Robert O’Harrow, Jr. The Quartermaster: Montgomery C. Meigs: Lincoln’s General, Master Builder of the Union Army. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016. Pp. 304; with 16 plates.


 
Much like George C. Marshall’s untrumpeted contributions to victory in the Second World War, Montgomery C. Meigs is a name often mentioned in American military history without a detailed understanding of why he deserves to rank alongside great Civil War battlefield commanders like Ulysses S. Grant or William T. Sherman. It is an undeserved fate for such an immensely talented officer who held the army’s most important administrative post of Quartermaster General from 1861 until 1882. In that role Meigs was responsible for the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars that enabled the Lincoln Administration to build up and maintain a national fighting force unequalled in size or complexity until the twentieth century. Robert O’Harrow’s study of Meigs seeks to reinvigorate public interest and appreciation for an officer long regarded as a key player in bringing about ultimate Union victory. Harrow’s task is daunting, and he joins the ranks of only two previous biographers in telling the life story of a nineteenth-­century renaissance-­man-­in-­uniform who was equally comfortable in the worlds of art, sculpture, architecture, engineering, mechanical innovation, and military administration.

What do we know of the life of the man who enabled Union armies to be the best equipped in the world? A man who chafed at deskwork yet who juggled it with astoundingly dexterity? A father who lost a favorite child to the war but created Arlington National Cemetery as a shrine to the nation’s dead and whose imprint on some of Washington’s most iconic government buildings remains apparent even today? The answer is not nearly enough, but fortunately Harrow’s talents as a storytelling journalist are put to good use painting an engaging portrait of a complex and sometimes contradictory man. Certainly publication of a new Meigs biography is timely, as seventeen years have elapsed since David W. Miller’s Second Only to Grant and nearly sixty years since Russell Weigly’s Quartermaster of the Union Army first chronicled Meigs’s extraordinary career. Harrow’s book divides between Meigs’s prewar life and the cataclysm that followed the 1860 election which catapulted him into the burdensome job of Quartermaster General. In that role Meigs did indeed become the master builder of the Union army, as every decision directly impacting the army’s ability to march and fight crossed his desk. Just a sampling of the wide-­ranging matters requiring his attention on a single day might include arbitrating extra pay for laborers, reducing the price of coffee, improving design of hospital cesspools, contesting transportation costs for new regiments, purchasing office clocks, approving repairs to Fort Drum, restricting what products army sutlers could sell, replying to Congressional inquiries, ordering bed sheets for prisoners of war, paying for Mississippi gunboat construction, clarifying forage and fuel allowances for chaplains, setting horse and mule purchase age limits, securing fresh water supplies for Fort Jefferson, and rejecting inflated bids for coffins and headstones. Never content to remain tied to a desk, Meigs took every opportunity to inspect forces in the field whether it was the Army of the Potomac on the Peninsula, the Army of the Cumberland at Chattanooga, or Sherman’s men at Savannah after the March to the Sea. Meigs was also one the first officers to advocate a hard war policy toward southern civilians, arguing that a horse was a munition just like a barrel of gunpowder and should be immediately confiscated for Union benefit.

Similar to other biographers, Harrow argues that Meigs sought the most economical ways to exploit the North’s rising industrial capacity and burgeoning technological innovation to tilt the scales toward Union victory, whether it was in weaponry and transportation, food production and preservation, or even advances in indoor plumbing. When considering Harrow’s work, however, the overriding question is what gap or niche this volume is intended fill. Is it supposed to update and supplant previous biographies as a detailed account of Meigs’s entire life, or merely be a nimble overview of his career with the largest focus on his Civil War activities? If the intent is the former, it falls far short, but if the latter, it largely succeeds. Chapter sizes are uneven and the bulk of Meigs’s early life is processed with a dizzying speed that whisks the reader from his birth in 1816 to a middle-­aged army careerist of 1851, in the span of fifteen pages. Meigs’s development as a nationalist as opposed to self-­identification by state is not fully addressed, his Mexican War service is severely condensed, and his nearly thirty years of life following the Civil War is summed up with similar rapidity in barely ten pages.

The great challenge in writing any short history is packing in as much information on the subject as possible, and few men left as large a trove of records detailing his private and public achievements as did Meigs. It is therefore unfortunate that the sources cited in producing this volume are disappointingly thin. Much background material for Meigs’s life or the functioning of the quartermaster department are drawn from secondary sources like Allan Nevins, Russell Weigley, and James McPherson; no contemporary newspapers were used, nor are long-­published records like the Papers of Ulysses S. Grant consulted. Nearly all of the primary documents used come from online repositories, leaving untouched the vast majority of Meigs material readily available at the National Archives. Regrettably, only three citations to NARA’s Quartermaster General’s Office Records appear when a targeted exploration of entries, such as the Combined Correspondence File, would have added weighty examples in conveying to readers the truly Herculean task Meigs faced every day. The range, scope, and complexity of the details found in those primary records are vital to proving why Meigs ranks alongside the war’s great field commanders. If the mountain of available primary sources was too daunting or a minimalist approach was purposely chosen as the author’s intended route, then Harrow should have included a preface explaining why such records were bypassed. Absence of those materials means that the most in-­depth understanding of Meigs’s wartime challenges and successes can be better found in the older biographies. Nevertheless, Harrow’s The Quartermaster is an earnest attempt to renew public appreciation for Meigs’s achievements, making the casual history reader or undergraduates not already familiar with him as the main beneficiaries of the book. Civil War specialists will find little original in argument or fresh in sources that shed new light on this truly extraordinary man. While Harrow’s book is well written, lively, and eminently readable, the definitive modern biography that fully chronicles Meigs’s long life and astonishingly productive career still remains to be written.