Hooker, meanwhile, was relieved of his command after he complained he had been asked to do too much in the face of a superior force. Corps commander Major General George Meade, a West Point graduate and an engineer in the old army, took command. He put the Army of the Potomac into motion on a path that would soon take it to a prosperous crossroads town in Pennsylvania called Gettysburg. Confederate forces were headed in the same general direction. Rumors asserted that Gettysburg had a shoe factory, and they desperately needed shoes. Fighting broke out on July 1 when the rebels happened upon Union cavalry at the town. Through verve and good sense, the small Union force stood pat. They occupied good, high ground just to the south, at a place called Cemetery Hill. What might have been a skirmish became a full-blown conflagration as divisions from both sides poured in.
Drawing on lessons learned from earlier campaigns, along with the experiments with flying columns, Ingalls and Meigs directed the long wagon trains well out of the way of the troops. Baggage and tents were not stored near the fighting. Soldiers carried only a small amount of food, and ammunition was delivered at night, mostly by wagon. Troops rarely saw the operations that sustained them. Ingalls established a temporary depot twenty-five miles behind Union forces, at the head of a small rail line and a road leading to Baltimore. Supplies also started arriving at Frederick, on the B&O rail line. Both locations served as communications hubs for the army, with telegraph lines to Baltimore and Washington. Riders conveyed messages from Baltimore to Westminster and then to Meade’s headquarters at Gettysburg. To make the most of local railways, Stanton called on Brigadier General Haupt, the military railroad chief in Virginia, who received authority to do whatever he thought necessary to keep supplies moving to the war fighters. Though Haupt’s chain of command went up to Meigs, and he depended on the Quartermaster’s Department for funding and labor, Stanton and Meigs allowed him to operate mostly as he saw fit. Haupt was a railroad engineer in private life and another of the war’s dependable, creative, and hardworking heroes. The year before, he had moved the great piles of supplies to Manassas. He seemed almost a conjurer in the way he had rebuilt a spindly looking railroad bridge near Fredericksburg. So thought Lincoln, anyway. “That man Haupt has built a bridge four hundred feet long and eighty feet high, across Potomac Creek, on which loaded trains are passing every hour, and upon my word, gentlemen, there is nothing in it but cornstalks and beanpoles,” Lincoln said.
Haupt rushed to Harrisburg and Baltimore, where he met with political leaders and railroad executives. He decided that only one line got close enough to the battlefield to be of use, a sparse operation out of Baltimore called the Western Maryland Railroad. It had just one track and four locomotives, and it lacked water stations, sidings, and turntables to maneuver the engines. The line typically ran just four trains each day that terminated at Westminster, where Ingalls established his depot. Haupt estimated the army needed at least thirty trains each way. He addressed this apparent impossibility with a few swift moves. First, he took control of the tiny railroad, under federal legislation approved the year before. Next, he ordered a trainload of railroad construction workers up from Alexandria and called on other rail lines to supply locomotives and cars. Then he put into motion an elegant system that ran around the clock. Five trains with ten cars each ran in convoys, one after the other in a long line. The trains carried in ammunition, weapons, and other supplies to wagons waiting at Westminster. They returned to Baltimore with wounded soldiers. Haupt estimated that 150 cars could go through every twenty-four hours, as long as they were unloaded promptly and there were no accidents. It was an ingenious solution to a problem that could have hobbled the Union army. Haupt later gave credit to the underappreciated railroad construction corps. “These men are not in a position to acquire military distinction or rewards, but I would fail in my duty if I omitted to signify to you my high appreciation of the labors, services, courage, and fidelity of the corps for construction and transportation in the department of US Military Railroads.”
The efforts of Haupt, Ingalls and Meigs, along with thousands of others who provided the labor and transportation, ensured that the Union had more than enough supplies to see it through the momentous days at Gettysburg.
Those three days: The massing of Union men and guns on the high ground at Cemetery Hill. The savage combat at the Peach Orchard, Devil’s Den, and Little Round Top. The ill-fated charge by George Pickett and his Virginians.
In those three days, the rebels reached the zenith of their cause, and the Union stood firm, well armed, well clothed, and well fed. “They began the fight, but we have repulsed them at all points,” Ingalls wrote to Meigs. “This entire army has fought with terrible obstinacy, and has covered itself with glory.” Even as the battle raged, Meigs prepared for the aftermath, arranging new wagons for supplies and remounts for the cavalry. On July 4 he asked Haupt to work closely with a private delivery firm that offered the services of its wagons and men to help move the wounded off the field. Meigs cautioned Haupt to set aside his compassion if necessary and remain focused on the greater goal, capturing and destroying Lee’s army. The pursuit took precedence over the wounded. “Let nothing interfere with the supply of rations to the men and grain for the horses.”
Meigs and all of Washington hoped in vain that Meade’s army would catch up to Lee before he could slip out of the North. Days went by. On July 14, resigned to another lost opportunity, Meigs ordered Haupt south. “Withdraw all your construction corps from Pennsylvania railroads and bring them as quickly as possible to Alexandria. Lee has crossed the Potomac.” The quartermaster general would not move on entirely without mopping up the blood-drenched terrain, where bodies lay, horses wandered, and weapons rested on churned-up dirt. He ordered several quartermaster men to oversee collection of huge amounts of materiel left behind by both armies, including muskets, ammunition, cartridge boxes, knapsacks, clothing, and more.
Captain W. Willard Smith, an aide to Halleck, was among them. He joined throngs of medical personnel, journalists, and onlookers from miles around who flooded into town. Smith discovered that collecting the gear was harder than he had expected. People came in “swarms to sweep & plunder the battlegrounds” of souvenirs. Some took guns, bayonets, and other equipment by the wagonload. One man made away with a six-pound cannon and lowered it into a well. Others took horses and mules, cutting out or burning away the US brand on the animals to obscure evidence of their thefts. When Smith and his men tried to retrieve the supplies, guilty residents professed ignorance. The captain confiscated a military coat and a pile of suspect tools from one man who claimed the tools were his and that he had paid for the coat with a loaf of bread. “I told him if he could prove that he owned the tools I would return them, but that I would not return the over coat, and that he ought to be ashamed to rob a Soldier who had come here to fight for him,” Smith wrote Meigs.
Smith eventually arrested scores of looters and put them on the grim work of burying the bodies of men and horses. More than 24,000 muskets and rifles, 10,000 bayonets, 2,400 cartridge boxes, sabers, belts, and hundreds of other items were retrieved eventually and made available to the army.
* * *
Meigs relished his department’s performance at Gettysburg. He had another reason to be proud that summer. John Meigs had graduated from West Point, at the head of his class, and joined the Army Corps of Engineers. He was assigned to Major General Robert Schenck, with responsibility for constructing entrenchments to defend Baltimore. Schenck gave him a thousand laborers and two companies of infantry. Before long, John received new orders directing him to defend the railroad lines in the vicinity of Harpers Ferry. The young Meigs had an idea related to ironclad boats that his uncle and father helped launch a year earlier, urging Schenck to fortify several railcars in the same way, sharp angles and all. “Against any but the largest bodies of troops, these defensive cars would be a perfect protection to the points where they might be placed,” he wrote.
Schenck agreed. He as
ked J. W. Garrett, president of the B&O, to fortify five railcars in the manner of the river ironclads, and five more as bulletproof rifle cars. Garrett assigned three hundred of his men to the job, and they worked six days straight to deliver them. The monitor cars were enveloped by iron plates fixed at 45-degree angles. They had openings for cannons and loopholes for rifles, with an entrance through a trapdoor in the floor. John Meigs named them, navy style, in honor of recent Union victories, including Antietam and Gettysburg.
Schenck sent John Meigs and sixty men to Harpers Ferry on the rail lines. John’s job was to protect workers repairing the damage caused by rebels. Fighting began as soon as he arrived. He silenced the rebels with mortar fire. On July 8 John wrote to Meade and his commander, seeking permission to go beyond the limits of his orders. “I am not afraid of the heavy masses of the enemy,” he wrote to the busy Meade. “May I build the bridge to-morrow and go on?” Schenck urged him to slow down and remain focused on his assignment. “Remember that the duty assigned you is not to seek a fight, but to help keep open and protect the railroad.”
John also wrote to his father from a post he called “Headquarters Iron Clads.” He gushed about the mission. He said he was especially proud of measures he took to deceive the enemy. It seems he painted the words Govt Stores on the sides of the bulletproof cars. “When Johnnie Reb comes up to them and sees the little shutters drop out of their ports and the whole thing suddenly transformed into an inapproachable blockhouse, I think he will be astonished,” John Meigs wrote. Two days after the letter, John got into a scrape when he was ordered to join a small force reconnoitering Confederate positions across the Potomac. During a fight, two dozen Union soldiers along with their commanding officer were taken prisoner. John escaped on foot, losing a borrowed horse.
CHAPTER 28
“Exhaustion of Men and Money”
Far from Gettysburg, the Union triumphed in Mississippi. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman led those fights, in campaigns that foreshadowed an intensified, grinding war in the east. Grant pushed his men through swamps and heat before laying siege to Vicksburg. Trapped for weeks, soldiers and civilians resorted to eating rats. The rebel army capitulated on July 4, with the surrender of thirty thousand soldiers, nineteen generals, and almost two hundred pieces of artillery. It would stand as one of the most important victories of the war. Sherman then drove the rebels out of Jackson, the state capital.
Meigs admired the toughness of those men. In an overview of the military situation, commissioned that summer by Seward, Meigs applauded their willingness to cut free of communications and supply lines. Such aggression gave the Federals extraordinary flexibility of maneuver, while lightening the load on the army’s strained supply apparatus. He praised Grant’s reliance on freed slaves as soldiers and laborers, saying the “newly raised negro regiments showed great valor and devotion, and forever in this country dispelled all doubts as to the capacity of this oppressed race for the defense of their newly acquired liberty.” Most of all, he drew attention to the campaign’s impact on the balance sheet of the logistical war. By capturing half of Mississippi, Grant and Sherman blocked the supply of beef cattle to the rebels in the east and prevented Richmond from sending weapons, food, clothing, and reinforcements to the west.
A Vicksburg woman, writing in her diary on July 4, hinted at the importance of this great divide. She was awed by the vitality of Union forces, “these stalwart, well-fed men, so splendidly set up and accoutered . . . Civilization, discipline, and order seemed to enter with the measured tramp of those marching columns; and the heart turned with throbs of added pity to the worn men in gray, who were being blindly dashed against this embodiment of modern power.”
Meigs told Seward he thought that Union victory in the war was assured. Some two hundred thousand square miles of land had been taken from the Confederacy during the war, the equivalent of territory the size of France. The Union had twice as many fighters in the field and a far larger pool of replacements to tap. Meigs had faith in that force, saying that long marches and hard fighting had tempered the men. He wrote that Grant, Sherman, and other bold generals gave them clear direction. And behind them all was a powerful war machine that drew on secure domestic sources to supply nearly all of the clothing, equipment, and food needed by the mammoth Federal force. In contrast, he told Seward, Richmond had to import much at great cost to sustain itself.
“The National Government enjoys the highest credit, with abundant resources in money, in men, and in material,” Meigs wrote. “Its armies everywhere outnumber the rebel forces, who are all in retreat. Every rebel port is blockaded, besieged, or possessed by the national arms. The Confederacy is divided by the Mississippi, all whose fortresses are in our hands, and whose waters are patrolled by a hundred war steamers.”
Still, Meigs warned Seward that the Union faced tough going until the end, saying that the rebels “are a gallant people and will make stern resistance, but it is the exhaustion of men and money that finally terminates all modern wars.”
Behind his optimism, Meigs was becoming angrier about the Confederacy and its leaders, including former friends. His emotions flared on August 17, 1863, about the time he was delivering his report to Seward. He learned that Union Commander George W. Rodgers, a relative of Louisa’s, had died of wounds suffered from cannon fire during a naval attack on Charleston Harbor. Meigs dwelled on the loss in an eleven-page letter to his father that underscored his fury. He turned again to the stark themes of his Christian upbringing to frame the war as a rite of national atonement. “Can all this devotion, this sacrifice, this courage, this patriotism be wasted?” Meigs asked in the letter. “Will God allow this sacred blood to be poured upon the ground & not accept it as an expiation of the national sins?”
* * *
On August 28, 1863, Meigs rode into the hills west of Washington, making his way to the sprawling camp of the Army of the Potomac, just north of the Rappahannock River. It was the first of several journeys that took him out of the capital for nearly four months, longer than at any other time during the war. He did his part for the Union in the field, as it faced another of the great threats—and then indulged in his passion for hunting. Judging from his dispatches, it was one of the most exciting and satisfying times of the war for Meigs. Wherever he went, Meigs observed mammoth, sometimes awe-inspiring operations. At the Army of the Potomac camp, he looked at a veritable city of white cotton tents, a scene made hazy in places by camp smoke. Conestoga wagons stood in straight lines in the fields not far from the horses and mules that would pull them. Scores of cannons gleamed in the hot sun. Men ate and laughed and slept and marched, as soldiers in camp always do. During the visit, Meigs looked on as General Meade received a ceremonial sword for his performance at Gettysburg.
On his return to the capital, he received orders to visit the principal armies in the middle states and the South. Planned stops included depots at Memphis, Vicksburg, and St. Louis, along with Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland. Stanton wanted Meigs to watch the soldiers on parade and examine the supplies provided by his department, including the baggage, clothing, ammunition, and wagons. His mission soon changed, and then changed again. First, he was redirected to Louisville to investigate a contracting scheme involving immature mules. In Louisville, he received a telegram ordering him to leave for Chattanooga, Tennessee. A ferocious battle was under way just southeast of the city, near a stream called Chickamauga Creek. Stanton wanted Meigs to help bring order to the Army of the Cumberland and send back reports about the action.
Drawing on sparse details, Meigs initially thought the Federals might have the advantage. It turned out the battle posed a grave threat, not only to Union forces led by Rosecrans but also to the North’s entire position in the region. Only the heroic performance of General George H. Thomas averted annihilation. Under his cool leadership, federal soldiers fended off an onslaught by Confederate forces under Braxton Bragg. Rosecrans and the rest of his Union army fled to Chattanooga. Thomas
rallied the remaining troops, buying time for Rosecrans and earning the nickname the Rock of Chickamauga. The fighting was over before Meigs arrived, but he found a perilous situation. Both sides had lost more than a quarter of their forces to casualties, more than thirty-four thousand in all. The battered Union forces rested in strong, well-provisioned camps throughout the town, but their sense of security was short lived. Bragg’s men cut the rail line to the federal supply base in Nashville and occupied nearby Lookout Mountain, which towers 1,500 feet over Chattanooga, along with Missionary Ridge, an impregnable-seeming position 500 feet high. Meanwhile, Lieutenant General James Longstreet’s corps, on loan to Bragg from the Army of Northern Virginia, took control of the valley and the south bank of the Tennessee River. The rebels resupplied themselves with weapons, ammunition, and shoes taken from the Union dead. The Federals had to content themselves with what they had. A single mountain path provided the only way to bring in supplies. Meigs saw that the path, which barely qualified as a road, would become a quagmire after a little rain. Rosecrans was trapped.
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