The American Future (11 page)

If Sumter had to go, Lincoln was determined that Pickens would stay with the Union. William Seward, Lincoln's new secretary of state, aware of Meigs's expedition to the Tortugas, asked his advice. Meigs, raring to go, freely gave it in a meeting with Seward and Lincoln—a relief expedition to Fort Pickens that would land men and blockade the harbor against boat attack from the mainland. But because Washington was so insecure, crawling with spies and both the army and navy beset by daily defections to the Confederacy, the mission, Meigs thought, would have to be kept secret if it was not going to trigger a preemptive Confederate raid on Pickens. Lincoln wanted Meigs to be there in person, which gave Montgomery an opportunity to point out the indelicate matter of his lowly rank for such a trust. Promotion was put in the works.

After years of being an office officer, Meigs was excited by this call to immediate secret action. He kept the information from his wife, Louisa, who was told merely that he was on a trip to New York. Once there Meigs commandeered a steamer from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to act as warship and sailed south on a requisitioned civilian vessel. Keeping the mission from the Department of the Navy made trouble but none that Meigs couldn't cut his way through. His own ship overtook the warship and arrived off Santa Rosa Island by the second week of April. In short order he managed to station a garrison of a thousand, with another thousand standing by, the harbor now blockaded and barred against boat raids. But there was nothing Meigs could do to prevent Confederate artillery on the mainland from lobbing shells. As he was preparing to sail back to New York, he heard the sound of their fire opening up on the fort. It gave him no joy. “The opening of a civil war is not a thing lightly to be seen and though I saw my duty plainly in reinforcing this beleaguered fortress & rescuing my countrymen shut up here from the hands and power of rebels and traitors, I could not [see] the opening of the fire without great regret. It must soon come however & God protect the right.”

“The country is in flame,” wrote Meigs in a one-line entry in his diary. So was he; passion unloosed. Louisa, who still had misgivings about the conflict, wrote to her son John that she was not enthusiastic about siding with the “extreme North…and such fraternity” who seemed to be dragging the country into chaos for some sort of righteous satisfaction. Nor did Louisa know what to make of the change in her familiar, dependable “Mont.” First he disappeared off to who knew where without so much as a by your leave or any explanation. And then he had become fearsome to live with. “His soul seems on fire with indignation at the treason of those wicked men who have laid the deep plot to overthrow our government…He looks so dreadfully stern when he talks of the rebellion that I do not like to look at him.” Certainly civil engineering no longer sufficed to assuage the storm of outrage that swept through Meigs when he considered what had become of his country; and what, especially, had befallen the institution to which he was most deeply attached and to which he had entrusted his eldest son: West Point. A full quarter of living West Point graduates had thrown in their lot with treason, and in the bitter spring of 1861 he felt their enmity, the collapse of their collegiate esprit de corps, everywhere he went. The commander of the battery that had fired on Fort Pickens was Braxton Bragg, just one year behind Meigs at West Point and thus well known to him in that little world. Joseph Johnston (class of '29, the same as Lee) had traded in the honor of quartermaster general of the United States for the same office in the Confederacy. And Johnston and Pierre Beauregard, the superintendent of West Point, were in command of regiments that were mustering in Virginia to threaten Washington itself; West Point traitors poised to swarm over
his
Washington, to camp on the Capitol Park, drink from the fountains he had created to slake the thirst of good republicans! Meigs took all this personally. And then there was Lee, for whose affected gallantry, honor, and all the rest Meigs had the utmost contempt, but whose shadow pursued him every day. Lee's house was on the Heights of Arlington, which if captured by Johnston and Beauregard would be able to fire directly on Washington and indeed on the President's House! A dwelling
connected inseparably with the memory of George Washington would be commandeered as the citadel of treason for the express purpose of destroying what the greatest of the Founding Fathers had so painfully made: a union of the free. Compared to Washington, what was Lee? Someone who had fouled his nest. On 22 April 1861, a week after Lincoln had called for 75,000 volunteers, Lee accepted the invitation to command the Confederate forces. Meigs was implacable. Any of the officers who had violated their solemn vows taken at West Point or at the naval academy at Annapolis (founded in 1845) should be permanently deprived of civil rights, subject to the confiscation of all their property and deported. But for the renegade leaders like Lee, Johnston, Bragg, Jefferson Davis, and Beauregard, this would not be enough. They bore personal responsibility for leading the people of the South into fire and slaughter. They would forever have blood on their hands. They “should be put formally out of the way if possible by sentence of death, executed if caught.”

A good piece of Meigs burned to take this fury into the field. But he also knew that it was not any reputed mastery of tactics that had recommended him as adviser to the president. Men like Seward and Lincoln both sensed in Montgomery Meigs the makings of a type that had never yet existed in the history of the United States—a war manager. However long the conflict lasted, it would take place on a scale unimaginable to the generation of Washington and Return Jonathan Meigs. The Confederates had planned for an army of 100,000, had enlisted almost that number by May, and under Joseph Johnston, their new quartermaster general, were expecting to have to establish a command economy capable of laying hands on every asset in the eleven states. When Forts Sumter and Pickens were fired on, the Union had ambitious plans laid out by Winfield Scott for seizing control of the Mississippi, cutting the Confederacy in two in the west, blockading Charleston and Savannah, but that was about all it had. Artillery and ammunition had been siphoned off south by the disloyal; customs houses, arsenals, and docks in the South had been seized. There were almost no uniforms, tents, blankets, rations, or, most important of all, animals: the mules that must pull wagons; horses for the cavalry and artillery; cattle to serve as beef on the inevitable long marches. Everything needed creating, virtually from scratch.

What was it about Meigs that made him seem the man who could rise to the challenge? He could be depended on to take no nonsense from the profiteers who were lining up to exploit the Union's predicament: syndicates who would buy ships and river transports on the cheap and lease them to the government at exorbitant rates; railroad men who would put a premium on the shipment of men and munitions; even horsetraders who would sell the army broken-down nags at extortionate prices. Meigs, it was thought, would give these rogues as short shrift as he had the contractors in Washington, call them to a severe account. He understood the engineering of war like few others: bridge-building, road-cutting, tunneling, fortification. But there was something else that Seward and Lincoln sensed in Montgomery Meigs: righteous anger translated into cold efficiency; someone who had suddenly lost all patience with the childish affectations of military gallantry; someone who seemed to know what was coming, four years before Sherman actually said it.

Not everyone shared this opinion. The secretary of war, Simon Cameron, for example, was against Meigs's appointment. For Cameron, Meigs was a jumped-up major who liked throwing his weight around; a nobody who had played with fountains and had pointlessly made enemies in pragmatic Washington. He was not someone who understood business. Cameron was overruled by the president and the cabinet. On 13 June Meigs was formally appointed to take Joseph Johnston's vacated place as quartermaster general of the Union. He was forty-six years old, and the hard work of a life was about to begin.

Meigs was a brigadier general now, but still without direct experience of fire. That was about to change. By July there were more than a quarter of a million men in the Union army and the new quartermaster general was scrambling to procure them uniforms. Any color would do—brown, blue, green, gray. (Many of the first federal soldiers went to battle wearing the identical gray as their Confederate foes.) Boots, blankets, tents, and guns were desperately needed. In every way, the Confederates seemed better prepared. Montgomery's brother Henry was supplying Southern troops with coats and shirts from his own factory in Columbus, Georgia! So the two brothers were in a uniform race. The older would win, but that conclusion was not foregone in 1861. No wonder, then, that Meigs was against any precipitous offen
sive into the South that might take the Union armies far from supply lines and depots that had barely begun to be constructed. Let the rebels rather come to us, he counselled Lincoln (who, surprisingly, began the practice of periodically asking his quartermaster general for strategic advice). But with Joseph Johnston established in the Shenandoah Valley with 12,000 and Beauregard less than thirty miles from Washington with another 20,000, a largely hostile Maryland to the north, and the Confederate press noisily looking forward to chasing Lincoln and the government from the capital, irresistible popular and political pressure built on Lincoln to stop the rebel offensive in its tracks. The editor of the
New York Tribune
, Horace Greeley, the most influential newspaperman in the country, urged a quick march, convinced that Confederate soldiers were an undisciplined rabble who would hardly survive their first contact with a real army. But the commander assigned to the task, Irvin McDowell, knew his opposite number well. He and the Confederate brigadier general had been exact contemporaries at West Point, and McDowell was in no hurry to advance. The troops are green, he told the veteran Winfield Scott. Theirs are green too, came the reply.

They didn't come greener than John Rodgers Meigs. On 2 July he had come home to Washington on furlough from West Point after two years at the academy. All along it had been a struggle. Montgomery recognized in his eldest son exactly the same qualities that had led his own father the obstetrician to pack him off to West Point, hoping to channel the unkempt energy into constructive achievement. It worked. But John Rodgers was, as his pa had been before him, a handful, rowdy, raucous, so resistant to family discipline that Montgomery resorted to the usual brutalities of the nineteenth-century home: tying his son to the legs of a wardrobe and denying him supper, and then whipping him when he managed to get loose. But the fact that he saw, without question, in his awkward boy the earlier version of himself only deepened the love-bond which was undeniably there. It mattered, then, for John to be admitted to West Point, and when news of the admission came through, Meigs felt his own vindication as well as his son's.

And when everything, at last, seemed smooth sailing in the autumn of 1859, and Montgomery brought John to the citadel on the Hudson
Heights, something else conspired to give father and son unexpected grief: John's scrotum. The medical examination of incoming cadets revealed something unknown to both father and son, namely a grossly enlarged spermatic vein, a varicocele “of such an aggravated character,” the understandably distressed father wrote in his diary, “that it was doubtful he would be able to discharge the duties of a cadet.” He was admitted, then, on probation, and sensing the acute suffering this particular problem might engender in his seventeen-year-old, Montgomery did all he could to reassure him that it was a temporary problem, not uncommon to lads his age and that would disappear in due course. Meigs was himself struggling with the shock of it, never suspecting the rowdy boy to be “disabled” in any way. Consulting anyone and everyone who might be qualified to give an opinion, beginning of course with his father, Charles, Meigs prescribed what he could for John—a suspensory truss-bandage, daily cold baths, morning and night, knowing that all these remedies might make him a figure of cruel fun among his peers. Rather sweetly Montgomery wrote John that though he might balk at dunking his member in cold water every day, “you will find that whatever is done with modest feeling is not immodest and that nothing is immodest which is necessary to health.” If all that turned out to be too difficult then there was always a Dr. Pancoast, who had performed a simple surgical procedure on countless young men to remove the difficulty, and, so Dr. Charles Meigs assured him, with not a single misfortune. But all the Meigses talked about it together. Louisa wrote her son of her surprise since “you have always seemed so well and accustomed to take so much exercise” and cautioned (thinking doubtless of the attractions of Benny Havens, the cadets' watering hole) that “if you are
careful
you may outgrow it.”

Dr. Pancoast's services were, perhaps mercifully, not called for. Gradually John's Trouble disappears from the family correspondence (though it was liable to flare up again in times of crisis); and probation was replaced by regular cadet status. But John was repeatedly interrogated by his father about his failure to come first in classes, about his habit of acquiring demerits, all of which Montgomery professed not to be able to comprehend though in his own time as cadet he too had been a demerit specialist. “My dear son, I am sorry to see by your letter of the…that you have allowed your competitors in the
class to beat you in marks even in such a study as geometry in which you say you are so well prepared…” But then John always had his mother's letters written in a quite different vein to fall back on for comfort. On his twentieth birthday she wrote, “I am descending down the vale slowly but surely yet it seems but a very few years since that I was as young and fresh as you are. I was scarce twenty-five years old when you were born and yet I felt myself of very mature years & I remember that I actually
blushed
at the in-appropriateness of the expression when the doctor spoke of the likelihood of your being a strong and vigorous baby from the fact of your having a
young
and healthy mother…We advance so rapidly from one stage to another that it all seems like a dream. In a few years you will have arrived at all the dignities and privileges of manhood and the battle of life for you will commence. You must put on your Christian armor and go forth into the strife.”

But Louisa meant it metaphorically. She somehow hoped John would never actually see battle. “Do not let all your thoughts be directed to making you a good soldier for this world's warfare but remember you once promised to become a soldier of Christ.” A preacher, then, not a fighter? Just what Louisa's feelings must have been when she saw Montgomery helping John with his sword and sash on the eve of the battle of Bull Run, it is only too easy to imagine. Living in an army family made it not a whit easier for so evidently loving a mother. John, with his father's permission, had joined up as a volunteer aide with McDowell's army and had been assigned to an artillery battery commanded by Major Henry Hunt. “I felt a pained shocked sensation when he told me of it,” Louisa wrote to her mother. There had been a difficult scene between mother and son. John told Louisa that after two years being “educated at the expense of the government” it was his duty to volunteer and that he would be ashamed to go back to West Point without serving at a time when the country needed all the men it could get. “I felt that it was the prompting of a nature, the stirring of his blood which comes from a patriotic race…but I felt a very motherly and womanish sinking of the heart nevertheless.” On the morning of 16 July 1861 John marched out from Arlington with the troops, leaving his father proud and his mother in prayer. The war had come home to the Meigs family.

This first campaign was a famous fiasco for the Union, a shocking humiliation. So confident was Washington society of bloodying the noses of the impertinent rebels, once they knew the day on which the battle was to be joined (21 July), carriages were taken to drive to Manassas as if on a summer excursion to the country. The photographer Mathew Brady and others whom Meigs, as a keen student of the new art, knew well, were there too to record the disaster. After a hearty and optimistic breakfast Montgomery himself went, in uniform, as an observer who would report directly back to the president. Louisa was all too willing to let him go, imagining he might keep a paternal eye on John. Meigs Sr. was himself confident that an early victory was at hand, not least because in just a few months he had managed to equip a substantial army with everything it needed.