Episode Details

Montgomery C. Meigs was born in Augusta, Georgia in 1816 and raised in Philadelphia, entering the University of Pennsylvania at 15 before West Point. In the Army Corps of Engineers he worked on the Mississippi River under Robert E. Lee, then in the 1850s built the Washington Aqueduct and oversaw the Capitol's new wings and cast iron dome. After he refused to steer contracts to allies of Secretary of War John B. Floyd, he was sent to build a fort in the Dry Tortugas.

After a secret mission to secure Fort Pickens, Lincoln named him quartermaster general, and he managed about $1.5 billion in wartime spending, standardizing wagon parts, tents and uniforms and using the telegraph to anticipate needs. When his son John Rodgers Meigs was killed in Virginia in October 1864, Meigs believed he had been murdered after surrendering. He chose Lee's Arlington estate for a military cemetery and ordered the first officer burials around Mrs. Lee's flower garden.

• His grandfather had been a classmate of Noah Webster.
• William Seward said that without Meigs the national cause would have been lost.
• He sealed more than 2,000 unidentified soldiers in a vault at Arlington beneath a cenotaph he designed, and put his name on the McClellan Gate.
• His Pension Building, now the National Building Museum, used 15 million bricks.
• Its 1,200-foot frieze includes a freed slave driving a quartermaster wagon, a figure Meigs insisted on.