The Army of the Potomac soon encountered three of Lee’s corps coming from the west. Almost 102,000 Federals engaged an estimated 61,000 rebels in the tangled undergrowth of a region in Virginia known as the Wilderness. The fight in the dim light beneath the pine, oak, and hickory trees took on a nightmarish quality. Coherent maneuvers were not possible, and many units blundered into the enemy. Gunshots ignited brush fires. The smoke obscured an already murky battleground. Men perished in the flames. Grant pressed on. He requested 5 million rounds of ammunition for the infantry and asked Washington to “rake or scrape together” new soldiers to replace the dead and wounded. James McPherson, the great historian of the Civil War, called it a “a new kind of relentless, ceaseless warfare,” fueled by what Lincoln called Grant’s “dogged pertinacity.” There was no escaping that it came with an unprecedented cost in lives. Army of the Potomac casualties after the first week exceeded the Union losses in any other week of the war until then, some 32,000 dead, wounded, and missing men.
Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan, whose rapid rise through the ranks was fueled by his aggression, echoed Grant’s relentlessness. With 10,000 cavalry soldiers, he carved a path toward Richmond, inviting an attack from the smaller rebel cavalry force under Jeb Stuart. They lived largely off what they found and destroyed railroads, trestle bridges, and telegraph lines along the way. At one rebel depot, Sheridan’s men dismantled or torched 100 railcars, 2 locomotives, and 1.5 million rations, including 200,000 pounds of bacon, according to Sheridan’s estimate. A showdown came at Yellow Tavern, several miles from the Confederate capital. Union fighters armed with modern fast-firing carbines riddled many of the enemy cavalry and dispersed the rest. Stuart was mortally wounded.
Now there was rain, day after day of rain. The Army of the Potomac slogged through the mud to do battle near Spotsylvania Court House. The fighting there became almost crazed. “To give some idea of the intensity of the fire, an oak tree 22 inches in diameter, which stood just in the rear of the right of the brigade, was cut down by the constant scaling of musket-balls,” one general reported. Civilians on both sides kept close track of these grim events through press accounts. In the North, it was widely thought the end of the war might be drawing near. “News continues very good,” one man wrote in his diary. “May it prove true, also.” It was not yet true. The end was not as near as many hoped. The fighting and the dying would go on and on that summer. After a month, the number of casualties reached 44,000 for the Union and perhaps 25,000 for the defensive-oriented Confederate force (a number that cannot be fixed for certain because of an unreliable Southern tally). One after another, the dead and infirm were ferried by quartermaster wagons and ambulances to Fredericksburg. And still Grant pressed on.
Behind it all, legions of supply workers, sometimes operating in the line of fire, provided steadfast support. For the crossing of the James River, army engineers built what was one of the longest floating bridges in the history of warfare, a 2,200-foot-long structure composed of 101 wooden pontoons. It enabled the crossing of a line of 3,500 beef cattle and a wagon train 35 miles long. The quartermasters, meanwhile, had to hustle to keep pace with the destruction of horses. In the first six months of 1864, the Army of the Potomac received almost 40,000 cavalry horses, representing two complete remounts.
Meigs went into the field again to help out as a set of eyes and ears for Washington. He traveled to Bermuda Hundred, Virginia, to assess the force under General Benjamin Butler, whose army was supposed to move toward Richmond. Butler had been bottled up in a defensive position. Meigs did what he could before leaving for Belle Plain, a rude landing on the Potomac south of Aquia that Grant used as a supply depot during the Overland Campaign. Meigs aimed to improve operations at the makeshift port, which seemed as congested at times as New York Harbor. As he sorted out those difficulties, a Patent Office clerk who had dedicated herself to helping Union soldiers received permission to travel to Belle Plain and then to Fredericksburg, which Union forces had occupied. The clerk, Clara Barton, was horrified by scenes of unrelenting agony. Wagons carrying the wounded bounced over rough roads and slogged through the pink clay mud at Belle Plain. In Fredericksburg, men lay so thick on the streets, exposed, untended, and unfed, that cavalry horses could not pass. Barton rushed back to Washington and reported to Senator Henry Wilson, who reached out to Stanton with a warning. Bring order to the chaos, Wilson said, or the Senate would find a way to do so. Stanton ordered Meigs to take command of both Fredericksburg and Belle Plain. He gave the quartermaster wide latitude to do whatever he needed. Meigs moved quickly, ordering homes in Fredericksburg opened to Union troops. He made sure they were fed and received care. He pushed for the army to clear guerrillas from along the river. The ability to use river transport ended the need to carry the wounded to Belle Plain by springless wagons over rough roads, an ordeal that killed some of them.
The wounded who made it to the landing were transported in steamboats to Washington. In less than a month, the city’s hospitals took in eighteen thousand new patients. Many of them died in short order, and then the corpses stacked up faster than they could be buried. A stench drifted over the city like smoke. Meigs had to provide the answer to a grim, practical question: Where would all the bodies go?
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Care of the dead became a responsibility for the Quartermaster’s Department early in the war, when Secretary Cameron had called on the department to help commanders keep track of soldiers who died at hospitals and take note of where each was buried. Cameron mandated that Meigs create a “registered headboard” at each soldier’s grave. That mandate was extended to the field a few months later, when army officers received orders to secure land near battlefields to inter the dead. In July 1862 Congress authorized Lincoln to create national cemeteries for servicemen. As the war ground on, finding burial sites became a monumental challenge. By the spring of 1864, the pine and rosewood caskets passed through Washington in a seemingly unending flow. On May 13 a cemetery on the property of the Old Soldiers’ Home ran out of room. Nearly 6,000 soldiers had been interred there in less than three years. Another 2,000 had been buried at Harmony Cemetery and elsewhere in the vicinity of Washington. Added to that were burials of more than 4,100 deceased former slaves.
Meigs knew already where he wanted to direct these “waves of sorrow,” as the journalist Noah Brooks put it. He would create a cemetery on the Arlington estate of Robert Lee’s family, a beautiful spread of land in hills on the south side of the Potomac, overlooking the capital. Lee’s wife, Mary, and the family fled the estate in the spring of 1861. In the first few years of the war, Union troops used one part of the property as a camp, while the federal government used another part to house and educate former slaves. The land was put up for auction after the Lee family failed to pay—effectively was not permitted to pay—a $92.07 tax bill. The federal government bought it for $26,800. The burials at Arlington began in May, with the interment of Private William Christman, twenty-one, a Pennsylvania infantryman who had contracted the measles and died at Lincoln General Hospital in the District. Meigs referred to the land as the “new cemetery,” even though it had not been formally established. On June 15 he toured the property before asking Stanton for permission to use it as the next national cemetery. In a brief letter, Meigs recommended “that the land surrounding the Arlington Mansion, now understood to be the property of the United States, be appropriated a National Military Cemetery, to be properly enclosed, laid out, and carefully preserved.”
With Stanton’s approval, Meigs sketched out his plans that same day for Brigadier General D. H. Rucker, the chief quartermaster of the Washington depot. The cemetery would occupy two hundred acres along the lines sketched out in a scale map drawn and signed by Meigs. Bodies that had been buried on the property during the space crunch in May were to be reburied close to the mansion. Locating the cemetery at Arlington was at root a logical decision. The land was close to Washington’s hospitals and easy to access. But there’s little doubt
that Meigs’s bitterness about Robert Lee’s defection factored into the choice. As he wrote several months later, he wanted Lee and other Confederate leaders tried and executed “by the government which they have betrayed [and] attacked.” News of Meigs’s plan for Lee’s former home stirred vengeful cheers from newspapers in the North. “How appropriate that Lee’s land should be appropriated to two such noble purposes—the free living black man whom Lee would enslave, and the bodies of the dead whom Lee had killed in a wicked cause!” one story said.
The number of burials mounted quickly, with nearly three thousand by summer’s end. The sad stories of the soldiers buried there and elsewhere in Washington at the time offer a haunting catalogue of death during the war. Most were young men under thirty, born in all parts of the United States, as well as in towns in Germany, Ireland, England, France, and a host of more exotic locales, including Russia, Persia, and Mexico. They succumbed to gunshots, cannon fire, and bayonet wounds; diseases that included dysentery, typhoid, and diphtheria; infections contracted during surgeries; and the blunt physical or emotional shock of losing a limb. Contrary to Meigs’s order, the officers in charge of Arlington initially dug graves far from the Lee mansion, where they had established their offices. When Meigs caught wind of their insubordination, he set matters straight. Twenty-six graves soon surrounded Mary Lee’s beloved rose garden, just steps from the place in the yard where, in warm weather, she liked to sit and read. As if to sharpen the point, Meigs soon dug a mass grave nearby, a huge pit to hold the bones of unidentified soldiers. He took pride in Arlington and hoped that Americans would understand his role in its creation. He later put his name in gilded letters on one of the archways leading into the place.
CHAPTER 30
A Vulnerable Capital
In June, as Grant lay siege to Petersburg, several miles south of Richmond, Lee secretly dispatched a force under Lieutenant General Jubal Early on a bold mission. Early was to protect Lynchburg from a Union threat and then move north to clear out the lightly defended Shenandoah Valley. If he succeeded, Lee told him, he was free to pursue fleeing Union troops into Maryland. Lee thought that a threat to Washington or Baltimore might spur Grant to send troops, weakening the main body of his army. Or he might make a rash attack on the rebels, opening up opportunities for counterattack. Lee also had in mind the pressing need for food, clothing, and animals. He told Early to go after any “military stores and supplies that were deemed of sufficient importance to warrant the attempt.”
Reports of the rebel raiding force arrived in Washington at a time when few were inclined to believe them. It was early July 1864, scorching hot and dusty. Congress remained in session, wilting through the legislative process. City residents, long used to false alarms, expected the reported threats to dissipate like a summer storm. Besides, they had other matters to worry about, including the upcoming presidential election. Many voters were appalled by the losses that came with Grant’s campaign, leading some pundits to predict that the Democratic candidate, former Major General George McClellan, might soon occupy the White House. Lincoln himself assumed that could be the outcome.
As details filtered into the city, fears about Early’s force began to take root. Observers reported seeing a rebel force estimated at twenty thousand moving through the Shenandoah Valley. It supposedly included horsemen, infantry, and artillery. On July 4 the telegraph line to the west went dead, and word arrived from railroad men that Federals had evacuated Harpers Ferry. Could the Confederacy be launching a third invasion? Though initially skeptical, Stanton sent out two forces to reoccupy Harpers Ferry and scout the situation on the Potomac near Point of Rocks, Maryland. After the soldiers departed, he realized the capital was vulnerable to attack. The city had strong physical defenses. More than 50 forts and 22 batteries straddled key points along a thirty-seven-mile perimeter on both sides of the Potomac. The forts, cleverly constructed of earth and logs, could hold 643 field guns and 75 mortars. Trenches linked many of them together. Meigs, Totten, and two other engineers had earlier studied the fortifications at Stanton’s request and found them sound.
The real problem was manpower. The fortifications required at least twenty-five thousand infantry and nine thousand artillery corps to man them. Grant’s demands that spring had nearly dried out the well of talent in the region. Fewer than ten thousand men remained on hand to fight the rebel force. Some of these men, recent recruits known as hundred-days men, had not been trained properly and did not even know how to march, much less aim and fire their guns. Others were debilitated by illnesses or wounds.
Early advanced north through the Shenandoah Valley and then pushed across the Potomac. On July 6 his force captured Hagerstown, Maryland, where officers extracted $20,000 from the locals, calling it payment for recent Union depredations in the Shenandoah Valley. His men drove into Frederick on the morning of July 9 and made a $200,000 “levy” on residents. They also took nearly a thousand horses and destroyed fifty miles of railroad track. The invaders encountered federal forces outside of Frederick. Major General Lew Wallace, with reinforcements rushed north by Grant, made a stern show of resistance near the Monocacy River, where the roads to Washington and Baltimore converged. He delayed the rebels but could not stop them. Early continued his advance on the nation’s capital.
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On July 4, 1864, Congress approved a reorganization plan for the Quartermaster Department. The vote affirmed the validity of Meigs’s incessant complaints about the need for more people. He and others would later consider the reorganization one of the war’s great administrative successes. It gave the department more clerks and enabled Meigs to fire cheats and incompetents more easily. On the same day, Meigs learned the White House intended to promote him for his service during the war. Though pleased on both counts, he considered those matters less important than Early’s mission. Meigs knew as well as anyone the numbers and the quality of war fighters in the vicinity, wanting in both cases. He saw an opportunity for himself. If the Quartermaster Department could be mustered to meet the threat, he might be permitted to lead men in battle. On July 9 Stanton seemed to open the way for Meigs, telling the army it could draw on the department’s clerks, workmen, and officers in Washington and Alexandria. The next day, Meigs handed out guns. As he was preparing for action, Halleck quashed his hopes, ordering the clerical force to guard shops, supplies, and public buildings. Meigs could not let go of his wish to help, so he offered his services to an officer directly involved in managing the forts. He argued that even if his men did not have fighting experience, they would look strong in the trenches, and so deter or delay the enemy. The officer accepted the help, and Meigs, at long last, received a field command.
By now, Early’s footsore men had set up camp just to the north of Rockville, several miles from the District. On July 11 they made another hard, hot march directly at the capital, triggering a stampede of Marylanders down the Seventh Street Road, on foot and in wagons filled with household goods. As threatening as they appeared, many of the rebels fell out of their lines, exhausted and covered in dust. They shot at the Federals but did not mount a full-on attack. Meigs’s clerks, meanwhile, rushed up to Fort Slocum, in northwest Washington. They arrived after dark, manned the rifle pits, and lay on their weapons in readiness. Two houses smouldered after being burned to the ground by Union troops, who wanted to remove any cover for rebel sharpshooters. Meigs admired the fields and rolling hills and farmhouses. He slept in an orchard, wrapped in a poncho, his horse tethered to an apple tree. Before dawn the next morning, he woke to the sound of lowing cows and braying mules. As he rallied his men, Meigs learned that the homes of his friend Montgomery Blair and Maryland governor Augustus Bradford had been torched by the Confederates. The quartermaster general received command of Federal forces at Fort Slocum, Fort Totten, and Fort Stevens, which happened to straddle the rebel path into town. Despite their inexperience, and just as Meigs predicted, they formed an imposing barrier behind the earthworks.
Working under Major General Alexander McCook, who had been given command of Washington’s defenses, Meigs organized the clerks, invalids, and others into a division of almost five thousand men. As they cleared away timber and brush in front of their position, the enemy appeared at Fort Stevens. Like so many, the Battle of Fort Stevens unfolded in a haphazard way. Union leaders did not know that the summer heat had exhausted many rebel soldiers. Southern officers seemed overly impressed by the capital’s defenses. In a report to Richmond, Early described them as “very strong and constructed very scientifically.” He pressed his men into artillery fire that came from almost every forward angle. As the day wore on, veteran fighters from the Army of the Potomac’s Sixth Corps arrived and stepped into the fray. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the scene was the presence of the president of the United States. Lincoln had restrained himself from giving tactical orders during the crisis, but he could not resist the chance to see the fighting. For the second day in a row, he rode his carriage to the front line, accompanied by his wife, Welles, and others.
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