On Hallowed Ground Read Online Free PDF Page B

in a matter of weeks, shored up Virginia’s coastal defenses, and scoured the country for field artillery
pieces. 12 He consulted with an obscure colonel named Thomas J. Jackson—not yet Gen. Stonewall Jackson—about raising forces in the Shenandoah
Valley. 13 He coordinated the defense of Harper’s Ferry with Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, a prickly but esteemed colleague who had recently
resigned as quartermaster general of the Union Army. Amid these developments, Lee heard the distant rumble of northern newspapers,
which were training their big guns on him—labeling him an ingrate and a traitor “in the footsteps of Benedict Arnold!” 14
    Reality was taking hold. With the capital braced for an attack, President Lincoln called for another 43,000 troops in May. 15 The rhetoric grew warmer with the weather. Former Army comrades who had admired Lee now turned against him. None was more
outspoken than Montgomery C. Meigs, a fellow West Point graduate who had served amicably under Lee in the engineer corps but
who now considered him a traitor who deserved hanging. “No man who ever took the oath to support the Constitution as an officer
of our Army or Navy … should escape without the loss of all his goods & civil rights & expatriation,” Meigs wrote that
spring. Singling out Lee, Joseph Johnston, and Confederate president Jefferson Davis, Meigs urged that they “should be put
formally out of the way if possible by sentence of death & executed if caught.” 16
    Meigs and Lee never met on the battlefield, but Meigs proved to be one of Lee’s most implacable foes in the months and years
ahead. He stepped into the quartermaster’s post on May 15, after the incumbent, General Johnston, went south with Lee. Meigs,
a demon for hard work and efficiency, quickly began to mobilize for a conflict he viewed as a life-and-death struggle for
the nation’s soul. Born in Georgia but raised in Philadelphia, Meigs had a strong sense of duty, a flair for the dramatic,
and a well-earned reputation for honesty in an arm of the service plagued by corruption and mismanagement. Tall and straight-backed,
he projected an intimidating, no-nonsense image, a man with a firmly set jaw, hooded eyes, and the bulging forehead his contemporaries
took as a sure sign of braininess. His fearsome appearance sometimes frightened his own wife. “He looks so dreadfully stern
when he talks of the rebellion that I do not like to look at him,” Louisa Meigs confided to a relative. 17 His own mother conceded that, when young, Meigs had been “high tempered, unyielding, tyrannical … and very persevering
in pursuit of anything he wants.” 18 Those traits would serve him well in his new job.
    Toward the end of May, even Mary Custis Lee had to concede that the gathering storm could not be avoided. She supervised servants
while they took down the curtains, rolled up the carpets, and packed up the wine cellar. She bequeathed care of the family
cat, a big yellow male named Tom Tita, to George Clarke, a slave who appreciated Tom’s mousing skills. Her motivation in leaving
Arlington, she told a daughter, was to spare her husband further apprehension. “I would have greatly preferred remaining at
home & having my children around me,” she wrote, “but as it would greatly increase your Father’s anxiety I shall go.” 19 Then she made an eerily accurate prediction: “I fear that this will be the scene of conflict & my beautiful home endeared
by a thousand associations may become a field of carnage.” 20
    She took a final turn in the garden, entrusted the keys to Selina Gray, a much-respected slave who served as Arlington’s housekeeper,
and followed her husband’s course down the long, winding driveway. Like others on both sides of the conflict, Mrs. Lee believed
that the storm would pass quickly and that she could return to Arlington in a few weeks. In reality, it would take twelve
years. 21
    One month to the day after Lee took