The Quartermaster

by Robert O'Harrow

  CHAPTER 20

  Shoddy

  The contractors came from everywhere that spring and summer of 1861, angling to sell an unprepared army everything the soldiers needed. There were contractors for bread, contractors for clothing, contractors for shoes. They provided horses, mules, forage, rail transport, steamers, coal, and construction equipment. They supplied the bullets for killing, surgical equipment to cut off mangled limbs, and ambulance wagons to take the wounded and corpses away. The men of the fast-growing army needed it all, and they needed it now, making the government an easy mark for chiselers. Many contractors operated with the cunning of butchers intent on peddling every piece of the hog. They sold sand in place of sugar, lame horses as wagon ready, and rusty muskets that the army had previously rejected as worthless. A single cattle broker made $32,000 (about $818,000 today) on one order simply by signing a contract and passing it on to a subcontractor. Shipping brokers arranged short-term leases worth more than the vessels themselves.

  One product embodied the fraud and corruption accompanying the army’s mobilization: shoddy, a fabric made of cuttings and other waste retrieved from the floors of clothing makers. Combined with glue, pounded and rolled, it had the appearance of sturdy cloth. Its lack of integrity became apparent only in the field, under a hot sun and exposed to drenching showers. It literally fell off the backs of soldiers. A muckraking reporter called it a “villainous compound” that was “no more like the genuine article than the shadow is to the substance.” The material was “hastily got up at the smallest expense, and supplied to the Government at the greatest.” Shoddy became a catchword for a national embarrassment.

  A satirical song that summer captured the sentiment:

  Close the record. O my country!

  Could it be you did intend,

  Wretches draped in shameful shoddy,

  To the battle-field to send?

  Shocking ripping, shoddy bursting

  Shoddy rotting in a day.

  Government employees enabled the profiteering. Horse inspectors in Washington endorsed the purchase of lame animals in exchange for cash bribes. A clothing inspector at the Schuylkill Arsenal in Pennsylvania approved vast piles of rotten stuff that later had to be condemned. A friend of Cameron’s, appointed by the secretary to quickly procure goods for the army, bought useless straw hats and linen pantaloons at exorbitant prices from yet another friend.

  In St. Louis, a fountain of corruption sprang forth from the army’s new Western Department headquarters. In some ways, the department epitomized the blockheadedness, waste, and abuses of those early months in the war. The department was led by Major General John Frémont, the flamboyant former presidential candidate sometimes known as the Pathfinder. The Blair family had pushed Frémont on Lincoln as its particular friend. He undoubtedly had many qualities that recommended him, but strict honesty and administrative skills were not among them. Frémont leased a lavish mansion for his headquarters and surrounded himself with bodyguards—or sentinels, as he called them—in the manner of a prairie potentate. Major Justus McKinstry, a West Point graduate, served as Frémont’s quartermaster. McKinstry hired others like himself: cronies of Frémont’s who played loose with the government’s money. Meigs permitted McKinstry to buy as he saw fit and, in an emergency, even to set the prices. Though he was energetic in arranging contracts, he cut corners. Meigs told McKinstry and Frémont to follow proper contracting procedures whenever possible and to send proposals and bids to Washington for review. The men ignored his orders, and Frémont became brazen. In the summer of 1861, he went over Meigs’s head and complained to Representative Francis P. “Frank” Blair Jr. of Missouri that he was not getting enough support from Washington. Meigs caught wind of the complaints after Blair spelled them out in a note to Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, his brother, who showed the letter to Meigs.

  The allegations irritated Meigs, who had passed on every request for funding to the Treasury with alacrity. He wrote Frank Blair that he had purposefully given McKinstry room to pay whatever he thought was necessary to acquire needed goods under the pressures of mobilization. He shared a guiding principle for the Quartermaster General Department at the time: “the most rapid possible concentration of overwhelming force” by the United States. “Tell General Frémont that no man more than myself desires to sustain him; no one is more ready to take a responsibility to assist him,” Meigs wrote. “The general is charged with saving the country. The country will be very careful to approve his measures, and will judge his mistakes, if any, very tenderly if successful.”

  Despite Frémont, Meigs’s reputation for competence spread widely that summer. George Templeton Strong, a member of the new United States Sanitary Commission, a volunteer relief organization, thought he was the ablest man he had met in the capital. “He is an exceptional and refreshing specimen of sense and promptitude, unlike most of our high military officials. There’s not a fibre of red tape in his constitution.” The quartermaster worked hard not to be dogmatic about bidding, and he accepted a certain amount of extravagance during a crisis. But he would not tolerate fraud or theft—evidence of which came his way after Frémont granted a group of Chicago citizens the authority to help outfit new regiments. While making their arrangements, the volunteers discovered irregularities in the purchase of horses by Frémont’s quartermaster agents. It seems that the agents were paying $75 and charging the government up to $110 for the animals. They took their concerns to Meigs, who launched one of several government reviews of the western operations.

  Those reviews provided cautionary tales of what could go wrong. Contractors had double billed for forage on deals awarded without competition. Frémont had ordered his men to accept a load of rotten cast-off blankets for sick and dying men. He personally arranged construction of lavish brick barracks, at unknown expense. He and his subordinates also made more than two hundred irregular appointments to his bodyguard ranks. Among them was a “director of music”—an engineer with the rank of captain. By August, only a few months into the war, the Western Department was millions of dollars in debt.

  All the spending seemed to do little to help where it mattered most, the fight against the rebels. Frémont was blamed for failing to give adequate support to General Nathaniel Lyon who, on a mission to clear Missouri of secessionist soldiers, was defeated at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek. More than twelve hundred Federals were killed, wounded, or missing in furious fighting on August 10. Lyon was the first Union general killed in action.

  The problems in St. Louis moved beyond procurement. At the end of August, Frémont declared martial law, confiscated the property of secessionists, and freed their slaves. Lincoln did not want this now, not at all. The president had worked hard to keep Missouri and other border states in the Union, and Frémont’s declaration outraged the state’s conservative Unionist Party members. The White House resolved to investigate matters in St. Louis and, on September 10, dispatched Montgomery Blair and Meigs to take stock. The men found an odd scene. Sycophants milled about Frémont’s headquarters. McKinstry, recently jumped three ranks to brigadier general, spoke with them at a rapid clip and seemed untrustworthy. The citizens they spoke to described Frémont as more intent on launching a dramatic mission on the Mississippi than on protecting Missouri. They said he tolerated no dissent or criticism.

  Montgomery Blair sent an urgent telegram to the president, imploring him to consider giving power in the state to Meigs. “Things are deplorable, and action must be decisive and prompt to save the state,” the note said. Lincoln held off taking such a move. The day before their return to Washington, Frémont ordered the arrest of Rep. Frank Blair, a volunteer colonel, after discovering that he had criticized him in letters to Washington. Meigs and Montgomery Blair returned to Washington and went to the White House, where Blair fulminated about his brother’s arrest. Meigs described Frémont as “prodigal of money, unscrupulous, surrounded by villains, inaccessible to the people, and ambitious.”

  Fr
émont knew trouble was coming his way. He fired McKinstry, making him a scapegoat. That did not deceive anyone. Major Robert A. Allen, a veteran quartermaster officer who replaced McKinstry, dove into the books. He found orders worth hundreds of thousands of dollars that were “informal, irregular, and not authorized by regulations or law.” Allen called on Meigs to take strong steps. “If the reckless expenditures in this department are not arrested by a stronger arm than mine,” Allen wrote, “the Quartermaster’s Department will be wrecked in Missouri alone.” Frémont lost his post that fall. More punishment was in store for McKinstry.

  * * *

  Congressional overseers, along with an investigative panel appointed by Lincoln, began to follow evidence of corruption. The most public of these reviews came from a select committee formed that summer at the request of Representative Charles H. Van Wyck, an anticorruption activist from New York. Van Wyck was a brawler disguised as an intellectual. The year before, he had accused Southerners of being cowards who burned slaves at the stake. When called out to fight by a representative from Mississippi, he proclaimed: “I travel anywhere without fear of anyone.” In February 1861 three men attacked him as he walked on the north side of the Capitol. His life was saved when a notebook and a folded copy of the Congressional Globe—the record of debates in Congress—stopped a knife from plunging into his chest. Van Wyck punched one of the attackers and then shot another.

  His committee’s mandate included any contracts for provisions, supplies, transportation, and services. Congress authorized them to determine if the contracts had been properly advertised and bid, and whether anyone received inflated profits. The committee had authority to call witnesses and subpoena records. Its five members indulged in the usual aggression and hyperbole that transformed every oversight effort on Capitol Hill into a political fight. They focused much of their attention on St. Louis during Frémont’s tenure and the activity of McKinstry and his aides. The men also drew on the work of the Lincoln commission, which was examining the debts of the Frémont operations. They collected two thousand pages of documents and testimony that showed wrongdoing across the country, involving people in every political corner. The abuses they exposed went far beyond anything that even the skeptical Meigs had suspected.

  In the rush to war, McKinstry arranged to pay inflated prices to a single St. Louis firm, Child, Pratt & Fox. In one case, he paid 35 cents for thousands of mess pans that cost the firm 291/2 cents. He paid 65 cents for camp kettles costing 421/2 cents. The list of items bought from Child, Pratt & Fox at exorbitant rates went on and on: picket pins (for tethering horses), overcoats, pants, blue blouses, cavalry equipment. More than $800,000 went to the firm, at up to 40 percent profit. The army eventually charged McKinstry with corrupt practices as a public official. After much deliberation, a court-martial found him guilty of twenty-six transgressions. Lincoln himself dismissed McKinstry from the service.

  The contracting committee then bore down on Meigs. It claimed to find evidence that he had tolerated Frémont’s practice of paying railroads whatever they asked, much to the detriment of the Treasury and the public interest. It focused on one transaction involving a thousand horses. The horses had been transported by rail at substantial cost from Pittsburgh to Springfield, Illinois. The lawmakers expressed dismay. Why would the quartermaster pay to ship horses west on the railroad when they could have been just as easily purchased at less cost in the Midwest? The committee called the episode a disgrace. They got it wrong, though, according to a plausible account from Meigs. The army had sent the horses to Washington to move artillery before the cannons arrived. Meigs then shipped them west to avoid the great cost of forage. The committee eventually backed off and acknowledged the remarkable efforts of Meigs and his department.

  Van Wyck gave voice to popular resentment about the corruption in general, saying that “harpies” and “vultures” had descended on the Treasury at the war’s outset. “The mania for stealing seems to have run through all the relations of Government—almost from the general to the drummer boy,” he said. Lincoln was among the angry. With his encouragement, Congress enacted the False Claims Act of 1863, a landmark law that gave whistle-blowers a reward for bringing forward evidence of contracting abuses. Sometimes called “Lincoln’s Law,” it remains one of the government’s key enforcement tools against fraud today.

  CHAPTER 21

  “Hard Work and Cold Calculation”

  The challenges facing the Quartermaster Department took on astonishing dimensions. Amid the confusion, corruption, and fear, Meigs and his men had to create a supply system that would satisfy the highest generals and the lowliest of volunteers, along with newspaper columnists and lawmakers ready to pounce on any sign of wrongdoing. They encountered an endless flow of obstacles with too few men spread across a rugged continent, always under tactical, strategic, and political deadlines. They had to succeed for the simple reason that the Union would lose the war without them.

  Much has been written about the tactics and glory of battles. But as Napoleon said, an army marches on its stomach. Before a commander can even hope to attack, destroy, or simply wear down an enemy, he must first be able to deliver 3,000 calories a day to each soldier. He must keep them warm and healthy. Then he has to be able to move them from point A to point B in a reasonable amount of time. There is no glamour in this, only “hard work and cold calculation.” Meigs embraced all of this as his lot. “The great part of a General’s labor history does not record,” Meigs wrote to his son John in November 1861. “The fighting, the direction, even the planning of the battles occupies in the whole seconds only to the hours of labor involved in the preparation & execution of marches.”

  Regulations mandated that the Quartermaster Department provide transportation for all men, food, weapons, and materiel, a list that grew as the war expanded. It supplied horses to haul artillery, cavalry, and wagon trains, as well as the forage to feed them. It built barracks and hospitals. It furnished uniforms, socks, shoes, needles, thread, pots, canteens, and other goods to the men. The department’s men also constructed and repaired roads, bridges, railroads, and military telegraph lines. They chartered ships and steamers, providing the coal to fuel them and the docks and wharves to unload them. They paid all expenses relating to military operations, except those assigned specifically to other departments.

  The department had changed little for many years before the war. Until Joseph Johnston’s brief ten-month stint, the department had had only one quartermaster general in four decades. With secession, the authorized staff of thirty-seven officers and seven military storekeepers lost eight defectors to the Confederacy, Johnston included. A third of the remaining men had been in their jobs for more than two decades. New recruits learned on the job. Meigs often complained that he did not have enough people to handle the ocean of paperwork behind the logistics. This was not mere griping. More than two-thirds of the handbook of army regulations at the time focused on supply forms and procedures. Those rules, applied with discipline, served as grease that lubricated the enormous, powerful war machine just then sputtering to life. Congress saw that something had to be done. So it authorized quartermaster captains for every brigade, while also increasing the permanent force in Washington with two dozen additional officers. The department got a new colonel, two lieutenants, and four majors. It was not enough but it was something.

  The Union retained experienced men who understood the nuances of supply systems—so far as they could be known in the midst of such rapid change. A dozen of the most important quartermaster officers came to their posts after training at West Point. They knew their business better than their boss, at least at first, and provided service as vital to military operations as harnesses are to a four-horse wagon. Without their determined efforts, the war machine would go haywire, pulling in a thousand directions. The supply system relied heavily on depots, and Meigs gave his depot officers room to run them and their field operations as they wanted, so long as they followed his rules a
nd principles. He shouldered responsibility for ensuring that they had enough supplies.

  From the first, he sheltered his men from political interference. He warned Cameron away from a plan to replace clerks with the war secretary’s handpicked people. He even pushed back on job recommendations from the president and the first lady. The department had enough to worry about without political meddling. The surge in spending and acquisition had no precedent. In the first year of the war, spending shot up eighteenfold to $174 million annually. It kept rising in each of the next four years. By contrast, expenditures by the Quartermaster Department in the war with Mexico had jumped only eightfold to $21 million.

  The outlays by the department now far exceeded any other category of spending in the entire federal government. Those were huge sums at a time when skilled artisans such as carpenters earned less than $2 a day.

  Quartermaster employees needed to be entrepreneurial, dogged, and diplomatic. In every theater of war, at every supply depot and in the cramped offices they occupied in Washington, they engaged in a complex dance with clothing makers, weapons factories, railroads, providers of forage, and many others. They made up many of the steps as they went along. Among the best of Meigs’s subordinates was Rufus Ingalls, who became a force of his own during the war. He wrote later: “It must be borne in mind that war on a scale inaugurated by this rebellion was decidedly new to us, if not the civilized world . . . It required the united abilities and exertions of our whole department, aided by the loyal producers and manufacturers of the country to meet the public wants; and, if there were temporary failures, the department should stand excused, for its labors have been unparalleled and gigantic.”

  To be sure, Federals had more to draw on than their Southern counterparts did. During the long boom after the Mexican War, the North’s economic growth far surpassed that of the Southern states. Cotton textile manufacturing in particular soared, with production more than doubling since 1850. Yet the North’s industrial economy, like American society in general, was still in a “gangling, adolescent state” and had far to go before it reached maturity. For all its growth, it remained diffuse and largely uncoordinated. Production lagged far behind what the growing army needed to stay alive and moving.