#6: Montgomery C. Meigs, Part 2 - Master Builder of the Union Army

This is the second of our two-part story about the life of Montgomery Meigs. Many people with high-profile positions in the US Civil have praised  Meigs as an unsung hero of the Civil War, saying without his expert management of Union logistics, the war could have had a very different outcome. He continued to leave his mark on Washington, DC after the war - overseeing the growth of Arlington National Cemetery, the expansion of the Smithsonian Institution, and his "Big Red Barn."

This Week's Ghosts of Arlington are:

1. US Army Brevet Major General and Brigadier General Montgomery C. Meigs (Section 1, Grave 1-EH)
2. Louisa Rodgers Meigs (Section 1, Grave 1-EH)

For more information, including links to stream the show and pictures from these two major construction projects, visit the GoA website: https://www.ghostsofarlingtonpodcast.com 

Transcript

Episode 6: Montgomery C. Meigs – Master Builder of the Union Army

Welcome and thank you for joining me for The Ghosts of Arlington Podcast; Episode 6: Montgomery C. Meigs – Master Builder of the Union Army  <PLAY THEME> Last week’s longer than usual episode covered the life of Montgomery Meigs up to the cusp of President Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration in March 1861. Today we will cover the rest of the talented engineer’s accomplished life.  

As the Union was beginning to dissolve, Captain Meigs returned to Washington and was quietly summoned to a meeting with newly elected President Abraham Lincoln by Secretary of State William Seward who was leading the efforts to plan defenses for the seemingly inevitable civil war. Lincoln and Seward wanted to reinforce the forts off the Florida Keys and in the Gulf of Mexico that Meigs had just returned from – particularly Fort Pickens. Lincoln and Seward wanted to reinforce Fort Sumpter off of Charleston, SC as well but feared that any move on Sumpter would provoke Confederate President Jefferson Davis – Meigs’ old ally – to attack Washington. Meigs immediately wrote up cost estimates and logistical considerations for the clandestine operation but when offered command of the mission, he refused, knowing that more senior officers than a captain would be needed to pull everything off. When Seward reluctantly agreed, Meigs replied that he was “ready for any duty, in any place, in any capacity…, so long as it was in [his] country’s service.” Colonel Harvey Brown was eventually selected as the expedition’s commander but Meigs was appointed the chief engineer and was given what was effectively carte blanche from the president to get the mission done. On April 6th, after a few short weeks of preparation, and without the knowledge of the Secretaries of War, or the Navy, a small task force, including one of the Navy’s most formattable warships – the USS Powhatan – left the Brooklyn Navy Yard. On April 16th, the ships anchored off Pensacola. Over the next two days, dozens of light artillery pieces, 73 horses, and nearly 400 men came ashore at Ft. Pickens which would stay in Union hands for the entirety of the war. The successful mission reinforced in Meigs’ mind the importance that logistics would play in the upcoming war – it wasn’t until May 1st when he returned with the borrowed ships to New York that he learned Ft Sumpter had fallen and the war had begun.

Meigs returned to Washington the next day and found it an already changed place. Thousands of Federal troops had poured into the capital and Confederate forces could be seen patrolling the far side of the three bridges crossing the Potomac River. After briefing Lincoln and his Cabinet on the Ft Pickens mission, Meigs had dinner with Seward and learned about the government’s plans to raise a wartime Army in which Seward saw Meigs holding a prominent position. On May 14, 1861, Captain Meigs was promoted to colonel and the very next day to brigadier general in the position of quartermaster general of the Army. It is hard to imagine anyone more prepared to be Quartermaster General than Meigs, yet his task was daunting – Only two months before his appointment the standing army had been about 14,000 men. Now, after President Lincoln’s calls for volunteers, the ranks had swollen to more than 300,000 men and the Army quickly faced shortages. Meigs was faced with creating a new logistical system that one historian called “the art of defining and extending what was possible” to provide “three big M’s of warfare – materiel, movement, and maintenance.” Fortunately, Meigs proved up to the task.

Much has been written about the tactics and glory of battles. But as Napoleon said, an army marches on its stomach. Before a commander can even hope to attack, destroy, or simply wear down an enemy, he must first be able to supply sufficient daily calories to each soldier. He must keep them warm and healthy. Then he has to be able to move them from point A to point B in a reasonable amount of time. There is no glamor in this, only “hard work and cold calculation.” Meigs embraced all of this as his lot.

Regulations mandated that the Quartermaster Department provide transportation for all men, as well as food, weapons, and materiel – a list that grew longer as the war expanded. It supplied horses to haul artillery, cavalry, and wagon trains, as well as the forage to feed them. It built barracks and hospitals. It furnished uniforms, socks, shoes, needles, thread, pots, canteens, and other goods to the men. Quartermasters also built and repaired roads, bridges, railroads, and military telegraph lines. They chartered ships and steamers, providing the coal to fuel them and the docks and wharves to unload them. They paid all expenses relating to military operations, except those few specifically assigned to other departments. Meigs managed all this while simultaneously identifying shysters and profiteers, looking to sell the government shoddy equipment, including uniforms that would literally dissolve on soldiers’ backs. 

Throughout the Civil War, the Confederacy never had enough supplies and the longer the war drug on, the more strained the southern supply chain became. This was simply not so in the Northern army, even as that army spread south. This complex system grew in efficiency to the point that Union troops on long marches would simply throw away equipment they felt was weighing them down, fully confident that they would be resupplied shortly. This act of waste frustrated the conservative Meigs to no end, but even he reported to the War Department, “That the Army is wasteful is certain, but it is more wasteful to allow a soldier to sicken and die for want of the blanket or knapsack, which he has thoughtlessly thrown away in the heat of the march or the fight than to again supply him on the first opportunity with these articles indispensable to health and efficiency.”

No one foresaw how long the Civil War would last. As the weeks turned into months, Meigs became more important to the strategic planners in Washington, often meeting with President Lincoln and Secretary Stanton multiple times a day.

On May 4, 1864, the Army of the Potomac began its great Overland Campaign into the Confederacy, which culminated nearly a year later with Sherman’s march to the sea, Grant’s capture of Richmond, and Lee’s surrender at Appomattox –  but only after fierce fighting that led to the need for a new National Cemetery; a need we spoke about way back in episode one. During this campaign, the northern forces lacked for nothing – in his memoirs, Grant wrote, “There never was a corps better organized than was the quartermaster’s corps with the Army of the Potomac in 1864.” This organization allowed Grant to wage “a new kind of relentless, ceaseless warfare.” One anecdote during Sherman’s march shows the confidence he had in Meigs. It is said that upon receiving one dispatch from Meigs – scratched out in his wretched script – Sherman endorsed it, saying, “The handwriting of this report is that of General Meigs, and I, therefore, approve of it, though I cannot read it.” If Sherman did not completely grasp the complexity of the supply system, he was confident Meig’s Quartermaster Department would supply him with what he needed. And it did just that.

When the war finally ended in mid-April 1865, Meigs suggested that the Union armies gather in Washington, DC at the end of May for a final Grand Review. Soldiers bivouacked in the hills near the city, around campfires that glittered in the night like stars. After the review came the monumental task of demobilization. The men of the Army had to be discharged, paid, and transported home; and once again, the Quartermaster Department managed it all. In 40 days, some 233,000 men, 12,800 horses, and 4 million pounds of baggage traveled back to civilian life. By winter, a second discharge brought the total number of men returned home to 800,000. 

The end of the war was not the end of Meigs’ time in uniform. He remained the Quartermaster General for another 17 years! During much of that time, oversaw the efforts to find and bring remains of fallen Union soldiers to Arlington, but that was far from his only task. He also began designing buildings for many of the other national cemeteries that were springing up in the aftermath of the Civil War and residential cottages at Fort Myer. During these years, Meigs took the road often in his official capacities. From 1869 – 1874, he went on inspection tours to Texas and the Southwest, and California a few times. He also found time to design a home for him and Louisa in Washington, as well as designs for the Building Museum at the University of Michigan and laboratories at Pennsylvania’s Dickinson College.

In 1875, he was sent to Europe to study the military operations of several European countries and report on his findings. About this same time, he began using a new piece of technology called the typewriter, the readers of Meigs’ reports no longer had to try to decipher them. 

 By 1877, the Smithsonian Collection had outgrown the Smithsonian Castle; Meigs provided the initial draft for and served as the consulting engineer of the National Museum, visiting the site almost daily during construction. Today, it is known as the Arts & Industries Building and in the true spirit of Montgomery Meigs, it is still considered the least expensive permanent building ever erected by the federal government. Louisa grew ill shortly after he returned from overseas and never fully recovered. When she passed away in 1879, they had been married for 40 years.

Change kept coming. In early 1882, President Chester Arthur ordered Meigs to retire. He was 65 at the time, 3 years beyond retirement age. But one last project carried the older quartermaster into retirement. The Federal Pension Bureau needed a new building and congress took the unusual step of naming Meigs to build it. The pension bureau had increased greatly after the war and by 1880, dispersed almost a quarter of the nation’s revenues. He modeled the building on palaces he had seen in Rome, with great rows of windows and clean lines. The design foreshadowed the Renaissance classicism that would soon flourish in the buildings of New York City.

Over the next 5 years, Meigs closely watched every detail of construction of the 4-story, 400 foot long, 200-foot wide building. When his final project was completed, it was met with mixed reviews: some people loved it; others hated it, and some jokingly referred to it as Meigs’ big red barn. General Phillip Sheridan, who had taken over for Grant as General of the Army following the Civil War, was asked to comment on his former colleague’s new building and he supposedly said the only thing he could find wrong with it, is that is fireproof.

Tastes change, however, and by 1985, the building was so admired that it was transformed into the home of the National Building Museum. The New York Time’s architecture critic was awed when he visited, call it “one of Washington’s greatest (and least known) pieces of monumental architecture… [It] will stand as a potent reminder of the ability of architecture to transcend the mundane and create truly powerful drama.”

Early on January 2, 1892, Meigs died after a short illness. He was 75 years old. His body lay in the library of his home and honorary pallbearers from the Army, Smithsonian, and National Academy of Sciences came 3 days later and carried his casket to St. John’s Church, just across the street from the White House. 200 cavalry and artillery soldiers marched with his casket across the Potomac River to Arlington National Cemetery to a spot high in the hills where his wife and son John were buried. The casket was put into a sarcophagus that Meigs himself had designed, with an inscription to remind the world of his passions: Soldier, Engineer, Architect, Scientist, Patriot.” Today, that sport is known as Section 1, Grave 1-EH. 

The Army issued General Orders to mark Meig’s death and honor his service, saying “The Army has rarely possessed an officer who combined within himself so many and valuable attainments and who was entrusted by the Government with a greater variety of weighty responsibilities, or who has proved himself more worthy of confidence. There are few whose characters and careers can be more justly commended, or whose lives are more worthy of respect, admiration, and emulation.”

Hugh McCulloch, Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury and personal friend of Meigs may have said it best: “The civil war in the United States could not have been prosecuted by the Government with the smallest hope of success, had not the Union armies been properly provided and cared for by the Quartermaster’s Department. Fortunately for the country, there was at the head of this department M.C. Meigs.

And with the passing of Meigs, next week we will move with the cemetery into the 20th century and watch it evolve and expand as new and terrible wars rage on a global scale. But before we do that, I have one personal observation about Meigs’ importance in the Civil War. I have heard it said that the closer one sits to the decision-makers; the more valued one’s council is. If you ever find yourself in Washington, DC, walking along Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and Lafayette Square continue west to the interaction with 17th Street. There, a literal stones-throw away from the front door of the executive mansion (and I’m talking a professional-outfielder-gunning-down-a-runner-at-home-plate’s stone throw, it would probably take me two throws) stands the Renwick Gallery, a branch of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. During the Civil War, the Renwick Gallery was Meigs’ headquarters and he was summoned to make the three-minute walk to the White House to advise President Lincoln multiple times a day. In the end, Meigs got his wish – to provide a service to the American people that was so important he will never be forgotten. He embraced Benjamin Franklin’s maxim that I have commandeered to close out this podcast every week: “Fear not death for the sooner we die, the longer we shall be immortal.” <PLAY TAPS>