The Quartermaster: Montgomery C. Meigs, Lincoln's General, Master Builder of the Union Army

by Robert O'Harrow Jr.

Overview

“The lively story of the Civil War’s most unlikely—and most uncelebrated—genius” (The Wall Street Journal)—General Montgomery C. Meigs, who built the Union Army and was judged by Abraham Lincoln, William Seward, and Edwin Stanton to be the indispensable architect of the Union victory.

Born to a well-to-do, connected family in 1816, Montgomery C. Meigs graduated from West Point as an engineer. He helped build America’s forts and served under Lt. Robert E. Lee to make navigation improvements on the Mississippi River. As a young man, he designed the Washington aqueducts in a city where people were dying from contaminated water. He built the spectacular wings and the massive dome of the brand new US Capitol.

Introduced to President Lincoln by Secretary of State William Seward, Meigs became Lincoln’s Quartermaster, in charge of supplies. It was during the Civil War that Meigs became a national hero. He commanded Ulysses S. Grant’s base of supplies that made Union victories, including Gettysburg, possible. He sustained Sherman’s army in Georgia, and the March to the Sea. After the war, Meigs built Arlington Cemetery (on land that had been Robert E. Lee’s home).

Civil War historian James McPherson calls Meigs “the unsung hero of northern victory,” and Robert O’Harrow Jr.’s biography of the victorious general who was never on the battlefield tells the full dramatic story of this fierce, strong, honest, loyal, forward-thinking figure. “An excellent biography...O’Harrow’s thorough, masterfully crafted, and impeccable researched biography is destined to become the authoritative volume on Meigs” (The Civil War Monitor).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781451671933
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	10/24/2017
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	382,720
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Robert O’Harrow Jr. is an award-winning reporter on the investigative unit at The Washington Post. O’Harrow is the author of No Place to Hide, Zero Day: The Threat in Cyberspace, and The Quartermaster, a biography of Montgomery C. Meigs. He was a contributor to the 2016 biography, Trump Revealed: An American Journey of Ambition, Ego, Money, and Power. He lives with his wife and son in Arlington, Virginia.

Read an Excerpt

The Quartermaster

Montgomery Cunningham Meigs was born on May 3, 1816, in Augusta, Georgia. His father, Dr. Charles Meigs, a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, with his new bride, Mary, had come to Augusta to start his medical career and raise a family in an atmosphere of piety. They lived not far from the Savannah River, optimistic about their prospects. But it soon became clear to the couple they could not stay in the South. The brutality of slavery made Mary ill. So they returned to Philadelphia, a bustling business center quickly filling with schools, churches, and businesses. It retained the charm of a provincial city, giving way quickly to unspoiled countryside. About sixty-three thousand residents relied on wood to heat their homes. Farmers brought food to the city by wagons. The city offered the Meigs family an affordable place to live, study, work, and grow. Montgomery and his six brothers and two sisters explored nearby rivers and forests. He loved to romp along the Delaware River with friends, examining the creatures he found in the mud and water. Sometimes in the summer, he fished until dark on the Schuylkill River. Now and then his family took sailing excursions to nearby farms.

Montgomery was bright and affectionate and “seems to observe everything that passes,” his mother wrote in 1822, when he was six. But he also pained his family. He “very soon tires of his play things,” she wrote. “Destroying them appears to afford him as much pleasure as their first possession—is not vexed with himself for having broken them. Is very inquisitive about the use of everything, delighted to see different machines at work.” When playing, he tended to be bossy. His mother described him as “high tempered, unyielding, tyrannical towards his brothers; persevering in pursuit of anything he wishes.”

Meigs’s father demanded discipline and excellence from the children. His stories were laden with moral lessons. The children often gathered around him near the fireplace and listened as he told them about their virtuous and industrious ancestors. The stories begin at the great Puritan migration in the 1630s, when the first of the clan arrived in Boston from England. The ancestors were educators, doctors, engineers, soldiers, and public officials. They were ambitious, patriotic, and pious. A certain righteousness also reappeared from generation to generation, much to the annoyance of neighbors and colleagues. Dr. Meigs in his stories underscored the importance of personal honor. He told the children it was their “rigid duty” to protect the family name. They were to “beware lest [they] disgrace that history.” In a note inscribed at the end of the family Bible, he wrote: Discard “without mercy every member of their blood line whose conduct might stain” the family reputation.

His father challenged Meigs in other ways. He taught at Jefferson Medical College and became a pathbreaker in the realm of women’s health, writing books on obstetrics while maintaining regular hours for patients. He shouldered an extraordinary workload, often snatching only two or three hours of sleep on the family couch before going to work. Charles Meigs didn’t seem to mind. He felt called to service and thought his medical work put him closer to God. Montgomery Meigs would credit his mother’s influence for much of his success, but he would never lose sight of the model set by his father.

As a boy, Meigs watched militia companies march by on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. He heard how Stephen Decatur, the American naval hero, had offered the toast “My country—right or wrong!” He dreamed of going to the United States Military Academy at West Point, in New York, where he could train as a soldier and engineer. He was accepted in 1832, when he was sixteen, and he was awed by the outpost perched on a bluff in the forested mountains of the Hudson Highlands.

Meigs studied mathematics, engineering, and building. One teacher insisted that every soldier know how to draw for mapmaking, and Meigs was soon able to do so with unusual finesse. Though he thrived as a student, he racked up demerits for cutting against what he later called West Point’s “uncompromising devotion to orthodoxy.” He complained about the demerit system, saying it impeded enterprising men in favor of “the stolid, the namby pamby, the men having no distinguishing traits or character.” In 1836 Meigs graduated fifth in his class and became a second lieutenant in the army, dedicating himself to God, family, country, duty, honor. He joined the artillery corps but gave up that commission a year later to become a brevet second lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers, an elite organization that played a primary role in building the young country’s roads, canals, bridges, and harbors. Its achievements included the country’s longest highway, the Cumberland Road, west of the Ohio River.

In the summer of 1837, one of his first assignments paired him with another West Point graduate, Robert E. Lee, class of 1829. Their task was to find ways of improving navigation on the Mississippi River. Meigs and Lee, his superior, set up headquarters on an abandoned steamboat about 150 miles to the north of St. Louis. Part of the deck was under water, but the staterooms were dry. Meigs drew and painted the countryside as part of mapmaking responsibilities. Lee directed a survey of the river and oversaw preliminary work of laborers to clear the river bottom. Meigs loved nearly everything about the assignment. For a time, the men bunked in a cabin onshore and ate the catfish and pike they caught. Meigs admired Lee, “then in the vigor of youthful strength, with a noble and commanding presence, and an admirable, graceful, and athletic figure. He was one with whom nobody ever wished or ventured to take a liberty, though kind and generous to his subordinates, admired by all women, and respected by all men. He was the model of a soldier and the beau ideal of a Christian man.”

With harsh winter weather coming on, Meigs and Lee disbanded their crew. Meigs went back to Philadelphia; Lee, to his wife’s plantation at Arlington, Virginia, in the hills overlooking Washington. They would remain fond of each other until a national crisis turned them into mortal enemies.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

Part 1

Chapter 1 Rigid Duty 5

Chapter 2 Patience and Perseverance 9

Chapter 3 Wholesome Water 16

Chapter 4 An Aqueduct Worthy of the Nation 22

Chapter 5 A Rival to the Parthenon 30

Chapter 6 America's Curse 35

Chapter 7 The Saturday Club 42

Chapter 8 The Workload Grows 48

Chapter 9 Rowdy Looking 52

Chapter 10 Energetic, Obliging, Firm 59

Chapter 11 An Inscription for All Time 68

Chapter 12 "Everything into Confusion" 78

Chapter 13 "Eternal Blot" 83

Chapter 14 Tall and Awkward Candidate 87

Chapter 15 Floyd Resigns 93

Chapter 16 He Plucked a Laurel 98

Part 2

Chapter 17 A Secret Mission 105

Chapter 18 A Soul on Fire 111

Chapter 19 Building an Army 117

Chapter 20 Shoddy 125

Chapter 21 "Hard Work and Cold Calculation" 132

Chapter 22 "The War Cannot Be Long" 140

Chapter 23 Gunboats 147

Chapter 24 "His Best Name Is Honesty" 154

Chapter 25 "Vast in Quantity" 163

Chapter 26 Hope Wanes 173

Chapter 27 "Fret Him and Fret Him" 181

Chapter 28 "Exhaustion of Men and Money" 190

Chapter 29 "A Beauteous Bubble" 200

Chapter 30 A Vulnerable Capital 209

Chapter 31 The Refit at Savannah 218

Chapter 32 The Journey Home 227

Chapter 33 "Dogs to Their Vomit" 232

Chapter 34 "Soldier, Engineer, Architect, Scientist, Patriot" 238

Acknowledgments 247

Notes 251

Index 291

Editorial Reviews

The Quartermaster offers a vivid and eminently human portrait of Montgomery Meigs, the brilliant and principled general whose mastery of supply and logistics on a grand scale contributed decisively to Union victory in the Civil War. Too long overlooked, Meigs deserves a place beside such luminaries as Grant and Sherman, as O'Harrow convincingly demonstrates in this fast-paced, bracing account. This is one of the most important Civil War biographies to appear in recent years.

Peter Cozzens

The lively story of the Civil War’s most unlikely—and most uncelebrated—genius.

The Wall Street Journal - Allen Guelzo

Robert O’Harrow brings an eye for lively detail and an appreciative sympathy for his subject . . . A former member of Lincoln’s Cabinet remarked that without Meigs’s superb contributions, “the civil war in the United States could not have been prosecuted . . . with the smallest hope of success.” The Quartermaster does much to sustain this judgment, highlighting the centrality of logistics to the Union victory and situating a principal architect of that success near center stage in the compelling national drama.

The Washington Post

Montgomery Meigs may have been a more important architect of Union victory in the Civil War than Grant, Sherman, Farragut—more important than anyone except Lincoln himself. And before supplying the armies that won the war, he supervised the expansion of the Capitol, including the construction of its new dome, along with the creation of the aqueduct that brought clean water to Washington. This splendid biography offers new insights on this man of many talents.

James McPherson

O’Harrow’s compact and remarkably readable portrait of Montgomery Meigs shows that Lincoln’s Quartermaster, long recognized as a significant player, was an even more fascinating and consequential figure than has been realized.

Douglas Wilson

As quartermaster general, Montgomery Meigs was one of the architects of Union victory in the Civil War. A brilliant engineer and talented organizer, he supplied the troops in the field and on the march, a daunting undertaking. Relatively unknown in our times, two of his enduring achievements can be seen today—the Capitol dome and Arlington National Cemetery. Robert O'Harrow, Jr.'s compelling biography of this remarkable man and soldier is rich in details and rightly places Meigs among the major leaders who saved the Union.

Jeffry D. Wert

An excellent biography . . . The author masterfully traces Meigs’ role in a variety of endeavors in the decades prior to the conflict. . . . Historians interested in the operations of the quartermaster department during the Civil War, particularly purchasing and distribution practices, will find this volume extremely useful. . . . O’Harrow’s thorough, masterfully crafted, and impeccably researched biography is destined to become the authoritative volume on Meigs.

Civil War Monitor

Montgomery Meigs may have been a more important architect of Union victory in the Civil War than Grant, Sherman, Farragut—more important than anyone except Lincoln himself. . . . This splendid biography offers new insights on this man of many talents.” ---James McPherson, author of The War That Forged a Nation

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