Meigs offered something of a tutorial about present circumstances. He identified the war economy as a key concern. The Treasury could barely stay ahead of creditors, he said, and the government’s line of credit was becoming too big for the market to bear. The Quartermaster Department, meanwhile, was losing its grip on commodity prices. As demand for hay and oats rose, so did their costs. Unless something changed, Burnside would be obliged to retire from the field and disperse his animals to save them from starvation. The quartermaster general told Burnside that his army was still strong, even though it was losing men to sickness and disability. His animals were well fed and healthy. The weather was still good. Meigs warned that the nation’s appetite for war was waning. The people needed another victory, and they needed it now.
“Every day weakens your army; every good day lost is a golden opportunity in the career of our country—lost forever. Exhaustion steals over the country. Confidence and hope are dying,” Meigs wrote. “The gallantry of the attack at Fredericksburg made amends for its ill success, and soldiers were not discouraged by it. The people, when they understood it, took heart again. But the slumber of the army since is eating at the vitals of the nation. As day after day has gone, my heart has sunk, and I see greater peril to our nationality in the present condition of affairs than I have seen at any time during the struggle.”
While the letter was heartfelt, Meigs lacked authority to make a direct order here, and Burnside chose to ignore the advice.
* * *
In January 1863, lawmakers condemned the lack of progress in the war. Some sought scapegoats. One of these, Senator James Lane of Kansas, claimed in a speech on the floor of the Senate that he knew the culprits behind Union failures. They were West Point graduates. Lane had played a role in the bloody tumult that gave birth to the state of Kansas. He considered the military academy a training ground of disloyalty. He said he could not think of a single graduate who had shown “a ray of genius” during the war. He went further. West Point not only controlled the government “with iron shackles,” but also one of its graduates was a traitor within. That would be Meigs, longtime friend of Jeff Davis. Lane described the quartermaster general as the very embodiment of “West Point pro-slaveryism.”
Though the allegations irritated Meigs, he had faced down demagoguery before the war, and he still had powerful friends in the Senate. One of them, Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs, offered a tart defense on his behalf. “A question has been raised here in regard to the loyalty of General Meigs, and why? It is said that he was Jeff Davis’s friend, and Jeff Davis was his patron,” Wilson said. “I do not think there is anything in that. Jefferson Davis stood by General Meigs when John B. Floyd undertook to crush him. Floyd was not only a traitor but a thief, and he left the Government only when there seemed nothing more for him to steal. Davis was not a thief, but a traitor to the country . . . as to the loyalty of General Meigs, I do not think there is a man in America who has a right to question it.”
As to the allegations that Meigs supported slavery, Wilson pointed to the quartermaster general’s annual report of the previous year. “General Meigs was among the first men engaged in this war who declared it to be the true policy of the Government to organize the black men of the South for military purposes.” The report called on the nation’s leaders “as clearly and as broadly as any man in America has ever laid it down, that the slaves of rebels should be used to save our periled country.”
* * *
Meigs had too much to worry about to focus long on political chicanery. Among other things, he was concerned about keeping up with the army’s insatiable demand for horses. Union forces relied on the animals to a degree that might be hard to imagine now. It needed horses and mules to maintain its very existence. The numbers in play were remarkable. Armies with about 426,000 men would soon have nearly 114,000 horses and 88,000 mules. That’s not counting the creatures sidelined by illness, wounds, or fatigue. Until now, Meigs had been lucky in meeting the demand. At the beginning of the war, Northern states had almost 5 million horses on hand. Enough were available even to offset the corruption among dealers who sold the government old, lame, and even blind animals. For many months, the prices remained steady, with horses delivered to Washington at the cost of about $125 each. But lately the market price had crept up close to $185, putting stress on both the Treasury and Meigs.
The quartermaster general thought that an obvious alternative was to encourage the army to confiscate horses in enemy territory, even though regulations permitted such taking only under limited circumstances. He thought it was irrational that Southerners were permitted to keep such an important resource. To Meigs, horses were as valuable as cannons or gunpowder. Given the number of animals the department routinely provided, he was skeptical when McClellan claimed, in October 1862, that his men could not chase Stuart’s cavalry in Pennsylvania because of a lack of horses. Meigs examined his records and found that the Army of the Potomac, in fact, had recently received more than a thousand horses over six weeks, at a cost of $1.2 million. Meigs wrote a testy letter to Stanton, answering McClellan’s allegations and underscoring the urgent need for better management. He said the cavalry would not need so many new mounts if McClellan’s soldiers took better care of the ones they had. “The efforts of a quartermaster alone are not sufficient to prevent abuse, suffering, overwork, or neglect. Every commander, from the highest to the lowest in rank, from the commander of an army to the chief of the smallest detachment to which a wagon is attached, has a direct interest in the condition of the stock.”
Meigs then turned his wrath on Major General William Rosecrans, another West Pointer and Army Corps of Engineers officer, who had recently assumed command of the Army of the Cumberland in Tennessee. Meigs heard little from Rosecrans until a night in January 1863 when Rosecrans made an urgent request for five thousand horses, armor-plated boats, and five thousand repeating rifles. Rosecrans was anxious to mount an infantry force to supplement his cavalry, which had turned in a mediocre performance just days before in the Stones River Campaign in Tennessee. His telegram went directly to the war secretary, who gave it to Halleck, who passed it on to the quartermaster general. “Major-General Rosecrans complains that his requisitions for horses to mount infantry regiments are not properly filled,” Halleck wrote.
Meigs chafed at the note. It was one thing for Rosecrans to surprise him with a massive requisition, he thought, but it was another to go over his head and then suggest he was falling short on his responsibilities. “General Halleck informs me that you complain that your requisitions for horses for mounting infantry are not filled, and desires the evil removed,” the quartermaster wrote Rosecrans. “Upon whom have you made the requisitions? I have no information on the subject from you or from the quartermaster of your command. Inform me, that I may act in the matter.” The exchange, on January 14, 1863, touched off a cranky correspondence that lasted months. In the midst of everything else, the two stubborn West Pointers struggled for the upper hand. They lectured each other on warfare and management. Rosecrans would not be put off by Meigs. On January 15 he upped his request to eight thousand mounts, complaining that rebel cavalry were getting the best of his army. He suggested that Meigs take contracting shortcuts to fill gaps in his forces.
Meigs remained skeptical. He thought that the expense and effort demanded by Rosecrans’s requests would sap the government unnecessarily, with no obvious benefit. He wanted more time and data to decide. In the meantime, he urged Rosecrans to take what he needed from the enemy. “It will take some time to get eight thousand horses, unless you can seize them in the field of your operations,” he said. “Why do you not send your infantry in wagons for forced marches to intercept cavalry?” One can see Rosecrans rolling his eyes: A desk-bound general pushing tactical suggestions from a warm office in Washington? “Your dispatch received; thanks,” he wrote back. “Have no wagons to spare, and these are cumbersome. In these narrow
roads can’t travel across the country. Would do well on Pennsylvania avenue.”
Rosecrans kept at it for weeks. By April, his lecturing took on a didactic tone, and in some cases he sounded remarkably like Meigs. “Cheap horses for service absolutely necessary is the worst possible plan, and this is tenfold worse when service is military,” he wrote. “The cost of feeding poor horses and bring them here is as great as that for good ones.” Still, the quartermaster general refused to take shortcuts with the law or the contracting process. He knew that Congress would rage at any hint of manipulation or corruption. He told Rosecrans the law required contracts and public bidding.
Meigs eventually acknowledged a crucial shortcoming of his system, saying there were not nearly enough knowledgeable inspectors to cull out the lame animals that contractors continued to fob off on the government. He asked Rosecrans to identify disabled horsemen who could serve as inspectors for the army. He also proposed an idea that might have been more than mere black humor: “Inspection by faithful cavalry officers is the only remedy I can find, unless General Burnside will, under martial law, hang one or two bogus and bribing contractors. That would improve the stock, I think.”
* * *
Rosecrans received 18,450 horses and 14,607 mules in the winter and spring, bringing to more than 43,000 the number of animals accompanying his men. No other army had as many. Finally, fed up about the expense and waste, Meigs uncorked a long letter that stands as a rich example of his oeuvre. It covered so much terrain that he himself described it as a “dissertation.” He drew on his department’s data to show why Rosecrans’s approach was costly and ineffective. One issue was the high number of lame horses that had been delivered to the army, only to be returned to quartermaster operations. Thousands had been sent back to Louisville. Meigs said the circumstances showed that Rosecrans simply asked for too many to be able to inspect them. Besides, Meigs said, the horses were overworked, underfed, and abused. Why did Rosecrans take his men and their horses on long marches with no clear purpose? “Such marches destroy the horses,” he wrote. “We have over one hundred and twenty-six regiments of cavalry, and they have killed ten times as many horses for us as for the rebels.”
He objected to Rosecrans’s assertions that his twelve thousand mounted men were outnumbered by rebels five to one. That would mean the enemy had sixty thousand men on horseback. How was that possible? Meigs suggested the general had to be mistaken. He pushed Rosecrans to live off the land, take what he needed from the enemy, and destroy the rest. It was an approach that Meigs would promote to the end. “[N]ever to pass a bridge without burning it, a telegraph wire without cutting it, a horse without stealing or shooting it, a guerrilla without capturing him, or a negro without explaining the President’s proclamation to him.”
The War Department went on to establish a specialized Cavalry Bureau to improve the purchase and care of horses. Run in collaboration with the Quartermaster Department, the bureau created sprawling depots in St. Louis, Washington, and four other cities. Each had stables and veterinary hospitals. In short order, the supply and quality of horses reached new highs.
CHAPTER 27
“Fret Him and Fret Him”
As another lovely Virginia spring reached its fullness, the ragged, determined rebel army stirred in the state’s Piedmont, a region that rises in great swells to a crest at the Blue Ridge Mountains. Camps came and went. Cavalry gathered near a town called Culpeper. It was early June 1863, and an awful blossoming of the two-year-old war was nearly at hand.
The Army of the Potomac occupied the terrain to the north along the Rappahannock River. Major General Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker now led the army. Lincoln gave him the job months before, after Burnside’s belated offensive was stymied by torrential rainstorms, a debacle that came to be known as the “Mud March.” Hooker was known as a morose schemer and drinker, but Lincoln thought he would fight. The president held on to that hope, even though Hooker had recently faltered at Chancellorsville. Far from living up to his nickname, “Fighting Joe” retreated in the face of a force almost half the size of his own. But if the battle marked one of Lee’s greatest victories, he paid dearly for it. Stonewall Jackson, shot mistakenly by his own men, died of the injuries a few days afterward.
Hooker worried now that cavalry led by Stuart intended to attack his supply lines. He ordered his horsemen out to assess matters, and on June 9 they crossed over before dawn and caught Stuart’s force sleeping. The fight at Brandy Station, with seventeen thousand mounted soldiers, was the largest cavalry battle fought on the continent. When the Northern cavalry withdrew, they took with them a rare victory. More important, they discerned that Lee was headed again into the North. The rebel army was moving out of Virginia in part because of its material needs. Lee knew that in a defensive posture, the South could not keep pace with the Union’s logistical might. He recognized the growing disparity in the “numbers, resources, and all the means and appliances for carrying on the war.” Union troops wore fresh uniforms and sturdy, factory-made boots. In camp they ate beef, pork and beans, and fresh bread. In contrast, the rebels generally made do with ragged uniforms or clothing handmade by sweethearts, wives, mothers, and slaves. Sometimes the rebels wore pants, shirts, and shoes they had taken from dead or captured Federals. They ate cornbread, and foraged greens and, with luck, wild game. The gap in manpower grew wider by the month. In Tennessee, Joseph Johnston wrote: “We are too much outnumbered everywhere.” Such disparities provided cold comfort to Lincoln, who, with good reason, worried continually about the quality of his generals. They brought him few victories.
On June 12 the president wandered over to Meigs’s office to see if the quartermaster would join him for a ride on horseback. He wanted to learn more about the cavalry from Meigs. He also needed to air his thoughts about Hooker, whose withdrawal after Chancellorsville had been a grave disappointment. “Never, as long as I knew him, did he seem to be so broken, so dispirited, so ghostlike,” the journalist Noah Brooks wrote about the president then. During the outing, Lincoln asked Meigs to join him again the next day for a demonstration of a new incendiary shell at Hooker’s headquarters on the Potomac River. When the time came, the men boarded a tugboat and headed down the river. They got only as far as Alexandria when word came that Hooker had canceled the demonstration. The enemy seemed to be stirring, according to a Union observer in a surveillance balloon who had seen reinforcements arriving at rebel camps.
Hooker wired Lincoln and said he wanted to make a rush on Richmond. The president urged him to remain focused on engaging Lee’s army. “Fight him, too, when opportunity offers,” the president wrote. “If he stays where he is, fret him and fret him.” Within days, federal troops began stalking the Army of Northern Virginia, keeping Washington at their back. The rebel forces maintained the initiative, and on June 14 they surrounded a Union garrison at Winchester, which barely escaped. The rebels took twenty-three cannons, more than three hundred horses, and hundreds of wagons filled with food and quartermaster supplies. Long lines of Confederate fighters began crossing the Potomac.
As this second invasion got under way, rumors spread and panic washed over the northeast region. Now the rebels were at Hagers-town, Maryland, it was said; now at Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. In Pittsburgh, fourteen thousand citizens manned defensive trenches. Stanton was so concerned Lee might be heading to Philadelphia that he ordered authorities to impress steamboats and barges to spirit away gun-making equipment. Meigs got involved more directly in the support of the Army of the Potomac than at almost any other time during the war. He moved to ensure preservation of equipment left behind by the sudden evacuation from the army’s headquarters at Aquia Creek. In a telegram to Ingalls, now a brigadier general, Meigs said he counted at least 126 railcars that traversed the line between Aquia and Falmouth, Virginia. He did not want them to fall into enemy hands, and he did not want them destroyed unless absolutely necessary. He suggested dumping them into shallow water so that Union forces cou
ld retrieve them later. Ingalls was not to burn any wharves, warehouses, or property. If the place were overrun, Meigs said, gunboats could pummel everything into splinters at the last moment.
Meigs also focused on demands created by an emergency proclamation from Lincoln that called on Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, recently admitted as a state, to muster a hundred thousand militia. He ordered his men in Pennsylvania to hire transportation rather than buy it. He said they should fix prices in advance. “The people should have just compensation,” Meigs wrote, “but should not be allowed to make speculation out of the Government.” As he attended to these details, Meigs pondered the fundamental reason for the conflict. He concluded that it was the sin of slavery. “God does not intend to give us peace again until we expiate our crime,” he wrote to his father. “Until the last shackle is stricken from the wrist of the black man.”
* * *
The close involvement of Meigs in the preparations came at a price for his subordinates. Prone to irritability, he became an ogre when he saw incompetence or hesitation in his men. Now he erupted in anger when he learned that someone had sent a wagon train of supplies north out of Washington without an armed escort. The timing of the train’s departure could not have been worse. The flamboyant Stuart and his horsemen were off on a romp around the Army of the Potomac. The rebel cavalry engaged Union forces in Maryland at River Road, just outside Washington, and then near Rockville. They made off with 150 wagons and 900 mules. In a flash of anger, Meigs sent a harsh letter to the hardworking Ingalls. “Last fall I gave orders to prevent the sending of wagon trains from this place to Frederick without escort,” he wrote on June 28, 1863. “The situation repeats itself, and gross carelessness and inattention to military rule this morning cost us.” The note troubled Ingalls, who fired off a note back to Meigs. “I had nothing to do with its escort,” he said. “I only hope our losses may not be greater. We are deficient in cavalry now. All will be done that is possible.” That response seems to have soothed Meigs.
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