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  Contents

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  PART 1

  CHAPTER 1 Rigid Duty

  CHAPTER 2 Patience and Perseverance

  CHAPTER 3 Wholesome Water

  CHAPTER 4 An Aqueduct Worthy of the Nation

  CHAPTER 5 A Rival to the Parthenon

  CHAPTER 6 America’s Curse

  CHAPTER 7 The Saturday Club

  CHAPTER 8 The Workload Grows

  CHAPTER 9 Rowdy Looking

  CHAPTER 10 Energetic, Obliging, Firm

  CHAPTER 11 An Inscription for All Time

  CHAPTER 12 “Everything into Confusion”

  CHAPTER 13 “Eternal Blot”

  CHAPTER 14 Tall and Awkward Candidate

  CHAPTER 15 Floyd Resigns

  CHAPTER 16 He Plucked a Laurel

  PART 2

  CHAPTER 17 A Secret Mission

  CHAPTER 18 A Soul on Fire

  CHAPTER 19 Building an Army

  CHAPTER 20 Shoddy

  CHAPTER 21 “Hard Work and Cold Calculation”

  CHAPTER 22 “The War Cannot Be Long”

  CHAPTER 23 Gunboats

  CHAPTER 24 “His Best Name Is Honesty”

  CHAPTER 25 “Vast in Quantity”

  CHAPTER 26 Hope Wanes

  CHAPTER 27 “Fret Him and Fret Him”

  CHAPTER 28 “Exhaustion of Men and Money”

  CHAPTER 29 “A Beauteous Bubble”

  CHAPTER 30 A Vulnerable Capital

  CHAPTER 31 The Refit at Savannah

  CHAPTER 32 The Journey Home

  CHAPTER 33 “Dogs to Their Vomit”

  CHAPTER 34 “Soldier, Engineer, Architect, Scientist, Patriot”

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Notes

  Index

  For my dear Amy

  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.

  —Abraham Lincoln, June 1861

  Without the services of this eminent soldier, the National cause must either have been lost or deeply imperiled.

  —William Seward, May 1867

  The logistical demands of the Union army were much greater than those of its enemy . . . Meigs furnished these requirements in a style that made him the unsung hero of northern victory.

  —James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom

  Meigs should be given a place near that of Seward and Stanton, Chase and Gideon Welles.

  —Allan Nevins, The War for the Union

  Prologue

  On March 29, 1861, Army Captain Montgomery Meigs, just home from work, found a letter waiting for him. Secretary of State William Seward wanted him to go to a meeting at the White House as soon as possible. President Abraham Lincoln had a problem to solve and needed to talk to a soldier about certain military operations. It was unusual for a president to seek advice from a captain, but these were unusual times, and Meigs was an unusual man. The country stood at the edge of war. Lincoln had been inaugurated on March 4. Six Southern states had formed a separate, provisional government: the Confederate States of America. Virtually all federal operations had been suspended in the South, and only a handful of fortifications there remained under Washington’s control.

  Lincoln spoke freely. He was determined to keep control of Fort Sumter, in Charleston, South Carolina, and Fort Pickens, on the Gulf of Mexico in Pensacola, Florida. But he worried that the nation’s small standing army did not have enough men for such operations. Because he did not want to provoke South Carolina, the most volatile of the Southern states, Lincoln focused on Florida. He told Meigs that General Winfield Scott, the army’s elderly leader, thought that reinforcing forts was impossible. Lincoln asked Meigs whether Fort Pickens could be held. “Certainly,” Meigs said, “if the navy would do its duty and had not lost it already.”

  Meigs was an army engineer with no fighting experience, but few could match his mix of creativity and talent for organization. He had built the capital’s new aqueduct, including a bridge with the longest masonry arch in the world. He also was the man behind the US Capitol’s recent expansion and the ongoing installation of its great dome. His integrity was unblemished. Lincoln knew he had the right man. Without consulting his secretaries of war or navy, he ordered Meigs to prepare an amphibious assault on Fort Pickens.

  Meigs and a handful of colleagues sorted out the logistics, chartered fast steamships, and secretly gathered nearly five hundred men and tons of supplies at the Navy Yard in Brooklyn, New York. Before dawn on April 7, the force was heading south. His ship ran into a violent gale at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. Its crew struggled to keep men and horses from being washed overboard. Meigs had “never seen so magnificent a sight as this roaring, raging sea.” The closer they drew to Pickens, the more he hoped the mission would “strike terror into the ranks of rebellion.” He believed the country would survive. “I see a bright future in which this great land under a strong and united government will at length again be free and happy,” he wrote at the time, “when traitors will have received due punishment for their crimes, and the sin of slavery wiped out by the hands of an avenging God.”

  Meigs could scarcely imagine that he was about to play a singular role in fulfilling that hope.

  PART 1

  CHAPTER 1

  Rigid Duty

  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.

  CHAPTER 2

  Patience and Perseverance

  Meigs began a long stretch as a journeyman engineer for defense and public works. His new assignment took him to the Delaware River, south of Philadelphia, where he helped improve a stone breakwater that protected the coast and facilitated navigation on the river and bay. He also helped rebuild Fort Delaware, a massive fortification on Pea Patch Island destroyed by fire.

  The project posed many challenges. The island had formed from silt over the centuries, and the mud went forty feet deep in places. Meigs and other engineers created an intricate wooden grillage as a foundation, pounding more than twelve thousand wooden piles into the mud, using steam-powered pile drivers. Builders had been using such structures since the days of the Roman Empire. A drawing by Meigs of the grillage looks beautiful, precise, and timeless, with its faint linear depiction of crossbeams layered underneath the outlines of the fort. Though he thrived on practical problems, he did not do as well as a manager. When called on to serve as a supervisor, Meigs sometimes became short-tempered. On Pea Patch, he had control of the federal funding for salaries and supplies. About $75,000 had been deposited in a bank in Philadelphia. Before releasing the cash, bank officials required Meigs to certify the payroll. He took the request as a suggestion that he might be skimming money for himself. The idea that someone might question his integrity was too much to bear. He launched into a letter-writing campaign, pages of complaint that went to officials at the bank and superiors in Washington.

  Bank officials were only fulfilling an obligation to guard against a perennial contracting scheme in which corrupt officials drew pay for no-show workers. Meigs’s behavior embarrassed everyone, though all agreed to treat it as a misunderstanding, and the episode did no lasting damage to his reputation. He worked hard, and colleagues and superiors could sense his devotion. With his career taking hold, Meigs’s vision for himself evolved. He began thinking of himself as an American patriot and public servant. “I am a citizen of the United States,” he wrote his father, “not of Connecticut where my grandfather lived or of Georgia where I was born or of Pennsylvania.”

  * * *

  In 1839 Meigs received orders to report to the Board of Engineers for Atlantic Coast Defenses in Washington. The board served as a bureaucratic bridge between fortification projects and the army’s military brass. The posting provided exposure to senior officials as well as the city’s ruthless politics. Washington suited Meigs. He liked good conversation and he was soon drawn to a young woman, Louisa Rodgers, the daughter of Commodore John Rodgers, a naval hero of the War of 1812. The Rodgers family had been prominent in Washington and Maryland for decades. Though the commodore had died a few years earlier, Louisa and her family still lived in a mansion that he had built on Lafayette Square, near the White House.

  Montgomery and Louisa made a handsome pair. Tall, upright, and proper, Louisa had the firm demeanor of her father. She sang beautifully and enjoyed riding. In addition to attending parties, the couple rode along the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal through the rugged landscape along the Potomac River north and west of Washington. After a steady courtship, they married on May 2, 1841, one day before his twenty-fifth birthday. Their marriage would ground and comfort Meigs for decades to come, while giving him political and social ties that would help him through controversy and struggle. They claimed Washington as their home, but they could not stay for now. Meigs received orders to design and build fortifications, including Fort Wayne on the Detroit River, near the border with Canada.

  The defenses were part of a long campaign to protect against invasion from British forces. Though the significance of the threat in Detroit was debatable, Congress pressed for the work. Because the project depended on the ebb and flow of congressional appropriations, Meigs sometimes had more free time than was advisable for so energetic a person. He filled some lulls by reading the history of engineering. He focused in particular on the work of Sébastien Le Pres-tre de Vauban, the seventeenth-century French soldier who served as King Louis XIV’s chief military engineer. Meigs had heard about Vauban at West Point. His plans for Fort Wayne drew directly from fortifications Vauban had built in France, including
thick masonry walls, protected walkways known as sally ports, and an internal parade ground.

  * * *

  Montgomery and Louisa anchored their lives to their children, with four born in the first five years of their marriage: John, Mary Montgomery, Charles Delucena, and Montgomery Jr.

  The family relished the frontier spirit that lingered over Detroit. Because the work there did not demand much of Lieutenant Meigs, he often slept in or took his dog and a gun on long walks through the northern woods. He assumed he would be more motivated when necessary, but that was not good enough for Louisa, who challenged him to find ways to be more productive. In response, Meigs launched a self-improvement campaign that included keeping a journal.

  For all his contentment, Meigs felt distant from what was the center of action for the army in the 1840s: Mexico, Texas, and the far West. The country’s hunger for that territory became sharp in his first few years in Detroit. It peaked in 1844, during the campaign leading to the election of James K. Polk, who believed America was destined to expand across the continent. In his inaugural speech on March 4, 1845, President Polk underscored his support of the annexation of Texas from Mexico, while making clear his intention to take territory in the Northwest. “The world beholds the peaceful triumphs of the industry of our emigrants,” Polk said. “To us belongs the duty of protecting them adequately wherever they may be upon our soil.”

  The new president was prepared to go to war. For the soldiers who would put his words into action, this meant a chance to earn glory, a rise in rank, and a boost in salary. Meigs had to watch from afar. Soon after taking office, Polk annexed Texas, which became the twenty-eighth state. He accepted a compromise with Britain at the 49th parallel in Oregon. Then, in a series of calculated provocations, he pushed Mexico into war, which began in 1846 after Polk claimed with little evidence that Mexicans had killed Americans near disputed territory at the border. Soldiers moved south, and the conflict soon created a rift in the United States that would only widen in the coming years. Democrats strongly supported their president. The Whig Party—the precursor to the Republican Party—railed against it. One Whig adherent was Abraham Lincoln, a freshman congressman from Illinois who accused Polk of violating the Constitution and called on him to produce evidence of Mexico’s culpability.