With the Confederacy imploding, Sherman wanted to resume moving as quickly as possible. “I think I see pretty clearly how, in one more move, we can checkmate Lee,” he wrote to Grant. Meigs joined the army in North Carolina. As he and Sherman sorted through logistical matters, news filtered into camp that 80,000 of the 125,000 men under Grant’s command had moved out of the trenches at Petersburg. Then came word about the battle at Five Forks, a crossroads in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, on the far right of Lee’s line. Lee declared that Five Forks had to be held in order to protect the last rail line into Richmond, but it fell quickly to Sheridan’s men. Lee telegraphed Davis that Richmond must evacuate, triggering chaos in the Confederate capital. Leaders fled as soldiers destroyed river bridges and torched the city’s business district.
Meigs boarded a boat and made his way north, visiting a supply depot in Morehead City. On April 5 he stopped at Wilmington, North Carolina, taking time to make drawings of Fort Fisher, which had fallen to combined Union naval and ground forces after a long campaign. He was delighted to learn that the Confederate government had fled from Richmond. In Washington, War Department clerks hollered the news out of office windows, people rushed into the streets, and the army launched into an eight-hundred-gun salute. “Richmond Is Ours!!!,” the Evening Star bellowed under a joyful headline: “The News—The Glorious News.”
Meigs heard the best report while aboard a boat that was anchored off the tip of the Virginia Peninsula. Lee and twenty-seven thousand of his men had surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House. Meigs made his way to City Point, Virginia, the hive of supplies and operations that Grant used as his headquarters. He began shutting down the war machine that he had such a great hand in building. For the first time in nearly four years, he suspended all orders for mules, horses, wagons, clothing, and equipage. Though Meigs was ebullient about victory, he also was bitter about the cost. He hoped that those responsible for the “murder of my son and the sons of hundreds of thousands” would be tried and executed.
He considered traveling home by way of Richmond, wanting to see for himself the fallen house of his enemy. He chose instead to join Grant and his staff and go to Washington. When he arrived, on April 13, he went to Louisa and the children. Afterward, he visited the War Department. He and Stanton shared happy stories about recent events until Grant arrived, and then Stanton greeted him effusively. Meigs also visited Secretary of State Seward, who was at home in bed recovering from a carriage accident. The next day, Good Friday, Meigs went to his office and then on to services at Saint John’s Church, across from the White House. He made the rest of the day into a holiday with his wife and children, as the city bubbled with happiness. Flags adorned most buildings, and residents and visitors alike paraded through the streets, some of them accompanied by marching bands. “The country is drunk with joy,” Meigs wrote in his journal.
* * *
That night, as Meigs relaxed with his family, bad news arrived by military messenger. He grabbed a handgun, threw on his coat, and rushed into the dark. The streets were filling with people who had heard rumors that an assassin had shot President Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre, where he had gone to see the play Our American Cousin. An assailant also had attacked Secretary of State Seward, still in bed at home. Meigs met Stanton and Welles in the lower hall of Seward’s Lafayette Square home. He learned that Seward was unconscious and bleeding from knife wounds. Seward’s son Frederick, bludgeoned while trying to defend his father, had slipped into a coma.
Stanton asked Meigs to clear the house of any nonessential people. Stanton and Welles wanted to leave immediately to find the president. Meigs implored the war secretary to stay put, for his own safety and the good of the country. Stanton ignored the suggestion and asked Meigs to join them. Meigs relented and called on soldiers to stand on either side of the carriage. A city judge sat up front with the driver and an army officer held on to the back as they hurtled through Washington. Tenth Street outside the theater was packed with an apprehensive and angry crowd. Lincoln had been carried across the street to a red brick townhouse owned by a tailor named William Petersen and his wife, Anna. Stanton, Welles, and Meigs walked up a flight of steps, went through a long hall, and found the president on a bed in a back room.
Lincoln breathed slowly and deeply and looked calm and striking. He had only a few hours to live. The small room was filled with Cabinet members, politicos, friends, and family, all of them pale with grief. No one spoke except for Stanton, who quietly directed the army’s search for the assassins. The near-silence was broken when Mary Lincoln came into the room from another part of the house. She kneeled beside the bed, took her husband’s hand, and sobbed. The eyes of everyone in the room shimmered with tears. A rainstorm sent rivulets of water coursing down the windows, in “dreary sympathy” with those inside. At midnight, on authority from Stanton, Meigs broke briefly from the scene to order the army to go on high alert, turn out in the capital, and double the number of guards at government facilities. Then, along with the others crowded around the president, he waited. Lincoln died at 7:22 a.m.
“The murderers have not been arrested,” Meigs wrote in his diary later that day. “J. Wilkes Booth, actor, murdered the president.”
* * *
On Tuesday, April 18, the mourners moved slowly through the East Room of the White House, one quietly after another by Lincoln’s body. They paused, looked at his face, and then passed by, crying and moaning, as at the loss of a father or a friend. Meigs went to the Capitol, on orders from Stanton, and began preparing for a lying-in-state. The next day, as Lincoln’s funeral procession made its way from the White House, the quartermaster general led a large contingent of department employees, including railroad construction corps members. When the president’s body arrived at the Capitol, Meigs directed its placement in the rotunda.
Meigs thought the president’s embalmed body was well preserved. Gone was the discoloration and swelling around his eyes that emerged on the morning of his death. Despite his anger and grief, he was proud of the setting and thought the dome’s interior looked magnificent. Mourners began flowing by the casket in a constant stream, entering the rotunda through the great east door and exiting through the west. In the evening, Meigs darkened the space with drapery over the windows. The next morning, a group of men—a military honor guard, Lincoln’s Cabinet, and generals Grant, Meigs, and Rucker—moved the body to a funeral car at the railroad depot. Alongside Lincoln’s casket, they placed a smaller one holding the body of his eleven-year-old son, Willie, who had died of a typhoid-like illness in the dark days of early 1862. Father and son were to be buried together in Springfield, Illinois.
As the funeral train rumbled west, Stanton asked Meigs to accompany Grant to North Carolina, where Grant was to take command of operations that would close out the war. Stanton said that Meigs had no time to spare. Could he pack and get to Alexandria before Grant’s boat departed? The haste was related to an unauthorized act by Sherman. Instead of demanding unconditional surrender from Joseph Johnston, Sherman entered into negotiations for what amounted to a truce. The apparent presumption of Sherman to take on political responsibilities infuriated Stanton and others in the administration. The agreement had to be undone as soon as possible. Meigs went home, grabbed a clean shirt, a poncho, and a valise. Before Meigs boarded the boat, the gruff war secretary, brimming with emotion, embraced and complimented him. “No better officer or more faithful soldier lives,” Stanton told Meigs.
CHAPTER 32
The Journey Home
The war was finally over. To mark the North’s victory, Meigs suggested the Union armies gather in Washington at the end of May for a final grand review. Soldiers bivouacked in the hills near the city, around campfires that glittered at night like new stars. Northerners flooded into the city by train and boat and carriage to witness the spectacle. The Army of the Potomac went first, looking crisp and disciplined as it moved in marching salute past President Andrew Johnson and the Cabinet. Sherma
n’s western army followed the next day. They had a looser-limbed style suggestive of their pioneer roots and the different kind of war they had been fighting.
Next came the task of demobilization. The men of the army had to be discharged, paid, and transported home. Once again, the Quartermaster Department managed. In forty days, some 233,000 men, 12,800 horses, and 4 million pounds of baggage traveled across the border between war and civilian life. Many went west to Louisville, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. Others passed through Baltimore and then on to Harrisburg or northeast through Philadelphia. By winter, a second wave brought the diaspora’s total to 800,000. The department’s transportation branch had never been busier. The logistics were akin to those needed for the massive offensives of the previous year—save for the absence of gunfire and the strange finality of it all. Meigs sensed grandeur in this migration. The government sent the men back to “every hamlet and village of the States north of the Potomac and Ohio Rivers, and restored to their homes, the labor of the war over, to return to the pursuits of peaceful industry which they had left at the call of their country in her hour of need.”
Those journeys brought an end to the war for the living. Much more still had to be done for the dead. The bones of tens of thousands of Northern men lay in forests, fields, and shallow graves on battlefields across the South. Their stories had to be documented, their passing marked. For Meigs, Stanton, and others, it stood as a matter of honor. Not long after Grant and Lee met at Appomattox, a Northern theologian named Horace Bushnell framed the war in a way that resonated with many in the North. The half million deaths were “the price and purchase-money of our triumph,” Bushnell wrote. “[In] this blood our unity is cemented and forever sanctified.”
Meigs seems to have embraced this notion. His own losses, his empathy for the parents who had lost their own boys, and his Christian devotion helped sustain him during his last great challenge as a war manager. Even as he delivered the survivors home, Meigs launched the campaign to identify and inter the bodies still in the field. He delegated much responsibility at first to Captain James M. Moore, an assistant quartermaster who supervised development of Arlington. Moore was not well known, but he was competent, dedicated, and energetic. His push to find the remains of Union men was among the most important of several under way at the time. On June 7, under Special Orders No. 132, he traveled to battlefields in the Wilderness and at Spotsylvania Court House. Men under his command scoured the landscape for remains. For two weeks, they buried and reburied bodies and bones. They had no difficulty deciding where to build new cemeteries. They efficiently chose the places of the greatest carnage. In some trenches, the bones of Northern and Southern men were intermingled. Moore’s men marked each grave with a headboard, neatly painted with the man’s name, rank, and regiment. When the identities could not be determined, they painted “Unknown U.S. soldier” along with a date of the battle. As hard as they worked, the burial crews could not complete their work immediately. Rotting bodies and Virginia’s heat sometimes forced them to wait.
The next assignment sent Moore to Camp Sumter, the notorious Confederate military prison in Andersonville, Georgia. Thousands of Federals, forced to live in trenches and little caves carved out by hand, died there of exposure, disease, and starvation. The crew and its supplies departed Washington for Savannah by ship on July 8. In Savannah, they had to scramble to find a way to travel inland. The railroads were in a shambles and they could not find enough wagons to carry them. Ten days after arriving, they procured a boat, traveled to Augusta, and found a working railroad. For six days, they crawled through Georgia on rickety tracks, seldom going faster than twelve miles per hour. Men dressed in rebel uniforms would board the train at stops and want to talk. Some of the Southerners seemed genuinely aggrieved about the treatment of Union prisoners, especially at Andersonville. “[A]ll of them candidly admitted it was shameful, and a blot on the escutcheon of the South that years would not efface,” Moore wrote to Meigs.
At Macon, the small force joined with a company of cavalrymen and the 137th Regiment of US Colored Troops. Nothing prepared them for what they found at Andersonville. The Union dead lay in trenches about three hundred yards from the camp stockade. Dirt barely covered the men, many of them naked and stacked like cordwood. In some places, rain had washed away all but a few inches of soil. With help from records secretly maintained by an enlisted prisoner of war, Moore eventually identified the names, ranks, and dates of death of 12,010 men; another 450 others remained unidentified. The burial crews worked from early morning until dark, laboring through oppressive heat that sickened some of them. Moore blocked out fifty acres for the cemetery, and his men laid out pathways and planted trees and flowers. They made bricks and then used them to create gutters to drain rainwater. They sawed 120,000 board feet of Georgia pine to make the grave markers.
News about the conditions enraged Northerners. Clara Barton had traveled to the prison to see the conditions for herself. On August 17, in a ceremony to commemorate the place as a new national cemetery, she raised the Stars and Stripes. Moore’s men fired a salute and sang songs. Moore hoped the new cemetery would serve as testimony to the hell that can be unleashed by war. “Nothing has been destroyed. As our exhausted, emaciated, and enfeebled soldiers left it, so it stands to-day as a monument to an inhumanity unparalleled in the annals of war,” Moore wrote Meigs. “The ground is filled with the holes where they had burrowed in their efforts to shield themselves from the weather, and many a poor fellow, in endeavoring to protect himself in this matter, was smothered to death by the earth falling upon him.”
Moore’s men eventually found and interred more than fifty thousand bodies across Georgia, Virginia, and Maryland.
* * *
Despite Moore’s achievements, Meigs grew frustrated in his effort to create a master list of the dead. Commanders had not always kept track of their missing and killed, despite clear orders to do so. Facing the demands of fighting and moving, officers often took advantage of a loophole that required action only “so soon as it may be in their power.” In the fall of 1865, the quartermaster directed the department to produce “a special report to his office of the localities and condition of cemeteries, with reference, especially, to their exact location, condition, place of deposit, and condition of records, with recommendations of the means necessary to provide for the preservation of the remains from desecration; and whether the site should be continued, and the land purchased, or whether the bodies should be removed to some permanent cemetery near.”
He called on another quartermaster officer—Lieutenant Colonel E. B. Whitman, of the Military Division of the Tennessee—to greatly expand the search for bodies from Georgia to Mississippi. Under Whitman, hundreds of men, operating in effect as forensic sleuths, traced the paths that the armies had followed. They received unstinting support from the War Department. “To ask,” Whitman said later, “was to receive.” His exploring party set out from Nashville in March 1866, with pack mules, camp gear, and provisions. They stopped at Corinth, Vicksburg, and Atlanta, and then followed Sherman’s route to the sea. At key locations, the scouts formed skirmish lines and swept over battlefields, a process that sometimes took up to a week. They took note of every grave they found. The unit distributed circulars—the headline read “Important Information Wanted”—to former Union surgeons, chaplains, soldiers, and quartermaster men. They also reached out to Southern citizens. Whitman and his men visited more than three hundred places. They found more than forty thousand graves and took note of more than ten thousand names that had been written on rude markers, cut into nearby trees or recalled by residents. They gathered information about twenty-eight thousand other men from the hospitals that had maintained records. The work brought the awfulness of the war to life for Whitman. “It revealed the sad fact, and brought it to notice, that the entire country over which the war had extended its ravages was one interminable grave-yard.”
By late 1866, more than three dozen national military
cemeteries anchored battlefields across the country. They held the remains of almost 105,000 Union soldiers—with many more to come. Meigs calculated the cost of removing and reburying the bodies at about $9.75 each. He continued to compile his list of dead, driven by the belief that every man who lost his life in the service of democracy deserved to be remembered. As Whitman’s scouting mission came to a close, penny-pinchers in Washington insisted on using cheap wooden headboards. Others suggested cast-iron markers showing only a number to identify the soldiers. Meigs wanted the cast-iron markers to be plated with zinc to prevent rust, and each to bear the soldier’s name. He thought these men deserved to be remembered by the living. The survivors of the great national cataclysm needed this fundamental observance to move on. “I do not believe that those who visit the graves of their relatives would have any satisfaction in finding them ticketed and numbered like London policemen, or convicts,” Meigs wrote. “Every civilized man desires to have his friend’s name marked on his monument.”
CHAPTER 33
“Dogs to Their Vomit”
Not long after the war, Major General Robert Allen, the talented quartermaster in the Trans-Mississippi theater, spoke to members of Congress about the Quartermaster Department’s role in the Union victory. He recalled the struggle to transform chaos into order while contending with an onslaught of criticism. “I must be permitted to remark that history furnished few, if any, examples of armies so great traversing territories so wide and having their every want at every step supplied.”
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