At first, Meigs chafed at the change. He knew Stanton as a Union Democrat and thought the war secretary capable of talking out of both sides of his mouth. Stanton could be harsh, even to those he liked. Meigs’s disapproval soon turned to admiration, as the tectonic pressures the men faced together produced a warm relationship. Stanton generally gave Meigs room to confront problems as he wished. Stanton blessed Meigs’s willingness, for instance, to coerce and counsel army leaders. As a consequence, the quartermaster imposed his will far into the field. During a meeting with Meigs in early 1862, Stanton collapsed. He had maintained an untenable schedule. Meigs told him to go home. Stanton said he did not have the strength to move. A physician was called, and for the next three hours, Meigs stayed at his side, keeping watch. The two men came to rely heavily on each other. A War Department clerk once told a story that offers insights about why Stanton valued Meigs. It seems a prominent senator went to Stanton in a full fury about something the quartermaster had done.
“Stanton!” he roared out. “I wonder how a lawyer, as you are, can keep that Meigs where he is! Why, he pays no regard to either law or justice.”
Mr. Stanton looked at his excited visitor and replied dryly, “Now, don’t you say a word against Meigs. He is the most useful man I have about me. True, he isn’t a lawyer, and therefore he does many things that I wouldn’t dare to do.”
“Then why in the name of heaven do you let him do them?” demanded the senator.
“Somebody has to do them,” the secretary answered quietly.
* * *
Meigs applauded the reforms that came with Stanton, including new rules governing War Department practices. Unlike Cameron, Stanton prohibited visitors to his home and curbed the access of lobbyists and lawmakers in the department, who previously had wandered through the offices at will. He also limited Congress’s access to him to just one day a week. Contractors and other visitors also had a single day for lobbying and other business. Stanton reserved the rest of the week to run the war. Stanton also pushed to snuff out corruption. He told Meigs to order quartermaster officers to report any signs of fraud. And he brought a sharp focus on McClellan, urging him to reopen all Baltimore and Ohio Railroad lines and to clear the lower Potomac of Confederate batteries that were harassing Union ships.
To ensure that Stanton’s directives to McClellan took effect, Lincoln himself issued Special War Order No. 1, on January 31, 1862, calling for the movement of army and naval forces against the rebels, to commence on February 22. He followed up with another order that called on the Army of the Potomac to seize the railroad at Manassas Junction in Virginia. In response, McClellan asked for more time, telling the president he had a plan to attack Richmond by way of the lower Chesapeake Bay. Lincoln asked his general to provide a convincing argument that he had a better plan. McClellan pressed his case, and Lincoln yielded. And so began preparations for one of the most ambitious movements in the war: the Peninsula Campaign. For any chance of success, Meigs and his Quartermaster Department would have to pull off logistical feats on a scale the world had never seen.
CHAPTER 23
Gunboats
The Union’s first important blow to the rebels came in the west, on February 6, 1862, during a short, spectacular battle at Fort Henry on the Tennessee River. The story of that victory began months earlier, in Meigs’s office on his first day as quartermaster. As he sorted through the chaos of mobilization, Meigs was asked to assess plans for gunboats that could pummel rebel forts, protect river traffic, and support infantry movements. The idea for the boats came from the recognition that the Union had to control the western rivers to prevail. The rivers ran deep into the South and offered promising alternatives to the rutted tracks that often passed for roads there. The Mississippi bisected the Confederacy and served as a highway of commerce. The Tennessee offered a direct route to the rear of the enemy.
Meigs saw promise in the plans, which included using a skin of heavy timbers to protect the boats. He also realized that even the stoutest wooden boats would turn into splinters under attack by modern rifled cannons. He sought advice from navy commander John Rodgers, his brother-in-law, who had recently been assigned to develop navy armaments for the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. They agreed that at least some of the boats ought to be shielded by iron plating, and Meigs began a search for the money to make the ironclads possible. They had no time to lose. Commerce stood at a near standstill on the Mississippi south of Cairo, Illinois. Lincoln did not need economic chaos in the West on top of the other troubles he faced. The Union also desperately needed a victory to encourage Northerners after the debacle at Bull Run.
Meigs put out a solicitation to boat builders even before the plans were complete. He received eight responses, the lowest of which came from an engineer in St. Louis named James Eads, forty-one, who specialized in salvage operations on the Mississippi. A small man with a high forehead and penetrating eyes, he came from a struggling family. He earned a fortune through brilliance and hard work. He had invented new machines and improved on existing technology. His work, including the creation of a diving bell and special small craft, improved dramatically the recovery of sunken riverboats. Eads later built the largest bridge of its time across the Mississippi, a pioneering steel structure that included the longest arch of any kind in the world.
After the fall of Fort Sumter, Eads examined his maps and understood instantly the importance of aggressive action on the rivers. He sold the idea of a gunboat flotilla to Edward Bates, a fellow Missourian and Lincoln’s attorney general, who had invited Eads to explain his conception for the president and Cabinet members. On August 7, Eads and Meigs signed off on a deal for seven virtually identical boats at $89,000 each, to be delivered by October 10. Meigs loved the project. He craved novelty and saw the boats as experimental technology. They would be slow, clumsy, and odd looking, but they represented a leap in warship construction. The specifications called for a frame of thick white oak timbers, bolted throughout. The deck would be 175 feet long and 50 feet wide at its broadest point. To lower the risk of sinking, designers divided the craft with watertight compartments. Each boat would be clad in tons of iron plating and loaded with thirteen guns. A steam boiler provided power to a paddlewheel in the rear.
Work began almost immediately at a boatyard about ten miles south of St. Louis, in the small village of Carondelet. In September, Commander Andrew Foote arrived in St. Louis to take over control from Rodgers. At the time, the flotilla consisted of just thirty-eight fortified flatboats to hold mortars, nine incomplete ironclads, and three freight-and-passenger steamboats that had been modified into war boats. It took Foote and Meigs months to cobble together the gunboat fighting force and to find the money to support it. They worked through a hybrid chain of command that mixed navy and volunteer army forces, all under the control of the Quartermaster Department. Their struggles showed the primacy of paperwork during the war—even as the Union’s fate hung in the balance. The challenges included resolving the differences in accounting methods used by the army and navy. Under navy custom, sailors’ pay included clothing and “small stores.” The army system did not account for such transactions. They had to sort out these details because neither man wanted to raise doubt about their integrity.
Meigs had to contend with delays and cost overruns. Eads had been overly optimistic about the time and funding the project would need. Though these wrinkles irritated Meigs, he understood the stakes and managed to find an additional $227,000. Foote, Eads, and their construction crews worked relentlessly. With improvisation under impossible deadlines, they drafted and revised designs, invented machinery to make new parts, and built boatyards and docks from scratch. Meigs pulled on the levers of the War Department in Washington to enable it all. The first boat emerged from the dockyards in mid-October and steamed to the staging area at Cairo, Illinois, commanded by a little-known brigadier general named Ulysses S. Grant. As the boats received their guns and supplies, Foote proposed taking four of them and
six thousand of Grant’s men up the north-flowing Tennessee to attack Fort Henry. Grant wanted to target Fort Donelson, on the Cumberland River, but he agreed to Foote’s plan.
The black-painted boats went into service at the end of January, mounted with 32-, 42-, and 64-pound guns, some of them rifled. Each had a distinctive band painted on the smokestack for identification. The fighting men called them turtles for their humped shape and low waterline. At noon on February 6, four ironclads, the Cincinnati, St. Louis, Essex, and Carondelet, along with three all-wood boats, steamed up the Tennessee. They went by Painter Creek Island and then directly to Fort Henry through a storm of rebel shot and shell. Grant’s foot soldiers missed the battle because they were stuck on nearly impassible muddy roads. The Essex soon drifted away after a shot exploded a boiler, scalding and killing several crew members. The other boats held firm as shells deflected off their iron angles. After just over an hour, the Confederate forces struck their colors. When word of the victory spread, the North rejoiced.
A week later, the Union force moved on Fort Donelson. The boats pummeled Confederate forces before being disabled and hauled off for repairs. This time Grant’s men stepped into the fray, forcing the rebel garrison to capitulate. The commander, Brig. Gen. John Floyd, fled. It was a decisive victory that put federal forces on the path into the South. By the end of the month, Nashville and much of Tennessee were in Union hands. The ironclads served as a fearsome weapon for the rest of the war in battles on the Mississippi and its tributaries. The effectiveness of the boats—and the bravery and resolve of Foote, who was wounded during the Battle of Fort Donelson—delighted Meigs. “Whenever you need authority or advice, write, and your dispatch will have prompt attention,” he wrote to Foote. “At other times, stick as you have done to the work of crushing out this Rebellion. I wish we had the same single mindedness and energy in some other places.”
Meigs took great pride in the Quartermaster Department’s role in the victories. He crowed that an enterprising subordinate had, in the midst of chaos, found a way to save money. Because so many riverboats had been idled by the rebels’ blockade of the Mississippi, a quartermaster officer in St. Louis was able to negotiate steamboat leases for troop transport at a fraction of the normal cost. Meigs told Stanton they had “been obtained at rates probably below those of any similar movement ever made.” In spite of his grueling workload, Meigs continued studying how to improve the gunboats. He shared his thoughts with Lincoln in an eight-page letter, recommending changes that would modify the vessels for use along Southern coasts. He included a diagram to illustrate his innovations. “I have thought much lately upon the result of our experimental Gun Boats on the Western Rivers,” Meigs told Lincoln. “They have done even better than I had hoped, and it appears to me that the experience thus far gained may be made available for important operations.”
* * *
The daring shown by Foote and Grant contrasted starkly with McClellan’s caution in the East. Under pressure from Radical Republicans, Lincoln relieved McClellan of overall command of the army, assuming the role for himself and Stanton. He continued to back McClellan as leader of the Army of the Potomac, and stood by his plan for the advance on Richmond. Lincoln issued general orders that it commence on March 18. With preparations under way, Washington received unsettling news: the CSS Virginia had appeared on March 8 near Fortress Monroe, a Virginia staging area for McClellan’s impending campaign. Known to Northerners by its former name, the USS Merrimack, it was an ungainly seagoing ironclad vessel that some thought looked like a submerged house with its roof just above water. Rebel officers soon put to rest any doubts about its lethality. They steamed directly at two Union frigates at the mouth of the James River, ramming and sinking one and helping to capture and burn the other. At least 240 Union men died, the navy’s worst day in its eighty-six-year history.
The attack set off panic. The president, Stanton, and others feared that the Merrimack might steam up the Potomac and target a nearly defenseless Washington. Lincoln asked a navy admiral for advice. When the officer had nothing to offer, the president sought Meigs’s opinion. The quartermaster general urged extreme caution. Meigs shared the fear that the vessel might go on a rampage and attack the capital. On March 9 he ordered troops in Annapolis to prepare to ambush the vessel. Caught up in the drama of the moment, he recommended sending “a number of swift steamships full of men, who should board her by a sudden rush, fire down through her hatches or grated deck, and throw cartridges, grenades, or shells down her smokepipes; sacrifice the steamers in order to take the Merrimack.”
Meigs added: “Promotion, ample reward, awaits whoever takes or destroys her.”
He also put into motion a plan to tow canal boats into the Potomac channel and sink them to form a massive blockade. Both measures turned out to be unnecessary. The USS Monitor, another new Union ironclad, was coincidentally on its way to the Virginia coast when the Merrimack attacked. On March 9 the two ships squared off in an unprecedented battle that resulted in a bloody draw.
That battle was a sideshow to McClellan’s offensive, which finally got under way. Day after day, the army departed from Alexandria aboard side-wheel steamers, schooners, brigs, and barks leased by the quartermaster department. Hundreds of vessels transported more than a hundred thousand men over several weeks’ time. Meigs worked closely with Assistant Secretary of War John Tucker, a former shipbuilding executive whom Stanton had assigned to the initiative. The flotilla formed the core of a huge fleet that the Quartermaster Department would maintain for ocean transport during the war. Department officers under Meigs eventually leased 753 steamers, almost 1,100 sailing vessels, and more than 800 barges. They bought or commissioned construction of about 300 additional vessels. Drawing on contracting lessons learned from his public works projects, Meigs inserted a clause in every boat charter that allowed the government to take ownership if it proved financially beneficial to taxpayers.
In addition to moving men, the Peninsula fleet transported more than 14,000 animals, 3,600 wagons, 700 ambulances, mountains of feed for the horses and rations for the men, pontoon bridges, telegraph gear, and vast amounts of other equipment. Even veteran officers had never seen anything like it. One supply officer wrote, “The magnitude of the movement can scarcely be understood except by those who participated in it.” After the force left Alexandria, Meigs’s involvement with the Army of the Potomac became less direct. He stood by his commitment and the practical need to allow his capable subordinates to solve the endless problems of supply they encountered. Among them was McClellan’s chief quartermaster, Brigadier General Stewart Van Vliet, who had learned the craft of logistics during the Mormon War several years earlier.
Van Vliet and his men eased the massive army onto the coastal terrain, and by the end of April, it was stretched across the peninsula, from Yorktown to the James River. Moving those supplies to the mobile troops posed a far greater test than expected. While planning the offensive, McClellan told Stanton that the roads were passable in every season. As it happened, the flat, sandy pathways became quagmires in heavy rain that spring. Even lightly loaded wagons sunk down to their beds. Only mules could get them through. The department officers quickly adapted to the conditions, and Van Vliet reported that the army was well supplied. Even so, McClellan complained endlessly. And he soon blamed delays in his movements on a shortage of horses and wagons, claims later dismissed as exaggeration. McClellan might have been looking for excuses. He and his senior officers also insisted that his force was not large enough to take on entrenched Confederate forces. One of his senior aides called the rebel front line “one of the strongest in the world.”
Meigs and others in Washington seethed as the army tarried. In June the president implored McClellan to move. “I beg to assure you that I have never written you or spoken to you in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you, so far as, in my most anxious judgment, I consistently can,” Lincoln told his general. “But you
must act.”
CHAPTER 24
“His Best Name Is Honesty”
The quartermaster general met with Stanton and Lincoln every day now—sometimes several times a day—to discuss the army, its movements, and its leadership. Though Meigs lacked battlefield experience, he offered them loyalty, brilliance, and an understanding of military culture. Neither Lincoln nor Stanton had much military experience. They did not know many of the basics of army life, such as framing orders properly and putting them into effect. They did not feel free to turn to McClellan and some other field generals, who seemed reluctant to work closely with the White House. Lincoln secretary William Stoddard illuminated Meigs’s role in a cornpone vignette about open visiting hours at the White House. In the story, a restive crowd waits for a chance to see the president. Suddenly three men barge through and go into Lincoln’s office. Two onlookers discuss the situation:
“Who’s that there tall feller that doesn’t have to wait? And the short feller with him, that’s mostly beard and spectacles? Three of ’em, and more beard, who are they, pushin’ straight in?”
“One of them is War, and one of them is Honesty, and one of them is Ocean.”
“Was that there Stanton? Well, now, if he wasn’t mad about somethin’ he looked it. I’d ought to ha’ known old Welles from his picture, but you didn’t call the other feller.”
“Yes, I did. His best name is Honesty, but his other name is Meigs. He buys things for the army. He is quartermaster-general, and when he gets clean through, there won’t be a stain on him, nor the smell of fire on his garments. Could you spend four or five thousands of millions of dollars and not steal some of it?”
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