The Quartermaster

by Robert O'Harrow

  “I guess I could. I wouldn’t steal a cent, but some of it might stick, somewhere, or sift out into the backyard somehow, while there was such an awful heap bein’ carted.”

  “There won’t any stick to old Honesty, nor sift into his backyard. He and a few men like him are the main reasons why we’re going to win this fight.”

  Meigs became Stanton’s “political ally, professional colleague, and personal friend,” as one historian has written, and Stanton often sought Meigs’s advice. When Lincoln demoted McClellan from general-in-chief, Stanton asked Meigs what he thought. Meigs was blunt and reassuring, saying that no general operating so far from military headquarters, with two hundred thousand men under his immediate direction, could manage such a post. “Gen. McClellan ought not to have such responsibility & I should think be glad to be relieved of it,” Meigs wrote.

  Stanton turned to Meigs again when he discovered that McClellan left behind inexperienced men to guard the capital, contrary to Lincoln’s orders. Out of pique and concern, Stanton initially refused to honor a request from McClellan for more men. When he finally agreed, Stanton asked Meigs to draft an order, on May 17, dispatching General McDowell to join the right wing of McClellan’s force with nearly forty thousand men, with an emphasis on protecting Washington from a rebel attack. Meigs did so after consulting with Lincoln, General Totten, and at least two others. Meigs edited those same orders after Lincoln added language he thought would encourage McDowell to make decisions on the fly. Lincoln offered these words: “You will retain the separate command of the forces taken with you; but while co-operating with General McClellan you will obey his orders, except that you are to judge, and are not to allow your force to be disposed otherwise than so as to give the greatest protection to this capital which may be possible from that distance.”

  Meigs convinced the president that such guidance ran contrary to army custom. He told Lincoln it “is dangerous to direct a subordinate not to obey the orders of his superior in any case.” Meigs counseled him to make the suggestion to McClellan and then give a copy of the orders to McDowell. The president went along. The quartermaster also got directly involved with movements in the field. On May 23, while working in Washington, he took on a commanding role briefly after Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson overwhelmed the Union garrison at Front Royal, Virginia, dangerously close to the Potomac. Early in the afternoon, General John W. Geary, commanding a small force near Rectortown, Virginia, fired off inaccurate telegrams warning about an enemy buildup east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He expressed concerns about the possibility of a move against the railroad at Thoroughfare Gap. At eleven at night, Major General Nathaniel P. Banks sent a telegram addressed to Stanton from Strasburg, saying the Union force had withdrawn in the face of superior numbers and was seeking reinforcements. The anxiety of army leaders was palpable. Lincoln and Stanton were away, steaming back to the city after meetings with McDowell at Fredericksburg, Virginia. An assistant secretary of war reached out to Meigs. “The secretary will be here in the morning. Have you any suggestions to make?” Meigs didn’t hesitate. He issued orders over the signature of the absent Stanton, commanding a regiment of troops to prepare for movement.

  Meigs played an important role in helping to formulate a response to Jackson’s presence in the Shenandoah Valley. On May 24 Lincoln and Stanton suspended the order directing McDowell to McClellan. In an order drafted by Meigs, Lincoln told McDowell instead to go to the valley in pursuit of Jackson. Meigs expressed “hope it will result yet in capturing a part of Jackson’s force.” It was a fateful decision, though, one that diverted reinforcements away from McClellan. “This is a crushing blow to us,” McDowell wrote Stanton at the time. There is no way to know whether the presence of McDowell’s corps at McClellan’s side would have spurred a successful drive on Richmond. But “the lack of it made McClellan more cautious than ever and gave the Confederate army defending the capital much-needed breathing space,” according to historian Peter Cozzens.

  * * *

  The campaign on the peninsula lasted more than two months and yielded little of strategic value. McClellan’s caution taxed an already struggling supply system. He lay siege to Yorktown and then, when the rebels retreated, slogged up the peninsula over the bad roads. The logistical demands were unprecedented. The army consumed six hundred thousand tons or more of supplies every day, nearly all of which had to be shipped in at great expense. McClellan made matters still more challenging by prohibiting troops from foraging in enemy fields unless they paid for whatever they took or issued receipts guaranteeing government payment later. He thought this benign approach would win over Southerners and shorten the war—a notion that Meigs condemned as silliness, or worse. Meigs had come to believe that to win, the Union had to turn away from this “tenderness for the rights of property” in enemy territory. In his judgment, the Union had to use every means to support its soldiers and exhaust the rebels’ will to fight. This included using enemy land to feed the army’s great herds of horses and mules.

  The provision of forage presented one of the great challenges of the war to Meigs’s department. Every horse needed to eat fourteen pounds of hay and twelve pounds of corn, barley, and oats, while each soldier required just three pounds of food. All together, the animals of the Army of the Potomac needed more than four hundred tons of forage each day. Without that fuel, the army could not move. Buying that feed and moving it to the right place, in a timely way, without bankrupting the government, was a stupendous logistical problem.

  At the beginning of the war, Meigs had left it to quartermaster officers at each depot and with each army to buy feed as needed. Those officers soon began competing with one another for supplies, driving up prices and further depleting a nearly empty Treasury. To contain the costs, a senior quartermaster officer launched a plan to cut corners by feeding the animals a less expensive mix of corn and oats. Contractors soon grasped that they could jack up profits by secretly bulking up the feed mix with less costly and less nutritious grains. Meigs investigated those scams, studied the market, and imposed price controls. To minimize manipulation of the market, he gave a single quartermaster officer in New York authority to negotiate giant forage contracts for the armies in the east. After those initiatives took hold, delays due to winter storms, railway disruptions, and simple chaos sometimes put the animals perilously close to starvation. But the department eventually got a grip on the problem, accumulating enough grain and hay to feed sixty-five thousand animals for forty days straight.

  * * *

  To keep the army moving on the peninsula, the quartermaster men solved many problems. At a supply depot along the Pamunkey River, for instance, they constructed temporary piers. To fashion the piers, they pulled boats and barges onto shore at high tide, covered them with planks, and then linked them together. They herded cattle over land, maintaining them in corrals and butchering them as needed. To minimize chaos, Van Vliet ordered that supplies remain aboard ships until needed. His men constructed a steam-hoist to speed the movement of food, ammunition, and other supplies onto wagons. The systems worked, but available food often could not be moved quickly enough over narrow, crowded, and mucky roads. Inevitably, many soldiers could never get enough to eat, and became churlish when their coffee failed to appear. They suffered from the shortage of vegetables, and as the campaign dragged on into summer 1862, sickness spread among the troops. They naturally blamed the quartermasters. “The means of transportation are still incomplete,” one observer wrote. “And the quartermasters [are] incompetent.”

  Still, the quartermaster officers did their part, and the army eventually moved so close to Richmond that soldiers could hear church bells ringing. Then a momentous change in rebel leadership altered the war’s complexion. Robert Lee assumed command of the Confederate army after General Joseph Johnston was wounded. Lee brought a new aggression and intelligence to the rebel war effort. On June 25 the brutal fighting now known as the Seven Days Battles began. The ne
xt day, Lee launched an attack aimed at forcing McClellan to defend his supply lines and engage in battle away from Richmond. Lee was intent on preventing a siege of Richmond. Federal soldiers suffered thousands of casualties before McClellan decided to retreat to Harrison’s Landing on the James River, about twenty-four miles southeast of Richmond.

  In the rush back, the trains of wagons supporting each brigade were permitted to make their own way. Instead of one well-organized line, there were as many as nine, all of them vying for position. Competition to get to the head was fierce because the roads were inevitably ruined for those lagging behind. Confusion often resulted. The Quartermaster Department bore responsibility. “A struggle for the lead would naturally set in, each division wanting it and fighting for it. Profanity, threats, and the flourishing of revolvers were sure to be prominent in the settling of the question,” wrote John D. Billings, a soldier with the Army of the Potomac.

  McClellan considered his retreat a success. He sent off notes to Washington that expressed his excitement. To Meigs and others, though, the campaign was a failure. The capture of Richmond had for a brief moment seemed only a matter of will—something that McClellan seemed to lack.

  Meigs’s view of the war shifted now, as hopes for a swift resolution disappeared. He realized the South would resist even if it became apparent that it could not win. The rebels would have to suffer before they would capitulate. Like a growing number of Northerners, he thought the Union needed a different kind of general, someone who would fight a different kind of war—an encompassing war sustained by industrial power and righteous resolve. “In the mean time the north must hold this wolf by the ears until it is exhausted by starvation or destroyed by the kicks & cuffs which it may yet receive,” Meigs wrote at the time. “Death or victory is the . . . necessity of our case, & I do not the less doubt the ultimate victory that God for our sins leads us to it through seas of blood.”

  * * *

  In the summer of 1862, the White House faced another strategic question: Should McClellan and his army stay at Harrison’s Landing or evacuate? McClellan maintained that the force opposing him was 200,000 strong. A growing number of doubters questioned his estimates. It seemed no one could know for sure. To clarify matters, Meigs studied Southern newspapers and the reports about recent battles. He identified the divisions, brigades, and batteries involved in each, and then pieced together an estimate of the size of the rebel force at about 105,000 men. If his sleuthing showed a clever turn of mind, it did not make much of a difference. McClellan sent so many mixed messages to Washington that fear of sudden annihilation at the hands of a quick-moving rebel army lingered among those in the White House. Though McClellan claimed he wanted to try for Richmond again, he also suggested that Lee might try to pin him on the peninsula with some of his men and make a move on Washington with the rest. Meigs, Seward, and others quaked at this prospect.

  Meigs’s anxiety peaked one night in July after reading gloomy dispatches from McClellan and his staff. He rushed up to Lincoln’s summer retreat, at the Old Soldiers’ Home in the District, woke the president, and urged him to ship the men off Harrison’s Landing. Meigs recommended killing the horses that could not be taken. It was a strange, overheated moment. Even the tolerant Lincoln thought it was odd. “I who am not a specially brave man have had to sustain the sinking courage of these professional fighters in critical times,” he told an aide. If nothing else, it showed that Lincoln was not easily pushed to do something against his judgment, even by a trusted advisor. For his part, Meigs thought the president misjudged the threat. “President thinks I tried to stampede him,” Meigs wrote in a pocket diary he kept during the war. “How long before he comes to my opinion to withdraw the army from a dangerous and useless position, and use it to defend the free states and as a nucleus for new armies?”

  Lincoln decided to go to Harrison’s Landing and take stock for himself. He was relieved by what he found. All was not about to be lost. Meigs was not mollified. He thought McClellan might be disloyal and maybe even capable of a coup. After all, McClellan had made clear he did not have faith in Lincoln. His troops revered him, even after the recent setbacks. Lieutenant Colonel Rufus Ingalls had replaced Van Vliet as McClellan’s chief quartermaster after Van Vliet requested reassignment to New York. Ingalls told Meigs in late July that the army was in magnificent shape, and its leader the “pride and boast” of the men. Their faith in McClellan unsettled Meigs. “They cling to him with love and confidence even through these fatal delays & these terrible retreating combats,” Meigs wrote Louisa. “It would perhaps be dangerous to our state to have a great leader with this power.”

  In July Major General Henry Halleck arrived in Washington as the army’s new general-in-chief. Halleck asked Meigs to accompany him to Harrison’s landing on the 24th. Unknown to McClellan, the new commander had the authority to decide what next to do with McClellan and his Army of the Potomac. Meigs worried about insurrection again one night while Halleck conferred with McClellan. Sitting at a campfire at twilight, he listened as officers vented their frustration about Lincoln, Stanton, and others in the capital. One officer said he’d like to “march on Washington to clear out those fellows.” When another general questioned the tone of their chatter, the men scattered into the dark. Halleck decided the army would withdraw from the peninsula and occupy Aquia Creek, bringing the unfortunate campaign to an end.

  Historians have debated the many reasons for McClellan’s failure in the peninsula, but no one can blame the quartermaster men. McClellan asked them to do what had not been achieved before. And in dismal weather, on bad roads, and in the face of endless demands, they performed well. For them, it was an unqualified victory. “The success of these movements gives striking evidence of the greatness of the military resources of the nation,” Meigs wrote in his annual report. To the end of his life, Meigs defended his suggestion to Stanton and Lincoln that McDowell confront Jackson in the valley instead of joining McClellan as planned. Meigs claimed later that the country was “shocked by telegrams” about Jackson’s defeat of Banks in the Shenandoah Valley, saying the setback spread “terror in Maryland, and doubts in Washington.” He acknowledged responsibility for supplying McClellan’s offensive, even though he thought it ill-advised and assumed it would end in defeat. But he held McClellan and his strategy almost entirely accountable for the failure on the peninsula.

  CHAPTER 25

  “Vast in Quantity”

  Events now offered conflicting evidence about which side was winning. Confederate armies dominated battle after battle through grit, sacrifice, superior leadership, and daring. The brash cavalry officer Jeb Stuart became so confident about the superiority of his men that he personally taunted Meigs after capturing a telegraph station. “To Quarter Master Gen. Meigs, Washington—In future you will please furnish better mules,” he wrote in a telegram. “Those you have furnished recently are very inferior.”

  Clearheaded leaders on both sides knew that day by day, even as the accounts of their victories were being written, the Confederacy was losing ground in the logistical war. Stoddard, one of Lincoln’s secretaries, later described this dynamic: “As [rebel] resources are to be rightly counted, every battle he fights brings him near his final defeat.” Lee’s strategy reflected this reality. He had to balance the need for battlefield victories against the search for new supplies, while also keeping an eye on political developments that might turn the tide. Lee understood the success of the Confederacy depended not primarily on waning supplies or battlefield victories, but “on his army’s influence on the minds of civilians,” one historian wrote. At the ebb of the Peninsula Campaign, he moved north and west. His scouts and informants learned that McClellan was finally leaving Harrison’s Landing. The Union general aimed to join forces with Major General John Pope, whom Lincoln had named head of the new Army of Virginia.

  Lee wanted to get at Pope before that combination could occur. He moved swiftly and secretly toward Virginia’s Piedmont region,
and then worked in concert with Jackson’s forces. They skirmished with Pope at the Rapidan River and thereafter as Union forces retreated across the Rappahannock. On August 24, Jeb Stuart’s cavalry mounted a daring night attack at Catlett’s Station. The horsemen not only captured Union soldiers but also found Pope’s baggage and a dispatch book. Lee then made a series of audacious decisions that created new threats to the North. He divided his army of fifty-four thousand in two and ordered Jackson to take twenty thousand men on a rapid forced march into Pope’s rear. Lee told Jackson to cut the rail line to Alexandria and disrupt Union communications.

  Jackson’s three hardened divisions had grown used to his extraordinary demands. Now he told them to leave behind their haversacks in order to speed their march. They hustled all night long, going some thirty miles to Manassas Junction. On their arrival, they saw evidence of what the fight against the North really entailed. Packed warehouses, overloaded railcars, and long lines of barrels held one of the great stores of supplies brought into the field during the war. Fifty thousand pounds of bacon, a thousand barrels of salt pork, hills of flour; jellies, coffee, and tea; piles of uniforms, new boots, and rifled muskets; toothbrushes and candles. “The hungry, threadbare rebels swooped down on the mountain of supplies at Manassas like a plague of grasshoppers,” one historian of the war wrote.

  As they frolicked, the men must have sensed the underlying reality, that the enormous stockpile of supplies represented a deep, complex enterprise working to destroy them. Jackson’s report to Richmond distilled the idea well. “It was vast in quantity and of great value,” he wrote. After stuffing themselves and putting on needed clothing, Jackson’s men gathered what they could carry, torched the remaining supplies, and fled. With flames leaping into the darkness, Jackson’s forces moved west through the night to a reunion with the forces under Lee.