The American Future

by Simon Schama

  Lincoln relied on Meigs for his panoramic grasp of the war—not just arrangements of soldiers or towns to be besieged, but rather as a vast, swarming social world to be got on the move, husbanded, treated as the precious resources they were; deployed and expended only with judicious intelligence—sailors and bargemen, horsemen, cannoneers, and snipers; surgeons, sutlers; cameramen, band musicians; mechanics; ditch diggers, gravediggers; cooks; balloonists, telegraph operators; semaphore men. Meigs was the commander of macro and micro. He knew where the next bridge had to be built, how to ford a river no one else had heard of, but he could also somehow see the needs of grand strategy. He was the omniscient Hamiltonian manager of the biggest, most capital-intensive enterprise the United States had ever set on foot, but it was all being done for the supremely Jeffersonian cause: the salvation of democracy. Meigs grew heated when he thought of the disdain of Europeans, especially the British upper classes who, not actually living among slaves themselves, could afford to be lofty about abolition, while imposing imperial autocracies in sundry parts of the world. The British were fake democrats, pretending to deliver virtue to the world while pursuing selfish imperial interests. For years they had been jeering at Yankees for their low materialism and want of martial spirit. Now “the same unfriendly spirit” was happy enough to view “the dreadful carnage” while making its pronounced partiality for a Confederate victory apparent. For the British, the bloodshed was comeuppance, but they should understand that it was in America that lives were being laid down for democracy; that this was a war for the future of the world. Two years before the Gettysburg Address Meigs wrote to his mother that after all the terrible sacrifices “the world will be better. Liberty in all climes will take a leap forward and future ages will rejoice in the advance of liberal ideas, in the proof, the signal proof that the people, the true democracy, is capable of self-government. It is a great and holy war. God is with us and who shall be against us?”

  But that war had to be won, or else America would be a squalid joke. For two years, the generals were Montgomery Meigs’s bane. How could the likes of George McClellan and Ambrose Burnside squander the perfectly equipped armies he had sent them with blundering irresolution? For months they would destroy their strength through sheer inanition, wasting men (for hundreds died every day through sickness), money, mules, hay and then, almost because the standoff had become intolerable, would hurl them at impregnable positions guaranteeing thousands of casualties and no better strategic position. Was this the best of the West Point loyalists? Often, it occurred to Meigs that he could do a better job in the field himself. But he seemed to have made himself indispensable as quartermaster general, and that was that.

  Meigs reserved his most withering contempt for George McClellan, whose principal cause in the war was, he suspected, George McClellan. The general in chief was always grumbling to Stanton and Lincoln about being massively outnumbered by the Confederates, using the disparity as an excuse not to engage them. Meigs thought McClellan had his own particular way with numbers, complaining he’d been sent just 150 horses a week when in fact he had received ten times that number. Antietam, the bloodiest day of the entire war, when the Union took more than 12,000 casualties, 2,000 of them dead in the cornfields of Maryland, ought to have been evidence of McClellan’s fierceness when roused. But since McClellan failed to concentrate his forces against Lee’s weaker numbers, and more damningly failed to fall upon Lee’s retreat, both Meigs and Lincoln believed the terrible carnage to have been in vain. It had halted Lee’s invasion of the North, but what should have happened was the destruction of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. So when McClellan had (to Meigs’s mind) the gall to run for the presidency against Lincoln, whom by this time the quartermaster general idolized, Meigs characterized “little George” as “the general who, after collecting into one vast Golgotha 200,000 men, held them in that pestiferous valley and petulantly whined and scolded and complained that the horror-stricken people refused more victims to his shambles—beat a disgraceful retreat and shouted victory from a gunboat while his brave but deserted legions were battling on…informing him by signal of the fight he should have led in person.”

  In particular Meigs hated McClellan’s grandiose naiveté, a function, he thought, of his remoteness from reality, in supposing that the war could somehow be fought as a tournament of gentlemen. For instance, why should McClellan put himself out to ensure that the arch-traitor Lee’s wife had safe passage through Union lines to rejoin her husband in May 1862? Meigs gagged on McClellan’s sentimental assumption that war was somehow a gallant business that could be conducted within the rules of decency, or as McClellan himself said after an interview with Lincoln, “upon the highest principles of Christian civilization.” There should, the general announced, be no seizure of enemy property, especially land or livestock, no political executions, and, horror of horror, no thought of liberating the slaves, a measure so heinous it should not be contemplated “for a moment.”

  To Meigs it was incomprehensible and absurd to deny the Union anything it could take from rebel farms, towns, and plantations—horses, cattle, crops, clothing, and especially slaves who were to be made free, who were at last to become true Americans! All this talk in the South—and sections of the North—over the war being fought over constitutional principles he dismissed as so much disingenuous cant. This was the war that would finally make good on the promises held out by the slave-owning Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, of liberty and equality. When Lincoln issued a draft proclamation in the summer of 1862, Meigs, influenced by Horace Greeley’s “Prayer of Twenty Millions” published in his Tribune, wrote that it was something “thinking men must have foreseen since the first gun fired.” Ever since his heated conversations with his brother in Georgia, Meigs had concluded that the terrible conflict had been sent by God as a chastisement to the republic for tolerating and condoning the unchristian abomination of slavery. Now some sort of expiation—a word he used often—had to be made in blood to atone for that dreadful sin. “God does not intend to give us peace again,” he wrote to his mother in 1863, “until the last shackle is stricken from the wrist of the black man.” So naturally Meigs welcomed Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation on 22 September 1862 and looked forward even more to its enforcement on the first day of the next year. The capture of Vicksburg by Grant made him elated since it would bring the full force of this second revolution into the heart of hell, Mississippi, a state he described as being of “special malignity.”

  Meigs was all for a black army, aggressively recruiting soldiers from among both the slave and free African American population and equipping them for cavalry as well as infantry combat, a thought almost as inconceivable to many Union officers as it was to Confederates. But Meigs wanted to prime their anger, point it right at the enemy. “It is impossible to cast aside the millions of recruits who will offer themselves, accustomed to the climate, inured to labor, acquainted with the country and animated by the strong desire not merely for political but personal liberty.” By September 1863 there were already 82,000 freed African Americans serving as soldiers and laborers; and by the end of the war, fully 10 percent of all Union troops were black. That was in large part Meigs’s doing; he established black garrison forts on the Mississippi and was happy to learn that in prison camps like Point Lookout, ex-slaves were guarding their former masters. Even more radical was his prescience that emancipation would be merely a paper revolution unless the liberated slaves received land. Without it the freedman “would be at the mercy of his former master who may drive him from the acres on which his cabin is built, his family sheltered and which, by mixing with them his own and his father’s labor he has acquired a natural right to possess.” Five acres per family was the very least that could make a black cultivator class a reality. And before long he would raise that estimate.

  As the conflict stretched on into a third and fourth year, the war had come to assume for Meigs the character of an ideological cr
usade, between “gallant free men” and “a barbarous people, driven by wide sweeping conscription and enforced by a merciless despotism;” a war between a perverted and an authentic version of what America was. This was the lesson he wanted to deliver to his impressionable son up at West Point. If any American wars had to be fought, then let them be fought over grave matters on which the destiny of the whole world turned. Let them be fought for decency’s sake, for the cause of humanity’s freedom, or let them not be fought at all. Once embarked on, though, such wars had to be prosecuted without pity toward those responsible for bringing the slaughters on. For the blood and suffering they had caused, Meigs still wanted his old comrades and mentors, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, tried, convicted, and hanged. After Lee had beaten off McClellan in a series of engagements and the fainthearted were already muttering about Lincoln’s inadequacies and the need to contemplate a compromise peace with the South, Meigs wrote to his son at West Point, shortly after the 4 July celebrations, in a chilling, Tolstoyan vein: “The North must hold this wolf by the ears until it is exhausted by starvation or destroyed by the kicks and cuffs which it may yet receive. No peace in compromise with the South is possible for our industrious educated democratic people. Death or victory is the…necessity of our cause and I do not less doubt the ultimate victory though God for our sins leads us to it through seas of blood.” For Meigs, the war was the necessary ordeal: the second American revolution.

  Having outgrown its original premises, the quartermaster general’s department moved around the block, into the handsome building that the banker William Wilson Corcoran had built on Pennsylvania Avenue near 17th Street, a stone’s throw from the White House. Corcoran had designed the extravagant Second Empire–style building, with French mansarded gables and Corinthian columns, to be the first public art museum in America. There the citizens of Washington would contemplate the glories of the national landscape, painted by the Hudson River luminists—Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, and Frederic Edwin Church. But collecting America did not mean pledging allegiance to it, for Corcoran was a Confederate sympathizer who fled Washington and sat out the war in Paris where his son-in-law was a diplomat for the South. Into the building moved the quartermaster general, using it to store uniforms and the mountains of paperwork the department was generating. But eventually the whole staff moved in. And there, in the compromised Mr. Corcoran’s paneled study, sat the beetle-browed Monty Meigs at the fulcrum of his vast, sorrowful empire of human straining. In place of pictures of dappled light falling through deep woods, the noble red man amid (for the time being) his buffalo, or flatboats gliding down the rivers, he brought maps and photographs, and those were nothing like the American pastoral. Instead, fixed in wet collodion prints, lines of the dead lay neatly assembled for disposal (and the photographer); pyramids of shells stacked by a dock; the rear ends of hundreds of mules awaiting their wagons; farmhouses and stores reduced to charred spars and brick rubble.

  But those were, after all, just paper and card images. Something in the quartermaster general told him he would do his job better if he were to see matters for himself. He had absolute faith in the best of his subordinates; honest, good, serious men, he thought, were McCallum, Allen, Easton, and the rest. Together they had sent the profiteers packing, had made whole armies, prostrate with sickness, fear, and exhaustion, movements of men once more. They had believed in free black American soldiers and had put them too on horseback and by their guns. But Monty wanted to get out of town before he went crazy with the sedentary claustrophobia of it. The trouble was that Lincoln depended on him to organize the capital’s defense, should Lee ever break through and threaten Washington directly; to make sure Lee never got home to Arlington Heights, from where he could launch shells at the White House—and the quartermaster’s building! But Gettysburg in July 1863 put an end to the northern invasion and encirclement strategy. Meigs could move.

  The late fall of 1863 found the quartermaster general at beleaguered Chattanooga. In late September William Rosecrans had lost the battle of Chickamauga, close to the Georgia–Tennessee line. Worse, as far as Meigs was concerned, the West Point engineer, of whom better things were expected, had done a McClellan and abandoned his army toward the end of a disastrous day, leaving his chief of staff to hold off the Confederates. Now he had taken the Army of Cumberland, the prize force, comprehensively equipped by Meigs, back to Chattanooga, where he was in a state of siege. Chattanooga was at the hub of rail lines, crucial to denying Lincoln his strategy of cutting the Confederacy in two, west and east. Rosecrans was supposed to have taken it. But it had taken him instead. Lincoln removed Rosecrans and sent Grant, Sherman, and General Joe Hooker to relieve the siege. But he also sent Meigs to sort out logistics on the spot. He would be the fixed point in the shakiness. When someone yelled for more artillery, more horses, more grape, more rations, Meigs would know whether it could be supplied and, if it could, get it there quickly. He could see right away that the situation of the Army of Cumberland was bad. Men had been living off weevily hardtack for too long, and now even this was in short supply and the army was in real danger of being starved into surrender. What would rescue it? Carpenters, Meigs thought, and telegraphed the secretary of war to that effect. They would build supply boats and they could bring in food supplies for both men and animals along what the soldiers called “the cracker line.” Getting this done on the spot made Meigs happy, though he covered his elation with his usual mask of sobriety.

  But when he slept under the cold November stars, in a Meigs blanket stitched to make a sleeping bag and filled with hay for warmth, and gazed at the thousands of lights set by campfires on the hill, Meigs felt the strength that comes from the instinct of rightness. He felt close to the thousands of men; to their fear and their courage; to the vermin that were crawling their backs; to the liquor they needed to get through; to the homespun letters they were scratching to their homes in Illinois and Vermont and New Jersey and his own ancestral Ohio. And then on the morning he stood with Hooker’s soldiers in the fog that shrouded their advance up Lookout Mountain and thought that such a blessed concealment could only be the work of God, and he continued to think this as the men shot and charged their way uphill and took the ridge. And then he watched as Union soldiers swept their way up Missionary Ridge—impulsively advancing beyond Grant’s orders but protected from deadly cannon fire by the misplacement of the guns at the distant summit of the ridge rather than the highest point from which they could be effective. This too, Meigs thought, was an intervention of the Almighty in blue serge. But then it was Braxton Bragg who was commanding the enemy. Bragg who had graduated a year after Meigs from the academy, who had fought against the Seminole and the Mexicans; who was undoubtedly brave and undoubtedly dim. A stickler for the rules, serving as quartermaster and commander, Bragg was reputed to have made requests from himself for certain guns and then declined them. But he had not noticed the top-of-the-hill problem. And so he lost Chattanooga. And Chattanooga began to lose the Confederacy the war.

  Once the situation was stabilized, Meigs rode with Sherman’s army a little ways into Georgia. Crossing the line stirred something painful in the recesses of the quartermaster general’s family feeling. Georgia was Meigs country; the place of Return Jonathan Sr.’s autumn years with the Cherokee; the place where his grandfather Josiah had been university president; the state where his father, Charles, had begun his practice; the state where Montgomery Meigs himself had been born! What if his father had stayed in Augusta? How different would his life have been? Would he, heaven forbid, have been a Confederate, just as Lee and Davis had obeyed instinctively the summons of their place? Somewhere to the south, on the Alabama line, was his estranged brother Henry, the Confederate quartermaster, still, for all he knew, turning out the coats and trousers that Montgomery’s and Grant’s men had taken aim at on Lookout Mountain and on Missionary Ridge. There was nothing to be done about this family misfortune. As far as Montgomery was concerned, Henry had put himself b
eyond the pale and was kin no more. But their father, Charles, was tormented by this war of brother-quartermasters and whatever turn the war took had continued writing to his son in Columbus. Knowing Montgomery was with the Union army, Charles implored him not to cut his brother off entirely. Perhaps he might even bring himself to attempt some contact, for their mother’s sake. Monty was hard-bitten, not easily moved by such appeals. Family feeling was patriotic, or it was contemptible. Henry, he wrote back to his father, had taken himself clean out of the company of his friends and family by being “false to his country’s interests…He has taken a post with rebellion and civil war.” But then, Meigs added a sentence which suggested that he believed Henry might not, after all, be irredeemable. Perhaps he had been Led Astray by the Georgia heiress. And he could yet be brought out of the land of iniquity and back to his senses. “I only hope that the advance of our army may catch him and send him north, out of the infamous company which has corrupted his good nature.” In Ringgold, Georgia, Meigs made inquiries, of the citizens, of captured Confederate soldiers, of anyone who might know a Mr. Henry Meigs of Columbus. Nothing was known. But Montgomery could not quite give up, so he left a letter for his brother in the drawer of a washstand in the lodging house at Ringgold, enclosed within another asking any person who might be in a position to send it forward to see it reached his brother’s hands. What the letter said, whether it held out an olive branch or a rod of imprecation, we can only surmise.