The American Future (10 page)

What was more, a dependable supply of water would relieve the citizenry of another regular terror: fire, and their dependence on the private brigades who might or might not come to the aid of a burning household and who might or might not have enough water to douse the flames and rescue those trapped inside! If the system worked as Meigs intended, there would even be some left for the spectacular fountains that would make the city the true new Rome of the West. Capital hydraulics would show America and the world “that the rulers chosen by the people are not less careful of the safety, health and beauty of their capital than the emperors who, after enslaving their nation by their great works conferred benefits upon the city which, their treason [to republican ideals] almost forgotten, cause their names to be remembered with respect and affection by those who still drink the water supplied by their magnificent aqueducts.”

The vaulting rhetoric worked. Congress appropriated the enormous sum of $100,000. In November 1852, the hitherto unknown thirty-six-year-old Captain Meigs was appointed by President Pierce's secretary of war. The erstwhile West Point hell-raiser and ringleader of the hot-flip rebellion, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, had championed Meigs against his many critics. Meigs might have used steam
pumps, but he chose the Roman way: gravity and a conduit, from the Great Falls of the Potomac. A nine-foot-diameter conduit would carry water over the Cabin John Valley and Rock Creek to a holding reservoir in Georgetown. So the city of 60,000 would receive 67 million gallons a day—one and a half times the quantity available for Victorian London!

Through the whole course of the work Montgomery Meigs was in his element, egotistically dueling in his mind with the legacy of Frontinus and the Caesars. The work
had
to be fine and enduring for “it contains my brains.” Apart from the conduit itself, two stunning bridges had to be built: the first a single-span 220-feet masonry arch (then the longest in the world) with a rise of fifty-seven feet thrown over Cabin John Valley; the second an iron bridge that was both aqueduct and viaduct 200 feet long over Rock Creek (both still wonderfully extant). For Meigs, the provision of pure water was an authentic American conquest, the right kind of war to be fought. On the day of the groundbreaking of the works in October 1853, complete with ceremonial shovel, he wrote in his diary in lapidary tones: “thus quietly and unostentatiously was commenced the great work. Which is destined, I trust for the next thousand years to pour healthful water into the Capital of our union. May I live to complete it and connect my name imperishably with a work greater in its beneficial results than all the military glory of the Mexican War.” Just in case it did not, Meigs had his name, Brunel-like, shamelessly stamped into the immense iron valves used on the aqueduct. On 4 January 1859 the first water was delivered to the city from Meigs's aqueduct, and he wrote in his diary: “God be thanked for making me the instrument of this much good for the city, for having given me the health, temperance, patience and skill to accomplish in the midst of attack so far so great a good…no more shall the houses of the poor burn in flames from want of the means to extinguish them…and the poor and the servant will now be relieved of the unhealthy labor of carrying water from the pumps through snowed up streets of winter.” A fountain now played in Capitol Park, right before the Congress, and though he was disappointed it shot only thirty feet in the air Meigs often went to stand in front of his “jet d'eau” for “it seems to spring rejoicing in the air…proclaiming its arrival for the free use of the sick and well, rich and poor, gentle and simple, old and young, for generation after generation
which will…rise up and call me blessed.” It was as though he knew already he might be on the receiving end of curses.

Was it a vice or a virtue that American government began to be embarrassed by the dinginess of its accommodation, the face it offered to the world? Was the sudden appetite for splendor a sign of democratic hubris or a coming-of-age? At any rate, senators, congressmen, presidents wanted magnificence in a hurry, and it was thus that Montgomery Meigs became the Indispensable Man, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers the battalions of construction. It had to start with the Capitol and with the first risk: fire. In 1851, the Library of Congress, containing the great gift of Thomas Jefferson's books, burned down. The miracle was that it had not taken Congress—a pavilion block with flanking wings surmounted by Charles Bulfinch's modest wood and copper dome—with it. But the fire was taken as a sign, if any were needed, that the Capitol needed both enlargement and to become more indestructibly fireproof. Legislators were becoming increasingly aware of the scorn poured on the dome, looking, as one uncharitable critic put it, “like a sugar bowl between two tea chests.”

A Philadelphia architect, Thomas U. Walter, was appointed to design and build the extended wings and a new dome, but in the spring of 1853 Meigs was assigned the work of overall supervision, which, Meigs being Meigs, meant more than just occasional superintendence; rather his own designs and concerns stamped on the work. The first—for he was still reading the ancients—was for acoustics. Meigs was prepared, at the beginning, to leave much of the exterior to Walter, but the issues posed by improved acoustics were for him, as was all his engineering, at root, like the good Jeffersonian that he was, the political working of republican democracy. Inaudibility, he thought, privileged the blowhard and discriminated against the Mr. Smiths of the nineteenth century, the little men who had been sent to Washington to give their voice with as much authority on the issues of the day as famed orators like Daniel Webster and John Calhoun. Poor or ill-considered legislation, bills compromised by being unexamined for the work of vested interests, were the result of that inaudibility! A vote
was a voice
! But transforming the acoustics of the chambers required something that Meigs anticipated would not be popular: closing the chambers off from natural light and ventilation. To deal with the objections he designed a system of steam-pumped hot air—an ancestor of
common central heating—and was careful about evenly diffused gas lighting.

None of this was enough to appease those upset by the decision, especially since Meigs's enormous dome, a full hundred feet taller than the Bulfinch original, was originally pierced by windows in Walter's plans. But Meigs, who had carefully studied Brunelleschi's sections and plans for the dome of the Duomo in Florence, especially the construction of an inner shell dome, as well as Wren's St. Paul's, rapidly came to think of himself and not Walter as the true architect. A state of sullen conflict poisoned the relationship between the architect and the engineer. As long as Pierce was president, Meigs was upheld in his superior authority by Jefferson Davis. The two men, then the two families, became close, socially connected. But after James Buchanan took office in March 1857, the new secretary of war, John B. Floyd—sometime failed cotton planter and ex-governor of Virginia—turned decisively to Walter's side. Floyd had his own reasons to dislike Meigs, and they had nothing to do with architecture and almost everything to do with money. Meigs had long been a thorn in the side of the lobbyists and contractors. When the House of Representatives had wanted to remove responsibility for public buildings and utilities from the army and deliver it instead to businesses, Meigs had fought the policy and prevailed. Thwarted, a faction in Congress, mostly southern Democrats, attempted to transfer the business from the Department of War to the Department of the Interior, and this, too, Meigs contested. As soon as a new gambit was devised that favored patronage and profit over the public trust, Meigs was onto it. Inflating the scale of jobs, so that only preselected big guns could bid, was ended. Low bidders, who won contracts on that basis but who then hiked their prices after contracts were signed, became a special target of his displeasure and criminal inquiry. Meigs knew that his stubbornness in these matters, his superior refusal to play by the usual rules, earned him much hatred around Washington. Lucrative kickbacks were being lost to misguided rectitude. But grandly casting himself in the mold of the Ciceronian honest man, he thought that he had no option but to stick to his guns.

The impasse between Floyd and Walter, on the one hand, and Montgomery Meigs, on the other, became so serious that work on the Capitol stopped altogether for almost two years between January 1858
and November 1859, and when it resumed it was with much rancor. In revenge for all the obstruction, Floyd maliciously interfered with Montgomery's son John's admission to West Point. An operatic scene ensued. Meigs handed Floyd a letter implying (though pretending to hope this could not be the case) that it had been the differences between them that had led Floyd to oppose John's appointment to the academy, ostensibly in presidential gift. Floyd read the letter on the spot and went white with rage. Meigs stopped pulling punches and told him “he had many times grievously wounded me and done me great injury.” Floyd said he would rather have resigned than see John Meigs go to the academy. The two could have murdered each other there and then. Instead, Meigs went straight to Buchanan, who as usual affected being much put upon and hemmed and hawed about Floyd being well intentioned. In the end, though, John was admitted, and Meigs took him straight off to the Hudson Valley.

But if he had won a skirmish, he sensed the satisfaction was temporary. “The Secretary will ruin me if he can,” he wrote. “I have done my duty and he will, I trust, find that to prosecute an honest man is to bite a file against God.” In October 1859 Floyd made it clear Meigs would have to leave his posts. A year later, with an election looming, it was official. Meigs was dismissed from all his great posts—the aqueduct, the Capitol, and the rebuilding of the Post Office. He was banished to the tropical fastness of the Dry Tortugas, seventy miles farther west in the Atlantic from the Florida Keys. There he was supposed to supervise work on the incomplete Fort Jefferson. The brick fort had been started in 1846 when it had been anticipated that the country might need an oceanic bastion against Spanish naval attack during the Mexican War. But that contingency now looked quaint, and the posting could hardly have been more remote. It seemed the end of the Roman's career. Floyd reveled in the humiliation. When Meigs asked for funds to complete the fort, he jeered at “the pestilent fellow who got trouble wherever he went” and how absurd it was to demand money to defend some “heap of rocks.” Hearing the news at West Point, his eldest son, John Meigs, wrote with indignant teenage loyalty in defense of his pa, “this is a pretty place to send talent that has been entrusted by the Congress of the nation with the expenditure of millions of dollars.”

But Meigs's exile turned out to be less of a penalty and more of a retreat where, between rapping his cane against the gun emplace
ments of Fort Jefferson, he took the opportunity to unbutton a little. Donning the white pantaloons of the islands, he walked the beaches, staring in rapture as “the waves splash away in great maps of light.” He watched the pelicans dive for fish; filled his lungs with sea air and his ever-active mind with matters that suddenly had become pleasingly important—crabs, for example, in all their tropical variety: “Hermit crabs, fellows with bright red and purple nippers with painted legs but with leather-covered bodies,” “stem crabs, fiddler crabs, soldier crabs, crabs which scarce move, a crab which darts with the speed of a spider, crabs which live on the vertical face of a wall and jump like birds from one perch to another.” Sometimes he would stroll along by the mangroves that leaned over the beach, their feet in the salt water, with scores of tiny crabs crawling over his coat and shirt, tickling his scientific fancy. But the naturalist Meigs could no more take his mind off his two homes than could the banished engineer. His house in Washington he knew to be secure and awaiting his return; the wider house of the Union, on the other hand, was threatened with imminent destruction. He began to think and act in parables. One day, walking the beach, Meigs found a hermit crab with a broken shell and, in the spirit of the Corps of Engineers, decided to rehouse it. The crab was brought home together with a vacant shell that Meigs judged suitable accommodation, and then the crustacean was gently teased from one to the other. “He readily accepted the new home.”

And then the world recalled him. Barely a month after Meigs sailed south, Abraham Lincoln was elected president. Early in the new year of 1861, his nemesis, John Floyd the Virginian (his state not yet formally seceded), was rumored to be diverting federal guns and munitions south to the Confederacy, and was indicted for fraud and malversation of public funds.

The joke was on John Floyd, who was indeed biting on a file. He was sweating it out in Washington, deserted by the feebly valetudinarian President Buchanan, fighting off criminal charges, worrying whether defecting to the Confederacy would make matters worse or better. Meigs meanwhile was sailing the coral reefs in his schooner, peering
at the turtles with an invigorated sense of patriotic usefulness, always a hearty tonic. For if there was to be a war, and it was hard to find anyone who, once the Republican Lincoln had been elected, imagined it would not come, then federal forts in the South—from Sumter at Charleston, to Pickens and Pensacola in Florida, to the brick Fort Jefferson in the Tortugas—were all hostage to the Confederacy. It was hard to get news to the islands, but there was a rumor around that Louisiana planned on raising a volunteer force of 10,000, some of whom would sail to Fort Jefferson. But without Union reinforcement, as many men as could be packed into a mere fishing smack could take the fort, Meigs wrote to Washington.

By February 1861, he already knew of Floyd's indictment for “debasing…public virtue” and of his own vindication and recall. But when he was not taking zoological notes and watching over the building of Fort Jefferson, Meigs was meditating on the tragic necessity of an American war he had never imagined he would be called on to fight. How could he not? The reason to fight it was there, in the Tortugas right before him, the backbreaking labor of the twenty-five slaves who had been imported from the Florida Keys to work on the fort. Meigs had come to this conclusion slowly, reluctantly, certainly not as a fire-breathing abolitionist and not someone who was already sharpening the blade of his saber for civil war. The militant abolitionist John Brown's violent raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry in October 1859, which resulted in fifteen deaths, Meigs had judged as the misguided, if not criminal, adventure of a near-lunatic. It merely showed, he wrote in his diary, how a small band of fanatics can disturb or even destroy a country's peace. And Bob Lee (as he called him) had done sterling work to stamp on it. But en route to Florida in late October 1860, Meigs paid a visit to his younger brother Henry in Columbus, Georgia, and everything changed.

The Meigses, of course, had a long Georgia connection through Return Jonathan Sr. The Cherokee's and Creek Indians' former territory in east Georgia, along the Alabama line, became Muscogee County, and its first town, on the Chattahoochee River, was given the name of Columbus in 1828 when someone had finished reading Washington Irving's
Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus.
In short order, Columbus became a center of cotton manufacturing, with
its biggest mill right on the banks of the Chattahoochee, using the forty-feet falls to power flour mills as well as cotton. In the middle of the river sat the sweet islet of Magnolia, where the scent of jasmine and the abundance of shady groves and hanging Spanish moss made it an irresistible courting spot. Sweethearts would row out there of a summer night and spoon to their hearts' content. Into one sweet-scented glade stepped Henrietta Hargreaves Stewart and Henry Vincent Meigs, fifth son of the Philadelphia obstetrician who had himself once been a Georgian. After they had wed, Mr. Stewart made Henry manager of his mill by the Chattahoochee. There was money to be made in Georgia. Dollars ripened in the sun like fat peaches. Raw cotton was being shipped from the slave plantations to the factories, combed, spun, and carded. Henry Meigs turned raw yarn into fabric and off it went into America or Liverpool. Was that all to end now, Henry worried, because of some Northern madmen who understood nothing of the South? Fidgety and anxious, Henry went to Washington and confided to Montgomery his apprehensions. Monty looked at his younger brother and judged him “a sad fellow” for being so torn in his loyalties. But now Henry had evidently pitched his tent four-square in the adamant South. When the table talk inevitably turned to the coming election, Henry ranted against the “fanatics” of the North who knew as much about slavery as they did of celestial revelation and the kingdom of heaven, and against the federal government's meddling in matters that were none of its concern. If a “constitutional” president were elected who would restrain the hotheads, all might yet be well, but if Lincoln was the people's choice, then the country's fields would be “reddened with blood.” As he listened to his brother, Meigs felt his mother's horror of slavery well up in him with augmented fury. How dare his brother wax sanctimonious as the Clapp Mill turned its wheels, the blood of slaves mingling with the river rush? How dare Henry write to their father, Charles, gloating that the skies over Columbus were bright with bursting fireworks to celebrate South Carolina's secession, “can a whole people be so deceived as you appear to think the South can be?”

Quite suddenly, the identity of his friends and his enemies became distinct in Montgomery Meigs's mind. They were the same as the friends and enemies of the United States of America. His wretched
adversary, Floyd, he remembered, had heard the cheers of the Virginia hotheads, when as governor he had promised to embargo goods from any free state not returning fugitive slaves to their masters! Such bravery indeed! Such exercise of the public trust! Meigs had heard rumors of so many of his old West Point comrades, men who as cadets and then officers had solemnly vowed to hold as sacred the college code of Duty, Honor, Country, violating it by planning to betray the Union. What
was
it these men, these
traitors
, including his own brother Henry, imagined they were defending? Was it the constitutional right of states to go their own way? Meigs thought that the most despicable and transparent sophistry. It was what the states were seceding for that was the true issue: the American future; whether that future would live up to Jefferson's noble promises of liberty and equality, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, or forever tarnish them with the odious hypocrisy of economic convenience. As the crisis reached a point of no return, Meigs had written that slavery “is not a thing which men brought up to look upon liberty of action, speech, thought and conscience should be called upon to worship under penalty of dissolution of their political organization and society.” Sitting at his desk in the citadel of Fort Jefferson, the white hot Atlantic glare scalding the walls, there arose before the thoughtful, burdened Montgomery Meigs the weighty apparition of American history, past, present, and future; the great cause for which Meigses had fought from the time of old Return Jonathan, and would do so again, if the cause were true and worthy of sacrifice. This one was. Not long after, Meigs would call it a “holy war.” He could see the two paths of American destiny stretching in front of him at this place and moment. Both were necessarily fateful. The path of blood and fire was never to be entered into without the most profound moral examination. American wars, he held, in the spirit of Jeffersonian idealism, ought never to be elective. But the path of accommodation with slaveholders, who would then forever hold the Union to ransom so they might protect their despicable institution from being swamped by democracy, was unworthy of the cause for which Return Jonathan had fought: a republic of freedom. He could never live with such an ethically debased America. “Am I to be the officer of some contemptible little state republic, some Bolivia…or Georgia…instead of the servant of a people stretching their empire
from ocean to ocean and touching the confines of the Arctic as they do of the torrid zone, a people great in enterprise, science, arts and commerce and in arms [all] this because they are free?

“Is all this to end in order that slavery not freedom may have greater sway?

“Is slavery stronger than freedom? Or does the Almighty who punished Israel for desiring a king punish us for boasting of freedom yet encouraging yet upholding or tolerating even, slavery? My heart grows sick as I think of this prospect.”

 

On 4 March 1861, the recalled and vindicated Meigs watched Abraham Lincoln sworn into the office of the presidency by Chief Justice Roger Taney on the east portico of the Capitol. The facade was still covered in the scaffolding of Meigs's reconstruction. Like the Union itself, Lincoln was in danger from the moment he mounted the steps, protected by guards supplied by General Winfield Scott. Tall, gaunt, and gawky, Lincoln seemed an unlikely man for the hour. Until that moment Meigs had no great opinion of the congressman from Illinois. Like most of the family, he had voted for Lincoln's old rival, Stephen Douglas, who had run on the northern Democratic ticket and was, they all thought, evidently the superior man. But Lincoln's great speech confirming that while the federal government would forbear from interfering with the “property” of slavery, it would not tolerate the “destruction of our national fabric” made a deep impression on Meigs. After the wretched temporizing of the Buchanan administration, it was astonishing to hear from the mouth of a politician an acutely philosophical intelligence, summoned at the behest of all possible crises, resolute in setting before the people exactly what was at stake: the life or death of the American democratic experiment. Though the new, abolitionist Meigs might have wished Lincoln more forthright on the ultimate incompatibility of slavery with that democratic Union, he agreed wholeheartedly with Lincoln's premise that “the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects this does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism.” Meigs was also won over by the classical eloquence
of Lincoln's modesty, two qualities not usually in tandem; together with the moral craft by which he plainly set responsibility for the outcome before his fellow citizens: “In
your
hands, my dissatisfied fellow citizens and not in mine is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail
you
. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.
You
have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it.”

For months Meigs had been yearning for a leader who, while avoiding belligerence, would not shrink from war to save America. In Lincoln's soaring peroration evoking “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart all over this broad land,” hoping for the return of “the better angels of our nature,” he heard the echo of the Meigs family instinct to see American democracy in the long arc of its history. “It was a noble speech,” he wrote to his father in Philadelphia, waxing almost Shakespearean himself as he was buoyed up by the solemn integrity of Lincoln's words. “No time was wasted in generalities or platitudes but he grappled at once with his subject and no man could doubt that he meant what he said. No point was omitted…but the disease of the body politic was analysed, its character and remedy pointed out and each sentence fell like a sledgehammer driving in the nails which maintain states. Kind and conciliatory, it still left no loophole for treason. War, I fear will come but it will be conducted humanely…If they bite they will bite against a file. He will defend and protect the public property…enforce the laws…and once more will freedom of speech and liberty of person be the rule of all our land and not the exception…The people about me applauded each sentence…some looked darkly and retired. Treason shrank out of sight and loyalty sat in the sunlight.”

From that moment Meigs was Lincoln's devotee, restive to serve, but unsure in which capacity he might give his best. For more than a decade he had been that most anomalous thing, a Washington soldier, and one of scant rank, too, still plain Captain Meigs, for promotion was excruciatingly slow in the Corps of Engineers. But his official rank was the only inconsequential thing about Meigs. He had spoken directly to three presidents, was about to be the confidant of a fourth, carried substance in Congress and in Cabinets, and
more important than any of this, had become the personification of public virtues that were in short supply in the capital and that, if worst came to worst, would be badly needed: integrity, competence, and resolution. He knew money, he knew metallurgy, and—this had suddenly become very important—Montgomery Meigs knew forts, North and South. He had built them, manned them, armed them, inspected them, defended them. As more and more states voted to secede from the Union, forts were very much on the new administration's mind. The status of Sumter in Charleston Bay was as close as anything to being a casus belli. South Carolina had been the first to depart from the Union but even before secession in late December, its congressional delegation had demanded the evacuation of the federal garrison. While the equivocating Buchanan, whose last speech to Congress had castigated Northern “fanatics” in much the same tones as Henry Meigs, was still in office, some sort of accommodation over Sumter seemed possible. A meeting produced an informal standoff arrangement by which the South Carolinians agreed to abstain from shelling the place into submission provided no attempt was made to reinforce it. But in January 1861, the garrison commander Robert Anderson had imported seventy-five men from another Charleston stronghold, an action the Carolinians decided to take as a violation of the standoff. It would take 20,000 men to hold it, the aged commander of the Union army, General Scott, concluded, and prepared for an evacuation.

The humiliation was passed to the incoming president. For Lincoln the status of Sumter and the other southern forts that would pass to Confederate control—Pickens on the Floridian island of Santa Rosa near Pensacola, Jefferson on the Tortugas, and Fort Taylor on Key West—was as much a matter of national symbolism as military strategy. He would have liked to have reinforced all of them if he could, since a naval blockade of the South was very much part of General Scott's “Grand Strategy” for a war of encirclement and strangulation. Scott's gloomy assessment persuaded him that ultimately Sumter was going to have to go. Lincoln made it clear that he was not about to cede the rest as if the United States simply accepted the fait accompli of its division. At issue was more than national amour propre. The Confederacy was now a fact with ten states already seceded and Virginia likely to follow. In February Jefferson Davis
had been elected provisional president and had taken a host of West Pointers with him.