Montgomery C. Meigs

From Freepedia

Image:Montgomery C. Meigs.jpg 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.

Meigs was born in Augusta, Georgia. 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.

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.

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 War 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 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 11–14, 1864), personally supervising the refitting and supplying of William T. Sherman's army at Savannah (January 5–29, 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.

Meigs recommended that the historic Custis Mansion in Arlington, Virginia, owned by Mary 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.

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 in 1875–76 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."

General Meigs was inducted into the Quartermaster Hall of Fame in its charter year of 1986.

References

• Online biography
• Eicher, John H., & Eicher, David J.: Civil War High Commands, Stanford University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-8047-3641-3.

External links

• Arlington Cemetery description of Montgomery Meigs
• Arlington Cemetery description of John Rodgers Meigs
• Quartermaster Hall of Fame