by Simon Schama
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.
Except tactical sense, glaringly missing from the commander. McDowell’s complicated plans for multiple outflanking movements suffered from confusion and irresolution and above all a failure to press home when it counted his massive superiority of numbers. Of the many regiments at his disposal, only two were ever engaged at the same time. So the advance up the hill at Beauregard’s batteries stalled, and then broke under counterattack, leaving all of Meigs’s mobilization—guns, wagons, animals—to the jubilant Confederates. Washington society, which had expected to be amused, was now panic-stricken, anticipating the city would be occupied by the rebels. Routes of retreat from Bull Run were clogged by a traffic jam of fashionable phaetons. Meigs overtook them riding a horse hard.
About three in the morning on Monday, 22 July, Meigs went to Lincoln in the President’s House to report directly on the disaster, doubtless stressing McDowell’s inability to make the best use of a finely equipped, if inexperienced, army. Lincoln received the news with melancholy stoicism and began to plan replacing McDowell with General George McClellan, who, in his particular way, would turn out to be an even greater disappointment. An hour later, at four in the morning, Meigs got home. While Louisa was relieved to see him safe, she could not stop worrying about her son whom Montgomery hadn’t seen amid the chaos of battle. It was eight in the morning when a horseman galloped fast to the door of the Meigs house, dismounted, and rapped on the door. John’s face was still black with smoke and powder. Montgomery was shaken from his sleep by his son announcing the scale of the rout, which his father already knew. Together they commiserated; together they resolved. Torrential July rain fell in sympathy with their somber mood. John had assumed that he would return to his regiment and protested to his father that he had come back to the city only to fetch fresh horses for Major Hunt’s battery. To Louisa’s relief, the father disabused the son. Meigs was proud of John’s courageous service under fire, carrying communications from Hunt to other parts of the field with balls whizzing around him. Reports would commend him on the day’s work, and Montgomery would egotistically congratulate his son on conducting himself so as to leave “my name unstained.” But Meigs himself had been exposed enough to harm, and had had his confidence shaken about the prodigal quality of commanders, to feel that enough was enough. John would, he ordered, return to West Point, honor satisfied, country grateful. A lesson to be taken from the disaster at Bull Run, Meigs thought, was there would be no easy victory and that John might well be needed to serve again. Louisa was grateful for her husband’s decisiveness. And John’s grandfather, Charles
, wrote the young man a burst of prose poetry that the Meigses seemed always to be able to summon for such moments.
“My dear John,” wrote the doctor, “when I think of this wicked war I rejoice that I am old. When I remember you then I lament that I am more than twenty-one…for if I were young again I might hope to follow you…But after all when I do die, why may I not hope to gaze out at you from out [of ] the face of some summer Moon or peep at you behind a gorgeous cloud in heaven and sympathetically move you ever safely onwards in the march for Truth and Honor.”
7. The quartermaster general, 1861–64
Now the real toil began, the work that would ultimately win the war for the Union as the Confederacy would be out-supplied rather than out-fought. Meigs knew that blundering generals could lose wars, but smart, resourceful ones could never win them without consistent and swift supply. Time and again, the availability of food, clothing, draft animals, and artillery horses—as much, if not more than the munitions themselves—made the difference between success and failure, both in particular battles and whole campaigns. Take underwear and soap, for example. Diarrhea and dysenteric infections like typhoid made short work of armies, on the march and in muddy camps. Toward the end of the war Confederate armies in Virginia had no more drawers to supply men whose underthings had been reduced to foul shreds and rags. And in both armies lack of hygiene could kill more men than shells and grapeshot. And without proper footwear, there could be no victories. By the summer of 1864 the Confederates had run out of horseshoes, so they ripped the shoes from dead animals and shot any sick or broken-down horses to get at the shoes. Much of their infantry were themselves shod in rawhide moccasins, if they were lucky, or not at all. It was said that you could tell where rebel soldiers had passed by the bloody footprints on the ground. Their best hope was to take Union prisoners, for whom the first order was to get their shoes off and transferred to their desperate foes. If that happened they were in luck, for Montgomery Meigs had assumed each Union soldier would need four pairs per year, and since he anticipated (correctly) long rugged marches, specified at the outset that footwear be hand-stitched, rather than the wood-pegged shoes that could be got from factory production. This kind of provision took longer, tried the patience, but it won campaigns. In fact the battle that has been seen (not altogether accurately) as the most decisive of the war, Gettysburg, came about almost by accident when Lee’s army in Pennsylvania were searching for footwear and ran into the army of General Meade! Later that year Lee actually curtailed his plan to attack Meade because of “the want of supplies of shoes, clothing and blankets…I was averse to marching them [his troops] over the rough roads of that region at a season too when frosts are certain and snows probable unless they were better provided [to] encounter…without suffering.” Lee had read enough about the Napoleonic wars to know armies never won with frostbitten feet.
On the other hand, when Sherman got to Savannah in December 1864, waiting for his army (that had been decently supplied in the first place) were 60,000 fresh shirts, drawers, and pairs of socks, 10,000 greatcoats (the assumption being that some at least of the original distribution would have survived the march through Georgia), 10,000 waterproof ponchos, and 20,000 blankets. There were also three full days’ rations for each man, ready to go. Meigs had shipped all these supplies south, partly in the ironclad armed transport vessels whose fleet he had designed, and had stored them on Hilton Head Island just off the coast. Just in case Sherman made a last-minute change of plan and continued to march south, Meigs had also sent an equivalent supply to Pensacola in Florida. Against this performance, the overstretched Confederacy, for all its own miracles of mobilization, had no chance.
But back in 1861, the Confederacy—which had assumed an army of 100,000 at the beginning of the year—was, if anything, more energetic than the Union. In the North, the cupboard was shockingly bare. A chain of empty depots with no reserve stocks of anything greeted Meigs when he took over his post. And the scale of his task was almost incomprehensible. Joseph Johnston, the defector, had been quartermaster general to an army of just 30,000. Two years later twenty times that number of soldiers had to be provided for. By Bull Run there were 230,000 Union troops in the field, and after the defeat Congress was quick to authorize funds for half a million. By the end of 1862, 670,000 soldiers had been mobilized for the Union, the biggest army in military history. A department that had barely existed before 1861 needed almost overnight to turn itself into an empire of supply. Meigs had to cast his eye over the entire map of needs, from railway track and rolling stock, river and road transports, to the manufacture of munitions, clothing, and tenting (Meigs designed a two-man bivouac lighter to carry as basic equipment), medical supplies like bandages, crutches, and splints, as well as ambulances and field hospital space for over 100,000 wounded, and the sad materials of embalming and burial. It was impossible to do all this himself, and as if wanting to vindicate the honor of West Point, Meigs went back for assistants to near contemporaries whom he knew personally as loyal and competent: the good engineers. Both Robert Allen, who became chief quartermaster for the western theater on the Mississippi, and James Donaldson, who ran the Department of the Cumberland, were classmates of Meigs in the cohort of 1836. Langdon Easton, who provided for the fast-moving Sherman army in 1864, was just two years their junior. On the other hand, Meigs—and the new secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, with whom he had an instant rapport—knew a good Scottish engineer-businessman when they saw one. So Daniel McCallum, the superintendent of the Erie Railroad who had transformed its operations, was made director of military railroads.
In a matter of months, the offices on Pennsylvania Avenue just west of the White House became a hive of activity. An instant clerical staff, many of them women (the first ever hired by the government), settled in and staffed the command-and-control station from which procurement officers and inspectors were dispatched, orders placed, shipments tracked, and the all-important means of expediting them to armies and forts mapped. The unglamorous work of drafting contracts, making them legally watertight by having them witnessed in front of a magistrate, then sending inspectors and periodic auditors to see they were properly executed, was necessary if the army was to be protected from unscrupulous purveyors aiming to make a killing from the urgency of the moment. The quartermaster general, after all, would be responsible for the expenditure of $1.5 billion—in 1860s values! No enterprise in Western history to that point had ever been so costly.
As critical as it was to meet those logistic needs as quickly as possible, Meigs was not one to skimp on quality, convinced as he was that “slop shop” fabric provided at low cost was a false economy, especially for the long marches he anticipated after Bull Run. New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and even Paris were scoured for clothing of heavy-duty quality. Revolvers as sidearms, another first, were ordered in hundreds of thousands from Samuel Colt’s factory in Hartford, Connecticut, to the precise specifications laid down by Meigs. Meigs was in love with iron (he had used it on the Capitol Dome), and now he aimed to build a fleet of steam-driven ironclad gunboats that could revolutionize river transport, a means of getting essentials to the armies without running the risks of the raiding attacks that could disrupt supplies coming by wagon train or railroad. Locomotives and track that could be quickly laid where the armies needed them were paramount, but Meigs, McCallum, and the other railroad chief, Herman Haupt, all knew that just as essential were repair trains that could be sent posthaste to wherever an enemy raid had cut a line. Sherman, who was seldom free with compliments, showered them on the ability of the quartermaster’s department to make good any damage to the one continuous line of track that rolled through enemy territory within hours of the damage. But Meigs could not afford to neglect traditional means of transport. Though he was always apt to quote Napoleon to the effect that a thousand men needed no more than twelve wagons, and complain that convoys were encumbered by wagons carrying nothing more than officers’ baggage, he still knew that mule trains
were the basic resource on which a moving army depended. Between July and September 1861, he sent thirty buyers into the field to acquire more than 100,000 mules—a quarter of all the mules then alive in the Union states. This would be an animal war—and Meigs could come on like an angry veterinarian if he thought generals and their staff were being reckless with their beasts of burden and combat: not feeding them the right mix of corn and oats; using them for prolonged periods that would critically shorten their working life. In the first buying outings in 1861, nearly 150,000 horses, used for cavalry mounts and artillery, were purchased, giving golden opportunities to dubious horse traders. When a vigilant inspector in Chicago took a close look at a buy that had been made in Pittsburgh, he discovered many horses that turned out to be “blind, swenies, spavined, stiff-shoulder, split hoof, curbed legs…ring-boned, deformed…big knee, wind-broken…deranged hip, stock-legged beside being too old and too young, too small and of the wrong sex.”
Since it took so much initiative and around-the-clock labor to put together the needs of a huge army, Meigs wanted generals in the field to engage, rather than use up, forage, mounts, food, and the volatile enthusiasm of the soldiers in irresolute tactics, wandering this way and that. Since the generals had to correspond directly with him for their needs, Meigs was never shy about giving them a piece of his mind, or indeed lessons in tactics and strategy if he thought they could do with them—which, until the advent of Grant and Sherman, he invariably did. To Ambrose Burnside he wrote in December 1862 as if he, Meigs, were commander in chief: “It seems to me that the army should move boldly up the Rappahannock, cross the river, aim for a point on the railroad between the rebels and Richmond and send forward cavalry and light troops to break up the road and intercept retreat.” Neither Stanton nor Lincoln minded these lectures on soldiering coming from their quartermaster general, for they also knew Meigs had a way with impressing on the generals just what was at stake. Just in case Burnside had failed to grasp this, Meigs wrote that staying put where he was in Virginia would be “death to our nation…defeat, border warfare, hollow truce, barbarism, ruin for ages, chaos!”
