the army had occupied Fairfax Court House and driven the enemy toward Centreville and Manassas. Though his men did not pursue the fleeing rebels, they captured flour, fresh beef, hospital equipment, and baggage. In truth, poor planning for the Federal’s advance left the army vulnerable at almost every turn. The men had left their encampments around Washington with no wagons. Soldiers carried three days’ worth of rations in their haversacks. Many of them demonstrated their lack of discipline, eating provisions with abandon and thus leaving themselves nothing for after the fighting. What’s more, a number of troops let it be known they would leave the army at the moment their three-month enlistments ended.

  Meigs and his son John both yearned to be in the field. John, still home on furlough from West Point, volunteered as an aide and messenger. Before John left, his father helped him buckle on his sword and pistol. Meigs had to stay at his desk in Washington for a few more days, arranging supplies and equipment for the army. He decided to “go up to the scene of action” on Sunday, July 21, when he expected the first great battle of the war to commence. Meigs arranged for his horse and carriage to be at his house at six o’clock that morning. He overslept and did not get on the road until after breakfast, about the time that much of Washington was going to church. He traveled south through Alexandria and then west toward Manassas. Along the way, he encountered ambulances carrying wounded men from a skirmish at Blackburn’s Ford, Virginia. He also ran into a ragtag bunch of soldiers from Pennsylvania who had followed through on promises to go home at the end of their enlistment. While their disorderliness disgusted Meigs, he did not try to stop them. He reached Centreville in the afternoon and joined a group of senators, House members, and other spectators perched on a high, round hill that overlooked the creek known as Bull Run. Cannons thumped constantly, and clouds of smoke drifted over the verdant battlefields. Rumors circulated among the crowd that the rebels had the upper hand.

  Meigs got out of his carriage and told a servant to turn it toward Washington for an easy escape. He mounted a small bay horse that he had brought along. He rode to a wooded area, where he ran into some officers he knew and a group of soldiers they commanded. They had taken part in a flanking maneuver earlier that morning, when the army had seemed to make headway against the enemy. As Meigs prepared to move closer still to the shooting, an officer warned him that the enemy appeared to be closing in. So he stood pat. By now, Beauregard’s forces had been reinforced by ten thousand troops under Johnston, Meigs’s predecessor as quartermaster, who had been transferred from the Shenandoah Valley on the Manassas Gap Railroad. An officer asked Meigs to use his binoculars to examine the activity on a hill about a half mile away. He dismounted, steadied himself and watched a group of skirmishers. As he stood there, he listened to the sound of hostile shells for the first time in his career. Someone remarked that one cannon shot had recently decapitated two Union soldiers. Meigs thought the flying shells were like “someone was tossing paving stones at me.”

  Men around him seemed stunned by the fighting. Brigadier General Robert Schenck, a political appointee, struggled to get his brigade into line of battle. Meigs, without authority, urged a colonel to take control. Troops from forward units began falling back through their line, warning that the enemy was close behind. An officer told Meigs that he had a choice: stay put and lose his life, or follow a group of men out of the woods. “If you will lead,” Meigs said decisively, “I will follow.�
� They left the woods and joined a mass of Union soldiers streaming back to Washington. Meigs saw evidence the Union had been routed. Guns, cartridges, and demolished cannons littered the way. The stuff was so thick on the ground that he worried his horse might misstep and injure itself. Fear spurred the men to behave more like a mob than an army now. One officer, obviously drunk, infuriated Meigs with his incompetence. The quartermaster general tried to rally the frightened troops, but in the frenzy of retreat, and because he was there as a staff officer, no one listened.

  He eventually found his carriage, offering it to lawmakers for the ride back to the District. Astride his horse, Meigs arrived in Washington at three o’clock in the morning. He went directly to the White House, where he had a long talk with the president. Meigs described what he had witnessed, and Lincoln told him what he had learned from the telegraph. The next day in Washington was sad and rainy. Meigs assumed that a new army would have to be re-created almost from scratch. One bright moment came when he learned that John had performed well in battle. A colonel commanding the Fourth Brigade who allowed John to serve as a volunteer aide during the fight reported that “a braver and more gallant young man was never to be in any service.”

  On July 23 Meigs ordered his quartermaster men back to camps occupied by Union troops before the battle. Ever frugal and practical, he wanted them to collect tents and other equipment before the rebels could get it. They returned with 175 four-horse wagonloads.