The Quartermaster Read online

  Totten further stoked Meigs’s qualms with a story about a curious land deal in New York. It seems that a representative of the War Department had been dispatched to New York to buy 111 acres on the East River for a fort. The deal was set for about $125,000. At the last moment, Floyd claimed he needed to give it more attention. Other investors known to Floyd then got involved, and the war secretary privately approved paying $200,000. Totten was flabbergasted at what he thought was evidence of blatant corruption—Floyd overpaying for land apparently controlled by his friends. Meigs tried to remain hopeful, deciding that Floyd must have been deceived “in some way or other.”

  * * *

  Washington was showing signs of becoming the national center that it presumed to be. It wasn’t just the new gardens and monumental public works. It was the people. They streamed into town from everywhere. Officers in uniform, explorers from out west, the occasional Native American in traditional dress, and the social elite wearing fine suits and billowing dresses. The city’s culture had long been dominated by Southerners. Because of its proximity to the rural Southern states, it held attractions for Southerners that eluded those in the North used to the more cosmopolitan charms of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. The Buchanan administration was filled with Southerners, who jammed the parties and seemed at times to be celebrating their standing in the capital.

  Floyd took advantage of the power that flowed from the South’s dominance. Soon after taking control of the War Department, he began turning his authority on Meigs. In one move, he urged the captain to begin applying a political litmus test to his workforce. He wanted to purge followers of the Know-Nothing movement, who objected to Irish, Germans, and Catholic immigrants. More to the point, they also opposed slavery, which offended Floyd. Meigs and other sensible folk—including Abraham Lincoln, then a lawyer in private practice in Springfield, Illinois—thought the group’s members were nearly unhinged. “Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid,” Lincoln wrote to a friend. “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].”

  Floyd’s obsession with the Know-Nothings verged on paranoia, and it would haunt Meigs in the coming months. More pressing now was another of Floyd’s demands. He wanted Meigs to award every contract automatically to the lowest bidder. At first blush, this seemed reasonable. Competition helped keep prices low for taxpayers. But Meigs knew that something else was afoot. Experience taught him that certain companies engaged in a type of legal extortion. They lowballed their original bids and then, when the work was too far along to stop, demanded more money. These were the kind of outfits Floyd appeared to have in mind. Word among Meigs’s allies was that contractors from Pennsylvania and New York had been whispering in Buchanan’s ear about just such arrangements. The idea of it was almost unbearably distasteful to Meigs.

  By June 1857, evidence of a web of corruption became compelling when an old friend of Meigs’s father called on the doctor in Philadelphia, saying he represented business interests in New York and Pennsylvania that wanted to build the aqueduct. The man claimed Buchanan backed those interests. He said if Montgomery Meigs were to direct the work to the right people, everybody would benefit financially, including Meigs himself. They would also use their influence in Congress to “secure the prompt appropriation of money and finish the public work.”

  Dr. Meigs was outraged to be solicited in this way. He hid his anger and asked his friend to put the proposal in writing. He then sent the document along to his son, who shared it with Totten. They agreed the president needed to see it as well. Totten, a savvy insider, told Montgomery Meigs to take care. The original document had to be protected at all costs! Meigs, assuming Buchanan would take swift action, wrote a long letter to the president. He underscored the nature of the corruption and defended his tenure in Washington, saying he had never been tempted to cheat or steal. “I fear no investigation. Every action of my life during its four best years, devoted to the public service in an honorable employment, has been dictated by the desire to leave an unblemished fame as the only heritage my children can look forward to.”

  Buchanan brushed aside Meigs’s evidence, saying he had no doubts about Floyd’s integrity. Despair began crowding out Meigs’s native optimism. He wondered whether he had enough support left in Congress to stand up to this new array of adversaries.

  * * *

  Floyd’s games and machinations rarely ceased. He ordered Meigs to hand over detailed financial estimates for upcoming work, a task that took weeks to complete. The report showed that substantial sums were in play, $150,000 or more each month. Floyd insinuated to Meigs that he might not be trustworthy enough to handle so much money flowing through his coffers. Administration leaks suggesting that Meigs was about to be fired soon wafted through the capital, eventually becoming speculative newspaper stories.

  Floyd then added to the pressure, ordering Meigs to provide advance notice of any impending purchases worth $2,000 or more. In late August Floyd redoubled his effort to purge the workforce of political undesirables. He suggested the removal of a watchman at the Capitol who was known for his Know-Nothing connections. Since no official order had come, Meigs took no action. Floyd also asked for a copy of Meigs’s payroll. This time Floyd included an incentive for cooperation by promising to boost Meigs’s pay. The idea was repulsive to Meigs, who declared his boss to be a “a two-pennies politician.” He realized his job could end any day and reached out to Davis repeatedly for help, complaining about Floyd and expressing fears that Walter might be given control of the Capitol project. He resolved to “strive, in the cause of truth and justice, to endeavor to finish my great works.”

  A few bright moments helped dispel Meigs’s gloom. The end of the year found him hustling throughout the Capitol with his old enthusiasm as he prepared to open the new House chamber. His workers connected the boilers of his innovative heating system, installed the last of the lawmakers’ desks, and laid the carpeting. With only a few days to go, Meigs invited his Saturday Club friends Bache and Henry, along with Davis and Seward, to help him sound out the acoustics. The men spread out across the room and sampled the effects of their voices. Meigs quietly read a short statement he had written about the military’s role in public works projects. He asked Davis if he was satisfied with the sound. “Perfectly. It is a great success, a solution of the problem,” Davis responded. “We had no right to expect such perfect success.” Meigs turned to Bache and asked him whether the application of their scientific principles had paid off. “Wonderful, wonderful!” the scientist responded from his spot on the other side of the chamber.

  The next evening, Meigs went to the Capitol with Louisa to sign letters. In the waning winter light, she sang a few verses in the new room. Meigs was enchanted by the effect of his wife’s voice. On another night, Meigs went to discuss the space with House members who had gathered there. He found them trying out desks, like students in a new schoolroom. Meigs explained a few technical details and then turned on the lights, attracting still others to the dazzling room. Opinions about the new chamber varied. Some praised the circulation system. Others grumbled that the temperature was too high or low. An article in the Boston Post said that the acoustics could not have been worse. One unsigned piece published in the Philadelphia Inquirer predicted that the hall “is, I fear, to prove an entire failure. I have not met the first man yet who speaks of it favorably.”

  Still others lambasted the ornamentation as garish or complained it did not have “a republican simplicity” they preferred. The wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice later reached out to Meigs to pass on her opi
nion, saying right-minded people in Washington considered the decoration “in very bad taste, that it was vulgar, tawdry, gaudy.” Meigs thanked her and said he did not take her criticism to heart. After all, he said, the decoration was the result of much study. A Vermont senator thought that the room was “overburdened and disguised and thrown out of sight by the great variety of colors put in,” and he publicly urged that Davis and Meigs include “a little more chastity” in the Senate chamber.

  The Washington Evening Star provided an assessment that Meigs welcomed. It said the “new Hall is, by long odds, much the finest deliberative chamber in the United States in all its conveniences and appointments, and is destined very shortly to become universally popular with the House and country.” The unnamed writer noted that the new space “affords no opportunities whatever for lobbying—an achievement in its construction of incalculable advantage to the future of the National Treasury.”

  CHAPTER 11

  An Inscription for All Time

  The acclaim Meigs received never seemed to sate his need for approval. Six years into his stint in the nation’s capital, he wanted more than ever to be remembered. He simply had to leave his mark. Early in February 1858, Meigs had his legacy in mind as he walked through the aqueduct conduits. He focused on the ill-lit walls. Half of the tunnel was lined with masonry, the other half prepped for its new skin of bricks. He was proud of the work, and for good reason. This stretch had come within an inch of engineering projections at either end. And it was looking as though he might push water through the system, at least for the purposes of testing, by the end of the year as planned.

  Meigs relished these weekly inspections. They got him away from Capitol Hill, where the harassment was becoming unbearable. He savored the smells and light along the Potomac. The tours also gave him ever-needed exercise. Meigs carried a pedometer to track how far he walked, and once recorded an outing of more than ten miles through underground conduits. The inspections also soothed his sense of obligation. Though he delegated work to talented subordinates, he felt compelled to stay on top of the details himself. It was as though Frontinus, the Roman engineer, was ever present on Meigs’s shoulder and whispering, “Do it the right way!” His walk through the conduit that February day took him into a section of tunnel that was nearly finished, with wet stucco still exposed. Standing in the half-light, Meigs indulged in a timeless impulse, scratching his name into the soft surface: “M. C. Meigs, Capt. of Engrs., Chief Sup. of the Washington Aqueduct, 16th Feb. 1858.”

  For another man, the graffito might have been a lark. Not for Meigs. As he noted in his journals, he knew that similar markings had been found after centuries in the buried homes of Pompeii, as well as inside the Egyptian pyramids. He hoped his inscription would also endure and one day call attention to him. What lay behind such exalted thinking? The history of engineering is filled with the gestures of men anxious to be remembered for their work. Consider Frontinus and his lead pipes.

  Whatever the reason behind it, the ad hoc memorial was only one of many steps Meigs took that year in the hope that his role in building up Washington was not forgotten. He had come to think of himself as a kind of engineer-artist, with his “poems written in marble, granite, brick and clay, lasting materials.” In March he commissioned two dozen shiny copper plates etched with these words:

  WASHINGTON AQUEDUCT

  A.D. 1858

  CAPT. M. C. MEIGS

  CHIEF ENGINEER

  One morning in late winter, intent on embedding the plates as soon as he could, Meigs guided his carriage toward the bridge at Cabin John, the span that would carry the aqueduct conduit across a creek that flowed down the rugged valley and into the Potomac. Meigs loved this bridge, which was several miles northwest of the city. Originally, he’d designed it with multiple arches. But he realized that he could construct something unique without adding to the cost of the project. Without seeking approval from Davis or Congress, he had changed the plans to include a single masonry arch, the longest in the world. Meigs delegated much of the design work to Alfred Rives, a brilliant young engineer from a distinguished Virginia family, who had trained in France. Meigs admired the young man and learned much about modern engineering techniques from him.

  When the captain arrived on this morning, though, he became annoyed with Rives because the cornerstone had not been laid as planned. Meigs became surly when he noticed that the masonry work also lagged behind the progress of the arch. He ordered the foreman to gather the men and place the first block. Just before it was set permanently, Meigs put into place one of the small copper plates inscribed with his name. He applied mortar to the stone in a sort of ritual before declaring the beautiful structure “the greatest arch in the world.” Then he traveled farther upriver to the aqueduct’s rubble dam, where he learned with satisfaction that another cornerstone had been laid, also on top of one of the copper plates. He decided also to have a stone block, inscribed with his name and the date, to be placed just beneath the surface of the water. There’s no telling how many memorials Meigs left behind, but there’s no question that he obsessed over the matter. Once, when reading about the world’s great architecture, Meigs considered the Roman bridge of Alcantara in Spain. In his journal he wrote that the markings on the bridge showed the name of the builder and the date it had been installed 1,755 years before. Meigs hoped his name would live at least that long in the nation’s memory. He even wrote a note to himself about it: “Will my copper plate or the inscriptions I am putting upon the bridges and other structures of the aqueduct be legible after the lapse of 1800 years—that is, in the year 3658?”

  To commemorate his work on the Post Office, he had created a time capsule out of a copper box. In it he put a list of government leaders, a report about work on the aqueduct, and transcripts of congressional debates about Meigs’s management of the public works projects. He sealed the box and placed it in a hole under a four-ton pillar. He was sure the contents would prove him worthy. “If these are opened 10,000 years hence and read, they will give the readers some idea of the manner in which those who built this great edifice have been attacked and interfered with by interested persons,” he wrote in his journal. “But this has been the fate of all builders of great works: Michelangelo at St. Peter’s, [Sir Christopher] Wren at St. Paul’s, and I. Doubt not that Phidias and Ictinus at the Parthenon were served just in the same way. Their works stand, and so will mine.”

  * * *

  New disputes in Kansas threatened to tear apart the nation. At issue was a constitutional convention in Lecompton to decide whether a future state would allow slavery or remain free. The idea of a convention was sound. The reality was a sham. Slave-rights advocates used rigged elections to pack the meeting with sympathizers. Of the sixty delegates, forty-eight were from slave states. Many could barely read. Bellicose and drunk much of the time, the group blundered its way through meetings as federal troops stood by to keep order.

  Buchanan folded under pressure from Southerners and endorsed Lecompton, another misstep of his mediocre administration. Leaders in his own party rebelled, Stephen Douglas among them, while the fledgling Republican Party, born just a few years earlier out of the old Whig party, gained confidence nationally. Kansas voters overwhelmingly rejected the constitution the following year.

  In the midst of this tumult, Floyd ramped up his campaign against Meigs. The secretary of war directed the captain to use a particular contractor to speed along contracts for supplies, hardware, lumber, and groceries. What’s more, Floyd lashed out in petty ways. In one instance, Meigs was forced to wait an entire day at the War Department for a meeting with Floyd—only to be told at the end that Floyd had gone home. Aware of the game, Meigs spent the day in a borrowed room, working on his correspondence.

  To make matters worse, Floyd had begun to show sympathy for a group of American artists who were complaining about Meigs’s use of foreign painters to decorate the Capitol. Among those signing a petition were Rembrandt Peale, Willson Pea
le’s son; Albert Bierstadt; and George Inness. In June 1858 the artists convinced Congress to charter an arts commission to investigate. Meigs was disgusted by Floyd and his “dishonest, unfaithful ways.” He began “to wish that I was relieved from all this labor and responsibility.”

  Meigs had an unexpected chance to distinguish himself on a steamy day in August 1858. He was riding up the C&O Canal on the deck of a small, fast steamboat when he heard a loud splash and looked over the side. A woman had fallen and was sinking under the surface of the water, looking like a “bundle of old clothes thrown overboard.” Almost without thought, he jumped in, waded over to shore, and ran down the canal path, sloshing boots and all. He dove back into the water and, with another man, pulled the woman to safety. It was a noteworthy effort in part because she was “mulatto,” as Meigs put it in his journal. Many people would not have thought of risking themselves to save her. Meigs seems to have regarded his effort a simple matter of obligation to another human being. “I was much exhausted,” he wrote in his journal. “I had no idea it was so difficult a matter to manage a woman in the water.”

  As so often happened, just as he was losing hope in his future, the work steadied him and brightened his mood. The keystone had been installed in the Cabin John Bridge, and Rives personally delivered photographs of the arch. It looked like art, a circular segment 220 feet long and just over 57 feet above the creek, supported by a matrix of timbers. Meigs thought of it as his masterpiece. It was far enough along to be considered complete, and whatever humiliation Floyd delivered now could not diminish the achievement.