* * *
For two days, Stanton and his aides in Washington read the dismal dispatches in which Rosecrans attempted to explain the reasons for the debacle at Chickamauga. “I know the reason well enough,” Stanton quipped roughly. “Rosecrans ran away from his fighting men and did not stop for thirteen miles.” It was now late on September 23, 1863. The war secretary realized that Washington had to do something extraordinary to help, regardless of the bungling that had created the mess. Chattanooga served as a railway hub in the region. The Union had to hold it to maintain control of Tennessee. Future operations deeper into the South depended on it. Stanton called for an emergency planning session and went to Lincoln’s cottage at the Old Soldiers’ Home to retrieve the president. Working through the night, the group resolved to reinforce Rosecrans with men drawn from the Army of the Potomac. They selected the Eleventh and Twelfth Corps for the job, giving the command to Hooker.
Now everyone asked the same question: How could they get the men to Chattanooga in time? For the answer, Stanton turned to the military railroad corps, one of the North’s greatest logistical weapons. Under the leadership of Colonel Daniel McCallum, the railroad operators would achieve something no one had done before, something that few thought was possible. McCallum was an engineer and a poet. He distinguished himself before the war as a railroad executive. In 1862 he became director and superintendent of military railroads in the United States. He had already worked wonders during the war. Under his leadership, the rail lines under Union control soared from 7 miles to more than 2,100 miles. He would oversee construction of 26 miles of bridges. His mission now involved moving twenty-three thousand fighting men, their horses, artillery, and supplies about 1,200 miles, all in one swoop. Halleck declared that such a movement was not possible. McCallum said it could be done in two weeks. Many people jumped in to help. Garrett, president of the B&O Railroad, contributed 194 troop cars and 44 stock cars. Garrett also sent telegraphs ahead to make arrangements for the various stages. He stayed in constant contact with McCallum.
Meigs served as field organizer in Tennessee. He made financial arrangements to move the soldiers on a railroad between Louisville and Nashville. Hooker and his officers quickly gathered their troops at Manassas Junction and Brandy Station. The soldiers carried only what they needed for the trip and the following few days. That included forty rounds per man and two days’ cooked rations. Commissary and quartermaster men arranged to provide coffee and sugar during the journey. Planners made sure that the trains moved in the dark to conceal them from rebel spotters in distant hills, and cautioned commanders to protect details about the planned stops: Wheeling, West Virginia; Columbus and Dayton, Ohio; Indianapolis, Indiana; Louisville, Kentucky; and, finally, Nashville, Tennessee. To confuse the enemy, officers received orders to say they were headed to Memphis. Somehow it all came together. By five o’clock on September 26, McCallum reported that nearly all the trains and troops and supplies were on their way west and south, thanks especially to Garrett and the other railroad men. Stanton was ecstatic. “A thousand thanks to you,” he wrote to McCallum.
* * *
The hot dust in Chattanooga whipped through the Union encampments. It had not rained for two months. Any shade disappeared as the men cut down trees for their fortifications and fires. The grass withered and turned gray. Food trickled in, at least until the rains began in early October, and then the hunger grew as the river rose and mud sucked at the wheels of supply wagons. Soldiers debated whether it had been better broiling in the sun or dying a cool, damp death through starvation. One wagon driver became so troubled by the mud on the single path he had to follow, that instead of beating his mules in the usual manner, he sat still in his seat and wept. The two armies faced each other from trenches and log fortifications. They were so close in places that some stopped shooting at one another. It seemed inhuman to take quiet aim at a man whose eyes they could still see at twilight. Men on both sides called their trenches gopher pits. They joked with one another even as giant shells, launched from rebel siege guns, shrieked overhead. They dueled with songs, “Dixie” from the Southerners and “Hail Columbia” from the Northern boys.
The logistical challenges facing the quartermaster corps were nearly overwhelming. Thousands of mules died from starvation and the work of hauling in rations for fifty thousand men and forage for the starving horses, many of which no longer had strength enough to pull artillery. Mule carcasses lined the rough road all the way to Bridgeport, Alabama, where the Union army had a boatyard and maintained supplies. Rebel cavalry made a devastating attack on the tenuous supply line. The attack, on October 2, destroyed more than three hundred loaded wagons. The rebels killed or captured 1,800 mules. The army, with enough ammunition for less than a day’s fighting, hung on “by the merest thread.” Meigs scrambled in his usual way. He urged Stanton to send more mules, in part to support Hooker’s arriving men. He guided pioneer troops who had put two abandoned sawmills into action, spitting out lumber for bridges, boats, and fortifications. He oversaw the inventory of equipment and metal from a large foundry and a destroyed bridge, stuff that was eventually transformed into rolling mills for rail lines.
Meigs wrote often to Stanton, and their correspondence showed a growing trust—even signs of affection. In one note, the gruff war secretary went beyond military protocol to express his appreciation of Meigs’s efforts. “Your very interesting reports have been received, and I thank you much for the intelligence conveyed,” Stanton wrote. “The army transportation advised by you to be forwarded is now being shipped by rail as fast as possible, and will be pushed forward with the utmost speed. ‘All quiet on the Potomac.’ Nothing to disturb autumnal slumbers. Your friends here are well. All public interest is now concentrated on the Tennessee and at Chattanooga.”
On October 16, with the situation fast deteriorating, the army created a new military division that encompassed Tennessee. Grant, hero of Vicksburg, was put in overall command. He relieved Rosecrans and placed Thomas, the Rock of Chickamauga, in command of the Army of the Cumberland. In an exchange of telegrams, the two new leaders discussed the army’s dire state. “Hold Chattanooga at all hazards,” Grant said. “I will be there as soon as possible. Please inform me how long your present supplies will last, and the prospect of keeping them up.” Thomas reported there wasn’t much. They had perhaps two weeks before they would have to abandon Chattanooga. “We will hold the town until we starve,” he told Grant.
Meigs traveled to Louisville to meet Grant and Stanton and then accompanied Grant on the return trip. Grant focused on feeding his men, and that meant improving his supply line. A key to this was the construction of a steamboat that could ply the upper Tennessee River, which could not be reached easily from downstream because of thin water at Muscle Shoals, Alabama. A quartermaster man, Captain Arthur Edward, had responsibility for building the boat. Meigs arranged for delivery of specialized supplies, including boilers and engines that were floated down the Ohio River and shipped by rail to the boatyard at Bridgeport, on the upstream side of Muscle Shoals. Mechanics and carpenters hustled down from the North to help out. The quartermaster team built the steamer from a flat-bottomed scow outfitted with pontoons, a new steam engine, a rough pilothouse, and a paddle wheel. The team fashioned a cabin from a rough frame and covered it with canvas. With the boat nearly complete, Grant launched a stealthy campaign to take key points on the river. At three in the morning on October 27, 1,400 men floated silently nine miles down the Tennessee on other pontoon boats, surprising the rebels at Brown’s Ferry. The Union force dismantled those boats and used the pontoons to build a bridge. Hooker’s men, waiting in reserve near rail lines outside of Chattanooga, moved to protect the bridge.
On October 29 the handcrafted steamboat Chattanooga steamed upriver. It moved barges holding thousands of rations, including pork and hard bread known as crackers, along with tons of forage for the animals. The boat stopped at Rankin’s Ferry and Kelley’s Ferry, triggering jubilat
ion among the hungry soldiers. They proclaimed the boat, along with the newly opened roads, a “cracker line” of deliverance. “Their joy at seeing the little Steamboat and scows afloat and loaded with rations can be faintly imagined—hardly described; they shouted and danced on the bank of the river like crazy men,” one quartermaster man recalled later.
* * *
Near the end of November, the replenished Union army began its push. The troops marched out of their lines in strict formation, as though on parade. More Union fighters followed, including twenty-five thousand of Thomas’s men. The rebels, lulled by the long siege, mistook it for a drill. Those on the front lines found themselves overrun by Union forces in a snap. “It was a surprise in open daylight,” Meigs wrote in a dispatch to Stanton that was soon published in newspapers. Sherman and his army arrived from the west and took a bridgehead several miles upriver of the city. Then Hooker pushed his men up Lookout Mountain. The Federals climbed and fought through rain and mist. Most of the fighting occurred above a mass of low clouds. Meigs was enchanted. Here was an imaginative desk general on a rare jaunt in the field who was on hand for one of the remarkable days of the war. He called it the “Battle Above the Clouds.” “At nightfall sky cleared, and the full moon, the ‘hunter’s moon,’ shone upon the beautiful scene,” he wrote in his dispatch to Stanton. “Till 1 a.m., twinkling sparks upon the mountain side showed that picket skirmishing was still going on; then it ceased.”
By the morning of November 25, the Stars and Stripes flew from the peak of Lookout Mountain. The fight continued. Southerners still jammed Missionary Ridge, and they commenced a cannonade on Union positions. All day long, big guns on both sides barked and spit fire. Infantry probes went up the ridge with limited success. Grant now ordered a general advance. He did not intend for the men to go far. They scrambled higher and higher on their own initiative, over rifle pits and through a hailstorm of shell, grape, and musket fire. Some fainted. All of them became soaked in sweat. They feared if they stopped, they would die. Meigs almost could not believe what unfolded before him. “With cheers answering to cheers,” he wrote, “the men swarmed upwards.” One Union leader later put the surge into perspective: “What so often is uttered in eloquent speeches in comfortable salons, in State House, and in halls of Congress, ‘Victory or dead,’ was here an uncomfortable reality.”
Grant, Meigs, and other leaders eventually followed the foot soldiers to the crest of the ridge. The Federals redirected captured guns and rebuilt log breastworks as barricades. Bragg’s disintegrating army fled the carnage. Union soldiers shouted, wept, and danced with emotion as they absorbed the new reality. Meigs looked around at the field and gave thanks for witnessing what he called the “great battle of the Rebellion.”
“Total defeat; they are driven from the field, and these impregnable positions are stormed by our volunteers,” he wrote that night before bedding down. “It was a glorious sight. I am rejoiced—I took part in it—a memorable day.”
Meigs collected war souvenirs that littered the ground. One man recalled that the quartermaster created a veritable “curiosity shop” of rebel bullets, bayonets, and cartridge boxes. Meigs later accompanied Grant and other generals on a visit to the top of Lookout Mountain. Meigs drank from a spring and filled his canteen. Then he rode off, found a covey of partridges, and, relishing a passing chance to hunt, shot three of them with his pistol. On orders from Washington, Meigs eventually made his way to Nashville, Louisville, and then, after the New Year, home.
CHAPTER 29
“A Beauteous Bubble”
In January 1864 Montgomery Meigs received another warm welcome home. Stanton, Chase, and Lincoln met him at the White House before he joined a stellar crowd at a dinner party that included Seward, congressmen, and Supreme Court justices. None of it sat well with him. He yearned to be back in the field. The cold nights, daily excursions, and simple food in Tennessee had suited him, all of it a “relief from the dreary monotony of office labor.” The sojourn afield had spurred doubts in his mind about his role in the war. Was the job of quartermaster the best he could do? Did people understand the important work of his department? The public was dazzled by stories of fighting generals, and he understood that against their exploits, the toil of administrators did not shine so brightly.
The administrative demands in Washington hit him like a hailstorm. One task required him to focus on a faltering effort by Lincoln to create a colony for freed slaves on Île à Vache, an island near Haiti. The president pushed the idea partly as a political solution to appease anti-black forces in the North that opposed emancipation, but the colony foundered quickly. Meigs arranged for a ship, Maria L. Day, to retrieve several hundred famished colonists and carry them to Washington, to “be employed and provided for at the camps for colored persons around that city.” Before long, Meigs asked Stanton for permission to join an offensive planned for the spring. The war secretary refused, saying the quartermaster was too important to the war’s administration to be spared. Meigs also sought a promotion, asking his father to reach out to influential friends in Pennsylvania, in the hope they might intercede.
As if seeking reassurance of his value, he went to the Capitol and inspected the progress of the work. The great dome was nearly finished, with its crowning feature, the statue of Freedom, recently installed. It looked as magnificent as he had envisioned. He was satisfied he could rightly claim a great share of credit for the success of the domes—but only a share. Walter deserved acclaim for his role in the design and execution as well. “The great dome of the Capitol was the conception of Thomas U. Walter. But it was Captain Meigs whose skill in engineering guided its construction,” wrote the historian Russell Weigley. “[A]nd if the dome displays a grace of line which is the mark of the architect of Girard College, it possesses also a sturdy dignity and reassuring stability which reflect the mind and character of its chief engineer.” The Architect of the Capitol, the office responsible for the operation and preservation of the Capitol complex, now agrees with that assessment. “While Thomas U. Walter is credited as the architect of the Capitol Dome, his world-renowned design could not have been accomplished without Montgomery C. Meigs.”
In any event, the new dome was an inspiration. Poet Walt Whitman, who served as a nurse in the District during the war, thought it sublime. “I shall always identify Washington with that huge and delicate towering bulge of pure white, where it emerges calm and lofty from the hill, out of a dense mass of trees,” he wrote in a dispatch for the New York Times. “A vast eggshell, built of iron and glass, this dome—a beauteous bubble, caught and put in permanent form.” Whitman offered an unintentional tribute to Meigs’s engineering efforts, saying that the derrick might be a fitter emblem of the nation’s character than the statue Freedom. “[T]here is something about this powerful, simple, and obedient piece of machinery, so modern, so significant in many respects of our constructive nation and age, and even so poetical.”
Meigs also visited the bridge at Cabin John, known as Union Arch. With the scaffolding removed, Meigs experienced the full effect of the smooth, imposing curve of stone. It was perhaps the favorite of his creations. “It stands successful—the greatest masonry arch in the world,” he wrote in his diary. “[W]ater flows through it; there is little leakage. A stone bears the inscription—Union Arch. Chief Engineer Capt. Montgomery C. Meigs. U.S. Corps of Engineers. Esto Perpetuo.”
Meigs added in his diary: “It is a great monument.”
* * *
On May 4, 1864, the Army of the Potomac began its great Overland Campaign into the Confederacy. It would culminate nearly a year later with the fall of Richmond, but only after what Grant described “as desperate fighting as the world has ever witnessed.” The numbers associated with the offensive—the supplies, the men, the deaths—remain notable. The force included nearly one hundred thousand infantry, fifteen thousand cavalry, and six thousand artillery men. They had rested in a comfortable camp north of the Rapidan River. They showed streng
th and discipline, and they had confidence in Grant, who was now lieutenant general of all Union armies, the first to hold that title since George Washington. Meade served as commander of the Army of the Potomac.
The quartermaster corps performed admirably here. They deployed 4,300 wagons to carry an immense supply of pork, crackers, coffee, salt, and sugar, along with mess kits, ammunition, and baggage. On hand to draw the wagons were 23,000 mules. More than 30,000 horses carried cavalry soldiers and pulled the artillery. Beef cattle followed on the hoof, to be butchered as needed. Grant later estimated that if put into single file and spaced properly, the train would have extended the seventy miles or so from the crossing on the Rapidan to the city of Richmond. Thanks to Rufus Ingalls, chief quartermaster of the Army of the Potomac, each wagon bore corps badges, division colors, and brigade numbers, along with markings that described its contents.
Ingalls adopted a strict method for using the wagons. As soon as they were emptied, they generally would be sent to the rear for resupply with identical provisions. Apart from creating a new level of efficiency, his system addressed one of the great logistical burdens of the war, the feeding of animals. Instead of having to carry tons of forage for themselves, the animals often ate when they returned to depots. Grant tells us in his memoir, “There never was a corps better organized than was the quartermaster’s corps with the Army of the Potomac in 1864.” Even so, the force moved slowly. Its path took it over terrain etched by streams and widely covered by thick forests. It squeezed over narrow roads in the direction of Chancellorsville. Grant intended to go after Lee wherever he happened to be. He aimed to attack with overwhelming numbers and then attack again, leaving Lee no chance of dividing his force and sending reinforcements elsewhere. As Grant told Sherman in the run-up to the campaign, he wanted all Northern armies, from Mississippi to South Carolina, to move against their rebel foes in a coordinated way. He wanted the armies to damage any enemy resources used to carry on the war. Sherman, fierce, temperamental, and energetic, stood ready to do so. His three armies—in Chattanooga, northern Alabama, and southern Tennessee—made a simultaneous move toward Atlanta. He wanted his combined force of 112,000 men to cause as much damage as possible and take or destroy the city railways. He was in a “savage frame of mind,” as one historian noted.
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