The Quartermaster Page 2
Meigs followed the far-off fighting through newspaper accounts: the Battle of Buena Vista in northern Mexico, the capture of Mexico City, and the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, giving control of California and the entire Southwest to the United States. Many of his army colleagues became famous and received promotions. Among them were Ambrose Burnside, Jefferson Davis, Ulysses Grant, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas Jackson, later known as “Stonewall.” The war resulted in appalling casualties, including more than 13,280 American dead, and it ignited a long fuse in Washington over the question of slavery. A lawmaker from Pennsylvania, David Wilmot, offered legislation that declared that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of” territory acquired during the war. The House approved Wilmot’s proviso. The Senate stood firm against it.
Meigs was unsettled that he had lived safely and comfortably in the northwoods while army colleagues had risked their lives or died for their country. He hoped to redeem himself one day, perhaps by achieving something so beneficial to the country that his name would never be forgotten.
* * *
As winter descended on Detroit in 1849, Meigs was ordered back to Washington to serve as staff officer to Joseph G. Totten, the army’s chief engineer and a hero of the Mexican War. Totten knew Meigs from his earlier days in Washington and would become one of his most important mentors. They had much in common. Totten’s family also had roots in England, and he was a West Point graduate who had worked on river and fortification projects. There were also plenty of differences. As a colonel, Totten had controlled engineering operations during the invasion of Mexico City and was made brigadier general for his bravery at the siege of Veracruz. During his rise through the military, Totten made time to study natural history. He focused in particular on sea snails and other Mollusca in New England and the Pacific Northwest. Totten lives on now in the names of some of his discoveries, including one dubbed Gemma Tottenii. When Meigs arrived in the capital, Totten occupied a central spot in the capital city’s scientific crowd. In addition to being the army’s chief engineer, he served as a founding regent of the new national museum known as the Smithsonian Institution. Totten welcomed Meigs into this circle.
There’s no overstating the pull that the Smithsonian exerted on certain men. It was the brainchild of James Smithson, the brilliant, illegitimate son of Hugh Smithson, the First Duke of Northumberland. A chemist and mineralogist, Smithson had donated a hundred thousand gold sovereigns to the United States, directing the money to be used after his death for “an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.” Smithson died in 1829, but it was not until 1846 that Congress approved legislation creating the museum. Nothing else like it existed in the country.
At the time of Meigs’s return to the capital, the first Smithsonian building, then under construction, was known as the Castle. It was a red sandstone complex modeled on a medieval Norman style. For Meigs and others, it embodied the spirit of a new era for American engineers and natural philosophers, or physical scientists, who were determined to take part in the tide of technological and scientific advancements sweeping the world, filling cities and landscapes in Europe and the United States with new bridges, buildings, canals, railroads, and telegraph lines. Meigs visited the US Patent Office regularly to study new inventions and engineering techniques, and he bought himself a microscope.
At the same time, he drew and painted. A reunion with Captain Seth Eastman, one of his drawing instructors at West Point, stoked his enthusiasm. Eastman was a talented careerist in the nation’s small standing army. He explored, built fortifications, and painted as he moved among posts in Florida, Texas, and Minnesota, becoming a specialist in the depiction of American Indians. In Washington, Eastman focused on illustrations for a multivolume document of native people. With Eastman’s encouragement, Meigs began making his own watercolors of local scenes, including the hills west of the city near Great Falls, the unfinished Washington Monument, and buildings in the city’s northwest quarter. The paintings spurred him to look at the city in fresh ways. They show the work of a skilled hand and sensitive eye.
Just as he and Louisa settled in, he was ordered to report to Fort Montgomery at the north end of Lake Champlain in New York. It was there, in September 1851, Montgomery and Louisa had their fifth child, Vincent Trowbridge. Now Meigs began to worry about money. Like many fellow officers, he had never made quite enough to feel secure. Fearing he would not be able to pay his bills, he accepted support from his father, who offered him several hundred dollars a year. Meigs thought it was ironic “to be able to buy whatever is proper and desirable for the public works and to be obliged to count sixpence in the management of my family.”
The work at least was interesting. It involved planning and constructing walls forty-eight feet high, emplacements to accommodate 125 cannons, and other fortifications. Meigs managed his time well enough to spend many hours tramping through the woods, hunting, and reading about science and engineering. He also made time to sketch and paint, even in the cold weather. He considered all of it as training for something important, something demanding, something big. Even his hunting excursions helped him prepare, or so he argued, because they “gave me, also, patience and perseverance, for the chase of the deer requires all this.”
Meigs’s chance came sooner than he expected.
CHAPTER 3
Wholesome Water
The fire started somewhere in the bones of the US Capitol, in a recess between the whitewashed walls and the old beams and bricks. Making his rounds near the Capitol’s west front, watchman John Jones noticed the flames flickering in the third-floor windows. It was sometime before eight o’clock on the morning of December 24, 1851. The location of the blaze could not have been worse, the reading rooms of the Library of Congress.
Fire in the District at midcentury was almost as common as empty political promises. Just the night before, a nearby hotel had burned down. Fire in the confines of the Capitol could spell disaster. The great pile of wood, brick, and sandstone was more than the center of the government. It also anchored the young country’s outsized aspirations to greatness. The building had been under construction or renovation for a half century. Though architects and builders had done their best with the budgets they had, the place had become a grand, handsome tinderbox on a hill. The library itself was especially vulnerable. Established in 1800 with a $5,000 appropriation from Congress, the library received its first shipment from a London bookseller. A room used by the House during the Sixth Congress became its home. The books were secure behind wire netting and locked doors, but nothing could protect the room from fire. In August 1814 flames consumed the library when the British invaded Washington during the War of 1812 and set the chambers in the Capitol ablaze. Thomas Jefferson reseeded the collection by selling the government his personal library—the finest in the land, with nearly 6,500 volumes in all.
Officials took new precautions, including the prohibition of candles and smoking in the reading rooms. But the threat was acute in the winter of ’51, when the rooms became nearly as dry as the leaves that skittered over the Capitol grounds. Jones and another man rushed upstairs and broke open the locked doors. For a moment, they had hope. The blaze was contained to a single table and books on shelves in two alcoves, choicest parts of the collection still untouched. With no time to lose, Jones and his comrade dashed off in search of water. In their haste they left the doors open, creating a draft that doomed the library. The flames glided over everything in their path. Volunteer fire companies raced to the scene in horse-drawn engines, the Columbia, Perseverance, Anacostia, and Union. Local toughs who made up the volunteer forces slugged it out over who would have the privilege to fight the blaze, and then they struggled with frozen hoses.
Eventually they pumped water in from a nearby fountain, while a handful of desperate citizens formed a small bucket brigade. The marines rushed in to help. After a daylong battle, two-thirds of the fifty-five thousand books were reduced
to gray ash. Lost too were maps, charts, thousand-year-old bronze medals, and busts of Jefferson and George Washington, along with portraits of the first five presidents. Investigators quickly determined the cause. On the floors below, the drafty committee rooms had large fireplaces, which lawmakers had kept stoked in a struggle against the subzero frost that had enveloped the District in those first days of winter. Sparks had ignited a wooden joist jutting into the flue of a poorly constructed chimney. Some residents fumed. “No public building should be erected in these enlightened days which is not made fireproof,” one man wrote in his private journal.
The public’s anger peaked with the news of how easily the catastrophe could have been averted. Jones told investigators that in the moment he burst into the library, “half a dozen buckets of water would have sufficed to extinguish the fire.” Congressional librarian John Meehan told lawmakers they should be grateful that some of Jefferson’s books survived. He appealed for action to protect those remaining. “I sincerely hope that the searching investigation Congress will give to the distressing event, which every lover of science and literature must deeply deplore, will lead to a detection of the causes that produced it, and to the adoption of means that will prevent, in all future time, a recurrence of the sad calamity.”
* * *
Pretense and muck marked the capital city midway through the century. The population had soared to more than fifty thousand from about fourteen thousand in 1800, but the District of Columbia remained more provincial than Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Laborers and clerks were the most common jobs. Washington also had ninety-nine lawyers, fifty engineers, eleven artists, four architects, and one matchmaker. Methodists dominated the ranks of the city’s thirty-seven churches. It was politics, not religion, that made the news. Of the eighteen newspapers and magazines published in the District, most of them were political rags.
Though formed as a compromise between North and South, Washington had the look and feel and rhythms of a large Southern town, including almost four thousand slaves and ten thousand free African Americans. To some observers, the District seemed poised between greatness and dissolution. The cobblestone of Pennsylvania Avenue linked Capitol Hill to the White House. The Treasury Department and the US Post Office Building appeared majestic, with their proliferation of columns. Off to the side, the unfinished Washington Monument stood alone in a pasture. The writer Henry Adams, a District resident, remarked famously that when he first saw the government buildings as a boy, they seemed “like white Greek temples in the abandoned gravel-pits of a deserted Syrian city.” After his only visit, Charles Dickens described it archly as “the City of Magnificent Intentions,” complete with spacious avenues “that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere.”
The city was divided by a canal that fed into the Potomac River. It was a sluggish stream that flowed only after sufficient rain. Raw sewage ran from government buildings directly into a branch of Tiber Creek and then on to the Potomac River. Pigs, cows, and chickens wandered on the dirt roads. In the springtime, the smell of stagnant canals wafted on the moist air. The inadequacy of the water supply became more pronounced every year. The system was comprised of a jumble of cisterns, wells, and springs. Though modern cast-iron pipes had been installed in places, primitive pipes made of bored logs also still carried water. (City dwellers tapped into the pipes when no one was looking, supplying their own homes first-come, first-serve style.) The main sources—Old City Spring, Caffrey’s Spring, and Franklin Park Spring—fell far short of the demand. Many of the city’s residents got their water from pumps on street corners that drew on insufficient supplies below. Others relied on the river, wells, and local ponds, and they often fell prey to typhoid fever and other illnesses. As in many cities at the time, death hovered over the capital like a specter. The onset of a mild illness in a spouse or child triggered a primal dread among even prominent citizens, who fled to healthier terrain each summer.
For decades, Congress had put off the task of creating a sensible water supply system, despite an obvious and growing need. The problem became so compelling that President Millard Fillmore, by temperament a waffler, told Congress that the city should be made clean and safe and “be the pride of Americans.”
“And as nothing could contribute more to the health, comfort, and safety of the city and the security of the public buildings and records than an abundant supply of pure water, I respectfully recommend that you make such provisions for obtaining the same as in your wisdom you may deem proper.”
Congress’s vacillation flowed from an enduring dynamic: every decision was subordinate to the math of politics. Lawmakers simply couldn’t divine the benefit of spending millions on work so far from their home districts. But the library fire stirred them to action. They agreed to allocate $5,000, more than ever before, to support the search for a solution. Totten, the army corps engineer, tapped a deputy, Captain Frederick Smith, to lead a study. Then Smith died unexpectedly. So Totten turned to Meigs, who was working on Delaware River improvement projects. Meigs hardly knew what to say. At last a great door was opening for him, giving him a chance to make a name for himself and work among people who mattered.
When he arrived in Washington, at six in the morning on November 3, 1852, Meigs was thirty-six. He was almost six foot two, wore thick side-whiskers, and he often seemed to be scowling. He was optimistic, though, because his simple orders gave him latitude to do great things, or so he thought. He was to conduct a survey and find “an unfailing and abundant supply of good and wholesome water” for the nation’s capital and neighboring Georgetown. His days of leisure were over. The hardest three months’ work of his life until then had begun.
* * *
Nearly every day that fall and winter, Meigs trudged to the north and west of the District with an assistant to take stock of available water. He thought that the solution might lay near a stretch of the Potomac River aptly named Great Falls, where water arriving from the west twisted over house-sized boulders. If the river here offered a seemingly unlimited supply of clean water, it also posed titanic challenges. It would take a feat of engineering to master the Potomac’s hydraulic power and convey the water to Washington.
Meigs was a man of his time, the great age of engineering. To an almost devout degree, he believed in the power of clear thinking. Technical solutions would come to him, he thought, if only he applied scientific principles and demanded excellence of himself. With discipline and enough money, “any achievement of engineering was possible.” He rushed at the work, establishing a pattern for the rest of his life. When he wasn’t in the field, he studied, examined maps, and learned what he could about the mystifying dynamics of water. He tallied the cost of every option. No detail was too small to consider. When he came up with ideas for Washington, he compared them to water systems in London, New York, and Boston.
He also rekindled a habit he had developed in Detroit, seeking inspiration from the past. That is how he found Sextus Julius Frontinus, one of the architects of Italy’s ancient water system. Frontinus’s memoir, The Aqueducts of Rome, impressed Meigs. Here in a 1,700-year-old book was a model for the lieutenant’s career. Frontinus was a brilliant soldier who committed himself to public service. He wanted little in return except the chance to build great things and a measure of recognition for doing so. His accounts offered insights that applied directly to Meigs’s ambitions. The Roman described his vision for a water system that provided not “merely the convenience but also the health and even the safety of the City.” He spoke about his practice of immersing himself in the technical details as both a practical matter and a point of honor. The book underscored for Meigs the imperative of will, along with a willingness to make things the right way, even if at great expense. Frontinus wrote that “for this reason, in accordance with principles which all know but few observe, honesty in all details of the work must be insisted upon.” The memoir resonated with something else in Meigs. Frontinus wanted the world to remember him, going so far as to
order that his name be imprinted on the lead pipe. He also shared this thought: “Remembrance will endure if the life shall have merited it.”
CHAPTER 4
An Aqueduct Worthy of the Nation
Three months after arriving, Meigs delivered his report. It must have come as a surprise to those in power. He had confronted a problem that had languished for years and proposed a solution intended to last lifetimes. Meigs spelled out his ideas in forty-eight pages with clarity and precision. He offered a sweeping view of the city’s needs for generations to come, suggesting the capital required far more water than anyone realized.
Great technological, industrial, and demographic shifts were urbanizing cities on the Eastern Seaboard and in England and Europe. From 1830 to 1860, the number of towns and cities in the United States with more than 2,500 people quadrupled to 392. The population soared more than fivefold to 6.2 million. The amount of water used by modern households had soared beyond all expectations. Meigs described how poor planning by other municipalities led to shortfalls, as demand exceeded the supply. New York had created its new aqueduct only a decade before, he said, and already the system each day delivered the last drop it could carry. Meigs noted the problem was particularly acute on Saturdays, due to what New York’s water commissioners called “zealous housewifery.”