The Quartermaster

by Robert O'Harrow

  The president stood on a rampart and watched as national troops marched out and exchanged fire with the rebels down in the valley. Now and then bullets thudded into the earthen berm, kicking up dust. Lincoln remained undaunted, even when sniper fire hit a surgeon standing three feet away. A chorus of men urged him to take cover. “Get down, you damn fool,” said Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes, according to legend. (The quote cannot be verified. But six decades later, Holmes, then a Supreme Court justice, recalled seeing the president at the fort.) General Horatio Wright, commander of the Sixth Corps men, started to order the president down and then balked when he considered the absurdity of pulling rank on the commander in chief. He offered Lincoln an ammunition box to sit on. The president lowered himself. He would not sit, though, and he bobbed up periodically to see what was going on, exposing himself to danger each time.

  When the rebel force withdrew, Lincoln cheered along with everyone else. The Union had repelled the enemy decisively, while suffering 280 casualties. For Meigs, the sultry day marked a high point in his career, and not only because he finally led men under fire. During the fighting, a War Department courier handed him a letter from Stanton. As of July 5, it said, the quartermaster had been brevetted major general for “distinguished and meritorious services to the present War.” Puffed up by the experience, Meigs issued a statement, General Orders No. 2, that praised his men “for the alacrity and zeal with which they organized and moved to defend the capital, insulted by traitors. The rebel army, under tried and skillful leaders, has looked at and has felt the northern defenses of Washington. These looked ugly and felt hard. They left their dead unburied, and many of their wounded on the way by which they retired. They will not soon again insult the majesty of a free people in their nation’s capital.” He gave it a dateline: “Headquarters Meigs’ Division.”

  * * *

  In the war’s Western theater, the armies under Sherman moved steadily closer to Atlanta. They fought at Dalton, Resaca, Rome, and Allatoona Pass, Kennesaw Mountain and so on, moving east and south through rugged, densely wooded terrain. Every movement depended on support from the railroad construction corps, whose achievements would seem implausible had they not actually occurred. The supply line began far back at Nashville. It extended 151 miles to Chattanooga. The railcars carried provisions, clothing, gear for the men, and forage for the animals. As at Gettysburg, the empty cars were then used to ferry back the sick, wounded, and discharged soldiers, as well as refugees and prisoners of war. The supply line later snaked its way toward Atlanta, 136 miles farther along the Western & Atlantic Railroad. The rebels attacked and destroyed sections of both lines repeatedly. They twisted the iron tracks and burned the timber cross ties. With supply trains barely keeping pace with the army’s needs, Sherman began excluding passengers to make room for food and other supplies. When clergy and others complained, Sherman said, “[C]rackers and oats are more necessary to my army than any moral or religious agency.”

  The Construction Corps distinguished itself by keeping the trains moving through vast stretches of enemy territory. In the lead was McCallum, the wizard behind the move of Union men during the siege at Chattanooga. He directed separate units of his men to work their way from both Nashville and Chattanooga and meet midway, fixing rails and building new water towers and telegraph stations. When they moved toward Atlanta, the men repaired damaged track as they came to it. Meigs ordered the completion of the rolling mill in Chattanooga that he and his men began working on during the siege the previous fall. The mill enabled them to straighten 50 tons of rails each day, far more quickly and at a far lower cost than manufacturing and shipping the rails from the North. The railroad workers rebuilt more than a dozen bridges that summer. One of them, over the Oostanaula River, was still burning when repairs began. Work was delayed for a time because the iron rails were too hot to handle.

  They made an even more impressive showing at the Chattahoochee River. It took the corps just four days to rebuild the 780-foot-long, 92-foot-high bridge over the river. All told, the logistical work during the campaign was among the most impressive of the war. Rail lines in the region under Union control rose to 956 miles from 123 miles a year before. The number of cars shot up to 1,500 from 350.

  On September 2 Sherman took Atlanta. “So Atlanta is ours, and fairly won,” he wrote in a dispatch the next day.

  Sherman showered the quartermaster operations with praise. Never once was there a shortfall of provisions, forage, ammunition, or any other essential supplies, he said. At no point were the construction workers more than five days behind the commanding generals. Sherman calculated that it would have taken almost thirty-seven thousand wagons to carry the same loads as the railroads, in the same stretch of time. “Bridges have been built with a surprising rapidity, and the locomotive whistle was heard in our advanced camps almost before the echo of the skirmish fire had ceased,” he reported, adding that the bridges “were built in an inconceivably short time, almost out of material improvised on the spot.”

  * * *

  More than a dozen cities honored Sherman’s march with hundred-gun salutes. Even as the guns thumped approval, Meigs prepared for the next stage of Sherman’s advance, pressing his people hard to maintain the momentum. He was as busy as ever when, on October 3, Stanton added to the workload. He sent Meigs to New York to inspect supply operations there. The war secretary had heard nasty rumors about another contracting scheme. Meigs caught the train to New York that same evening, about the time one of his worst fears became a reality. His son John was shot dead on a back road in the Shenandoah Valley.

  John, twenty-two, had been working as an engineer with a new force called the Army of the Shenandoah, which was formed in response to Early’s recent campaign. Federals under Phil Sheridan had ravaged the valley, taking or destroying two thousand barns filled with hay, seventy flour mills, and no fewer than three thousand sheep. Sheridan named John his chief engineer. Though still green, the young man knew all the important roads and streams west of the Blue Ridge and, like his father, showed talent as a mapmaker. John and two aides were returning to camp along a country lane when they came upon three men. It was raining. The other men wore capes or coats that obscured their dress. John Meigs apparently identified them as Union colleagues, when, in fact, they were rebels.

  The exact details of what came next might never be known. Sheridan tells us in his memoirs that he was told the rebel guerrillas called on Meigs and the assistants to surrender. According to this version, Meigs offered no resistance. That story differs from one offered by a man claiming to have been one of the rebels at the scene. He said later that John Meigs pulled a gun and fired. (In examining the gun later, Montgomery Meigs found that it had been fired.) Federal soldiers discovered John’s body sprawled on the ground. He lay on his back, one bullet wound in the head, the other in his heart. His left arm stretched above his head, the right extended at his side, a handgun nearby.

  When Meigs heard the circumstances, he concluded that John had died in an ambush, not in an honest fight. Meigs was convinced that enemies had targeted John and considered it an act of murder. “And so has perished my first born a noble boy—gallant generous gifted—who had already made himself a name in the land,” Meigs wrote in his pocket diary. “A martyr in the cause of liberty.” Sheridan ordered his men to burn all houses within five miles, giving the job to a twenty-four-year-old general named George A. Custer, who would gain infamy a decade later for leading 266 officers and men to their annihilation in the Battle of Little Bighorn against the Lakota, Arapaho, and other Indian tribes. On October 7, John Meigs’s body was moved to Washington.

  The next day, Lincoln, Stanton, and others joined the family for a funeral service at Oak Hill Cemetery Chapel. Stanton called him “one of the youngest and brightest ornaments of the military profession.” A few days later, Montgomery and Louisa buried John’s remains in a place alongside Charlie and Vintie. They planted ivy at the base of an oak tree nearby. (John’s body
remained there until 1880, when Meigs transferred it to a family plot at Arlington. For his grave, Meigs commissioned a poignant sculpture depicting John’s body as it was found, sprawled out on the ground.)

  Neither Montgomery nor Louisa gave in completely to grief. They had too much to do and too many people depending on them. “Dear Mont grieves for him most deeply and tenderly, but has so much pride in remembering what he was and so much patriotism which encourages him to remember the holy cause, in which our happiness was sacrificed that he does not give way to despondency,” Louisa wrote to an aunt. “He has a courageous & noble spirit, & since our loss is irremediable, he feels that we must look forward to that Eternity where we hope to meet our dear son with those who have gone before him, not upon a past which can never return to us.”

  But Meigs never really moved on. The reservoir of bitterness about the war and the defection of his former friends and colleagues only deepened. He offered a $1,000 reward for information about his son’s killer, fixing his obsession on several guerrillas. Among those in his mind was Colonel John S. Mosby—known as the Gray Ghost—the commander of irregular Confederate cavalry in the Blue Ridge country. He thought of the killers as infamous “villains” who had committed “murder” on that country road. He vowed to identify them and hold them responsible for snatching away his son in whom Meigs had invested his highest hopes. “I never did know an equal & and I never shall find one other like him,” he wrote his family. Decades later, Mosby disputed any notion of murder. He said John Meigs died in a fair fight at a hard time. “When they came to the Shenandoah Valley to win glory in the Northern Army, they could not have expected to engage in the pastime of killing us without running the risk of getting killed themselves. They took their chances: we did the same.”

  CHAPTER 31

  The Refit at Savannah

  Long after the war, Sherman enjoyed describing how the Union’s ability to repair rail lines demoralized his enemies. He liked one story in particular, an apocryphal tale about a chat between two rebel soldiers. As the story went, the rebels had just destroyed a tunnel and blocked Union trains. One soldier blithely predicted that, as a consequence, the Northern forces would retreat. The other just shook his head. “Oh, hell,” said the listener, “don’t you know that old Sherman carries a duplicate tunnel along?”

  The rail lines helped amplify and extend the North’s power during the campaign to Atlanta. But the time had come to move on, to cut free of such support. Staying in Atlanta required devoting too many resources to protecting the line of supply, an effort that was sapping his army. So Sherman and Grant traded thoughts about a seemingly outlandish alternative. Sherman would send all his wounded men back to Chattanooga, tear up the rail line to Atlanta, and then would “move through Georgia, smashing things to the sea.” Sherman, more fervently even than Meigs, believed that Federals had to pursue a hard, encompassing war. He wanted to crush the Confederacy’s spirit and cripple its ability to continue fighting. Grant consented, and on November 12, 1864, Sherman summoned the soldiers involved in the defense of the railways. Then his army, some sixty thousand of the Union’s fittest men, marched away. Great black columns of smoke rose into the sky behind them as Atlanta burned. On their way out of the city, soldiers sang a chorus of “Glory, glory, hallelujah!” It was a confident, well-fed force that had been tempered by hardship and success. The last questions about the country’s leadership had been answered in recent days with Lincoln’s reelection, an outcome attributable in part to Sherman’s success in Atlanta and the vote of the soldiers.

  The force brought relatively few wagons. Sherman encouraged his men to forage liberally and to take or slaughter mules, horses, hogs, and other animals. The Union rules for war had changed. Gone was the sense of delicacy about civilian interests. The army cut a broad swath through the fertile state, some thirty miles on either side of its path to the sea, causing perhaps $100 million in damage, or roughly $1.5 billion now. “This may seem a hard species of warfare, but it brings the sad realities of war home to those who have been directly or indirectly instrumental in involving us in its attendant calamities,” Sherman said. It fell to Meigs to ensure that the men received supplies at its terminus, even though no one in Washington knew for sure where that would be. Sherman planned to head to Savannah. Meigs reckoned it was possible Lee would pull out of Petersburg and confront Sherman’s army, forcing it toward Pensacola. So he arranged two refits.

  * * *

  Meigs respected Sherman, who in turn had great confidence in the quartermaster. It was said that upon receiving one dispatch from Meigs—scratched out in his wretched script—Sherman endorsed it with these words: “The handwriting of this report is that of General Meigs, and I therefore approve of it, but I cannot read it.” If Sherman did not completely grasp the complexity of the supply system, he was confident the Quartermaster Department would provide what his men needed. For weeks, Meigs and hundreds of his subordinates worked feverishly to gather and ship food and equipment. In December civilian captains guided steamers and other boats through savage winter storms to Port Royal Harbor, near Hilton Head, South Carolina, the staging area for the refit at Savannah.

  The quartermaster men then faced the problem of getting the supplies into Savannah Harbor. For four years, Georgians had clogged the harbor with every kind of obstacle. Meigs summoned a special wrecking party from the Florida coast, marveling as it cleared a path with “ingenious equipment which modern science has contrived.” The triumphant army reached Savannah on December 21. They had waded through swamps, destroyed railways, burned down houses, herded cattle, and slept under the stars. They left friends along the way in scattered graves that marked the army’s course. And now they received an unlikely gift: a new wardrobe. On the boats and in warehouses were tens of thousands of new boots and shoes, greatcoats, fresh shirts, trousers, and underwear; blankets, camp kettles, pans, axes, spades, and shelter tents; wagons, whippletrees for wagon horses, harnesses for mules; leather, wax, and even needles and thread.

  Meigs regarded the refit at Savannah as one of his department’s finest accomplishments. In an exchange of letters with Sherman, however, he focused his praise on the army’s recent march. To Meigs, it demonstrated like never before the viability of warfare untethered from supply lines. He was especially taken by the fact that Sherman’s men found forage for their animals rather than relying on costly deliveries from the North. In a Christmas Day response, Sherman thanked Meigs for his support. “I beg to assure you that all my armies have been admirably supplied by your Department,” Sherman wrote, adding: “I am sometimes amazed at the magnitude of its operations.”

  To many Northerners, Sherman now embodied the great meshing of men and management and verve that marked his army’s sweep through Georgia. In their cheering, perhaps understandably, the civilians did not pause to consider what lay behind Sherman’s great achievement. “To his admirers he looked modern, and Americans were nothing if not modern,” the historian Charles Royster wrote in a study of Sherman. “His success came from decisiveness, speed, efficiency, statistics, sophisticated logistics, long-range planning, large-scale operations, and thorough results.”

  * * *

  Though Meigs was immersed in the logistical challenges, he received an honor for work unrelated to the war. On January 5, 1865, the National Academy of Sciences swore him in as a member. Congress had formed the group two years earlier to provide advice to the government about science and technology. Among the fifty charter members were several of Meigs’s friends and fellow Saturday Club members, including Bache and Henry. With his induction, at age forty-eight, Meigs became one of the first elected members—a noteworthy achievement for a part-time scientist, technologist, and tinkerer.

  The next day, he and Stanton traveled to Savannah to confer with Sherman about the next stage of his army’s movement. War leaders wanted to maintain the momentum at all costs. Grant asked Meigs to provide grain and commissary supplies to Sherman with the least delay possi
ble. Meigs pushed his people hard. He also continued to keep a close watch on spending. As he had throughout the conflict, he worried about government debt and the impact on the Northern economy. The armies under Grant and Sherman continually ordered supplies at the last moment. Such requests precluded planning, and that meant added expense. Meigs was most concerned about the cost of shipping. Nearly everything had to be delivered by sea, with Northern ships cycling in a constant stream along the East Coast. Grant’s siege force required a virtual armada to keep it supplied, including 190 steamers, 60 tugs, 40 sailboats, and 100 barges. The cost of shipping forage reached $1 million a month during the winter. Those vessels comprised a mere subset of the Quartermaster Department’s ocean fleet, which in the last year of the war included 719 vessels that cost more than $92,000 a day on average to operate. The department operated another 599 vessels for river transport. The demand for ships and boats was so acute that Meigs sometimes resorted to taking newly made vessels from private shipping companies. He urged Sherman to give him as much time as possible to prepare when ordering supplies.

  Union leadership decided against a direct attack on Charleston, one of the great rebel strongholds during the war. It opted instead for a more daring plan—marching inland, cutting off the city from supplies and then attacking. Sherman’s army trudged through sand and swamps in South Carolina, terrain that many military men regarded as inaccessible. Charleston soon fell. The army pushed on, tearing up railroads as it went. In Columbia, soldiers torched much of the city and destroyed huge caches of the Confederacy’s remaining gunpowder and cartridges. Once again, Sherman’s army needed to be “reclad and reshod.” To help prepare for this refit, Meigs had ordered two divisions of the railroad construction workers to travel by rail from Nashville to Baltimore, and then by ship to the Carolinas. They traveled with the army and soon repaired two rail lines headed inland from the North Carolina coast. Those lines were supplied with railcars and engines shipped from the North or captured by the army. When the right wing of Sherman’s force arrived at Goldsboro, on March 22, 1865, they replenished themselves with rations and clothing from yet another field depot established by the quartermasters. Every soldier received a complete outfit. Wagons were repaired, covered with new canvas, and filled with supplies. The animals were fed with forage shipped in from the North.