Existing comment:
Montgomery Cunningham Meigs,
Brigadier General Brevet Major General U.S. Army
Quartermaster General
1861-1882.
Soldier, engineer, architect, scientist, patriot.
Born 1816 - Died 1892.
Montgomery C. Meigs
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Montgomery Cunningham Meigs (May 3, 1816 – January 2, 1892) was a career U.S. Army officer, civil engineer, construction engineer for a number of facilities in Washington, D.C., and Quartermaster General of the U.S. Army during and after the American Civil War. His management of the immense logistical requirements of the war was a significant contribution to the Union victory.
Early life and engineering projects:
Meigs was born in Augusta, Georgia. He was a great-grandson of Continental Army Colonel Return J. Meigs, Sr. While a boy, he moved with his family to Pennsylvania, and he initially attended the University of Pennsylvania, but was appointed to the U.S. Military Academy and graduated in 1836. He received a commission as a second lieutenant in the 1st U.S. Artillery, but most of his army service was with the Corps of Engineers, in which he worked on important engineering projects.
In some of his early assignments, Meigs assisted in the construction of Fort Mifflin on the Delaware River and Fort Wayne on the Detroit River. He also worked with then Lt. Robert E. Lee to make navigational improvements on the Mississippi River.
His favorite engineering project before the war was the Washington Aqueduct, which he supervised from 1852 to 1860. It involved the design of the monumental bridge across Cabin John Branch, which for fifty years remained unsurpassed as the longest masonry arch in the world. From 1853 to 1859, he also supervised the building of the wings and dome of the United States Capitol and, from 1855 to 1859, the extension of the General Post Office Building.
In the fall of 1860, as a result of a disagreement over procurement contracts, Meigs "incurred the ill will" of the Secretary of War, John B. Floyd, and was "banished to Tortugas in the Gulf of Mexico to construct fortifications at that place and at Key West." Upon the resignation of Floyd a few months later, Meigs was recalled to his work on the aqueduct at Washington.
Civil War:
Just before the outbreak of the Civil War, Meigs and Lieutenant Colonel Erasmus D. Keyes were quietly charged by President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William H. Seward with drawing up a plan for the relief of Fort Pickens, Florida, by means of a secret expedition. In April 1861, together with Lieutenant David D. Porter of the Navy, they carried out the expedition, embarking under orders from the President without the knowledge of either the Secretary of the Navy or the Secretary of War.
On May 14, 1861, Meigs was appointed colonel, 11th U.S. Infantry, and on the following day, promoted to brigadier general and Quartermaster General of the Army. He established a reputation for being efficient, hard-driving, and scrupulously honest. He molded a large and somewhat diffuse department into a great tool of war. He was one of the first to fully appreciate the importance of logistical preparations in modern military planning, and under his leadership, supplies moved forward and troops were transported over long distances with ever greater efficiency.
Of his work in the quartermaster's office, James G. Blaine remarked, "Montgomery C. Meigs, one of the ablest graduates of the Military Academy, was kept from the command of troops by the inestimably important services he performed as Quartermaster General. Perhaps in the military history of the world there never was so large an amount of money disbursed upon the order of a single man ... The aggregate sum could not have been less during the war than fifteen hundred million dollars, accurately vouched and accounted for to the last cent." Secretary of State William H. Seward's estimate was "that without the services of this eminent soldier the national cause must have been lost or deeply imperiled."
Meigs's services during the Civil War included command of Ulysses S. Grant's base of supplies at Fredericksburg and Belle Plain, Virginia (1864), command of a division of War Department employees in the defenses of Washington at the time of Jubal A. Early's raid (July 11 to July 14, 1864), personally supervising the refitting and supplying of William T. Sherman's army at Savannah (January 5 to January 29, 1865), and at Goldsboro and Raleigh, North Carolina, reopening Sherman's lines of supply (March – April 1865). He was brevetted to major general on July 5, 1864.
A staunch Unionist despite his southern roots, Meigs detested the Confederacy. He recommended that the historic Custis Mansion in Arlington, Virginia, owned by Mary Anna Custis Lee, the wife of Robert E. Lee, be used as a military burial ground. Based on this recommendation, Arlington National Cemetery was created in 1864. In October of that same year, his son, First Lieutenant John Rodgers Meigs, was killed at Swift Run Gap in Virginia and is buried at Arlington Cemetery. Some saw his recommendation to use the Mansion as a burial ground for Union troops as an act of revenge on old colleague Lee, who he regarded as a traitor.
Postbellum career:
In 1865, Meigs was in the honor guard at Abraham Lincoln's funeral.
As Quartermaster General after the Civil War, Meigs supervised plans for the new War Department building (1866–67), the National Museum (1876), the extension of the Washington Aqueduct (1876), and for a hall of records (1878). In 1866–68, to recuperate from the strain of his war service, he visited Europe, and from 1875 to 1876 made another visit to study the organization of European armies. After his retirement on February 6, 1882, he became architect of the Pension Office Building, now home to the National Building Museum. He was a regent of the Smithsonian Institution, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and one of the earliest members of the National Academy of Sciences.
Meigs died in Washington after a short illness and his body was interred with high military honors in Arlington National Cemetery. The General Orders (January 4, 1892) issued at the time of his death declared that "the Army has rarely possessed an officer ... who was entrusted by the government with a great variety of weighty responsibilities, or who proved himself more worthy of confidence."
Pension Building (1882–87):
Following the end of the Civil War, the United States Congress passed legislation that greatly extended the scope of pension coverage for both veterans and for their survivors and dependents, notably their widows and orphans. This ballooned the number of staff that was needed to implement and administer the new benefits system to over 1,500 and quickly required a new building to house them all. Meigs was chosen to design and construct the new building, now the National Building Museum. He broke away from the established Greco-Roman models that had been the basis of government buildings in Washington, D.C., up until then, and was to continue following the completion of the Pension Building. Meigs based his design on Italian Renaissance precedents, notably Rome's Palazzo Farnese and Plazzo della Cancelleria.
Included in his design was a 1,200-foot long sculptured frieze executed by Caspar Buberl. Since creating a work of sculpture of that size was well out of Meigs's budget, he had Buberl create 28 different scenes (totaling 69 feet in length), which were then mixed and slightly modified to create the continuous 1,200-foot long parade that includes over 1,300 figures. Because of the way that the 28 sections are modified and mixed up, it is only by somewhat careful examination that the frieze reveals its self to be the same figures repeated over and over. The sculpture includes infantry, navy, artillery, cavalry, and medical components as well as a good deal of the supply and quartermaster functions, since that was where Meigs served during the Civil War.
Meigs's correspondence with Buberl reveals that Meigs insisted that one teamster, "must be a negro, a plantation slave, freed by war," be included in the Quartermaster panel. This figure was ultimately to assume a position in the center, over the west entrance to the building.
When Philip Sheridan was asked to comment on the building, his reply echoed the sentiment of much of the Washington establishment of the day, that the only thing that he could find wrong with the building was that it was fireproof. (A similar quote is also attributed to William T. Sherman, so the story might well be apocryphal.)
The completed building, sometimes referred to as "Meigs's Old Red Barn", was created by using more than 1,500,000 bricks, which, according to the wits of the day, were all counted by the parsimonious Meigs. |