The Quartermaster Read online

  For his part, Meigs wanted vindication. He also decided it was his duty to prevent abuses by the administration. Though work on the Capitol was at a standstill because of a lack of funding, he urged his allies in the Senate to take a closer look at Floyd and his relationships with contractors. It was plain from recent newspaper accounts alone that there was plenty of fodder for an inquiry, and Meigs’s suggestion helped spur on lawmakers. The Senate demanded records from the War Department, and the House formed an investigative committee to examine corruption even more broadly in the administration. Leading the committee was Representative “Honest John” Covode, a big, tough coal company owner from Pennsylvania. Covode pressed his inquiry relentlessly throughout the spring of 1860. He followed a long paper trail and gathered testimony from witnesses, filling hundreds of pages.The findings implicated the Buchanan administration with evidence showing that many of the sordid rumors about corruption were true. The Lecompton, Kansas, constitutional convention had been manipulated through bribes. Buchanan had misused patronage for political gain. The committee also found evidence that government officials had been misusing printing contracts to generate illicit cash.

  Floyd stood out among the damned. Though it remained unclear whether he benefited directly, evidence showed that he had abused his public post with impunity, helping political and personal friends in schemes that reeked of illegality. Although Floyd was disgraced, he was not removed. It was only a matter of time before he would seek revenge on the uppity captain who had made so much trouble for him and his friends.

  CHAPTER 13

  “Eternal Blot”

  In January 1860 the widening rift between North and South became a family matter for Meigs. The occasion was a visit from his younger brother Henry, who had married a Southern woman and settled in Columbus, Georgia. Henry, owner of a prosperous mill, had taken on the outlook of a Southern gentleman. It was the second time in two years that Henry had gone to Washington. On the earlier visit, Meigs had proudly guided him on a tour of the Capitol’s workshops, ventilation system, and Brumidi’s decorated corridors. This time they spent hours talking about the growing sectional tensions. The brothers, born five years apart, realized they were at odds over slavery and states’ rights.

  Meigs had a hard time accepting that his younger brother tolerated slavery and considered secession a legitimate possibility. The Meigses generally considered slavery no less than an “eternal blot” that “defiles all.” He decided that Henry had sold out, trading his family’s veneration for the country for “the almighty dollars which he has invested in Columbus Mills.” His brother’s overt turn was the latest in a chain of events that was altering Meigs’s outlook. First came Floyd’s behavior. Then John Brown and the crazy attack at Harpers Ferry. Now this, his own kin edging close to treason. Meigs was being pushed to confront hard questions. Where did he stand? What was he going to do about it?

  Meigs had some rare personal victories. One of them had to do with his self-styled role as art patron. His push to make the Capitol a national showcase of art and creativity had been unprecedented and lavish. In a backlash, the American artists demanded that Congress require Meigs to use American-born artists. Meigs remained defiant. He believed that the work of most American artists was not worthy of a county courthouse, never mind the nation’s Capitol. He sought the best artists he could find, regardless of their origins. Some House lawmakers jumped on the dispute, expressing concern about the reliance on foreign artists. They formed an arts commission to investigate, a panel of artists that had a decidedly nationalistic bent.

  In February 1860, the commission finally delivered its report, describing the decoration as “tawdry and exuberant ornament” executed by “an effete and decayed race which in no way represents us.” It said that artists’ “patriotic hearts should perform the work.” The victory for Meigs? Nobody really cared about the findings. Soon after the report was issued, the commission was dissolved. The money it had called for from Congress was never appropriated. And Brumidi continued carrying out designs for murals that Meigs had approved.

  Meigs took comfort from another pet project, aqueduct Bridge No. 6 at Rock Creek. Meigs originally intended to carry the water through pipes laid under the creek, which was deep enough for boat navigation. But then he reasoned that he could use the forty-eight-inch water mains to support a bridge, and he envisioned an innovative structure that melded form and function. Now his idea was becoming a reality with a design that included cast-iron cross braces and, at road level, two long iron girders. On the girders sat crossbeams made of timber. The timbers in turn supported a road for carriages, rails for trains, and a footpath. There was no other bridge quite like it in the country. It represented another advance in the education of Montgomery Meigs.

  * * *

  The last battle between Meigs and Floyd began in June. Perhaps inevitably, it had to do with money. Elevating the dispute this time were constitutional questions. Despite being weakened by the Covode committee findings, Floyd remained in his post, pushing his advice on the pliable, overwhelmed president. The captain would not be deterred. Sensing that Floyd was about to fire him, Meigs went outside the chain of command and again reached out to friends in Congress. Davis and other lawmakers—worried that Floyd would gain unfettered access to the project’s funding—quickly intervened. They reasoned that as long as Meigs remained, Congress would at least have an honest broker.

  The lawmakers proposed allocating $500,000 for the water system and then pushed it through the regular committee paths in the House and Senate. Then they took an added step, using a new bit of legerdemain that remains a congressional tactic to this day. To ensure that Meigs controlled the project, Senator Robert Toombs of the Finance Committee proposed language that the money be spent by “the Chief Engineer of the Washington Aqueduct who shall be as heretofore an officer of the corps of Engineers not below the rank of Captain and having experience in the design & construction of Bridges & aqueducts.”

  The move pleased Meigs. It also raised constitutional questions. Could Congress dictate how the president spent the money, and, in effect, tell the commander in chief how to manage the military? Buchanan sidestepped a direct fight, dismissing the provision as a mere recommendation. “I deemed it impossible that Congress could have intended to interfere with the clear right of the president to command the army,” he said. The president added an oblique dig at Meigs, saying that he could not go along with Congress because it might encourage military men to seek help from lawmakers. “Officers might then be found, instead of performing their appropriate duties, besieging the halls of Congress for the purpose of obtaining special favors and choice places by legislative enactment.”

  Meigs paid the price for his temerity. Not long after the $500,000 was appropriated, Floyd ordered him to hand over control of the waterworks to another officer. Floyd named Meigs the financial director, a transparent effort to maintain a fiction that he was complying with Congress’s wishes. Davis, consulting privately with Meigs, counseled restraint. He said Meigs should take only those steps that would “preserve your reputation and manifest your faith to public service.” Meigs would not relent. He fired off a long letter to the president, claiming that Floyd’s arrangement violated the law. He even lectured the president about the army’s customs and urged him to honor the wishes of Congress. Buchanan wrote back, saying Meigs was close to insubordination. US Attorney General Jeremiah S. Black agreed. “I do not permit myself to doubt that Captain Meigs will obey his orders without being put under the ‘strong pressure’ of anything but his own sense of duty not as a ‘reluctant and unwilling instrument’ but with the cheerfulness and alacrity which becomes an officer of his grade and character,” Black wrote.

  When Meigs wrote the president again, Buchanan returned the note unopened. After many years, Meigs had lost his access to the White House. Still, he continued to resist. Acting in his capacity as financial director, Meigs declined to pay an inspector who he believed was not q
ualified. Meigs said the payment was not consistent with the mandate he had received from Congress. He told Buchanan that Floyd’s orders regarding the aqueduct were no longer binding on him. That was it. When Meigs returned from a visit to the aqueduct on September 20, he found new orders waiting for him at home. Floyd relieved him of duty and ordered him to assume command of construction at Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, seventy nautical miles west of Key West, Florida. The New York Times wrote that “his unpardonable offence was his persistent efforts to guard the Treasury against the enterprises of Mr. Floyd’s pet contractors.”

  The long fight was over. Meigs had been banished. By all appearances, his career as the capital city’s builder had come to an end.

  CHAPTER 14

  Tall and Awkward Candidate

  As Meigs prepared for his exile, the run for the White House entered its final stage. It appeared nearly certain in the North that Abraham Lincoln would win, an outcome that to many Southerners presented an existential challenge. Though Meigs could not know it, the election result would open the way for the greatest opportunity of his life.

  It had been a colorful campaign with torchlight parades, barbecues, and incendiary rhetoric. The focus shifted inexorably to Lincoln. He had defined the terms of the contest during a brilliant speech before he was formally announced as a candidate. The pivotal event was staged in February 1860 at New York’s Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Lincoln had been invited to appear as a result of his eloquence during debates in Illinois, when he’d campaigned unsuccessfully for the Senate against Stephen Douglas two years earlier. People packed into the school’s great hall, waiting to see what this little known westerner had to say. Savvy New Yorkers were initially unimpressed as Lincoln took center stage. They saw a “tall,” “angular,” “awkward,” and “ungainly man.” One man in the audience recalled being embarrassed on Lincoln’s behalf. That impression changed the moment he began to speak, as Lincoln’s “face lighted up with an inward fire.”

  The speech focused on the question of the federal government’s authority to limit slavery in the territories. Lincoln had spent months researching the matter. He pounded home his points with the chop-chop-chop of logic rather than with rhetorical flourishes. He argued that Douglas, the most prominent Democratic candidate, and the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, had been inconsistent and incorrect in their stances. Lincoln argued that the framers of the Constitution had no intention of limiting the federal government’s role. He walked a narrow path through his logic. He conceded that slavery was a fact of American life, but he warned against passivity in the face of disunion. The partisan crowd cheered. Southerners who read the widely reported speech took it as confirmation of their worst fears about so-called Black Republicans—an epithet used to underscore their anger about the party’s anti-slave agenda.

  “Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government nor of dungeons to ourselves,” Lincoln concluded. “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”

  Lincoln’s chief opponent for the Republican nomination was New York Senator William Seward. Though Seward thought the race was his to lose, his New York roots made him suspect to westerners, while a long history of opposition against slavery made him unacceptable to moderates. He had long ago lost any chance of Southern votes when he gave his “higher law” speech—arguing that certain moral laws transcended the Constitution—during the debate about the Compromise of 1850. At the Republican convention in May 1860, Seward initially led the voting, but support waned over fears that he could not take two key states, Indiana and Pennsylvania.

  Lincoln advisors improved their candidate’s chances by quietly promising that he would select Cabinet members from those two states. Lincoln won on the third ballot with a platform that opposed slavery in the territories, endorsed free labor, and rejected the tactics of John Brown.

  The Democratic Party, meanwhile, was disintegrating. The party had met for its convention in Charleston, South Carolina, in April. Northern and Southern delegates engaged in a furious battle over a radical platform proposal that called for a federal slave code that would guarantee the expansion of slavery. Douglas supporters managed to block that plan, spurring Southern delegates to walk out. Douglas could not capture the two-thirds majority to secure the nomination. The party halted proceedings and opted to reconvene in June in Baltimore. In that session, Douglas edged out John C. Breckinridge for the nomination after Southerners again walked out and formed their own party. In a hastily organized meeting across town, the new organization, the Southern Democratic Party, named Breckinridge as its nominee. Yet another party formed as well. The new Constitutional Union Party was comprised of former Whigs and American Party members who felt the Republicans were too radical. They nominated John Bell, a former congressman from Tennessee, and Edward Everett, the diplomat, politician, and art connoisseur from Massachusetts.

  Douglas was the only candidate who appeared as a stump speaker during the race. Lincoln and the others followed the accepted practice of laying low, meeting with delegates, and allowing proxies to do their work. Bell’s campaign handed out bells to supporters. Lincoln’s people, including thousands of young men, held stirring torchlight parades for the “Woodchopper of the West.” Though Lincoln could not count on any electoral votes in the South, he dominated polls in the North.

  * * *

  Just before the election, on October 20, 1860, Meigs closed out his official accounts, paying the Treasury $93.56 to balance the books. Then he left his family and headed to Knoxville, Tennessee, his first stop south on the way to his new assignment. Louisa wanted to go along. Meigs declined, saying he thought Louisa’s presence in the capital would serve as a reminder that he was in exile for his principles. He assumed Floyd and his friends would be swept out of Washington by the election and guessed he would be back in town before spring. He left Washington with a clear conscience. He didn’t care that he had cemented his reputation among some Washingtonians as self-righteous. He found it amusing that otherwise sensible people thought he should have bent to the corruption to protect himself from Floyd. Meigs sent a note to the Army Corps of Engineers office. It was a final dart at the secretary of war, spelling out why he believed that the orders sending him south were illegal. “I understand that the work of the Aqueduct and the expenditures thereon are going on in defiance of the law of Congress,” he wrote.

  For all the tumult in his life, Meigs seems to have looked forward to his trip to the Dry Tortugas as something of an adventure. He planned on sailing, studying, fishing, and hunting. He hoped to study the “rare & beautiful forms of life with which God had bedecked those tropic shores.” He justified these diversions as ways to increase “my store of knowledge & make myself able to be of use to a people to whom Washington & Adams, Jefferson & Clay thought worthy of their highest efforts, their most unselfish devotion.”

  From Knoxville, Meigs went to Columbus, Georgia, and stayed with his brother. In the pocket diary he carried along, he noted only that he found Henry’s family well. But it was a tense visit for Meigs, who saw many Southerners preparing openly for secession, behavior he considered treasonous. Henry’s view of the nation’s circumstances was nearly the opposite of his own. Like his white neighbors, Henry felt passionately that Southerners were being asked to bow “to the idea of a forced submission to the rule of the outrageous majority.” Nothing would be resolved, Henry believed, “until the fields of this country are reddened with the blood of its people.” Meigs passed through Montgomery, Alabama, and then caught a steamer in Pensacola, Florida, touching at Apalachicola, St. Mark’s, Cedar Key, Tampa, and Key West before reaching Fort Jefferson on November 8. He took stock of the mood at every stop, as though he were a spy. He was chilled by what he was learning.

  * * *

  Election Day was a
nticlimactic, at least for many Northerners. Even the pugnacious Douglas had reconciled himself to a Lincoln victory. He had begun encouraging voters to actively support the president-elect against those who favored disunion. Lincoln swept the field with 180 electoral votes. He won every Northern state except New Jersey. Breckinridge came in second, with 72 votes. Douglas ran a distant fourth, behind Bell, with 12 votes. “We cannot tell yet what historical lessons the event of November 6, 1860, will teach,” one New Yorker wrote in his journal, “but the lesson cannot fail to be weighty.”

  Meigs, a Democrat like his parents, would not know the outcome of the election until more than a week after the fact. His barren new home had no telegraph service, and the mail steamer arrived with newspapers only twice a month. He knew the consequences were likely grave. His trip had finally clarified for him what others had seen long before: the South would do almost anything to preserve slavery, the cornerstone of its culture and commerce. On November 10 Meigs wrote to General Winfield Scott, the aging commander of the army. The letter was an extraordinary deviation from the army’s chain of command, but Meigs felt he had no choice because he no longer knew which of his superiors he could trust. The urgency of the situation demanded unusual action.

  “Dear Sir: As the only Engineer present on duty upon the Fortifications in this vicinity, I feel compelled to address you on a subject of importance to the public service and yet one upon which I do not feel at liberty to write a formal official letter,” Meigs wrote. “Pardon the liberty or the irregularity and make such use of the views which I present as your own opinion of their value and importance may require.”