The Quartermaster

by Robert O'Harrow

  New technology helped Meigs overcome certain challenges. Consider Isaac M. Singer’s sewing machine, which eventually helped the Union surmount the limitations of an industry in which seamstresses stitched most clothing by hand, or Gordon McKay’s machine for stitching soles onto boots and shoes. Before the war, few people understood or valued the power of these innovations. Meigs’s embrace of them—to produce forage caps, shoes, and cavalry boots in bulk—opened the way for their adoption almost universally. Sensitive to untapped possibilities of such technology, Meigs took time early in the war to personally inspect McKay’s shoes. He overruled subordinates who dismissed machine-made boots as a passing fad. Northern factories went on to produce nearly a half million pairs. The army found that they typically lasted eight times longer than handmade shoes. Gordon McKay went on to become a shoemaking tycoon.

  The quartermaster system hurtled into existence like a railroad engine being built on the run. It would soon dwarf all other industrial enterprises in the nation, including as many as 130,000 civilian participants. In superintending this colossal endeavor, Meigs provided momentum to the nation’s economy for years to come. As historian James McPherson wrote, “In these and many other ways, Meigs and his Bureau left a permanent mark on American society.”

  For now, in the summer of 1861, Meigs still had to ensure that Union troops received guns to shoot and pants to wear and food to eat. And that was far from a sure thing.

  * * *

  In late July, Meigs learned that federal officials in charge of buying weapons asked Congress for only $2.5 million, a small fraction of the spending needed to arm the fastest-growing army in the world. Blame for the inadequate request lay with the dysfunctional Ordnance Bureau, which epitomized the organizational chaos during the war’s first few months. The bureau’s chief soon lost his job. His replacement, Lieutenant Colonel James W. Ripley, earned the nickname Ripley Van Winkle for his apparent inability to rise to the demands. Congress had the sense to appropriate $10 million. Though Meigs’s portfolio did not include buying weapons, he took it upon himself to dispatch an agent to Europe to acquire a hundred thousand muskets, twenty thousand sabers, and ten thousand revolvers and carbines. At the same time, the quartermaster scrambled to address a shortage of clothing for the burgeoning army, which had already distributed everything it had. This was not merely a matter of keeping the men warm. Union troops died by friendly fire because of soldiers’ inability to identify friend or enemy. Meigs ordered the irregular clothing replaced as soon as possible with blue uniforms made under exact specifications. (His demand for uniformity and efficiency left the nation with a novel legacy that has come down to this day: small, medium, and large sizes.)

  “The nation is in extremity. Troops, thousands, wait for clothes to take the field. Regiments have been ordered here without clothes. Men go to guard in drawers for want of pantaloons. The necessity is far greater than I imagined,” Meigs wrote. “I had no idea of the destitution, this want of preparation by this Department when I took charge of it. It has been forced upon me by gradual proof . . . We must bear the clamor of fools who would pick flaws in a pin while the country hangs in the balance.”

  Waste compounded Meigs’s challenge. Infantry soldiers often abandoned heavy clothing on warm days. He wrote with frustration about a large, new regiment that cast aside eight hundred coats on a single march, only to find themselves freezing days later in a cold rain. The improvidence vexed the quartermaster, but he attributed it to inexperience. He adopted the pragmatic view that winning trumped his own ingrained sense of frugality. In a report to War Department leaders, Meigs wrote: “That an army is wasteful is certain, but it is more wasteful to allow a soldier to sicken and die for want of the blanket or knapsack, which he has thoughtlessly thrown away in the heat of the march or the fight than to again supply him on the first opportunity with these articles indispensable to health and efficiency.”

  Adjusting his view did not initially change circumstances in the textile mills, which simply could not keep up with the army’s extraordinary needs. That was due in part to the nature of the garment industry. Seamstresses, who comprised one of the largest workforces in the nation, sewed by hand at home or in small workshops, generally earning about $4 a week. They fought against the adoption of the sewing machine, which they feared would drive down their already meager pay. Finding enough blankets posed an even harder challenge than providing clothing. Army regulations called for each soldier to receive two blankets every five years. Gray, wool, and warm, they were substantial affairs that weighed about five pounds each. The problem was that no one manufactured enough of them. Meigs reached out again to foreign suppliers, buying two hundred thousand blankets from brokers in England. In something of an experiment, he also turned to French contractors for entire sets of clothing and camp gear for ten thousand men—uniforms, belts, knapsacks, blankets, tents, cooking utensils, and more. He paid the same prices as the French army, about $800,000 in all. Meigs thought the sturdy equipage might serve as a model for the US Army.

  Though undeniably creative, these efforts triggered political grief. Just as he had been criticized for hiring foreign painters at the Capitol, the America-first crowd now blasted him for spending tax dollars abroad. The Board of Trade in Boston reached out to Cameron and predicted dire consequences, including widespread unemployment and nothing less than the ruin of the American economy. The newspapers injected energy into the dispute by reporting incorrectly that the deal was worth up to $60 million. A younger Meigs surely would have overreacted to the criticism and drafted one of the long defensive screeds that had become a hallmark of his management style. Now he wrote a relatively temperate note to Cameron, explaining that he had no choice. He did include a dig at the disgruntled merchants. “Should the Board of Trade be right in its opinion, and the domestic manufactories be able to supply regulation cloth enough before cloth can be imported from Europe, it will be gladly purchased at any reasonable price and made up into clothing,” he wrote.

  The complaints from the industry eventually had an effect. Congress prohibited most foreign purchases for the rest of the war. Congress got involved with procurement in other ways, too. In an effort to crack down on fraud and waste, lawmakers mandated that supply officers create a paper record of every verbal agreement, appear before a magistrate, and swear to the authenticity of each deal. Though the measures seemed in accord with Meigs’s devotion to good government, he recoiled at them. He thought it folly to even try to eliminate all corruption. Meigs wrote to the chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, saying that such a law would have the unintended effect of choking off the sprawling supply apparatus he was trying to bring to life. To defeat the rebels, the federal government needed less bureaucracy and more unrestrained fighting. He used his note as a chance to lecture.

  “[If] the conditions in regard to contracts imposed by this bill become law, the country may as well at once yield to the Southern rebels all they ask. They are directed by one mind, prompt, strong, determined, bold. They are not distracted by divided counsel; are not restrained by rules, regulations, laws, customs, precedents, all the paraphernalia which the good sense of the people has designated as red tape.”

  The Quartermaster’s Department made headway throughout the fall of 1861, and by the end of the year, the army supply system had virtually supplanted the state and volunteer organizations. Meigs standardized contracting practices and imposed rules for army buying that generally required advertisements in advance, sealed bids, and the award of work to the lowest bidders. The results showed. The Union army now fed, sheltered, and outfitted nearly seven hundred thousand men. It had acquired tens of thousands of horses and mules, along with harnesses, wagons, and mountains of feed. Meigs even found money to fund the creation of an experimental balloon corps for military surveillance.

  The nation’s cottage industries, meanwhile, started working more closely with the military. “There never was an army in the world that began to be supp
lied as well as ours is,” General McDowell told Congress in December. Despite the successes, new problems emerged. The rush to war spurred a triple threat to the North’s economy, including a mountain of debt, rising prices, and a diminished Treasury. Even as Meigs surmounted the supply challenges, he prepared to tell Congress that the army was running out of money. That meant the army might soon be unable to pay for new expeditions, or even provide ample forage to the cavalry, artillery, or baggage trains. Civilian teamsters might desert the service unless they were paid, and then the army could be paralyzed at the moment when the Union needed it most to move and fight.

  CHAPTER 22

  “The War Cannot Be Long”

  Major General George B. McClellan, the North’s greatest hope in the early days of the war, soared into prominence after a string of small but encouraging victories in western Virginia. In the summer of 1861, he had been brought to Washington by Lincoln, who wanted a leader capable of giving direction to the Federal force. Lincoln named him commander of the new Army of the Potomac and then, after Scott retired in the fall, general-in-chief of all Union forces.

  McClellan came from a wealthy family in Philadelphia. He attended West Point, joined the Army Corps of Engineers, served with distinction in Mexico, and then worked as a railroad executive. At thirty-four, he had a thick mop of hair and a lavish mustache. Because he was a compact man, some called him Little Mac, not always in a flattering way. He burned with ambition and spoke cavalierly about conflict. “The war cannot be long,” he told admirers at a dinner in Philadelphia, adding: “It may be desperate.” McClellan had one especially outstanding quality. He relished the work of whipping his two hundred thousand green soldiers into a fighting force. Week after week, he put the men in blue through their drills. In turn, they loved their leader’s style, his direct demeanor, and his abundant energy.

  In those first few months, Meigs shared the foot soldiers’ enthusiasm for McClellan. But his confidence wavered as the year ended with no movement by the army. Meigs could not understand the commander’s apparent unwillingness, in the face of the public clamor, to launch the giant force against Richmond, Virginia. He did not like McClellan’s apparent arrogance or his disregard for the nation’s leaders. McClellan showed no inkling that he understood or cared about the financial impact of his delay. Meigs estimated that the Army of the Potomac cost the Treasury $1,000 a year per man to sustain—$200 million in all—whether they were drilling or fighting. At the same time, no one outside McClellan’s inner circle seemed to know what he intended to do, not even Lincoln. The president once was turned away by a McClellan aide who claimed his boss was sleeping. After the New Year, word seeped out that McClellan lay in bed, ill with typhoid, and yet he refused to cede control to subordinates.

  Meigs was feeling surly about all of this when he received an unexpected visitor at his office. It was the president, and he was distressed. Lincoln lowered himself into a chair near the fireplace. It was January 10, 1862, one of the lowest moments of the war for Lincoln, Meigs, and the Union itself. “General, what shall I do? The people are impatient,” Lincoln said. “[Secretary of Treasury] Chase has no money, and he tells me he can raise no more; the General of the Army has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub. What shall I do?” Meigs counseled change. He told Lincoln that if McClellan had typhoid fever, it would take him six weeks to recover. Rebel forces could attack any day. Meigs said the president had to consider replacing McClellan and getting on with the war. He urged Lincoln to gather his generals. “Send for them to meet you soon and consult with them,” Meigs said. “Perhaps you may select the responsible commander for such an event.”

  Lincoln agreed and moved quickly. He called for an emergency war council and asked Meigs to arrange for McDowell and Franklin, both division commanders under McClellan, to meet him at the White House. They convened that night and listened as the president repeated what he had told Meigs earlier. The president told the men that “he would like to borrow” the army if McClellan did not want to use it. Meigs, McDowell, and Franklin followed up with another meeting at Meigs’s home to discuss the possible movement of thirty thousand men to the York River in Virginia. They concluded it could be done, but it would take up to six weeks to arrange enough boats to move the men and their supplies. When they returned to the White House for yet another war council, Lincoln said he had heard from McClellan. He had caught wind of the discussions to replace him and suddenly felt better. Lincoln said McClellan would attend a planning session the next day.

  This gathering was dispiriting. McClellan took a seat near Meigs and Blair, chatting with them quietly as Lincoln and Secretary Chase shared a whispered conversation. Lincoln pointed to a map and asked McDowell to describe the idea for a campaign that he and Franklin had discussed with Meigs. McClellan was sullen and curt.

  “You are entitled to have any opinion you please!” he said.

  Chase, with his eyes on McClellan, said the group wanted to learn what the major general had in mind for the federal forces. Everybody turned toward McClellan, who remained silent, his head hanging down. After a long pause, the general spoke up. He said he had no idea what Chase was talking about, and, in any case, he did not recognize him as his boss. He lapsed again into silence.

  Meigs moved his chair close to McClellan’s and whispered, “The President evidently expects you to speak. Can you not promise some movement towards Manassas? You are strong.”

  “I cannot move on them with as great a force as they have,” McClellan replied.

  “Why? You have near two hundred thousand men; how many have they?”

  “Not less than a hundred seventy-five thousand, according to my advices,” McClellan said.

  “Do you think so?” Meigs asked. “The president expects something from you.”

  “If I tell him my plans, they will be in the New York Herald tomorrow morning. He can’t keep a secret; he will tell them to [Lincoln’s son Tad].”

  “That is a pity, but he is the president, the commander in chief,” Meigs said. “He has a right to know. It is not respectful to sit mute when he so clearly requires you to speak. He is superior to all.”

  McClellan finally shared a few details, sketching in the outlines of his operations. Lincoln pressed for more. Getting nothing, he called the war council to a close. On the way out, McClellan approached Lincoln. He urged the president to trust him, saying that if he “would leave military affairs to me, I would be responsible, that I would bring matters to a successful issue and free him from all his troubles.”

  * * *

  As the Cabinet struggled with McClellan, it also had to address the incompetence of Secretary of War Simon Cameron. Lincoln and his advisors worried about the corruption that had flourished among War Department contractors. They arranged to get him out of the way, sending him to Saint Petersburg as minister to Russia. Meigs knew the change was necessary. He saw Cameron’s limitations as a manager up close. He nevertheless offered his thanks before Cameron left town. Meigs appreciated the latitude the war secretary had given him and the fact that Cameron supported him now—quite a shift given his professed dislike of Meigs just months before.

  The quartermaster general also appreciated Cameron’s outspoken support for using freed slaves to fight the rebels. At the risk of upsetting the president, Cameron told a regiment of soldiers in Illinois that he supported putting guns in the hands of former slaves and letting them do God’s work. In a draft of his annual report, the war secretary went even further. “It is clearly a right of the Government to arm slaves when it may become necessary as it is to take gunpowder from the enemy,” he wrote in a document shared with the press. Meigs admired Cameron for taking a principled stand on the matter at a time when Lincoln, Seward, and others aimed to put off questions about the slaves as too politically charged. He understood Cameron’s passion now, in a way that had escaped him only a few years before, when his self-absorption blinded him to the true significance of slavery to the nation’s future.


  The war had given Meigs a new perspective, and he now considered the liberation of slaves part of a “great social revolution.” As black refugees flocked to the capital, his men built housing, schools, and hospitals for them. The quartermaster general saw former slaves distinguish themselves as laborers, teamsters, and soldiers. It occurred to him finally that they too might want to contribute to the Union cause. As a practical matter, Meigs concluded there was no choice. In the first year of the war, in a more discreet way than Cameron, Meigs had begun advocating for the military’s embrace of escaped slaves. In one report, Meigs wrote: “In this work the loyal inhabitants of the country, white or black, must be compelled to assist, and it is impossible to cast aside the millions of recruits who will offer themselves for the work, accustomed to the climate, inured to the labor, acquainted with the country, and animated by the strong desire not merely for political but for personal liberty.”

  Cameron’s replacement was Edwin M. Stanton, a lawyer who had served as attorney general under President Buchanan. Stanton was a large man with a salt-and-pepper beard and unkempt, thinning hair. He had an insolent demeanor and held savage opinions about the nation’s leaders, privately denouncing the Lincoln administration after Bull Run. He once described Lincoln as “the original gorilla.” The press and public knew little of such remarks. Northerners honored Stanton for his performance during the secession crisis, when he worked tirelessly to hold the government together. Newspapers hailed his appointment as a wise move by Lincoln. “The army will move on now, even if it goes to the devil.”