The Quartermaster Read online

  Meigs continued to work, even though he and Louisa could hardly bear their losses. Like other parents of their day, they clutched at pieces of the boys’ clothing, toys, and other mementos. They commissioned a daguerreotype of Vintie and a medallion bearing the likeness of Charlie. They visited the boys’ graves often, and they carried fear through the days like a virus, quaking even at a cough or sniffle among their surviving children. Meigs reasoned that God was teaching him and Louisa lessons about the nature of true faith. He was bowed and confused and found that it was “hard to walk uprightly in a heavenly course.” About his boys, he wrote: “They loved each other in life and in their deaths they were not long divided.”

  Meigs had to move forward with his life, and quickly. In December 1853 several members of Congress began questioning his management, as they had done with Walter. Critics took issue with the Army Corps of Engineers’ role in public works. The attacks came in the form of questions cloaked in the spirit of good government. Representative Richard Stanton of Kentucky wanted to know why a junior army captain was in charge of the Capitol extension projects. Who gave him the authority to make such sweeping changes to plans that Congress had approved two years earlier? Stanton promised to launch an inquiry about the military’s control of the projects.

  Meigs wasn’t the real target here. Stanton and other lawmakers wanted to make life hard for Davis, who had committed the sin of outwitting them. When Davis took control of the largest public works projects in town for the War Department, they were deprived of patronage and power. Stanton had helped push forward the Capitol extension plans a few years earlier and wanted to control the project. To thwart him, Davis had arranged to have him stripped of a committee chairmanship with oversight authority—or so it seemed to Meigs.

  Meigs knew that the political game in the capital was rough, and he realized that the wrangling might put his career at risk. After the holiday lull, the attacks came quickly. On January 3, 1854, an ally of Stanton from Tennessee submitted a “resolution for consideration” launching an inquiry into changes to the Capitol extension plans, the authority behind them, and the costs. Filled with anxiety, Meigs decided to visit Senator Sam Houston, the firebrand Texan who had served as first president of the Republic of Texas. Houston had influence and Meigs wanted to be sure of his support during the upcoming battles. Houston stayed in an upper room at the Willard Hotel, a preserve of the rich and powerful just off Pennsylvania Avenue. When Meigs arrived, the living legend lay on the floor, a red blanket under him, his head on a pillow made of newspapers. Houston was unwell, but he remained feisty, pouring out invective, blasphemies, and gobs of tobacco spit. Meigs was relieved to hear that Houston did not harbor any personal grievance against him or his work. He came away feeling mildly reassured about his chances to survive the political fight with Stanton and his allies.

  CHAPTER 6

  America’s Curse

  Up on Capitol Hill, lawmakers were contemplating matters that would have far greater import than the building projects. As Meigs reached out to Houston, Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois was urging Congress to endorse the construction of a rail line to the Pacific Ocean. Douglas was a little man with a big head and grand ambitions for himself and the country. He argued that it was in the government’s interest to establish pathways to the West, where droves of gold miners and pioneers were seeking riches and new lives.

  On the surface, Douglas’s idea seemed just the thing for a young, sprawling country. He had watched the effects of a transportation revolution in Chicago, which now served as the locus for more than two thousand miles of new rail lines. He wanted to use iron rails to stitch together the continent. For his proposal to succeed, the government would need to provide land subsidies to the railroads. Douglas reasoned that the best route for the railroad would be windswept plains of the vast region known as Nebraska. Obviously, the government had to survey the land before it could be handed over to railroads. But before any official survey could be conducted, the land had to be organized as a territory. This posed a great problem. Powerful Southerners would not support new territories unless slavery was permitted.

  Slavery was America’s curse. Congress had twice limited its spread into the territories. The Compromise of 1820, also known as the Missouri Compromise, prohibited slavery west of the Mississippi and north of latitude 36 degrees, 30 minutes—land that had been acquired through the great Louisiana Purchase of 1803.That angered Southerners. The Compromise of 1850 tried to maintain the balance of slave states and Free States during the nation’s westward expansions. It also gave slave owners certain prerogatives. The Fugitive Slave Act, part of the Compromise of 1850, allowed white Southerners to abduct runaway slaves and take them back to the South. This complex deal infuriated abolitionists. Ironically, it depended on federal authority at a time when the call for “states’ rights” was a refrain across the South. In its wake, the writer Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an instant bestseller about the horrors of slavery. The book infuriated readers in the North—as well as those in the South who objected to its slant.

  Douglas’s legislation sought to create two territories, Nebraska and Kansas, with a combined area that now encompasses Colorado, North and South Dakota, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, and Wyoming. Under his proposal, the new territories would be situated west of Missouri, a slave holding state. During the debate, Douglas, following the lead of Southern senators, took the momentous step of including language that would repeal the old geographic limits on slavery. Over the furious opposition of abolitionist members of Congress, the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed Congress in May 1854. Representative Abraham Lincoln said, “Little by little, but steadily as a man’s march to the grave, we have been giving up the old for a new faith. Nearly eighty years ago, we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a ‘sacred right of self-government.’ These principles cannot stand together.”

  Meigs had little faith in Douglas, whom he once described as having a “perverted moral sense or none at all.” But his reaction to Douglas’s proposal revealed the limits of his opposition to slavery. He privately considered the legislation a “great wrong in the course of freedom,” because it could allow slavery to flourish in new territories. At the same time, he was cautious in expressing his views. Meigs wrote little about it in his journals, and he was not inclined now to take a public stand.

  Meigs clearly did not want to alienate Davis, the man who held sway over his future.

  * * *

  Now Meigs became even more focused on his own legacy. He was “perfectly occupied with the desire to build the dome of the Capitol and to make it more beautiful and graceful than any other.” He often paged through Recueil et Parallele des Edifices de Tout Genre, Anciens et Moderne—a decades-old book that contained hundreds of drawings, plans, and elevations of notable buildings in world history. Meigs loved the prints of Raphael’s decorations, details of Roman vases, drawings of columns. Most of all, he treasured images of domes: the Pantheon in Paris, St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, and St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. He saw them as a personal challenge.

  The Capitol dome posed another problem that Congress had put off for years. Made of wood and sheathed in copper, it rose 140 feet above the ground. It formed an interior rotunda 96 feet high, giving it more balanced proportions inside. The foremost issue was fire. The blaze that consumed the old Library of Congress had come close to igniting the dome. With the building expanding at a rapid clip, the dome also represented an aesthetic problem. It was far too small to balance with the larger building. Even philistines who cared nothing about design or architecture could see that it would look comically small on the new structure, a little like a beanie on the head of a giant.

  Meigs’s obsession was fueled by an architectural rendering by Walter. Seven feet long, the drawing of an imagined Capitol included people, horses, and carriages moving abo
ut on the east plaza. Crowning the building was a towering new dome topped off with a statue. Viewers flocked to Walter’s office for a look. When Meigs saw the drawing, he realized the new dome would be one of the most recognizable pieces of architecture in the country. He had to get credit for building it. He examined every detail of Walter’s drawings. While he admired its grace, he found shortcomings. Among them were columns at the base of the dome. They looked appealing on paper, but in Walter’s plan, they were purely decorative. Meigs believed that every part of a building ought to serve a structural purpose. Working in private, Meigs allowed his ambition to take flight. He studied the engineering. He imagined the aesthetics. Then he drafted his own plans. Looking down on his work, his self-regard blossomed like a hothouse flower. “I have in the Parallele des Edifices most of the domes in the world of any celebrity,” he wrote, “and I think mine is better than anyone of them.”

  * * *

  The pace of work caught up to Meigs, who was beginning to look less like a soldier than an irritable, burly accountant whose battles were mostly with his ledgers and meddlesome politicians. At thirty-nine, he weighed about two hundred pounds. One day in October 1854, he decided to go hunting with John, his oldest boy, and exercise. For hours, they trooped through the ravines near Little Falls, and scanned the colorful trees and undergrowth for targets. Squirrels, bullfrogs, blackbirds, or rabbits—it didn’t matter. Meigs loved shooting. After huffing along all day, he was so stiff that he could barely walk up the stairway at home. In his journal he vowed to exercise more often.

  “For I am thus losing the strength which enabled me to go through with the fatigue of my survey when I came here, fresh and vigorous,” he wrote. “It is not making the best out of my time or doing my duty to myself or to the country to give up the cultivation of health of body while using my brains for the service.”

  He continued handling the growing demands like a circus juggler who keeps mismatched objects aloft. No task was too small for his attention now. He managed even after Davis added still more to his portfolio by placing him in charge of the construction of Fort Madison, a battery in Annapolis, Maryland. His accounting at this time shows the remarkable scope of his work. In just one month, workers had put into place more than 200 blocks of marble. They had received delivery of 576,906 bricks and laid 543,774. He calculated the average time it took for contractors to make window jambs for the new wings: seventy days, at $2.50 per day for cutting and carving the marble. That didn’t include the fine work, such as the carving of decorative foliage.

  Meigs was becoming a better manager. Once while doing his tabulations, he realized that a contractor had unwittingly far underbid on its work. The mistake put the firm at risk financially. Meigs, rigid in his demand for honesty from contractors, nevertheless showed a pragmatic flexibility that was becoming a hallmark of his management style. Instead of enforcing the contract dogmatically, as he would if he thought contractors were trying to cheat, Meigs altered its terms to make it fair. He wanted to pay able contractors a fair price for good work. This fastidiousness went beyond the ledgers. He examined the friezes he had commissioned for the building’s windows and demonstrated how craftsmen could use a “bolder style of modeling” for the decorative details in the gallery of the House of Representatives. Once, he whipped out his own pocketknife and carved minute changes to an artist’s work.

  There was not enough time in a normal workday for all of this. Meigs regularly stayed at his Capitol office until ten o’clock at night, trying to plow through paperwork, and fatigue sometimes overwhelmed him. One evening at home, he fell asleep in a chair while looking at a sketch of the Louvre in the Illustrated London News. Domestic troubles added to his load. That summer, he and Louisa had a baby girl. While trying to stay on top of her household, Louisa discovered that one of the family’s servants had been stealing. She was vexed by the problem and distressed by Montgomery’s chronic absence. One evening, she gathered the kids, trooped to the Capitol, and surprised him at his office. He had the sense to know when it was time to bow with good cheer to a greater force: the love he had for his family. After they “burst in upon me and took possession of me, I showed them the curiosities of the office and then came home with them.”

  * * *

  Meigs often sought ways to become more efficient. This was not because he subscribed to Benjamin Franklin’s famous adage “Time is money.” For Meigs, a more important idea was at stake. More time meant more work. It was the work that held out the chance of making something memorable. One of his guiding lights was the British educator Sir Isaac Pitman, an unorthodox Christian who believed in helping people improve their lives through efficiencies. “[T]ime is life,” Pitman once said. Meigs reckoned he could squeeze extra minutes free from his days by learning to write more quickly. As it happened, Pitman had developed a kind of script aimed at enabling people to do just that. It’s what we now know as shorthand.

  Meigs started reading Phonographic magazine, which provided instruction for enthusiasts, and he studied a manual for specialists, pasting an index of shorthand symbols in his journal. Near the end of the year, he bought a gold pen designed specifically for shorthand writing. An inveterate tinkerer, he was thrilled when it arrived. “This is written with it, and I am much pleased,” he wrote in his journal that night. He practiced shorthand whenever he had a spare moment and tried to sell others on the method, including his son John. Meigs was “seduced by the beauty of the forms and the ease with which the thoughts are put upon paper.” He could be evangelical about it, and when one of his clerks rebuffed a suggestion to learn shorthand, Meigs refused to give him a raise.

  Meigs’s enthusiasm was a mixed blessing. His normal script was generally illegible, sometimes undecipherable. His shorthand script would prove to be nearly impossible to read, at least for all but a few specialists. He used the pen on Christmas morning and then again on the last day of December 1854, when he posed a question to himself: What have I done and learned this year? His answers say much about who he was becoming. Meigs believed he had worked hard and honestly and had much to show for it. Though the aqueduct work had slowed because funding from Congress ran low, the Capitol had progressed rapidly. The interior walls now rose to the level of the roof, which was being built of iron in a shop that Meigs had also designed.

  He thought of all the men he had employed—more than five hundred directly under him—along with the blessings their jobs had brought to their families. He took pride in the legions of other men who benefited from the public works projects, men who worked “at the quarries; at the brickyards; at the forests from which the lumber, the firewood for the brick, comes; in the boats bringing sand; in the vessels bringing marble and other materials, in the factories, [with] the lime and cement; in the machine shops, making machines and cast iron in the foundry and rolling mills making the iron, a vast number of others who have in part, at least, derived their living from this work, and thus have, through my hands, obtained some good.”

  CHAPTER 7

  The Saturday Club

  One of Meigs’s favorite activities involved a group called the Saturday Club. It was an informal collection of science-minded men who gathered each week to share ideas and make sense of a torrent of scientific and technological advancements in Europe and the United States. Its organizer was George Schaeffer, chemist and examiner at the Patent Office who specialized in the use of microscopes. Schaeffer had worked with Meigs at the aqueduct, helping assess the quality of water, and invited him to attend a meeting in January 1855.

  They had much to consider. In the United States, the number of patents had soared from fewer than 500 a year on average in the 1840s to 1,892 in 1855. So many new tools and devices were being created that the Patent Office in Washington became a destination for tourists. At the same time, new building methods were transforming Europe and the United States. The British engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, for instance, revolutionized travel with iron railways, suspension bridges, and tunnels, a
ll built with innovative methods and designs. The Crystal Palace, which housed the Great Exhibition in London several years before, had demonstrated a new way of using mass-produced cast-iron building components. The builder James Bogardus had recently made the first all-iron building facades in the United States. Along with new technology came revolutionary ideas. Charles Darwin proposed that all life on earth had common ancestors. James Maxwell, the Scottish theoretical physicist, delved into the notion that electricity, magnetism, and light shared common properties. Physician John Snow, a pioneer of modern epidemiology, had recently traced the origins of a cholera outbreak in London to a single public water pump. His innovations would help transform public health.

  The Saturday Club in Washington had no rules, formal leaders, or organizational chart. The only requirement for entrance was technological or scientific achievement. Even that requirement was interpreted broadly. Members included engineers, explorers, naturalists, and painters. Most pursued their passions as amateurs while working in other careers. Joseph Henry, one of the group’s unofficial leaders, was an exception. A professor at Princeton, he had conducted scientific research into electricity, magnetism, and solar spots. For nearly a decade, he had served as secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. A. D. Bache, the friend and collaborator of Henry and Meigs, was another science luminary. In the 1830s he had investigated the causes of steam-boiler explosions, a deadly problem that came with the advent of steam power. The federally funded investigation was the first time the government turned to scientists to inform public policy. Bache served on the board that selected Henry to lead the Smithsonian. He was also the head of the Coast Survey—the oldest scientific organization in the government—and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.