The American Future (9 page)

The Meigses were staunch Jeffersonians. How could they not be? They were all over America—Ohio homesteaders, Georgia merchants, Philadelphia doctors. They subscribed to the vision of their country as a new polity in the world, the first true “empire of liberty” as Jefferson had put it. The difficulty of reconciling power, freedom, and justice did not dampen their patriotic energy, although Mary Meigs, Montgomery's mother, feared for the Union should her southern relatives support the expansion of slavery into that empire of liberty.

Idealism at West Point lived on in one fundamental aspect of the institution, its commitment to civil as well as military engineering. Sylvanus Thayer had resisted teaching the subject alongside the sciences of fortification and ballistics; but West Point's Visiting Board, appointed in Jefferson's spirit, had insisted on it. And the academy became America's only school of technology and engineering; the elite members of each class taking instruction from Dennis Hart Mahan, who, like Thayer, had had a European as well as American education, and then joined the United States Army Corps of Engineers. It was West Pointers who constructed America physically and materially in this period, Jefferson's dream of a westerly-stretching empire of liberty a real possibility—through the pioneering survey maps; the building of roads, bridges, and canals; the dredging of harbors; the protection of ports from natural as well as foreign threats. That sense of patriotic vocation was what made Montgomery Meigs put up with the foul smells and the ferocious heat of St. Louis in 1837: the conviction that he was America's centurion-engineer, out on the far provincial frontier, the
limnes
, creating and guarding the new Rome with as much integrity and tireless zeal as the ancients. Ten years later word would come to him of the exploits of Lee and other brother-officers from West Point in the Mexican War where
General Winfield Scott was bringing slaughter to Mexico. But Meigs reassured himself that the peaceful work he was engaged in would ultimately redound more to the happiness of his country than the annihilation of the Mexican Army, the despoliation of their people, and the annexation of Texas.

This was Meigs's West Point talking: the ethic planted by Jefferson that, for American soldiers, sustaining life, repairing damaged social fabric, and building anew was as much part of the military mission as lessons in killing. Only in America was a corps of civil engineers instituted as the highest elite of the army. On the Web page of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers the spirit of Lee and Meigs on the Mississippi lives on, complete with images of levee restoration in Louisiana and bridge building (in every sense) in Afghanistan. In recent years, the corps has had to try to discharge its historic responsibilities with fewer resources, since it's suffered the same kind of “streamlining” (a term used without any trace of irony for the great river-minders of the nation) as other branches of the government. Ironically, then, precisely the branch of the armed services that might have made the American presence more welcome in Iraq has been the one most starved of funds, which have gone to more purely military exercises. The war-winners have been seen, until very recently, as optional auxiliaries. Similar damage to the corps has been sustained at home, where over a hundred levees, dams, and dikes for which it has maintenance responsibility have been classified as in serious danger of breach. When the corps fails to deliver on the high expectations made of it, whether in New Orleans or in Baghdad, the sense of falling short is registered with painful acuteness at the place where it began, up on the Hudson Highlands. Go into a West Point classroom, and the odds are that you will find nineteen-year-old women and men grappling with hydraulics rather than ballistics.

This, at any rate, was the kind of lieutenant that Montgomery Meigs became in the years after his expedition to the Mississippi with Lee: a master of the theodolite as well as ordnance. On his way back from St. Louis, Meigs had crossed the Alleghenies in a sleigh, had ridden the new Baltimore and Ohio railroad, and done the rest by boat and horseback. He knew exactly what it took to throw the American idea across the continent and still keep faith with it. It would never have
occurred to him that the vocation of the army was not democratic nation building, beginning with his own.

This did not preclude a strong military element in his work for, so American officers believed, there was still an obstinate and vengeful enemy that wished to do the United States harm, namely the unreconciled British Empire. Hard as it might be to credit now, the Canadian frontier in the late 1830s and 1840s was an unstable and unpredictable boundary. The most militant American nationalists claimed the entirety of the northwest frontier up to the fifty-fourth latitude boundary of Russian Alaska, a presumption the British had no intention of conceding. Since the attempt in the 1812 war to take lower Canada, the British had every reason to be vigilant about American designs on the colony, especially when there were Canadian rebels actively seeking the support of American irregulars. Despite official American neutrality, skirmishes occasionally turned into real battles, seizures of ships on the rivers and lakes, raids and retaliations across the shifting frontier. As long as the border was unsettled, Congress neither wanted to stamp on the action, nor wanted to give the British provocation for a full-scale third American war. What it needed, either way, were forts, and in 1841 Congress finally appropriated funds for a chain of them across the northern frontier.

That was Montgomery Meigs' first major posting after the Mississippi. Following the work with Lee, the Corps of Engineers had returned him to Philadelphia which meant a reunion with his family. Amid the domestic comforts—gardens, songs at the piano, promenades—Meigs fell in love. Louisa Rodgers was graceful and lively rather than conventionally pretty. Photographs of her taken by her keen photographer-husband show an attractively strong face—a powerful nose and jaw, dark complexion, and thick black ringlets. Louisa was vivacious and forceful like his mother, Mary, and her grandfather Commodore John Rodgers was the most famous naval hero in American history after John Paul Jones. They married, the children came quickly and often, and in 1841, Meigs took his family northwest to the Detroit River, on the edge of the British war zone. There, Meigs spent eight years building Fort Wayne, named for “Mad” Anthony Wayne, the general under whom his great-grandfather Return Jonathan Sr. had served at Stony Point—and who had
taken Detroit from the British. That enemy still seemed to be at the gates of the United States. Should its troops cross the lakes and scatter the modest frontier force, they would never, Meigs thought, be able to take Fort Wayne. Everything he had learned from Mahan at West Point—Roman and French fortification science, especially the work of Louis XIV's pet genius, Sebastien Vauban—went into the formidable structure. Built from primitive, economical materials—packed earth, fronted with thick cedar rather than masonry—its star form, taken from Vauban's classicism, allowed for projecting artillery bastions on each of the protruding points. Bearing in mind the British habit of burning and razing everything in their way, Meigs turned the barracks into an inner stronghold: its walls, made from local limestone rubble, twenty-two inches thick. The barracks, gabled and pedimented in American-Palladian grand style, still stand by the river at the end of Livernois Avenue in a tough area of the city, the property of the city of Detroit, which opens them on summer Sundays for Civil War reenactments.

So while brother West Point officers were pushing the American Empire south, carving a path in fire and blood all the way to “the halls of Montezuma” in Mexico City, Meigs became Captain Meigs, the American Vauban, unrenowned in the world, but rapidly acquiring a reputation for engineering competence and integrity as solid as Fort Wayne. In Washington, the Army Corps of Engineers knew all about the formidable Meigs: his unhelpful aversion to the bribes and kickbacks that were a routine part of frontier construction; his omniscience; his eagle-eyed passion for minutiae. Nothing doubtful got past his scrupulous inspection. It was at this time that Meigs began filling small green octavo and duodecimo notebooks with encyclopedic observations, drawings, and pasted cuttings on
everything
that came his way—topography, architectural details, load-bearing problems, the customs and appearance of this or that Indian tribe, the state of local roads and canals—all dashed down in his high-speed hand which, for someone constantly taking on yet more work, was never quite fast enough, necessitating after 1853 his using Pitman shorthand. (For the historian, Meigs's shorthand is even harder to read than his longhand.) Trust went a long way to overcome illegibility, though. Toward the end of the Civil War General Sherman signed a procurement order saying, “the handwriting of this report
is of General Meigs and I therefore approve it but I cannot read it.” Meigs's notebooks are full of the routine toils of supervising excavations and foundations, masonry and timberwork, roof trusses, joists, and pulleys, but they also breathe a scrupulousness rare for the time, for recording every load of material, every day's hire of work. In the golden age of the huckster, Meigs was flint: wise to the wiles of land agents, gunsmiths, timber haulers, boat captains, anyone looking to make a killing, not just from the overstretched government, but from America's homesteading immigrants, the multitudes looking to find a home that was settled and safe. It was the good faith and credit of the republic, he thought, that was at stake in such matters. And if the United States Army could not be trusted, who could?

This reputation for integrity Meigs took back with him to Washington in 1852, along with his multiplying family. He was not well off. Army pay was poor, prospects of promotion dim and slow, so he was obliged to live in the house of his widowed Rodgers mother-in-law and her daughter Jerusha on H Street. But the extended family may have helped when in the autumn of 1853, two of Montgomery and Louisa's sons died of an “inflammation of the brain” (perhaps viral meningitis); first the eight-year-old Charles and then the two-year-old Vincent, named for the family patriarch. Both parents were prostrated by grief. Louisa howled hers, and Monty, as he would again, clenched his jaw and threw himself into the work of creating Washington.

He was only thirty-six and well out of active command but in a few years would become one of the powers in the city, in part at least because he never swaggered with that self-knowledge. The army had been given power by Congress over much of the fabric of the rapidly growing city to keep it from of the clutches of the corner-cutting profiteers who battened like leeches on some of the most spectacular contract opportunities in the country. President Zachary Taylor, the insubordinate ripsnorting hero of the Mexican War, had barely taken office when stories, most of them true, circulated that members of his own Cabinet were egregiously on the take. Washington was a prime opportunity for getting rich fast since it was agreed the city needed drastic improvement. Very much a work in progress, the city was a ramshackle, chaotic, dirty, and dangerously insalubrious town of about 40,000, a quarter of whom were black, mostly free. Foreign visitors who arrived to see American democracy at work (or
be confirmed in their lofty ironies about it) almost always commented on the disparity between reality and the grandeur of its original design: wide processional boulevards opening views along the mile between the President's House and the Capitol spacious enough to provoke thoughts on the arrival of a new Rome in the world. Even by 1850 the only true avenue was Pennsylvania, the rest being carriageways of dirt separated by coarse grass in which geese, cows, and hogs happily fed. After a spell of rain, everything turned into a miry bog through which ladies attempted to make a way through the ducks toward the twelve-seater omnibuses, where they seated themselves and attempted to avoid the flying sprays of tobacco juice that were a regular hazard of the American scene.

The greatest enemy of Washington's pretenses to metropolitan dignity was disease. Whatever the other virtues of Pierre l'Enfant's choice of site on the Potomac, he had failed to notice just how fetid the torpid river became in the spring and summer, and l'Enfant's ambitious plans for canals had managed to create the country's richest opportunity for mosquito breeding. The waterways of a city that l'Enfant had imagined as that American Rome, embellished with healthful fountains, a cascade falling from the height of Capitol Hill down to Pennsylvania Avenue, were choked with the remains of rats, dogs, horses, and, not so occasionally, people. Cholera, which had been an occupational hazard of anyone living in the city in the 1830s, would still make periodic visits. And in July 1850, so the coroners concluded, cholera morbus took its most distinguished victim, the president of the United States.

That Zachary Taylor had been struck down in front of the Washington Monument at the 4 July Independence festivities only made the disaster more sensational. It was a broiling day; for some reason the president was wearing a heavy coat and downed a large quantity of iced water (some said complemented by iced milk). Back in the White House he collapsed, sank into a trembling fever, then unconsciousness, waking only to declare, rather impressively, “I should not be surprised if this were to cause my death.” On 9 July he was proved right. Historians have speculated that Taylor might in fact have died from heatstroke, but cholera was the official coroner's verdict. And the death of the president from drinking polluted water was the strongest incentive for the Corps of Engineers, who had been assigned the job of providing
a new water supply for the capital, to rise to the challenge. When the army's first choice suddenly died—perhaps also from cholera—the work was given to Meigs, for whom it took on historical, as well as personal, significance. His hometown, Philadelphia, had become famous for the purity of its drinking fountains, doubtless welcomed by Meigs' physician father. But for Meigs, the challenge was less to equal Philadelphia's achievement than to demonstrate to his countrymen and to the sneering Europeans that a people's democracy was capable of doing as much as Rome had for its citizens. Commissioned by Congress to write a report, he boned up on Sextus Julius Frontinus, the aristocratic master of Roman hydraulics, and his great system of aqueducts. In the report “written at a gallop” and delivered in fifty-five days, Meigs declared it a scandal that “the nation's most honored citizens” had to suffer through the heat and dust of a Washington summer, slaking their thirst only with dangerously corrupted water. The remedy would doubtless be ambitious and therefore expensive, but Congress should think loftily when it came to the good of the commonweal for “water should be as free as air and always supplied by government.”