The Quartermaster Read online

  Another member was Titian Peale, son of the artist Charles Willson Peale. He was an artist and illustrator as well as a naturalist, collector, and explorer. A decade earlier, Peale had taken part in the US Exploring Expedition, a four-year scientific journey that named the continent of Antarctica. He now worked at the Patent Office. A passionate lepidopterist, he would create one of the great collections of butterflies in North America.

  Each man presented his discoveries, experiments, and oddments in show-and-tell style, often with great enthusiasm. These included a gyroscope, a homemade air gun, microscopes, fossils, chromolithographs, an electromagnet, and the plaster cast of a rabbit’s head. Meigs was happy the group had a great appetite for conversation, cold beef, and white wine. As one friend put it later, “The discussions were always able, and when, as was often the case, the views of the members were not in accord, they were warm and keen. No one spoke who had not some thing to say, and he fared badly who advanced theories he was unable to maintain.”

  In Meigs’s first meeting, the group took time to assess a new kind of photograph made on glass plates through a process known as collodion. Some of the images, produced by John A. Whipple, depicted the Cambridge Club in Boston. Meigs displayed photo plates made by Thomas Crawford, showing sculptures destined for the Capitol pediments. As Meigs recalled it, everyone declared Crawford’s to be “more skillful as photographs than Whipple’s and were generally admired as works of art.” Meigs liked the “pleasant intercourse with intelligent and scientific men” and assumed he would be able to turn to them for advice. In the coming years, the meetings would add pieces to the clockwork of his training, helping him to become one of the great innovators and managers of his day. The club would also help secure Meigs a place in the history of American science. Along with at least five other Saturday Club members, Meigs would years later become a part of a new organization called the National Academy of Sciences.

  * * *

  The range of Meigs’s activities stands in contrast to our specialized world. One day, while managing hundreds of workers and millions in spending, while solving engineering problems and fending off political threats, Meigs took time to watch a painter spread plaster on the wall above his office door, mix colors into pots of lime, and then apply the mixture onto the wall. It was February 1855, and Meigs was witnessing the first fresco painting in the United States, a work that he had commissioned. Over the next several weeks, he would return to the room often to observe. The artist was Constantino Brumidi. Born in Rome in 1805, Brumidi had been trained at the prestigious Accademia di San Luca. When he was thirty-five, he joined a group of artists restoring frescos in the Vatican. He earned a certain fame, with one reviewer in Rome declaring that Brumidi’s pictorial effects were second “only to the great masters of the High Renaissance.”

  While it is open to debate whether Brumidi’s talent merited such hyperbole, there’s no question that he was a skilled and insightful painter. Meigs liked him from the start. He recalled when he first met “the lively old man with a very red nose, either from Mexican suns or French brandies.” When Brumidi offered to show what he could do, Meigs had pointed out the area above the room’s doorway, a semicircular space known as a lunette. He told Brumidi to use the space to demonstrate his skills, and selected as a theme the famous account of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus being called from his plow to serve as dictator of ancient Rome. After painting an oil study, Brumidi began working in the unheated room. News of the fresco spread quickly. Before long, Meigs escorted President Pierce, Senator Douglas, Jeff Davis, and the art connoisseur William Corcoran through viewings. Brumidi became a sensation on Capitol Hill. With Meigs’s support and direction, he devoted the rest of his life to decorating “the new cathedral of human freedom.” Brumidi would document and celebrate several of the most important innovations and inventions of the day: Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical reaper, steam engines, an ironclad ship, electrical generators, and the telegraph.

  Those successes bolstered Meigs’s desire to make the Capitol a palace of art. Meigs went on to commission oil paintings, elaborate ironwork, and columns adorned with carvings of native plants and vegetables. He secured permission from the Capitol gardener to gather sticks, leaves, and flowers as models for metal ornaments to decorate doors of the House chamber. In fulfilling the captain’s artistic vision, a foundry at the Capitol also produced decorative cherubs, grapevines, lizards, beetles, and flies. When he learned that two Ojibwa leaders were in town to settle a treaty with the federal government, he called on a decorative stonecutter to make likenesses of them. The busts remain among the finest nineteenth-century depictions of Native Americans. Meigs eventually “dispensed federal funds in patronage of the fine arts on a scale rarely rivaled before the Twentieth Century,” one historian wrote.

  * * *

  For all the pleasure he took from engineering and art, political strife on Capitol Hill now became Meigs’s greatest preoccupation. Work on the aqueduct languished for lack of funding, and opponents on Capitol Hill held up proposals for new infusions of cash. Representative Stanton, Meigs’s nemesis, began investigating the military’s central role in public works projects. But in early 1855 Davis and Meigs pushed back. They pressed their allies for help, including a freshman congressman named Edward Dickinson. Meigs told Dickinson that Stanton’s “inquiry was to me a great trouble, taking me from my duties and occupying my mind and attention, which had enough without any such distractions to keep them fully employed.” He urged Dickinson to make clear to Congress that it would find nothing untoward. Dickinson, a lawyer from Massachusetts, had only a few weeks left in his term. His daughter Emily was something of a recluse whose short, idiosyncratic poems would later earn her renown as one of the literary geniuses of the nineteenth century. At her father’s suggestion, she, her mother, and her sister had come to Washington. During their visit, on February 20, Representative Dickinson went on the counteroffensive when speaking on the House floor. He asked Stanton a series of tart questions about the investigation. Stanton declined to play along, saying it would take “more time to explain my opinions on that subject than it would be proper to take now.”

  Dickinson would not be put off. He said the investigation had found that the work on the Capitol and aqueduct “was progressing in the most skillful, the most scientific, and the best possible manner.” He went further, edging up to insult, saying that most members involved in the investigation considered the allegations a “farce.” As for Stanton, Dickinson said the “subject had become a perfect monomania with him.” The attack was well timed. On March 3, 1855, the funding questions came to a head as the House voted on appropriations in the Civil and Diplomatic Bill. The aqueduct was only one part of the bill. For many, including those interested in Washington, DC, and politicos fascinated by the power struggle involving Meigs, the project provided the sort of political drama that many Washingtonians craved. The budget proposal had strong Senate support, but no one knew which way the House vote would go. The city bubbled with anticipation, and the House galleries, packed with onlookers, hummed. As the day wore on, lawmakers raised and tabled opportunities to vote on the aqueduct. Meigs remained on hand even as representatives left for dinner. No one knew what would happen because support seemed to be breaking down along unpredictable lines.

  Representative William M. Tweed changed his mind to vote in favor of the aqueduct to spite an enemy who had declared his opposition to the project. (Tweed was tough and later came to be known as “Boss” Tweed while running New York’s Tammany Hall political machine.) Laurence Keitt of South Carolina went home and to bed after concluding the vote would not take place. Someone in Meigs’s camp went to rouse him in time to cast a vote in favor of the funding. Stanton, meanwhile, decided to back away from voting at all. He had abandoned his campaign under the pressure from Davis and fellow lawmakers. He slipped off the floor of the House and hid out in the House clerk’s office. Stanton did not want to vote because he worried his constituents w
ould not like it if he supported the aqueduct after having taken such a strident stand against the project.

  A little after three in the morning, a vote was finally called and the project approved, 82 to 77. Congress appropriated $250,000. The crowd still in the House chamber cheered. Meigs went home, sat down at his desk, and recorded his thoughts. “God grant to me a grateful heart for the high privilege bestowed upon me in being a humble instrument in his hand for the outpouring of this great blessing. One that does not stop in the brief space of one mortal life but flowing on down the long stream of time for a thousand years . . . Making more healthful the dwelling of the poor, more grateful the heart of the humble as of the high.”

  CHAPTER 8

  The Workload Grows

  In the days after the vote, people approached Meigs on the street to offer congratulations, as though he personally had won a great political battle. Meigs thought that some of them were mostly happy that the value of their land would now soar as a result of all but certain access to water. New waves of work also came at Meigs, including an assignment to expand the Post Office Building. Engineers, managers, clerks, and draftsmen filed through his office looking for work. Among them was the son of Major G. W. Whistler, an army colleague of Meigs’s. Whistler’s son James was an unorthodox young man who had recently been kicked out of West Point. At the academy, he had been something of a fop. He was nicknamed “Curly” because he wore his hair longer than was allowed. He didn’t impress Meigs, who had no interest in hiring the young man. “He is evidently smart and quick but self-conceited and vain,” Meigs recalled. “I heartily tired of him, feeling no great disposition to bring him within my reach.” It’s probably just as well. James Whistler later moved to Paris, where he would paint, among many important works, his Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1. It is better known now as Whistler’s Mother.

  Meigs had another interesting visitor, Representative Stanton, the enemy himself. Stanton came with Walter and Douglas to talk about architecture. Awkwardness thwarted matters until Meigs nodded at Walter to indicate that an introduction was warranted. Meigs and Stanton shook hands. Walter took Stanton to see Brumidi’s fresco, and Stanton announced he was delighted by it. He made it clear he was happy now to support Meigs in his endeavors, or at least stay out of the way. About this time, Meigs began pursuing dreams of creating a new kind of bridge to carry the water over Rock Creek in the capital. His plan would make double use of the cast-iron water pipes by employing them as the bridge’s structural support.

  Meigs was nearly always working, but he wasn’t always grim. Occasionally, he indulged in a sort of off-kilter humor involving snakes. Meigs loved snakes. During hikes or while touring work sites, he chased them down and then showed them to colleagues or his children. In the spring of 1855, during a trip to Fort Madison, he caught two black snakes and took them back to his office. About five feet long, they slithered around or rested on shelves while Brumidi painted and visitors came and went.

  Meigs pondered their movements, as though they were sculptures come to life. He noticed that one of them was rather benign, while the other tended to be cranky and excitable. He left it to his visitors to discern the difference, chuckling when the cranky one startled them by lashing out. He asked his favorite caster to make bronze likenesses of the snakes. The unusual bronzes were used as handles on doors leading into the expanded House chamber and can still be seen by visitors. Meigs also admired a plaster cast of a snake coiled on a table, made by one of the Capitol artists. Moved by the delicacy of the rendering, Meigs called it “this transcript from nature.”

  * * *

  Throughout that year, Meigs focused much of his time on the Capitol dome, a project that he realized required a mix of hard work, ingenuity, and inspired logistics. First, an army of workers had to tear down the old dome, the wooden structure covered by copper. Then they had to install the many iron parts of a far larger dome that was proportioned properly for the expanded building. During the work, Congress had to be able to conduct its business below.

  The iron dome, first suggested by Walter, offered remarkable advantages over stone, the material traditionally used in the world’s great domes. Iron was far stronger and lighter than masonry. It would not crack if the building’s foundation shifted, as happened to other domes. Cast-iron columns and other components would be far easier to produce than those carved from marble, saving months of labor and untold dollars on supplies. Once a single pattern was made, it would take only days to produce the lot. The “Great Dome,” as Meigs referred to it, would be a semi-elliptical form that rose 228 feet, essentially like that Walter had envisioned. Topping it off would be Crawford’s Freedom (also called Freedom Triumphant in War and Peace and, earlier, Armed Liberty), the 16-foot-6-inch-high statue of a classical female.

  Meigs realized that something else was needed, a new kind of derrick to lift all the components into place. Derricks were nothing new. Construction projects, quarries, and railroads relied on them every day. At the Post Office, he connected four of them in a row, like masts on a ship, distributing the weight and concentrating forces so that workers could easily lift stones weighing up to seven tons and gently put them into place. But the construction demands posed by the dome were unprecedented. Almost nine million pounds of iron components had to be lifted one by one and bolted into place by men who had never worked at such heights. There was little room for error. Meigs devised a simple, ingenious wooden tower, 100 feet tall. On that would sit a derrick with a timber mast and a long boom. The entire machine would rest on an 18-foot base that distributed weight across the floor of the rotunda. When rotated, the boom above would sweep over the outer edge of the dome’s base.

  Two giant timbers for its superstructure arrived in late spring, giving the project momentum. Now one crucial challenge remained. How would the tower stay upright during the strain of lifting? For the answer, Meigs turned to the techniques of ship rigging. Stays like those used on the mast of a schooner would hold the derrick in place. But under the pressures exerted here, hemp ropes like those used on ships would shred. Meigs turned to John Augustus Roebling, a brilliant, innovative engineer from Prussia, who’d immigrated to western Pennsylvania two decades earlier. While working as an engineer for the Allegheny Canal system, Roebling imagined a new kind of wire rope that could withstand the strain of pulling canal boats through the mountains. Roebling moved to Trenton, New Jersey, and worked on a variation of the cable, made with strands of twisted iron wire, using a method adopted from the mines of his native Prussia. In the summer of 1855, he used the cable for a spectacular suspension bridge across the Niagara River gorge in western New York. The 825-foot span hung on four 10-inch cables.

  Roebling traveled to Washington to meet with Meigs. The two struck a deal that would solve a crucial engineering problem, while also saving taxpayers money. With this tower and derrick, Meigs could eliminate the need for massive, expensive scaffolding. As for Roebling, his invention would later become a component of some of the technological and engineering triumphs in the coming century: deep mines, elevators, and suspension bridges, including the Brooklyn Bridge. The cable arrived in the fall, and Capitol workers attached it to the towering derrick. Meigs ordered a steam engine placed on the roof and the wood from the old dome used as its fuel. He described these developments in a long note to Davis on November 26. He laid out the design, engineering, and construction efforts, while deftly outlining his own claim as creator of the dome. He wrote that Walter’s inspiring drawing was a mere sketch that conveyed the “general effects of the whole building as completed.” He said his rival’s drawing did not include any engineering detail and fell short from an aesthetic point of view.

  Meigs described how the final dome would include a nine-foot vertical wall inside, a space he said would be used to create an enormous frieze to illustrate the nation’s progression from “the depths of barbarism to the height of civilization.” He underscored his belief that the dome would eventually serve as the
symbolic center of the nation. On December 7 he climbed up ladders to watch as workmen removed the last piece of the old dome. A temporary roof and windows were installed, allowing in brilliant light that brought the old paintings below to life. Three days later, a workman tested the finished derrick against a stone weighing eleven thousand pounds. It worked well. A delighted Meigs called it “a beautiful machine.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Rowdy Looking

  By early 1856, Meigs was becoming frustrated. He focused endlessly on his projects, among the most ambitious in the country, aiming for work that would last. He used steam engines and modern construction methods to minimize the costs. But while admirers marveled, a handful of journalists and politicians criticized the expense and his management. Stories in the New-York Daily Tribune galled him because they appeared to have been planted by lawmakers who disliked Davis and the War Department’s involvement. Meigs sought a meeting with the powerful Tribune editor Horace Greeley, one of the principal critics.