The Quartermaster

The Quartermaster
Author: Robert O'Harrow
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2016-10-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1451671946

“The lively story of the Civil War’s most unlikely—and most uncelebrated—genius” (The Wall Street Journal)—General Montgomery C. Meigs, who built the Union Army and was judged by Abraham Lincoln, William Seward, and Edwin Stanton to be the indispensable architect of the Union victory. Born to a well-to-do, connected family in 1816, Montgomery C. Meigs graduated from West Point as an engineer. He helped build America’s forts and served under Lt. Robert E. Lee to make navigation improvements on the Mississippi River. As a young man, he designed the Washington aqueducts in a city where people were dying from contaminated water. He built the spectacular wings and the massive dome of the brand new US Capitol. Introduced to President Lincoln by Secretary of State William Seward, Meigs became Lincoln’s Quartermaster, in charge of supplies. It was during the Civil War that Meigs became a national hero. He commanded Ulysses S. Grant’s base of supplies that made Union victories, including Gettysburg, possible. He sustained Sherman’s army in Georgia, and the March to the Sea. After the war, Meigs built Arlington Cemetery (on land that had been Robert E. Lee’s home). Civil War historian James McPherson calls Meigs “the unsung hero of northern victory,” and Robert O’Harrow Jr.’s biography of the victorious general who was never on the battlefield tells the full dramatic story of this fierce, strong, honest, loyal, forward-thinking figure. “An excellent biography…O’Harrow’s thorough, masterfully crafted, and impeccable researched biography is destined to become the authoritative volume on Meigs” (The Civil War Monitor).

Second Only to Grant

Second Only to Grant
Author: David W. Miller
Publisher: White Mane Publishing Company
Total Pages: 578
Release: 2000
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

"As quartermaster general, Montgomery C. Meigs fought on all fronts of the Civil War. His was the planning and direction that kept both eastern and western theater Union generals well supplied with all the clothing, equipment and accouterments, tents, and horses they needed. His responsibilities also included wagon, rail, and water transportation. Giving everyone a chance to participate in the enormous job of supplying the Union armies, he took full advantage of, and boosted the industrialization of the United States. His reorganizations improved military transportation and the structure of his quartermaster department staff." "Meigs used his skills continually. During the Gettysburg campaign, as Meade's Army of the Potomac moved rapidly north. Meigs kept Meade's supply line shifting along with his army. In the West, Meigs personally was involved with the "cracker line" that kept Chattanooga's defenders supplied. Meigs' supply bases at Fredericksburg and Belle Plain kept Grant moving against Lee. His resupply of Sherman at Savannah in 1865 was triumph of logistics that put the Yankee army back in the field, after a 250-mile march, in new uniforms supported by top quality equipment." "But Meigs accomplished even more. An architect, engineer, regent of the Smithsonian Institution, and member of the National Academy of Science, his contributions to the work of government at Washington kept him involved with the new dome and wings of the United States Capitol, the Pension Building, and other structures still in use today."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Montgomery C. Meigs and the Building of the Nation's Capital

Montgomery C. Meigs and the Building of the Nation's Capital
Author: United States Capitol Historical Society
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2001
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

At the age of thirty-six, in 1852, Lt. Montgomery Cunningham Meigs of the Army Corps of Engineers reported to Washington, D.C., for duty as a special assistant to the chief army engineer, Gen. Joseph G. Totten. It was a fateful assignment, both for the nation's capital and for the bright, ambitious, and politically connected West Point graduate. Meigs's forty-year tenure in the nation's capital was by any account spectacularly successful. He surveyed, designed, and built the Washington water supply system, oversaw the extension of the U.S. Capitol and the erection of its massive iron dome, and designed and supervised construction of the Pension Building, now the home of the National Building Museum. The skills he exhibited in supervising engineering projects were carefully noted by political leaders, including president-elect Abraham Lincoln, who named Meigs quartermaster general of the Union Army, the most important position he held during his long and active military career. Meigs believed Washington, D.C., should be the reincarnation of Rome, the ancient capital of the Roman Empire. He endeavored to memorialize the story of the American nation in all the structures he built, expressing these ideas in murals, sculpture, and monumental design. Historians have long known Meigs for the organizational genius with which he fulfilled his duty as quartermaster general during the Civil War and for his unwavering loyalty to Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. This volume establishes his claim as one of the major nineteenth-century contributors to the built environment of the nation's capital.

Mrs. Lee's Rose Garden

Mrs. Lee's Rose Garden
Author: Carlo DeVito
Publisher: Cider Mill Press
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2015-04-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1604335467

The poignant, personal, and unbelievably true story of Mrs. Robert E. Lee and General Montgomery Meigs, and the founding of the Arlington National Cemetery, in the midst of America's greatest struggle--the Civil War. Mrs. Lee's Rose Garden is the intensely personal story of Arlington National Cemetery's earliest history as seen through the lives of three people during the outbreak of the Civil War: Mary Ann Randolph Custis Lee, Robert E. Lee, and Montgomery C. Meigs. With all the majesty and pathos of a Greek tragedy, this story unfolds as the war's inevitable spiral of betrayal, tragedy, loss, and death begins, ultimately transforming the nation's most famous country estate into its most sacred ground. In the years before the war, the Arlington estate sat like an American Acropolis towering above Washington. Mary Custis Lee was known as the Rose of Arlington, a brash, young, willful, and charming young woman, indulged by her famous father, George Washington Parke Custis, the grandson of George Washington. Artistic, well read, and highly intelligent, she was an avid gardener who spent as much time as possible tending the numerous flowerbeds of the Arlington Mansion, along with her mother and her three daughters. Handsome and dashing, Robert E. Lee was easily the most promising soldier of his generation. But long before he was a field commander he was also a great success in the Army Corps of Engineers, having worked on major projects around the U.S. His friend, Montgomery C. Meigs, who had served under Robert, was a scion of Philadelphia society, and rose to become the engineer responsible for helping to complete the capital, and one of the most accomplished builders of his generation. When the time for war arose, Lee refused the opportunity to head the Union Army. He could not draw his sword against his own state, his own people, and instead accepted a commission in the Confederate Army, pitting himself against many of his old comrades. Thus began a series of events that would ultimately pit these three against each other. Mrs. Lee's Rose Garden is an intimate retelling of Arlington National Cemetery's tragic beginnings, and sheds new light on this profound chapter in American history.

Slide Rules and Submarines

Slide Rules and Submarines
Author: Montgomery C. Meigs
Publisher: The Minerva Group, Inc.
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2002-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780898759051

The classic problem of when to depend on lessons learned from previous conflicts and when to employ new tactics and technology always confronts military leaders. At the beginning of World War II, for example, Allied naval strategists were prepared to do battle using traditional tactics against surface vessels, but - this study contends - not against submarines; because the strategists failed to appreciate either the damage done by submarines in World War I or the tactics that had worked successfully against them. Consequently, from the beginning of World War II to mid-1943, German U-boats were able to mount a devastating campaign against Allied shipping. In Slide Rules and Submarines, Montgomery Meigs describes how the allies learned to counter the U-boat threat. Using new technology - and new tactics derived from scientific methods - they devised countermeasures to defeat the German submarine menace. Then, continuing to apply those successful measures, they went on to negate the Japanese submarine threat in the Pacific. The author cites the crucial role of civilian scientists - the "outsiders" - who worked with military staffs and operational commanders of the campaign at sea. Their open minds and objective methods were essential for the application of such tactical advances as sonar and radar, acoustic torpedoes, depth finders, and code breaking to the battle. As this study illustrates, the importance of such timely and innovative cooperation among scientists, the research and development community, and military commanders in bringing technological knowledge to bear for operational and strategic advantage cannot be overstated. Meigs study of how such cooperation succeeded in the crucible of wartime crisis is itself an example of how the lessons of the past can serve us well today. J. A. Baldwin Vice Admiral, United States Navy President, National Defense University

A Civil War Soldier of Christ and Country

A Civil War Soldier of Christ and Country
Author: John Rodgers Meigs
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2006
Genre: Military engineers
ISBN: 0252030761

This collection of letters and documents offers a rare glimpse into a young officer's interesting but short life. Mary A. Giunta's A Civil War Soldier of Christ and Country tells the story of the relationships between the headstrong John Rodgers Meigs and his family and friends; his heartwarming eagerness to please his demanding parents; his West Point experiences that include a meeting with Abraham Lincoln; and his life as a combatant in the Civil War. John Rodgers Meigs was the son of Union Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs, and his official correspondence reveals much about his duties as a military engineer and aide-de-camp to Union generals. The private correspondence between him and his father and mother is especially compelling. Approximately forty of the letters were written in an early version of Pitman shorthand and are here transcribed for the first time. Collectively, they provide an intimate picture of the young Meigs, uncover the concerns of a family with high expectations, and offer a unique look at a devastating war.

John M. Schofield and the Politics of Generalship

John M. Schofield and the Politics of Generalship
Author: Donald B. Connelly
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 488
Release: 2006-12-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807877085

In the first full biography of Lieutenant General John McAllister Schofield (1831-1906), Donald B. Connelly examines the career of one of the leading commanders in the western theater during the Civil War. In doing so, Connelly illuminates the role of politics in the formulation of military policy, during both war and peace, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Connelly relates how Schofield, as a department commander during the war, had to cope with contending political factions that sought to shape military and civil policies. Following the war, Schofield occupied every senior position in the army--including secretary of war and commanding general of the army--and became a leading champion of army reform and professionalism. He was the first senior officer to recognize that professionalism would come not from the separation of politics and the military but from the army's accommodation of politics and the often contentious American constitutional system. Seen through the lens of Schofield's extensive military career, the history of American civil-military relations has seldom involved conflict between the military and civil authority, Connelly argues. The central question has never been whether to have civilian control but rather which civilians have a say in the formulation and execution of policy.

Freedom's Cap

Freedom's Cap
Author: Guy Gugliotta
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 498
Release: 2012
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0809046814

The history of the modern U.S. Capitol, the iconic seat of American government, is also the chronicle of America's most tumultuous years. An award-winning journalist has captured with impeccable detail the clash of personalities behind the building of the Capitol and its extraordinary design and engineering.

On Hallowed Ground

On Hallowed Ground
Author: Robert M. Poole
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2010-11-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0802715494

Documents the founding of the monument cemetery on the former family plantation of Robert E. Lee, revealing how the site once intended for the burials of indigent soldiers became a national resting place of honor throughout the subsequent century.

Intel Wars

Intel Wars
Author: Matthew M. Aid
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2012-01-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1608194817

Traces the monumental growth of the American intelligence community after the September 11 attacks, citing the billions that have been spent on intelligence efforts while explaining why its sophisticated systems are still being eluded by ragtag enemies. By the author of The Secret Sentry.