Montgomery Meigs

Montgomery Meigs was quartermaster general of the Union army, supplied it through four years of war, and began burying the dead in Robert E. Lee's garden. He was an engineer by training, and before the war built the Washington aqueduct and the great cast-iron dome of the Capitol, whose construction he continued through the fighting on Lincoln's instruction that the city should see the work going on. As quartermaster from 1861 he handled something like fifteen hundred million dollars of contracts - uniforms, wagons, horses, railways, food - with a reputation for honesty that mattered enormously in a war whose early procurement was riddled with fraud. Grant said afterwards that the Union could not have won without him. He had served under Lee before the war and regarded his going south as treason of the most personal kind. When Arlington, the estate of Lee's wife Mary Custis Lee, was confiscated and needed a use, Meigs proposed it as a national cemetery in 1864 and had the first graves placed deliberately close to the house so that the family could never live there again; he later had a vault of unknown remains from Bull Run dug in the rose garden. His own son was killed in the Shenandoah that October and is buried there, as are Meigs and his wife. He designed the Pension Building afterwards. Arlington now holds more than four hundred thousand graves, and the decision that made it what it is was taken in anger by a man who had been betrayed by a friend.

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