The Quartermaster Read online

  His plan offered a view of the problem that squared with his own devotion to improving the world. Washington had almost eight thousand dwellings, shops, and public buildings, and more under construction. Why not provide so much water that no one had to worry about waste? A near-endless supply would help the people live cleaner, healthier lives. With his system, he said, Washingtonians could open fire hydrants and “cleanse the streets and gutters, and, washing into the sewers the offal of the city, remove at once from sight and smell these offensive and fruitful sources of disease and death.”

  He reviewed three possible sources of water, including Rock Creek in the District, and Little Falls and Great Falls on the Potomac River. He recommended the last one, by far the most expensive option. The report not only displayed Meigs’s grasp of detail but also showed his talent for persuasion. He was a natural lobbyist, and here he was selling a vision—a romantic story of America’s future. He called on his readers to consider Washington as part of the great sweep of time. He argued the city needed more than health and protection from fire. To thrive and become one of the world’s great capitals, it needed elegance. The system he had in mind would provide enough water to supply in perpetuity fountains that would cool the city “while, by the grace of their sparkling jets, they please the eye, and add beauty to comfort and health.” From another man, at another time, it might have sounded fanciful. It resonated with those who read it.

  As for the engineering, Meigs described how gravity would carry the water more than twelve miles from near Great Falls into the District. The Potomac water would course through seven-foot-wide conduits made of bricks, dropping on average about nine-and-a-half inches each mile. The minimum cost would be just over $1.9 million. For $350,000 more, Meigs said he could double the capacity by expanding the conduits to nine feet. As he waited to hear how this was received, Meigs hoped that he would be recognized for his vision. “If it is not good & does not give me a standing among engineers,” he wrote to his father, “I shall be disappointed for it contains my brains.”

  * * *

  On March 3, 1853, in the chaos of the last day of the session, lawmakers appropriated $100,000 for the project. After years of vacillation, they finally committed to paying attention to one of the capital’s central inadequacies. In one of his first acts, the new president, Franklin Pierce, embraced the project as well. It is not as though Pierce had given the matter much thought. The force behind his decision was Jefferson Davis, the new secretary of war, one of the most formidable men in Washington. Davis had served as the junior senator from Mississippi, where he chaired the Committee on Military Affairs and was a member of the Public Buildings Committee. During army service, he won acclaim in the Mexican War, where he was wounded in his right foot during the Battle of Buena Vista.

  Brilliant and tough, with a straight back and piercing blue eyes, Davis would mean more to Meigs’s career than almost any other man. Given that Davis was fiercely proslavery, he might have seemed an unlikely supporter of Meigs, who, like his family, opposed slavery. But the two had more in common than was readily apparent. Davis was West Point class of 1828. He too had bucked authority there. As a politician, Davis tempered his suave rhetoric with a grasp of detail, and he had a passion for architecture and new technology. Like Meigs, he was optimistic about the future of the nation’s capital and he was driven to impose his will. “Davis excelled in this kind of bureaucratic empire building, and as a major figure in the Pierce administration, he wielded immense power,” Guy Gugliotta wrote in a history of the Capitol.

  Davis pressed Pierce to transfer control of major public works projects from the new Department of the Interior to the War Department. Davis leveraged his new authority in a decision that baffled and infuriated his critics. On March 29 he handed over control of the water project, to be known as the Washington Aqueduct, to Meigs, still a nearly unknown junior officer who had only just been promoted to captain. What’s more, Davis gave Captain Meigs responsibility for enlarging the United States Capitol, an even more prominent plum. It was a fantastic turn for an army officer with no wartime experience, whose career had seemed destined for obscurity. But it would not be the last time that a powerful man, taken by Meigs’s intellect and energy, would offer him a hand up.

  Meigs took it all in stride, but he was still green and could not know the forces that would stand in his way. As gatekeeper to a fortune in spending, he would be a target for years to come. Under the city’s unwritten rules, Meigs would be allowed to succeed only if he directed some of the work to the right people and their friends. To prevail, he would have to master the dark arts of politics and bureaucratic wrangling—while also managing men, overseeing millions in spending, and seeking solutions to mind-boggling engineering problems.

  * * *

  Meigs’s first lessons in Washington corruption came at the Capitol, a building that epitomized the striving and contradictory character of the republic it represented. From the fields down the hill, Congress’s home appeared stately and steadfast. Prints at the time showed it as a romantic vision, cloaked in a gauzy bank of moist air. In reality, it was drafty, damp, and cramped. And that was only the start of the problems. Design flaws made it nearly impossible for lawmakers to understand one another during debates.

  When Meigs assumed oversight of the extension project, Capitol architect Thomas Ustick Walter was embroiled in allegations of corruption. Walter was one of the country’s leading architects. He had taste, talent, and a fine drafting hand. Before taking on the Capitol post, he had designed hundreds of homes, churches, and prisons. His best-known work was Founder’s Hall at Girard College for Orphans in Philadelphia. After the fire in the congressional library, he designed an ingenious fireproof space made of cast iron, a building material that was transforming modern construction. His ink and watercolor drawings stood on their own as beautiful artifacts.

  Despite his fine record, Walter was besieged. Certain lawmakers and whistle-blowers claimed he had overpaid for marble and, presumably, pocketed some of the money. They said he used slipshod construction methods. Meigs was asked to weigh these claims. So he dove into the details, poking at the building’s foundation, reading through Walter’s reports, and examining his accounting ledgers. He figured out what was going on, and it wasn’t nice. Contractors, lawmakers, and bureaucrats anxious to control Walter and his budget had spread false allegations. A congressional oversight committee claimed it had evidence suggesting “great irregularities,” but it was mostly innuendo, not evidence. Meigs stood by the facts he had unearthed. With a few minor exceptions, he concluded Walter’s work was fine. He thought Walter had chosen the “most beautiful specimen of marble” in the United States for the building’s outer layer.

  The fact that he helped save Walter’s job did not mean Meigs would defer to his more famous and experienced colleague. On the contrary, the captain intended to take control. Meigs was on a mission now to do great work and leave a permanent mark in history. Following another man’s vision was not the way to make his own name. The two would fight over control of the work at the Capitol for years to come, spurring Walter in a fit of frustration to describe Meigs as “the most tyrannical, despotic, vain, and unscrupulous man the world ever saw.”

  Meigs soon imposed radical changes in Walter’s plans, which called for spare, unadorned spaces. Meigs wanted a building with decoration and details that spoke to the nation’s wealth, power, and technical innovation. Meigs’s plans, derived in part from an earlier proposal, placed the legislative chambers in the interior of the expanded building. His changes would give lawmakers private rooms and passageways beyond the reach of the public or reporters. To link the building to the outside world, he planned to install a telegraph. His plans included monumental staircases, glazed ceiling panels, and galleries capable of seating 1,200 people. He also called for stained glass set in iron frames in the ceiling and a lobby in the House wing that featured Corinthian columns. Much of what he proposed was modelled on Renaissance
painting, architecture, and ambitions. Because he had never traveled abroad, nearly all his ideas came from books.

  * * *

  Meigs soon took aim at the building’s engineering problems, including the atrocious acoustics and a substandard heating system. In June 1853 he sought help from two luminaries of science he had befriended during earlier spells in the District. One was A. D. Bache, a Smithsonian regent, physicist, and scientific reformer who served as superintendent of the United States Coast Survey, the nation’s oldest scientific organization. The other, Joseph Henry, was a pioneer of electricity and the first secretary of the Smithsonian, who had dedicated himself to fulfilling the dreams of  James Smithson. They expressed enthusiasm about helping Meigs, and with approval and funding from Davis, the three men went on a whirlwind tour to conduct practical “experiments in sound” at buildings in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.

  The physics of sound had long confounded scientists and builders. Certain churches, theaters, and concert halls over the centuries had just the right angles and proportions to enable speakers to hear one another at great distances, often with amazing clarity. In the best spaces, such as Milan’s La Scala opera house, singers and actors could easily cast their voices to the back seats. Obtaining such effects took ingenuity or plain luck. In the legislative chambers in Washington, the result was a fog of sounds. That was a significant defect in a building where talk and debate were the reasons for being. The three men visited concert halls, theaters, churches, and a prison. They spoke from different parts of every room, taking note of the duration, volume, and direction of the echoes. They made drawings showing the general form of the spaces. Meigs was enchanted by the trip. He enjoyed his colleagues and swooned over the art, design, and architecture he saw along the way. In his journal, he exclaimed: “The stairs of the Metropolitan and Saint Nicholas hotels are alone worth the visit to [New York].” When he returned to Washington, he used his insights to reason that both sound and light were essentially waves that rebounded off surfaces. If he could not see sound waves, he thought he could at least assume that they behaved in roughly the same way as light. Predictions could be made. Meigs suggested reforms that seem obvious today, including the installation of draperies on the walls and cushions on chairs to dampen echoes.

  In his plans for moving the chambers to the center of the building, he also eliminated windows. Behind this unorthodox idea was a double agenda. Solid walls would eliminate exterior sounds and drafts, which he assumed blocked voices from reaching distant points in the room. Without windows, he also would have to create an unprecedented, steam-powered fan system for pumping air through the legislative chambers. This gave him another chance to leave his mark with something innovative. When news of Meigs’s plans surfaced, lawmakers responded with a cacophony of complaints. Who in his right mind would create a room without windows? But Henry and Bache approved, and so did Jefferson Davis and the president. They had faith that his innovations would solve the long-standing problems.

  If these were heady times for Meigs, he rarely could rest easy, and just months into his new job, he suddenly faced the prospect of failure. His masons went on strike over their working conditions, and a contractor failed to deliver on a contract for ten million bricks. He worried that even a slight delay would give envious contractors and their allies in Congress the pretext for removing him.

  Bricks were vital to his projects. Cast iron and new building methods might be the hallmarks of the industrial revolution, but the homely red baked brick provided its foundation. England had used billions of bricks in the first half of the century. Almost every project Meigs supervised relied on bricks, including the Capitol’s inner walls and the aqueduct’s culverts and tunnels. Meigs began counting his bricks, tracking the time it took masons to lay them and calculating the per-brick cost to taxpayers. To ensure that he had enough labor, he traveled to New York and hired bricklayers at $2 per day, while negotiating an end to the strike. Meigs also went in search of other sources of bricks, finding a million in Baltimore, a million in Philadelphia, and three million in New York. The bricks varied in quality, size, and shape, but they sufficed. For now, the crisis was averted.

  CHAPTER 5

  A Rival to the Parthenon

  In just a few months, Meigs had taken on more labor than any other man in Washington. On some days he worked nearly around the clock in an unused committee room at the Capitol, a cluttered space that resembled the nest of a magpie or a mad scientist’s workbench. Bricks and chunks of marble shared tabletops with architectural drawings, newspaper clips, ink bottles, art history books, and the ledgers he used to track spending, manpower, and a vast array of supplies, including seventy-five thousand cubic feet of marble that made him especially proud. “I doubt whether so large a quantity of so beautiful a material has ever before been delivered at a public building in the same space of time,” Meigs wrote in a report.

  Some observers admired his stamina, saying he projected an almost “Atlas-like” aura. Not only did he inspect work sites, he drafted plans, managed payrolls, and signed requisitions for even minor purchases such as candles and sponges. On top of everything else, he decided to decorate the Capitol as he expanded it. What could an army engineer know about the nuances of art and decoration? To Meigs’s mind, it was a simple matter of studying. He assumed he would absorb what he needed. He committed himself to ensuring that every space in the building inspired visitors with the promise of America.

  Like Capitol builders before him, Meigs drew inspiration from the Pantheon in Rome. He also keyed his ambitions to the Parthenon in Athens, an indication of his engineering and aesthetic ambitions. Built five centuries BC, the Parthenon stood as a model of balanced architecture. Its proportion spoke of the universal. It had an added appeal of being an engineering wonder. Over the centuries, the building had withstood earthquakes, fires, and relentless assaults by rain, wind, and ice.

  He began by working on the designs of the columns destined for the expanded Capitol, spending an entire day drawing the tops, or capitals, of the columns of the eastern portico. That summer he turned to the design of triangular pediments above the building’s eastern entrances. To be complete, those spaces needed sculptures, so Meigs reached out to Edward Everett for advice. Everett was a brilliant politician, diplomat, and orator from Massachusetts. While serving as a congressman, he helped give shape to the Capitol’s design and construction. He was well known for his taste and knowledge of culture and the arts.

  Everett recommended Hiram Powers and Thomas Crawford, whom he considered among the best of American artists. Both living in Italy, Meigs wrote to them and spelled out his hopes. He said he wanted images that would glorify the ideas at the center of the national narrative, including progress and freedom. “In our history of the struggle between civilized man and the savage, between the cultivated and the wild nature are certainly to be found themes worthy of the artist and capable of appealing to the feeling of all classes,” Meigs wrote. Powers demurred, while Crawford jumped at the chance, becoming part of Meigs’s expanding cadre of collaborators.

  In addition to tackling the aesthetic problems, Meigs had the added challenge of convincing lawmakers to go along with his scheme. Most Americans took pride in their bland tastes. To them, stark interiors and whitewashed walls reflected what Meigs called a “republican simplicity.” In contrast, Meigs wanted to emulate the complex designs, vibrant colors, and richness that characterized much Renaissance art. In a letter that August, Meigs assured Crawford that he and Davis would have control over the art commissions for the Capitol. Meigs sent along drawings of the Capitol’s south wing and the pediment planned for the eastern portico. “I do not see why a republic richer than the Athenian should not rival the Parthenon in the front of its first public edifice,” Meigs wrote. On October 31, Crawford sent designs for the pediment to Meigs. Called Progress of Civilization, it had fourteen figures, including European pioneers and a Native American family in distress. At the center was a
symbolic figure representing America. Crawford had models of the figures photographed in Rome and included the photos in his dispatch. Meigs loved what he saw. With support from the president and Davis, he signed off on the commission.

  * * *

  At the end of October 1853, Meigs decided to break ground on the aqueduct. He had gathered workers, equipment, and supplies in the hills northwest of Washington. He rode with an assistant up the C&O Canal and found a ragtag bunch of laborers waiting for his arrival. If the construction site was chaotic and dirty, it represented a shining moment in Meigs’s life. Here was his chance to erase his regret at sitting out the war in Mexico. With his workers looking on, he turned the earth. “[A]nd 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. “May I live to complete it & thus connect my name imperishably with a work greater in its beneficial results than all the military glory of the Mexican War.”

  Aware of the political support he needed, Meigs organized a more formal ceremony on November 8. President Pierce, Secretary Davis, Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, local politicos, and dozens of others rode with him up the Potomac in a small steamboat. Meigs provided champagne and food. He made a few remarks, and then he wisely handed a spade to Pierce, making way for the president to break ground.

  Proud as he was of these public milestones, Meigs was in private consumed by grief. Two of his boys had died just weeks before. Both succumbed to an ailment that Meigs called bilious fever, a combination of high temperature, severe headaches, and vomiting. Charles, eight, passed in early September, followed by Vincent, two, a month later. Meigs and his wife, Louisa, could not know the exact cause of their illnesses, given the limits of medical science then. The boys may have died from foul water, one of the chronic problems Meigs aimed to fix. Their deaths were sadly commonplace. The chances of dying, in fact, had increased in recent decades for a growing proportion of Americans who lived in urban areas. The bigger the city, the higher the death rate. The reasons seem obvious now: crowding, open sewers, contaminated water, and, thanks in part to the spread of railroads, the rapid movement of people. American cities “had become virtual charnel houses,” one historian wrote.