Meigs understood where he stood and what he had done, and he did not want to leave those days behind. Never again would he have so much power or stand so near the center of such a vital enterprise. He had to move on, and for now that meant attending to administrative chores. Congress soon passed a law limiting the standing army at 75,000. Meigs let go thousands of employees and dismantled military depots that had anchored bases of operations everywhere in the field. The department held fire sales of 207,000 horses and mules, 4,400 barracks, hospitals, and other buildings and mountains of irregular or damaged clothing. Meigs also shed the great fleet the department had amassed. The number of ocean transports shrank more than tenfold to 53 vessels. He sold off all 262 riverboats left in service.
As he managed this contraction, Meigs could not get his emotions in order. He nurtured his grievances against those who had betrayed the country. He could not come to grips with the deaths of so many young men, including, of course, his beloved son John. Even if he had wanted to move on, he simply could not. Soon after the war’s end, Varina Davis wrote to Meigs from Georgia. She wanted to visit her husband, Jeff Davis, who was being held in a cell at Fort Monroe. She hoped that with Meigs’s endorsement, Stanton might intervene. Stanton said it was up to him. Meigs told himself that he understood her suffering; she simply wanted a measure or two of comfort. Yet he could not bring himself to respond to her, the wife of a former friend who had helped Meigs in uncounted ways. He merely sent word through channels that Jeff Davis was faring well enough. “Poor woman she has been guilty of a great crime,” Meigs wrote to his father. “Even the blood of my son slain by her husband’s hired murderers does not shut up my compassion.”
Alfred Rives, the brilliant aqueduct engineer who had worked under Meigs’s supervision on the Washington Aqueduct before the war, sought a reunion. Meigs spurned him, saying he would not “see any of those gentlemen who had deserted their country & joined the party who murdered my son with any satisfaction.” His rancor toward the South deepened during the debates about reconstruction and rights of freed slaves. He believed that given an opportunity, white Southerners would strip freed slaves of the freedom they had won. Repeatedly he urged Congress to remain vigilant. To help former slaves eke out a living and guarantee them a measure of economic freedom, he urged lawmakers to give each family five acres of land. “The emancipation of the negro slave is incomplete as long as, being without land, he is at the mercy of his former master.” His lobbying came to nothing. President Andrew Johnson showed no interest in the cause. In his frustration, Meigs predicted Southerners would resume their oppressive ways and return “like dogs to their vomit. They can not enslave but they will outrage & oppress. Their hearts are not changed.”
By the end of 1866, the war caught up with Meigs. He often felt unwell. His legs swelled. Each breath came hard. A doctor diagnosed his ailment as a form of typhoid. At age fifty-one, he had to take a break. In early 1867, Meigs took a short sick leave. His family recommended more and, stubborn as he was, Meigs agreed. He and Louisa settled on a plan to tour Europe. In late May, the War Department gave Meigs extended leave, putting General Rucker temporarily in command. His friends applauded the change. To open doors in Europe, Seward gave his friend a letter addressed to American diplomats. The letter gave Meigs much credit for the Union victory. “The prevailing opinion of this country sustains a firm conviction which I entertain, and on all occasions cheerfully express, that without the services of this eminent soldier, the National cause must either have been lost or deeply imperiled in the late Civil War.”
The family traveled abroad for a year. For the first time in many years, Meigs relaxed as he and Louisa absorbed the great art and architecture that had, through reproductions, inspired so much of his work on the Capitol. When he returned, he found his job in Washington a steady if sometimes boring routine. Now he was responsible for much of the “military peace establishment.” If the challenges fell far short of what he craved, he could at least keep watch for interesting, sometimes tumultuous, developments as the nation turned its eyes again to the west. Settlers needed the protection of soldiers, and the soldiers needed supplies from the Quartermaster Department. Meigs became preoccupied with Native Americans and their resistance to the waves of white people occupying their tribal lands. He displayed little empathy about the plight of American Indians. Instead, still bitter about the war, he focused on blocking their access to modern repeating rifles. “As a measure of humanity to our own men, whom they murder, and to our own women, whom they violate with all the aggravations of savage barbarity, the supply of arms to any Indian, not a citizen of the United States, should be prohibited by legislative enactment, under severe penalties,” he wrote. “The arrow is a sufficiently effective weapon in the chase of the buffalo.”
Meigs also shouldered the tedious task of settling claims relating to confiscations of property from border state residents during the war. The department reforms in July 1864 required him to establish that persons making the claims had been loyal at the time. He eventually oversaw adjudication of nearly thirty-four thousand cases worth $40 million. All through the postwar years, he also monitored the national cemeteries and the graves of fallen soldiers. Congressional support for that work came and went, and Meigs’s proposal for zinc-plated iron markers languished. In the meantime, the cemeteries fell into disrepair, and “the wooden head boards have been set up as they fell from decay, or they have been replaced by numbered stakes.” Meigs resisted a congressional mandate to use marble or granite as markers. He thought they cost too much. It is our good fortune that Congress ignored him and appropriated $1 million for the placement of sturdy headstones on every grave. The standard markers now present a familiar, elegant profile to cemetery visitors. Cemetery crews did not finish the project until 1881, when virtually all the graves of Civil War soldiers had received markers.
* * *
As the new decade approached, Meigs itched to create and build. Slogging through administrative work was not enough. It never was. In 1869 and 1870, with his personal finances well in hand, he began making designs for a family home in the capital. He let his imagination romp, making drawings with illusionary murals, Roman doorways, and rooms framed by columns. The house, built on Vermont Avenue, was fireproof. It had a simple exterior, a mansard roof, and a wide porch. High ceilings and brick-and-mortar floors framed the interior. A fireproof circular staircase connected the upper and lower floors. A library had room enough for several thousand books, including texts about history, science, and the military. The house became an anchor for his children and grandchildren, whom he liked to amuse with stories or by showing them how to plant flowers in “grandmother’s garden.” He once summoned the grandchildren and told them to stand around a box in the yard. Just when they settled down, he gave the box a kick. Snakes slithered in every direction, the children squealed, and he had a big laugh, telling them the snakes were there to eat bugs, not them.
Meigs offered designs for a museum building at the University of Michigan and laboratories at Pennsylvania’s Dickinson College. After Congress appropriated money to pay superintendents to keep watch over the national cemeteries, Meigs began drafting plans for a model “lodge” to house them. In 1870 he sought advice from Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect, who suggested that the cemeteries ought to “establish a permanent dignity and tranquility.” Meigs designed small homes in a popular style at the time known as French Second Empire. The prototypical version was L-shaped, with a half basement below, sleeping quarters above, and a mansard roof. They could be made of brick or stone, depending on supplies available to local builders. One of the first lodges went up at the Battleground National Cemetery, which Meigs created on a square acre not long after the Battle of Fort Stevens for Union soldiers who died there. Dozens of the lodges still stand in cemeteries across the country.
In another collaboration with Olmsted, Meigs drafted plans for a huge military warehouse in Jeffersonville, Indiana. Designed wi
th utility in mind, it includes attractive details such as arches built into solid brick walls and Tuscan-style pilasters. Meigs estimated the cost at 5.5 cents per cubic foot of storage room. He also had a hand in designing cottages that served as housing for commissary sergeants at Fort Whipple, now known as Fort Myer, in Arlington, Virginia.
In 1877 he turned his attention to a new museum for the Smithsonian Institution. It had received a huge donation of objects from the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876. The old Castle did not have enough room to hold the expanded collection. Meigs attended the Centennial as an exhibitor and won an award for two of his drawings of bridges. The board of regents, still led by Joseph Henry, asked him to study public museums in Europe and apply his findings to the new space in Washington, called the National Museum Building, now known as the Arts and Industries Building. His plans called for a square, fireproof building. An architectural firm, Cluss and Schulze, later refined plans and made the final drawings. Meigs served as the consulting engineer, visiting the site almost daily to make inspections of the work.
The Smithsonian broke ground for the building in April 1879. It had an open floor plan, a rotunda, large arched windows, and eight towers. Perched on top are allegorical statues that depict Columbia Protecting Science and Industry. The National Museum Building embodied the spirit of Montgomery Meigs in one important respect. It is still considered to be the least expensive permanent building ever erected by the federal government.
CHAPTER 34
“Soldier, Engineer, Architect, Scientist, Patriot”
Meigs took to the road more often in those years. From 1869 to 1874, in his official capacity as quartermaster general, he went on inspection tours to Texas, the Southwest, and California. Once, he rode the Northern Pacific Railway to the Red River and then headed to Denver. On other trips, he traveled to the West Coast, stopping at San Francisco and Los Angeles. On at least one of these journeys, he took his son Montie along. In 1875, on special orders, he had returned to Europe to study the military operations of other countries, with a particular focus on quartermaster operations. He savored this trip, in part because it gave him time to paint. He focused on churches, steeples, shorelines, and clouds in watercolor renderings that show the finesse of an energetic man who has calmed down.
Something else made the journey memorable. Meigs began using a new technology called a typewriter. An inventor named Christopher Lathem Sholes had recently begun mass producing the first practical model. Suddenly, readers of Meigs’s letters did not have to decipher them. Meigs described the typewriter as “a wonder of invention, and a triumph of human ingenuity and brains, over the stupidity of dead metals, that the thing does so quickly and so well. Writing twenty words a minute, the action of the living fingers and their diverse and complicated muscles, is another wonder.”
We learn from his letters that he met with German emperor William I and senior military leaders. He described the people, the clothes he wore, the maneuvers he observed, and some of the lavish social events he attended. He exclaimed about the wealth that surrounded him, and in a note to Louisa, he drew a diagram of the dinner table. “It is impossible to imagine the brilliant appearance of a gathering for an imperial dinner, all in new fresh clothes, blue, light blue, scarlet, green and white with the breasts covered with decorations and epaulettes and shoulder and gilt or silver shoulder knots.”
His affection for his wife jumped out of each note. “Ever your loving, MCM,” he wrote. Not long after Meigs’s return, Louisa began feeling poorly. She tired easily, and her heart troubled her constantly. In March 1879 her lungs became congested. She would never fully recover. When she died, in the fall, they had been married for almost four decades. Meigs thought that she looked more beautiful than when they’d met—“as time allowed the good & great soul to stamp itself on” her features.
The changes kept coming. On February 6, 1882, President Chester Arthur ordered Meigs to retire. He was sixty-five, three years beyond retirement age. Others had waited in the wings for the top post, including Rucker and the inimitable Ingalls. In a statement to the officers in his department, Meigs offered an old soldier’s glowing memories. He wanted them to remember:
The corps has seen great changes since I entered it. It has been expanded till, leavened by the knowledge and spirit and integrity of the small body of officers who composed it early in 1861, it showed itself competent to take care of the supplies and transportation of a great army during four years of most active warfare.
It moved vast bodies of soldiers over long routes; it collected a fleet of over 1,000 sail of transport vessels upon the great rivers and upon the coast; it constructed and equipped a squadron of river iron-clads, which bore an important part in the operations of the army in the West, and after having proved its practical power and usefulness, was accepted by the navy, to which such vessels properly belonged; it supplied the army while organizing and while actively campaigning over long routes of communication by wagon, by rail, by river, and by sea, exposed to hostile attacks and frequently broken up by the enemy; and, having brought to the camps a great army, it, at the close of hostilities, returned to their homes over a million and a quarter of men.
It is now reduced to the proportions of a peace establishment, containing only sixty-four officers of the staff and about two hundred acting assistant quartermasters who hold their commissions in the line. During this time the corps has applied to the wants of the army over nineteen hundred and fifty-six millions six hundred and sixteen thousand dollars and has used this vast sum, nearly two thousand millions, with less loss and waste from accident and from fraud than has ever before attended the expenditure of such a treasure.
One last project carried Meigs into old age. The federal Pension Bureau needed a new building, and Congress took the unusual step of naming Meigs to build it. The number of bureau employees had soared to keep pace with the needs of Civil War veterans and the families of those who had died. By the early 1880s, the Pension Bureau dispersed almost a quarter of the nation’s revenues. It was another unexpected chance, enabling him to apply ideas that developed during his European trips. And it turned out to be his final and most important architectural contribution.
Meigs’s design drew on the Farnese and Cancelleria palaces in Rome, Renaissance masterpieces he saw during his trip with Louisa. With its great rows of windows and clean lines, the design foreshadows a revival of “Renaissance classicism” that would soon flourish in the buildings of New York City. Plans showed a building that was far larger than the Roman models—400 feet long, 200 feet wide, and almost 152 feet high. It had four floors. Meigs relied on brick and iron instead of stone and timber. In deference to instructions he received from Congress, the building was virtually fireproof.
Just as he did with the Cabin John Bridge, Meigs went beyond his mandate and used the project as a chance to innovate. He aimed to create a modern, well-ventilated space that would be bright, healthy, and pleasant for the workers. Wherever possible, he sought to supplement traditional building methods with modern techniques, such as the use of metal trusses. For the site, he selected the north end of Judiciary Square.
Over the next five years, Meigs kept watch on the details of construction. He documented each stage with photographs, which show layers of red bricks rising steadily over time, more than 15 million in all by the end, making it the largest brick building in the world at the time. It is a wonder inside, a surprise that has to be experienced to be understood. A gigantic courtyard rises more than four stories high. A water fountain sits on the main floor. One hundred forty-four columns form the perimeter on the first and second floors. Behind them are offices. Eight colossal columns rise seventy-five feet from the courtyard. They remain among the tallest in the world. Each is made with tens of thousands of bricks and plastered over and painted to resemble marble. A shed roof, chosen for its economy, tops it off.
Meigs once calculated that the space holds 4 million cubic feet of air. The volume of air i
nside was key to his goal of air-conditioning the place. He came up with an innovative scheme involving vents in the walls that allowed fresh air in, and hot air to rise up and escape. His theory about the space turned out to be true, as the courtyard served as a natural chimney. Meigs claimed a great public health achievement here, saying his tabulations showed that the number of sick day claims by clerks plummeted after they moved into the Pension Building. To enable clerks to store and move records, Meigs designed an elevated rail track that carried baskets containing up to 150 pounds of documents. The track fed a hand-operated elevator that moved the documents to lower floors. He built shafts to house a hydraulic elevator for disabled veterans. They remained empty because no money was available at the time to buy and install the lifts. Meigs took care to honor Civil War soldiers. He commissioned a three-foot-high terra-cotta frieze that wraps around the outside of the building. Meigs hired Caspar Buberl, the same Bohemian artist who’d created Columbia for the Smithsonian Museum Building. He drew on disparate sources for the design, including the ancient Parthenon and the photographic studies by Eadweard Muybridge. The frieze depicts Federal infantry, cavalry, artillery, navy, quartermaster, and medical units. To ensure Buberl got the details right, Meigs arranged for soldiers in fighting uniforms to march by the artist.
For the building’s west entrance, Meigs insisted the frieze honor freed slaves. One panel depicts a black man driving a wagon pulled by mules. Meigs told Buberl, “He must be a Negro, a plantation slave, freed by war.”
The Quartermaster Page 24