Meigs was born in Augusta, Georgia, in May 1816. The city’s population had soared in a half-century from 3,000 to 58,000. In 1836, he graduated fifth in his class, part of an elite group of aspiring scientists and engineers. But before it could be placed atop the dome, Meigs had to solve a vexing engineering problem: How to put the new cast-iron dome itself on the old building? William Dickinson, co-editor of a collection of essays about Meigs, said that Meigs’s appointment as quartermaster general “signaled the beginning of a new style of modern business management in government that would profoundly influence the course of the Civil War.”. Perhaps he can be forgiven for his egotism. Meigs listened carefully as Lincoln framed his intent. The two men paddled across the Mississippi in a dugout canoe, scanning the densely wooded shoreline north of St. Louis. Floyd was a political hack from Virginia who succeeded Davis. Monty Meigs romped along the Delaware River with pals. ‘Thus often,’ says the President, ‘I who am not a specially brave man have had to sustain the sinking courage of these professional fighters in critical times.'”9. Textile makers peddled material for uniforms called “shoddy,” redefining the meaning “poorly made.” It literally fell off soldiers in the field. Back in Georgia, Dr. Meigs suffered from “bilious” fevers, which he blamed on the climate and his wife, Mary Montgomery Meigs, who hated slavery. Beauregard, Henry W. Halleck … Meigs had his own troubles, though. Simon Cameron (Mr. Lincoln’s White House) His father believed that his son had been murdered and placed a $1,000 reward on the killer's head. But these days, remarkably, few can recall his name, let alone the details of his greatness. “Perhaps you may select the responsible commander for such an event,” he told Lincoln. His goal was to become ... Of his work in the quartermaster’s office, James G. Blaine remarked: Montgomery C. Meigs, one of the ablest graduates of the Military Academy, was kept from the command of troops by the inestimably important services he performed as Quartermaster General. Montgomery Meigs, a descendant, became quartermaster general for the Union Army during the Civil War — his “righteous anger translated into cold efficiency,” as Schama writes. Montgomery Meigs was born at Augusta, Georgia, on May 3, 1816, the son of Dr. Charles Dulcena Meigs and Mary Montgomery Meigs. Caught up in the rapidly developing campaign, Ingalls did not fully respond to Meigs until July 20, though he had immediately collected statements from his subordinates, Capt. As a headquarters general, Meigs had unusual access to the President – on both a military and social basis. Meigs squeezed in near the platform the next day and watched as the Republican president-elect took his spot at the front of the crowd. The pace of Meigs' intellectual life also quickened in the federal city. He said one was Captain Meigs, another was a naval officer named Porter.3, Montgomery Meigs eagerly sought promotion in these early days of the Lincoln Administration . Henry Villard. It had grand buildings, including the Capitol and White House. Due to the high colonial mortality rate, of his two wives … He … It seems that Lt. Meigs had undertaken a crash course in water systems in New York, Boston, Paris and ancient Rome. Meigs was born in Augusta, Georgia on May 3, 1816 to the prominent Philadelphia physician and professor Charles Delucena Meigs and his wife, the former Mary Montgomery. Montgomery Meig's moth… The result was big, brash and controversial, an expensive structure made with more than 15 million red bricks that mixed the classical with the modern. Two months later another crisis struck when the ironclad Merrimack, rechristened the Virginia by Confederates, started sinking Union ships at Hampton Roads. Montgomery Meigs was a cynical interviewer when Brumidi, a refugee from political turmoil in Italy, came looking for work. ‘No one,’ said the President, ‘but these young men were here as clerks to write down his plans and orders.’ Most of the work was done, he said, in the other room. The fortunate men were Major [Irvin] McDowell, and Captain Meigs of the engineer corps, both of whom received the rank of brigadier-general. His father was a nationally known obstetrician and professor of obstetrics at Jefferson Medical College His grandfather, Josiah Meigs, graduated from Yale University (where he was a classmate of future dictionary creator Noah Webster and American Revolutionary War general and politician Oliver Wolcott), and later was president of the University of Georgia. Instead of an attractive, utilitarian bridge, Meigs oversaw the design of the longest stone arch in world history at the time. (Letter from Montgomery Blair to Abraham Lincoln, September 14, 1861). Montgomery Meigs (Mr. Lincoln’s White House) The system relied on gravity to carry the water more than 12 miles from Great Falls into the District. When McClellan lay at Harrison’s land, Meigs came one night to the President & waked him up at Soldiers’ Home to urge upon him the immediate flight of the Army from that point — the men to get away on transports and the horses to be killed as the [army?] Meigs, the Capitol project’s superintendent, interpreted his mandate from Congress and Davis broadly, giving himself wide latitude to do pretty much whatever he wanted. His traveling companion—and assistant for this engineering project—was Second Lieutenant Montgomery C. Meigs, but one year out of West Point. Meigs would have none of him, arid in his diary he wrote bitterly: “I for one have no pleasure in association with such as he. Unless you’re an aviation history geek or just a pilot who resides in Illinois, you might not have heard of Octave Chanute. And this little painting is where it all began. Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress. Meigs' record as Quartermaster General was regarded as exceptionally brilliant, both in effectiveness and in ethical probity, and Secretary of State Robert E. Lee's Arlington estate into a military cemetery was partly a gesture to humiliate Lee for siding with the South. Lee found Meigs’s extraordinary energy curious. But Meigs’s admiration would soon turn to bitter hatred. The pitch for the aqueduct had been so successful that Meigs’s boss and soon-to-be friend and mentor — Secretary of War Jefferson Davis — added on … He also wanted to help the poor, who suffered most from the fires and diseases. To save money and get rid of debris, Meigs burned the wood from the old dome to fire the steam engine. During his childhood the family moved from Georgia to Philadelphia, where he matriculated at the University of Pennsylvania in 1831. His friendship with Montgomery Meigs was frought with irony, as Meigs became Lincoln’s Quartermaster General. “Our plan was to get a good-sized steamer and six or seven companies of soldiers, and to carry the latter, with a number of large guns and a quantity of munitions of war, to Fort Pickens, land them on the outside of the fort under the guns of a ship of war, and the fort would soon be made impregnable ? Villard credited Meigs appointment to the influence of Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, but the truth was that Meigs had cultivated relationships with President Lincoln and Secretary of State Seward as well. He gives us a sense of Meigs' work and his persona. Meigs later railed against the demerit system in characteristic fashion, writing that it hindered “enterprising” men in favor of “the stolid, the namby pamby, the men having no distinguishing traits or character.”. The family moved back north, to Philadelphia. During the first year of the Civil War, Montgomery Meigs was a important military adviser for President Lincoln when there were few experienced army officers in Washington he could talk to with confidence. On Dec. 21, 1864, as William Tecumseh Sherman’s army came to the end of its devastating March to the Sea, his soldiers found a gift awaiting them in Savannah, Ga. A flotilla of transport ships in the harbor was crammed with comforts for the more than 62,000 weary men: tens of thousands of sturdy boots and shoes, fresh shirts, socks, underwear and trousers. While Meigs made his way, the siege of Fort Sumter in South Carolina began and ended. But in a letter to Gen. Winfield Scott urging for the promotion, Lincoln expressed unalloyed admiration for him. “I feel as though I was a plug which filthy rats & mice were gnawing at all the time in order to increase the flow from the Treasury — Contractors architects & Secretaries all against me,” Meigs wrote in a letter. The plan involved diverting the U.S.S. On April 13, after surviving a 34-hour bombardment from secessionist forces, Maj. Robert Anderson surrendered. The Meigs family had moved to the southern territory when Return Meigs was appointed to a post there. Early in his life, Chanute became fascinated by flight. The bottom is out of the tub. There were greatcoats and blankets, camp kettles and pans, axes and spades, and even needles and thread. He must take an officer of higher rank. He became the Quartermaster General of the Union Army during the entire Civil War, but he also had an illustrious career both before and after the war. When the older brother was killed in action in the June 1862 Battle of Glendale, Virginia, William Henry Christman became the sole provider for the family. In a letter to his father, he wrote: “I wish you could see my jet d’eau in the Capitol Park. Indeed I know of no one possessed of so many positive advantages, or to whom so little can be objected, & if he can win the cordial support of the principal assistants in the Department, that little would be nil in a month. Simon Cameron One of Meigs’s most determined antagonists was one of his bosses, Secretary of War John B. Floyd. But even as he wrestled with corruption and the natural friction that accompanied wartime logistics, Meigs remained determined to crush the South and end slavery. He asked me whether Fort Pickens could be held. M.C. Montgomery Blair wired President Lincoln: “Appoint Meigs by telegraph things are deplorable and action must be decisive & prompt to save the state.”7 On a lighter note, when Hermann the magician performed at the White House on November 24, 1861, General Meigs was one of the few military officers present. He [Lincoln] replied that he would consider on it and would let me know in a day or two.”1. That way, he knew, his former friend and now foe would never be able to live there again. Lincoln barely knew Meigs, a mere captain before the war, when he had vaulted him far above his rank seven months before. Meigs urged that it be built with cast iron. Gideon Welles (Mr. Lincoln’s White House) Montgomery's mother had a strong aversion to slavery and Monty's father decided to move the family to Pennsylvania. He died in Chicago in 1910. President Lincoln’s frustration with inactivity of the Union Army boiled over in Meig’s office in the Winder Building on January 10, 1862. Meigs, who so wanted to be remembered, would be proud. He had door handles cast in the form of black snakes his men found while working on the aqueduct, and railings made with images of leaping stags. He also left behind another legacy — of technical ingenuity, humanity, love of art and belief in Washington, D.C., as a world power — before the first shot of the Civil War was ever fired. “The people are impatient,” he told Meigs. Said that when Pitt wished to take Quebec he did not send for an old general but he sent for a young man whom he had noticed in the society of London, named [James] Wolfe, and told him that he had selected him to take Quebec, to ask for the necessary means and do it and it was done. “He must take an officer of higher rank.”. Ranked fifth in the graduating class of 1836, Meigs … Working for as little as $8 a day, Brumidi filled the canopy under the dome with a painted swirl of mythic figures. An excellent biography about the incredible Montgomery C. Meigs, of his vital role not only during the Civil War, but of his earlier years as well. What shall I do?”. When Meigs wasn’t overseeing the manufacture of bricks for the aqueduct, the digging of tunnels or the construction of bridges, he was revising budgets or redrafting plans to enlarge the House and Senate. He stood almost 6-foot-2 and wore a thick beard. His men bought or built almost 600 boats and ships. In Lynchburg, Va.; Knoxville, Tenn.; Columbus, Ga.; and Montgomery, Ala., he snooped around and took notes. The next year, Congress allocated $5,000 to explore new sources of water. I look upon it with constant pleasure for it seems to spring rejoicing in the air & proclaiming its arrival for free use of the sick & well, rich & poor, gentle & simple, old & young for generation after generation which will have come to rise up & call me blessed.”. He worked tirelessly to fight fraud and spend taxpayer money wisely. Over the remainder of the Civil War, Meigs’ honesty served him well in his position which required superintending the purchase and distribution of millions of dollars in supplies. Meigs urged the president to move forward and seek guidance from a war council about how to do it. The message of the move could not have been clearer: Meigs had been banished. “[Treasury Secretary Salmon] Chase has no money and he tells me he can raise no more; the General of the Army has typhoid fever. At Louisville Lee met up with Captain Shreve and inspected the equipment the experienced engineer had ordered for improving the rapids. opened the conversation. Apart from his illness, he seemed little inclined to go on the offensive against the rebel South. The people are impatient; Chase has no money and he tells me he can raise no more; the General of the Army has typhoid fever. News of that meeting pulled McClellan off his sick bed and back to military command. Then as now, the nation’s lawmakers didn’t show much interest in spending money on the District, a political limbo. Meigs was very good at what he did. Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, editor. Now, the water was spraying 60 feet into the air for any lawmaker to see. Long after his role was forgotten, the aqueduct he built still carries nearly 100 million gallons of water each day for use in the District and Northern Virginia. Meigs also ruminated about the institution that he believed threatened the nation’s existence. These included men like General Winfield Scott (Virginia), George Thomas (Virginia) , General John Buford (Kentucky where his family supported the Confederate Cause) General John Gibbon (North Carolina), Admiral David Farragut (Tennessee) the Union’s master logistician, General Montgomery Meigs of Georgia. “General what shall I do? His analysis was grim, according to writer Sherrod E. East and his essay “The Banishment of Captain Meigs.”. He wanted ventilation that would create a healthful environment for the clerks. Mr. Seward broke out with ‘I can understand too how that is, Captain Meigs, you have got to be promoted.’ I said, ‘That cannot be done; I am a captain and there is no vacancy.’ But Mr. Seward told the President that if he wished to have this thing done the proper way was to put it into my charge and it would be done, that I would give him an estimate of the means by 4 P.M. of the next day. The two shared a rough-hewn cabin on the shore. He remained in his post as Quartermaster General until 1882. (A native of Georgia, Meigs later served as quartermaster general of the Federal Army during the Civil War.) The day after an emergency Cabinet meeting to discuss the situation at Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens, Captain Meigs was summoned to a meeting with President Lincoln and Secretary of State William H. Seward to discuss a relief expedition for Fort Pickens in Florida. The President protected him from the wrath of Secretary Welles – who when he discovered what plans had been hatched, confronted President Lincoln at the White House: He was alone in his office and, raising his head from the table at which he was writing, inquired, ‘What have I done wrong?’ I informed him I had received with surprise the package containing his instructions respecting the Navy and the Navy Department, and I desired some explanation. Davis made him responsible for other major projects, including the expansion of the Capitol, the Post Office building and improvements to Fort Madison in Annapolis. “I have come to know [Meigs] quite well for a short acquaintance, and so far as I am capable of judging I do not know one who combines the qualities of masculine intellect, learning and experience of the right sort, and physical power of labor and endurance so well as he.”. A natural destination for him was West Point,the country’s first engineering school, where he was admitted in 1832. In was a tough period. He was the son of Dr. Charles Delucena Meigs and Mary Montgomery Meigs. But the construction challenges were daunting. It is known now as Arlington National Cemetery. In an inspired move, he hired Constantino Brumidi, an Italian artist who had immigrated to America and would spent the last quarter-century of his life working on the Capitol. Pensacola would be a very important place for the Southerners, and if they once get possession of Pickens, and fortify it, we have no navy to take it from them.’, ‘Mr. They built hospitals for the wounded and then buried the dead. But they had a change of heart after the Library of Congress room caught fire on Christmas Eve 1851 and almost sent the Capitol’s old wooden dome up in smoke. Meigs listed what he expected from his son if he did not return from the Persian Gulf. It also would be inspired by Renaissance architecture. Seward reminded him that the president, as commander in chief, could make it happen without too much fuss. Upon receiving one report from Meigs, whose script was notoriously illegible, an admiring Sherman said: “The handwriting of this report is that of General Meigs, and I therefore approve of it, but I cannot read it.”. Would the President do this now? “God for our sins leads us to [victory] through seas of blood,” he once wrote to his son, John. That included taking charge of the building’s decoration. '” To accomplish their mission required subterfuge because Porter did not trust the Confederate sympathies of some employees of the Navy Department . It costs me nothing, therefore, cordially to support your preference; for, in truth, I have not, from the beginning, had any candidate to present for the office….6. Lincoln chatted easily with Meigs, who told him that plenty of men could be found to attempt a rescue of Fort Sumter, despite what his superiors in the Army might say. Water went to Washington homes about five years later, albeit for limited use – it was turbid and not drinkable until about 1905. “Meigs was quite willing to offer advice, and the president seemed to be always anxious for it,” according to historian Carmen Brissette Grayson. But the money held a far greater significance for Washington. Outside, down the hill in the direction of the White House, sat a new fountain. I imagine 12,000 lieutenants died in the civil war (if 2% of the 620,000 civil war deaths were lieutenants) and quite possibly the one most frequently written of is John Rodgers Meigs. President,’ said I, ‘there is a queer state of things existing in the Navy Department at this time. I told him that men enough could be found to volunteer to endeavor to relieve Fort Sumter, but that persons of higher position and rank than myself thought it not to be attempted, that this was not the place to make the war, etc. I then asked if he knew the young men. It had triggered the arrival of Meigs, who was asked to conduct the survey. On Dec. 29, he resigned, claiming indignation over the federal government’s efforts to reinforce Fort Sumter. Of the three options presented, Meigs wanted Congress to embrace the most ambitious, which involved construction of a massive aqueduct that he promised would carry water for hundreds of years. Under his guidance, Meigs carried the compass and made paintings and maps of the landscape. Meigs and his many assistants, working with private contractors, the nation’s railroads, ship builders and others, routinely came up with innovative solutions to the logistical problems the war posed. He [Seward] complimented me much. In the coming months, he wrote numerous letters to military leaders and fellow officers, seeking help and offering advice. Then he dispatched Meigs to the Dry Tortugas off the coast of Florida, assigned to improve Fort Jefferson. The North could take steps to prepare. Through legal measures designed to punish the traitors, the government legally acquired Arlington in January 1864 (Poole). I told him certainly if the Navy had done its duty and not lost it already. A few months later, on a bright October day in 1853, Meigs rode to Great Falls and broke ground in a ceremonial beginning. The son of Joseph Hancock and Mary Meigs Taylor and the grandson of Montgomery Cunningham Meigs, he was born in Washington, D.C. on October 13, 1869. Transcribed and Annotated by the Lincoln Studies Center, Knox College. Meigs and a fellow Army Corps of Engineers officer were there to help improve navigation of the river. It was the family grounds of the wife of his former friend and colleague, Robert E. Lee. Under Meigs’s plan, it would be fireproof and so well lighted that it would not have a single dark corner or corridor. At the time, some critics derided the building as an aesthetic catastrophe, calling it Meigs’s “Old Red Barn.” Sherman is said to have cracked that the building was fine but for one thing: “It’s too bad the damn thing is fireproof.”. Simply getting the water to its destination wasn’t enough for Meigs, according to Harry C. Ways, former chief of the water system and author of “The Washington Aqueduct 1852-1992.” One valley proved to be an irresistible temptation for something more. William H. Seward Meigs was part of the White House conference that handled the crisis and he assisted Navy Captain John Dahlgren in preparing Washington for attack. It was a pittance, compared with the magnitude of the project. But they became comrades who, according to writer Simon Schama, “shot wild turkey from horseback, Missouri-fashion, and caught whiskery catfish.”, Meigs would recall his time with Lee as a notable point in his early career, and Lee as “the model of a soldier and the beau ideal of a Christian man.”, Lee was “one with whom nobody ever wished or ventured to take a liberty, though kind and generous to all his subordinates, admired by all women, and respected by all men.”. © 2002-2020 The Lehrman Institute. Mr. Welles is surrounded by officers and clerks, some of whom are disloyal at heart, and if the orders for this expedition should emanate from the Secretary of the Navy, and pass through all the department red tape, the news would be at once flashed over the wires, and Fort Pickens would be lost for ever. Even the risers on each of the 39 steps descending into an aqueduct vault in Georgetown are made up of cast-iron letters: MC MEIGS. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1890. These papers he had signed, many of them without reading,- for he had not time, and if he could not trust the Secretary of State, he knew not whom he could trust. Colonel Sawtelle. The bottom is out of the tub. “I told him I was only a captain and could not command majors who were there,” Meigs wrote in his journal. Journalist Henry Villard later wrote in his Memoirs: “In the critical, anxious days in April, the President was persuaded to promote two subordinate officers in the regular army at once to high rank. By using modern materials and methods, he aimed to save money and cut construction time. “Is all this to end in order that slavery not freedom may have greater sway?” Meigs wrote. “I repeated this to Mr. Seward, and said to him, ‘Give me command of the Powhatan, now lying at New York ready for sea, and I will guarantee that everything shall be done without a mistake. Meigs may be the most important bureaucrat in American history, a desk jockey who built the war machine that crushed the Confederacy. Three weeks after Lincoln’s speech, Meigs found himself at the White House, standing before the president he had doubted. Would Meigs, in a secret mission, take command of the fortress and keep them safe? Lee had been at the top of West Point several years earlier. Meigs routinely declined Floyd’s requests, delayed or complained to Congress. At its peak, the project employed more than 50 engineers, surveyors and inspectors; 700 tradesmen; 1,100 laborers; and 60 cooks and waiters. Michael Burlingame, editor, William O. Stoddard. The alleged object was to give them, as being specially zealous in their loyalty, the necessary authority to insure the protection of the Government from the traitorous designs for its overthrow then being prosecuted at the capital. that was all,” wrote Porter. I asked who were associated with Mr. Seward. During the war, Meigs was so highly regarded that almost anyone who mattered listened to him. Galesburg, Illinois. … I hope the prints do him injustice,” Meigs, a Democrat, wrote to his brother that evening, March 3, 1861. “The rebels are a gallant people & will make a desperate resistance,” he wrote to Seward in 1863, “but it is exhaustion of men and money that finally terminates all modern wars.”, The vast, efficient logistical system that Meigs created supported that aim like no other in history. He was clearly distressed. I very much wish to appoint Col. Meigs Quarter-Master General; and yet Gen. Cameron does not quite consent. His older brother enlisted in the Union Army in June 1861, leaving 16-year-old William as the oldest able bodied male in the family to care for the farm, his siblings, and his infirm parents. This request was relatively straight-forward, but Meigs was drawn into plans hatched by Seward and Navy Captain David Dixon Porter which involved diverting ships from the resupply of Fort Sumter to the resupply of Fort Pickens, which Seward deemed more important. “Thus quietly and unostentatiously was commenced this great work — which is destined I trust for the next thousand years to pour its healthful waters in to the capital of our union,” Meigs wrote in his journal that night. The day after an emergency Cabinet meeting to discuss the situation at Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens, Captain Meigs was summoned to a meeting with President Lincoln and Secretary of State William H. Seward to discuss a relief expedition for Fort Pickens in Florida. “No time was wasted in generalities or platitudes but he grappled at once with his subject & no one could doubt that he meant what he said,” Meigs wrote in a letter that day. 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