The Quartermaster Read online

  Greeley’s influence went deep. As a backroom politico, he had helped William Seward win election as New York’s governor and as US senator. As a reformer, he urged young ambitious men in the East to “Go West!” in search of their fortunes. Greeley was pale, with light hair, and he often wore scruffy coats. He struck friends and strangers alike as both intense and distracted. To some, he seemed to be a scatterbrained crank. (“Had God granted him a little practical sense, he would have been a great man,” a fellow New Yorker once wrote.) In a few years, he would become one of the nation’s fiercest abolitionists—and a thorn in the side of Abraham Lincoln.

  Now, on April 4, 1856, Greeley grilled the engineer about the particulars of the public works project. Had Meigs made the original estimates for the Capitol extension’s cost? How much over the estimates had the project run? What about the wages Meigs was paying—were they inflated? In each case, Meigs’s answer surprised Greeley, or so Meigs believed. Meigs was not impressed by Greeley, describing him as an odd duck who did not “look like a man of character or of strong personality and honesty of purpose.”

  A week later, Meigs turned his lobbying effort on Congress. Funding for the aqueduct appeared to be threatened again. To head off another budget crisis, he decided to show key lawmakers that the Treasury’s money was being well spent. Meigs spent a lot of time on Capitol Hill and worked hard to maintain political support. He and his team arranged for a workboat called the M.C. Meigs to carry selected politicians up the Potomac. They put together a cold picnic lunch, including wine and liquor. About two dozen passengers showed up on April 12, 1856, a warm and windy Saturday. They were a surprisingly ecumenical bunch, given the mounting disputes over slavery, states’ rights, and other matters. Representative John Wood, a Republican newspaper owner from Maine, was there. So were representatives Preston Brooks and Laurence Keitt, both of them Democrats and proslavery advocates from South Carolina.

  The Potomac is beautiful in the springtime, with blossoms and tender leaves foreshadowing lush green. Only the “quiet, temperate men from the North” took note of the scene. The Southerners, those “rollicking, roistering sons of the South,” as Meigs called them, focused on the stores of whiskey, brandy, champagne, and sherry. He didn’t really care what they did, so long as the trip produced the political support he needed. Meigs and his team showed the men aqueduct brickwork, culverts, and tunnels. They explained how the water from the Potomac would flow downhill to the District, and all the benefits that would bring.

  * * *

  The threat of violence wafted through Washington these days. The country was losing patience with itself, as regional stereotypes and biases calcified into stony feelings. One Northern cliché held that Southerners would hang on to an agrarian way of life even if it doomed their economy. They would do almost anything to defend their system of slavery because they treasured their leisurely way of life. Southerners believed that Northerners welcomed the coldly efficient blessing of the industrial revolution, even if it meant losing their souls.

  The tensions were reflected in the reaction to a new book by a progressive Northern writer named Frederick Law Olmsted, a social critic and journalist who later earned renown as a landscape architect. The book, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, provided a firsthand account of plantations and Southern society. Northern readers found it appalling and barbaric. Southerners denounced it as antislavery propaganda. About the same time, the country was troubled by news from the West, where the territories struggled toward statehood. Ever since the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened the possibility of slavery’s expansion, trouble in the western territory seemed to presage a dark future for the country. The tensions reached a breaking point when a zealous outsider named John Brown began operating as kind of latter-day prophet, organizing Free State residents in Kansas for violent resistance. He said the North must “strike terror in the hearts of the proslavery people.” As if to demonstrate his resolve, Brown, four sons, and three other men massacred five proslavery settlers, killing them with broadsword blows to the head. A large proslavery gang, meanwhile, broke into a federal arsenal in Liberty, Missouri, taking guns, swords, and cannons. The proslavery group was convinced that the Free State forces had created a secret army to attack Southerners. The antislavery town of Lawrence, Kansas, was besieged by eight hundred proslavery men. Leaders barely averted a crisis, but the relief was temporary.

  In Washington, congressmen and others talked openly about the possibility of a fight between North and South. Militaristic rhetoric grew more extreme by the week. On May 8 the District was jolted when a Southern-born representative shot dead an Irish waiter at the Willard Hotel, an anchor of political and social life in the city. The shooting had no direct connection to slavery, but Northerners saw it as a symbol of Southern aggression and intolerance. Meigs was appalled, writing, “This is one example of the evil of carrying weapons.” Then violence seeped into the Capitol itself. This time the instigator was Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina. He was angry at Massachusetts congressman Charles Sumner for a speech that Sumner called “The Crime Against Kansas.” Sumner blasted the South and its ways, taking pains to deride Senator Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina, a relative of Brooks’s, for supporting popular sovereignty about slavery in the western states. Sumner likened Butler and Senator Douglas, coauthors of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to Don Quixote and his squire, Sancho Panza. For good measure, he claimed Butler had fallen in love with “the harlot, Slavery.”

  Sumner was a handsome man and something of a hero in New England, where he seemed to embody that region’s flinty values. Yet he was not well liked in the Senate. His fiery abolitionist rhetoric alienated many of his colleagues. Most Southerners would not speak to him. On May 22 Brooks walked up to Sumner at his Senate desk, where he was preparing mail. “Mr. Sumner, I have read your speech carefully, and with as much calmness as I could be expected to read such a speech,” he said. “You have libeled my state, and slandered my relation, who is aged and absent, and I feel it to be my duty to punish you for it.”

  Brooks began pounding Sumner with a gold-headed cane made of gutta-percha, a hard, rubbery substance. Brooks chose the cane because he thought it would deliver maximum pain without actually killing. The first blow stunned and blinded Sumner. Others came quickly. Sumner was helpless, trapped by his own small desk until he tore it up from the floor. Standing nearby was Representative Keitt, one of the “roistering sons of the South” who had enjoyed Meigs’s whiskey on the excursion up the Potomac. A flamboyant proslavery radical, he called himself a “visionary and a theorist.” He would come to be known as the “Swashbuckling Secessionist.” When others in the Senate moved to help Sumner, Keitt held them off.

  The attack stunned the nation. Northerners saw it as an effort to silence “an eloquent and erudite” spokesman for freedom. In the South, editorialists applauded the episode, with some deriding Sumner as “an inanimate lump of incarnate cowardice.” Brooks was lauded as a hero and given canes to replace the one he had broken during the attack. Radicals in the South would do almost anything now to protect slavery, the institution that anchored their society. “If the northern men had stood up, the city would now float with blood,” Keitt wrote to the woman he was courting. “Everybody here feels as if we are upon a volcano.”

  * * *

  On the same day, May 22, illness took hold of Meigs and forced him into bed with fever and vomiting. Over the next six weeks, he lost thirty pounds. It was a hard blow for the bluff, kinetic man who was so often seen prowling around blocks of marble and statuary that he came to be known to some as “Meigs among the ruins of Carthage.” He seemed so close to death that his parents rushed to Washington for a last visit.

  But he recovered—and then he had to answer aggressive questions from lawmakers who could not believe he was properly managing so much work and money. A report he submitted to Congress carried a power that belied his illness. He documented with math and fine print the complexity of the thr
ee-year-old operations under his control. For starters, Meigs showed he had maintained the financial integrity of every job. He took on no debt because everything had been bought with cash, almost as soon as the bills came due. He catalogued the supplies involved, including hundreds of tons of cast iron for pipes, window sashes, and ceilings in the House and Senate; heaps of marble, shipped in from quarries in Vermont, Massachusetts, and Tennessee; scores of columns; and about eighteen million bricks. He named each vendor, the day of each purchase, and the cost of delivery, down to the penny.

  The report also contained an analysis of the costs of hiring and feeding horses and oxen. It enumerated the wagons and other vehicles used in the course of his work, as well as all the workspaces, including smith shops, machine shops, sculptor sheds, sawmills, bronze shops, and marble shops. His list goes on and on, illustrating his growing prowess at organization. How much was Meigs getting paid to manage these operations? He mentioned that too: $1,800 a year, the standard salary of an officer of his rank.

  Somehow Meigs remained focused on all these details while the presidential election of 1856 stirred passions in the city and raised profound questions about the country’s future. Many across the political spectrum considered disunion a possibility. The election itself was a mess, in part because the character of the political parties had evolved rapidly in recent years. Democrats selected James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, a bland sixty-five-year-old bachelor. He had served so long and often as a lawmaker and diplomat that he was nicknamed Old Public Functionary. The fledgling Republican Party went with John Frémont, the politically connected but inexperienced “Pathfinder,” who had earned renown for his exploration of the West. The American Party, which promoted nativism, chose former president Millard Fillmore of New York as a compromise candidate.

  The South generally lined up behind Buchanan. In the North, it was not clear who the electorate would support. Many Northern regular voters were energized, even radicalized, by events in Kansas. Voters pored over newspaper accounts of the campaign and turned out everywhere for raucous political rallies, concerts, and picnics. They were treated to a remarkable array of stump speakers, including Greeley, Seward, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Abraham Lincoln gave close to ninety speeches.

  Meigs followed along like everyone else. But he seemed most concerned about the impact of the election on his work. Lawmakers had recently signaled a reluctance to reauthorize spending on the aqueduct until they knew who was going to occupy the White House. Nativist lawmakers, emboldened by the campaign’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, were considering holding back funding because the ranks of Meigs’s workers included Irish Catholics. When Buchanan won Pennsylvania and Indiana, and it became clear he would prevail, Meigs wrote, “This ends the long agony of the two parties and frees the South from its fears and threats of a dissolution of the Union.” He could not know then how wrong he was.

  CHAPTER 10

  Energetic, Obliging, Firm

  With change coming in the White House, Meigs acknowledged his debt to Jeff Davis for giving him immense authority and political cover. Just before Buchanan’s inauguration, Meigs gave Davis rare photographs of the Capitol. In a note, Meigs told his friend that he thought the images “would be interesting as memorials of the connection [Davis] had with this, one of the great buildings of the world.”

  Davis, touched by the gesture, offered a warm response the next day.

  Captain M. C. Meigs

  Dear Sir:

  Accept my thanks for the photographs that you sent me yesterday. You are not mistaken in supposing that they would be of interest to me. When hereafter I shall revert to my connection with the great building from which they are taken, I shall not fail to remember that whatever the pride and satisfaction I may feel in consequence of that connection will be mainly attributable to your having been put in charge of them immediately after they were placed under my general direction. I hope the country will appreciate your services as fully as I do and that your good reputation may outlast your durable structures.

  Very truly yours,

  Jefferson Davis

  Davis was stepping down as secretary of war and resuming his post as Mississippi’s senator in Congress. He would continue to support Meigs in the fights against critics and corruption. In one letter, Davis would describe Meigs as being full of “resources, above personal jealousy, calm, energetic, obliging, firm, discreet, just, patient to hear, and willing to instruct.” He said Meigs’s “scientific attainments, architectural knowledge, and mechanical skill” had been pivotal to the success at the Capitol and aqueduct.

  Another influential man now offered himself to Meigs as a supporter. He was Senator William Seward of New York, one of the most powerful political forces of his day, whose abolitionist convictions and antislavery speeches helped to frame the Northern case against Davis’s South. A gregarious, warm-hearted man, Seward liked Davis personally, and the two shared an appreciation of the Capitol architecture, new technology, and the talents of Montgomery Meigs. He had recently become a vocal supporter of the Capitol project, saying it served as a symbolic retort to “weak and foolish talk” of disunion.

  One day not long after giving his gift to Davis, Meigs ran into Seward. The senator invited him to a party at his home that night in honor of a sculptor who was making a bust of Seward. It was a classic Washington affair (if better provisioned than most, with the claret and cigars that Seward enjoyed), filled with politicos, journalists, and other talkers. Meigs was sitting with a group in the corner of the library when Seward walked up. Seward directed the group’s attention to a series of reference books. When he was New York’s governor, Seward said, he had managed to get such a set into every school district. He was proud of the gesture, saying that the books contained “a whole range of human knowledge.” Seward said he was seeking congressional support for another endeavor that he thought would help transform the world. It was a transatlantic telegraph cable linking North America and Europe. Meigs was captivated by the idea of a long-distance wire under the Atlantic Ocean. He told Seward that he thought the Washington Aqueduct was a “great thing which would live after me and do good.”

  * * *

  On March 4, 1857, one of the most hapless men in American history was inaugurated president of the United States, declaring that events in Kansas were “a matter of but little practical importance.” With him came the man who would make Meigs’s life miserable.

  President James Buchanan stood on the east front of the Capitol, against a backdrop of columns. More than twenty thousand people gathered around—the men dressed in long overcoats and wearing tall black hats, many of them standing on a platform that Meigs had built to hide the construction debris. Watching through a window in the Senate wing, he was as content as he could be. The House had that morning approved $1 million in spending on the aqueduct and Capitol projects. Across from his perch, Meigs had built a small stage for a photographer Meigs had hired the year before. His job was to photograph the swearing-in ceremony, something that had never been done before.

  Photography was a new technology that captivated people across the Western world, Meigs among them. Recent improvements had made the process of taking a photograph easier, while driving down the cost of prints. Portrait studios had begun producing an unprecedented number of images. In Massachusetts alone, more than four hundred thousand daguerreotype portraits were taken in one year. Meigs embraced both the aesthetic and technical challenges of the technology. He often remarked in his journals about the beauty of the images he saw. He realized that photography could also be employed as a tool for builders. About the time he hired the Capitol photographer, John Wood, Meigs told Davis that he could save money by making photographic copies of building plans. Meigs promised to create a visual record of the projects for the Library of Congress and the War Department. Cheering him on was Titian Peale, his Saturday Club friend and also an experimental photographer. It was Peale who urged Meigs to hire Wood, the Capitol’s first official photograp
her. The shot of the inauguration was a clean-cut success (with few smudges and little blurring), perhaps the last that Meigs would have in the Buchanan years.

  * * *

  Meigs’s new boss, Secretary of War John B. Floyd, was a former governor of Virginia. He came into office with the apparent conviction that it was his right to provide patronage to his friends. He also thought that slave ownership was the natural right of Southerners, one that needed defending at all costs. To the degree that he was known around the country, it was for a proposed tax on products of Northern states that refused to return fugitive slaves to Virginia.

  Meigs had his first pangs of doubt about Floyd after a brief meeting with him on March 12. He thought Floyd lacked a quality he could not pin down. It dawned on him that his professional life might be in jeopardy. “I hope that I may find him as much disposed to put confidence in me as I did Davis,” he told himself after the meeting. “If not, my work will not be so pleasant as it has been heretofore.”

  Signs of trouble stacked up quickly. In April two men walked into Meigs’s office and said that one of them was going to be appointed master blacksmith of the Capitol extension project. They were not seeking his support, they said, merely telling him as a courtesy. Meigs set them straight, making clear that he would oppose them. He fired off a letter to Floyd asking him not to make any changes until Meigs could explain his management system.

  Then Meigs received an alarming letter from his friend Joseph Totten, still chief engineer of the army. Totten told him that Floyd had been asking about the huge sums of money flowing through Meigs’s operation. He thought it was likely that someone had been whispering in the war secretary’s ear about the possibilities of getting control of that money. Totten recommended that Meigs visit Floyd as soon as possible. A few days later, Meigs spoke with Floyd for about ten minutes during a walk to the White House. The meeting ended poorly when one of Floyd’s clerks offhandedly suggested that Meigs had been deceptive about an appointment on the aqueduct. Meigs was taken aback.No one in the department had ever questioned his integrity before.