The American Future by Simon Schama Read Free Book Online Page B

grandson, George Washington Parke Custis. The man best known for living in the mansion, the master of the slave-tilled plantation that stretched down the hill into the valley, was Custis’s son-in-law, Robert E. Lee. And it was Lee’s fellow West Point graduate, Montgomery Meigs, who in the summer of 1864 made a point of turning the manorial idyll (which the Lees and the Meigses had together enjoyed as a social setting) into a boneyard. Lee, who had been the superintendent of West Point from 1852 to 1855, had, in Meigs’s eyes, violated his beloved academy’s code of “Duty, Honor, Country” by accepting command of the Confederate army, a treachery compounded by the fact that Lee had also been offered the same post for the Union. Other West Point graduates whom Meigs knew well—Joseph Johnston, James Longstreet, Braxton Bragg—had all followed Lee. One of the academy’s roistering young bloods, Jefferson Davis, another of Meigs’s former friends and mentors, became the president of the Confederate States of America. Even more iniquitous in Meigs’s eyes,Pierre Beauregard had actually left his superintendent’s post at the academy in 1861 in order to join the rebels, or as Meigs always called them: “the Traitors.” Had all these men not remembered that the citadel on the cliff was called the “School of the Union” and its graduates the “Children of the Union”? But it was the treason of the slave-owning Lee that most envenomed Meigs’s passions. Lee had broken the house of the American union. Now Meigs would do his utmost to make sure that Lee’s own house, where six of his children had been born, would be made permanently uninhabitable. Should the traitor return, he and his kin would be forced to sleep “in the company of ghosts.” A student of classical literature, Meigs knew the Roman custom of sowing their enemies’ land with salt to make it forever sterile (and quoted it to his superiors when, for example, they were considering how to treat the conquered port city of Charleston, South Carolina). Now he would turn implacably Roman. In August 1864 he had twenty-six Union soldiers, who had been interred near the old Lee slave quarters of the estate, brought to the portico of Arlington House like visitors about to pay their respects, and had them buried again, right beside Mrs. Lee’s rose garden.
    2. The fight for the citadel: soldiering and the Founding Fathers
    Montgomery Meigs took Lee’s treason personally because twenty-four years earlier, in the summer of 1837, the two men had roomed together by the coffee-colored Mississippi. Their task as young West Point graduates and officers of the Army Corps of Engineers had been to survey the river from the Des Moines rapids down to the new river port of St. Louis and make recommendations for improving navigation. The need was urgent because steamboats had revolutionized the possibilities of river traffic, and ports like St. Louis, then no more than 5,000 strong, were perfectly situated to capitalize on the opportunity. At the junction of the Missouri and the Mississippi, the cash staples of the lower South—cotton ginned in Eli Whitney’s machines—would be warehoused and sold to buyers from the industrial North and East. Northern hardwares and manufactures would in turn be loaded on boats sailing south and west to Memphis, Natchez,and New Orleans. St. Louis was also one of the jumping-off points for the Conestoga covered wagon trains heading west, carrying with them everything needed to make a new homestead America in the prairies: timber, draft oxen, saws, plows and hoes, bedsteads, pots and pans. St. Louis had just been optimistically declared a “Port of Entry for the United States,” but American geography was notorious for failing to cooperate with the dreams of enterprise. Upstream on the Mississippi, the rocks of the Des Moines rapids made navigation