harrow discusses his book. Developed washington d. C. s infrastructure and expanded buildings and sites, such as the u. S. Capitol dome and the Arlington National cemetery. This is just over 50 minutes. Joining us tonight is robert oharrow, a reporter with the Investigative Unit of the Washington Post who is focused on privacy, national security, federal contracting, and the financial world. He has won multiple journalism awards. The 2013 sigma delta chi award. Regional emmy. , a he previously won the top prize for investigative reporters and editors for exposing fraud, waste, and abuse in Homeland Security contracting. He has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist twice. He is the author of no place to hide. Michelle krowl is a civil war and reconstruction specialist at the library of congress. She received a ba in history at berkeley. She is the author of several articles and books on topics related to the civil war. She has worked at the Library Assistant at the Historical Society of washington, d. C. , an assistant professor, and as a research assistant. Is aimportantly, she member of our scholarly advisors. I would like to call out to specific and powerful connections. Quartermaster Montgomery Meigss department was responsible for caring for the war dead. That included burials at the national cemetery. It is remarkable that in choosing to live here, lincoln was putting himself facetoface with the human cost of war every day. Second, alike lincoln did during his time, we can view the capitol dome in the distance. Providedat view lincoln with the inspiration and a constant reminder of what was at stake. At the onset of war, construction of the dome was halted. If people see the capital going on, it is a sign we intend the union shall go on. Please join me in welcoming robert and michelle. [applause] michelle thank you for having us here tonight. The first question for those folks who have not picked up the book, how did you get involved with this project . How did you come across Montgomery Meigs . Robert it is a story that is true. I was walking with my family ,s we often did along the canal and if any of you are locals, it , andbeautiful spot normally, we went down across the canal and up the canal. I am a robert frost fan. Divergeave to now and then. Lets go uphill and find out where this goes. It was a path through the woods. It was a little twolane road. I highly recommend it. There was a railing part way down in the middle of the woods. I wondered why is there a railing in the middle of the woods . There was a granite memorial down below my feet. There was just enough light to see a memorial to captain meigs. Wasntht, wait a second, meigs a general in the civil war . For some reason, this one stuck. I have never once lost interest in what i found. Michelle one thing i wanted to start with because you are researching Montgomery Meigs, who notoriously had bad handwriting. [laughter] michelle so how did you overcome his handwriting . What kind of challenge was that for you . Robert the handwriting was an enormous challenge. It literally is so bad that the library of congress helpfully tells us at the beginning of this paper, this index, beware of going further. [laughter] robert they say you probably will not be able to read all that you encounter. It is amazing. When sherman and meigs had grown to know each other through work at a distance primarily, there was a story and it is so good. Sherman gets an order that is written in his script and he says, these orders from general meigs, therefore, i approve of them, but i cannot read them. [laughter] robert instead of dodging your question, i will try to answer it. Telling anybody story is really a haphazard event. The more you pull back the onion skin layers, the more complicated and contradictory it becomes. My project, which took five years from beginning to end while i was working at the paper , was a constant reevaluation using as Many Disparate sources as i could stumble across. You remember bill clinton used to say, even a blind hog will find an acorn now and then. I felt like i was a blind hog. I used, i suspect in a fairly early sort of way, i got tons of fullblown from google books and found my way there. So a lot of source documents, first editions, google books. The official records saved me luckily, john hague, he own project somehow transcribed his journals. Essentially, i triangulated as many source documents and the gift that never stopped giving was that meigss handwriting was illegible to begin with. But he was an efficiency guy. Meigs became a devotee to the in the 1850s of the idea that he could use time more efficiently, because he wanted efficiencies in every realm possible, with some deviations we will get to that in a bit but he adopted a form of writing called pittman shorthand and so he sealed the fate of his journals, 15002000 pages of journals and no one could read them. Not only was it pittman shorthand, he taught himself, and then he used an idiosyncratic version of the shorthand. So it is like a double encryption of his handwriting. There was 2000, no, it was the anniversary of the capitol dome being completed, Congress Paid a guy who was a shorthand specialist to transcribe all of. Is journals a committee came together and so i got a stack of his journals transcribed and i went a step further than anybody else that gone and i had them all ocred. If anybody wants them, i have searchable journals from meigs for all of the 1850s and part of 1860. That is how i got around the letters i could not read. I am an Old Newspaper hack and so you learn that time waits for no one. You have to get it done. I did the best i could with the materials i could access. Michelle having cracked the code and gotten these sources, what kind of man is meigs and what drove him . What did you find about him . Robert i found, one of the things that made me very happy because stories follow a similar pattern. By the way, i abstracted this stuff out. It is interesting for me and i will try to get into the particulars, but i am really fascinated that meigss life story follows a traditional arc. Which is to say he was really immature. He was really immature, probably a genius, when he came to washington in 1852. He was not as disciplined as he should have been. Scattered,ttle bit super creative and super talented, but of the things one about him, he was open to growing and he grew in many ways, including on his views on slavery, which were very ambivalent because his boss and his good friend jeff davis was a slave owner. So you did not see him walking about the use of slaves in general, and he did not grasp the enormity of slavery until later, but he did grow. Meigs was a guy who was so creative, he could not walk by a welldone painting or a stairway, a beautiful architectural stairway when he visited new york, or windows or the framing of windows, everything, he would stop. I almost sense that he would become mesmerized by the balance and the proportions and the utility of the things he saw. He was really moved by architecture, painting. I suspect he was moved by colors. He was almost obsessive about renaissance art, but he never saw it. He only saw it in books. I think the patterns with the suggestions of colors and the books he bought sort of inflamed him. He was so varied and impassioned about engineering did you guys know he was the First Industrial user of photography in the world . He used photography and became a photographer and used a particular method, so he was so varied in his interests, practical and passionate, that i wanted to use a quote michelle helped me track down. His wife wrote to her mother early in the war and she uses this phrase, it is as though his soul is on fire with indignation. I realize, wait a second, his soul is on fire in general. His was a soul on fire, and my editor disagreed with me. At the same time, he was highly self regarding. He was irritable. He was very cranky, very demanding. He could be a bore. He was so selfobsessed. So that is the mix you get. He was also incredibly loyal. He was apparently very engaging. They had something called a saturday club, top scientists, explorers, engineers, people passing through, dangers, and they would get together and drink and do a show and tell of stuff. Apparently, he had a lot of faithful friends. Michelle that is what is so striking reading your book and knowing a little bit about him, that combination of someone who harkens back to the past for his architecture, but is so interested in technology, and he is an engineer, but he is an artist. He is inducted into the National Academy of sciences, too. He really is much as you describe a renaissance man in so many ways. , well, there is another aspect. He was devoted to innovation. I think he stands as one of the Great Technology innovators in the 19th century. I mean taking other peoples very good ideas, which stand on their own, and realizing there are other ways of using them so you create something new. He did that over and over again. Which is kind of a remarkable synthetic ability, and i admire that very much. Michelle that leads into our next question. Our audience will appreciate this, but for those who will come later to washington, can you describe the impact that meigs had on the environment in washington, d. C. . Robert to some degree, sure. He was summoned he was living a career as a journeyman engineer in the army and heading probably toward being more forgotten that he has been to a career that would have integrity. It would not have been memorable. He was summoned to washington because the water was really bad here and there was not enough of it and the capital had almost burned down when the library of congress caught fire. They didnt have enough water to put it out and the crisis objects were destroyed, our American History went up in flames some of it. He came to washington, as you know, and they said, find a source of water. He did a threemonth crash survey, and his report was so concise and brilliant and both practical and sweeping. Look it up. It is really a cool document. He talks about washington is going to become one of the great, the center of one of the great empires in world history. By the way, he also predicted that the other great world empire was going to be russia. It was really interesting. He felt that washington needed a water system that would allow the city to live healthy lives, allow people to realize their dreams. It was so well done that the incoming secretary at war who became his very close to friend and main political patron, the guy that was the political knife fighter who protected meigs gave for the next eight years gave him the job to expand the capital building. Manifest destiny was bringing in lawmakers. They needed more space. In effect, that guy, the secretary of war, gave meigs the two greatest construction plums in america at the time. So he had his fingerprints on the capital. When you look at the dome, that is his. He helped design it. He built the water system. So there is water all the way up the macarthur boulevard and the canals. There are these beautiful im trying to remember greek revival . In any case, beautiful brick water houses as well as one of the great monuments in this area, formerly known as union itdge, but it is a bridge is a stunning i do not know what you would call it protomodernist piece of art. , a he insisted that it be kept spare. No extra embellishments. So you have the line in the arch, and it happened to be the in worldbridgeary bridge i history until then. The patron was jeff davis who went on to become the president of the confederacy. Michelle we know he was very influenced by davis in the period and had a friendship with him. How did that relationship or how did his feelings about davis and robert e. Lee, how did those things change after secession . Robert well, before we get to secession, meigs came out of west point. West point was the Main Engineering School in the country. His first assignment in the army corps of engineers was with robert e. Lee and they went to the mississippi and they were trying to find ways to improve navigation. It is an interesting thing because he did admire lee. Lee even then was kind of stiffnecked and a very proper meigs said he is a guys guy. Women love him and men love him. Dont get the feeling they remain close friends. They socialized and they were fond of one another and he was much closer to jeff and his wife. When the war came, meigs was pretty clear about what he wanted. He wanted then hanged, and he never reconciled with them. He felt his patriotism, i think was on an order that was very different than what we might be able to experience now. It was a faith in a democracy that was fledging, and a country that was still gangly meigs had thed insight that it was a great possibility of creating freedom for people and the idea that there were people turning back on it instead of resolving the problems offended him in a passionate way that might be hard for us to grasp right now. Michelle his soul was on fire with indignation. Robert yeah. Michelle i think most people know meigs as the quartermaster general. Maybe you can what kind of job was that . What was the quartermaster responsible for and how did he and print himself and his Organizational Skills on that job . Robert when we talk when i talked earlier about him growing, after i got three years into the project or longer, i realized meigs could not have done what he did during the war if he had not done what he did in the 1850s. He had to marshall, he had to follow the money and he did down to the penny. He had to organize laborers. He had millions and millions of bricks and he tracked them and he tracked how much it cost to lay each brick. I mean, it is an amazing thing, the detail he brought to bear. While he was doing that, by the way, and you may remember this, he is decorating the capital, so and fending artists off american artists. Back then, they were talking about making America Great again. He hired all these artists and he would go through the capitol and see their work. Now and then he would whip out a pocket knife and show the artist how he wanted some detail in the wood model a little more finally. Im getting chills thinking about that kind of thing. Just a riff a little more on this, while he is doing all of this, spending millions, he had enormous control, and remember he was a captain, right . While he is doing all of this, adopting photography and plans and doing politics and covering his tush from political attacks, know nothing folks wanted him stuff, on and on and on, that guy took time to watch an artist paint the first fresco in the united states. He would go there in the middle of the day day after day for weeks to watch this guy work in real time. What is really interesting to me is that there are some art historians who make the case, and i believe they are correct, i have to assume they are, that meigss journal of the artist working, the details he observed and what he did and how he put it on the fresco, the wet plaster, is the first document in real time of a fresco being made in world history. Which is i think fantastic. So this is the kind of guy he was. He developed and grew into the 1850s. H during the war, in the spring and summer of 1861, it baffles me that we survive. The army went from lets say, 16,000 of a Standing Army and a small Quartermaster Department into an army with a quarter of a million men, probably as many horses and animals, uncounted wagons had to be procured. The men did not have clothing or underwear. There were soldiers out on patrol in their longjohns because there were no uniforms. Gs did at a high level was he delegated a lot of work to his very experienced underlings and began to work with these Cottage Industries around the country to mobilize them and to arrange for supplies. When he did not get the supplies he needed, he ordered supplies , a whole set of supplies, from clothes, blankets, and he got reamed out for that. He did what ever he had to until he could get this machine up and running in 1862, and he lucked out because you may recall that the treasury ran out of money in early 1862. It was almost out of money, and was very glum, very down, about the prospects, his prospects as well as the countrys prospects, and he wandered over to meigss Office Downtown and he walked in and goes and sits in front of the says, meigs, the bottom is out of the top. What am i going to do . My view, one of the not heroes of American History, mcclellan that was gentle, right . That is washington doublespeak. Mcclellan is ill and would not see the president. Would not even see him. Oh, the general is not feeling mcclellansesident, aides would say. Meigs just winged it at first. He made plans, he was not just putting out fires. He began planning what became the brown water navy. In his first day in office as a quartermaster, he started doing drawings of these ships, these riverboats, and they had to technology was changing in the non, and they were rifled and they could obliterate wood. They could have wooded this thick and they would just blow it off. Meigs started designing iron covered riverboats that ultimately damn the torpedoes farragut used to turn the tide. So robert im sorry. The boats were not ready until later, actually. In any case, they made a big difference. Michelle since we are in washington, does he ever see the battlefields . So much of his activities were logistical. Did he ever have a chance to command troops, for example . Robert meigs relished his role had, and hehat he welcomed it. I get the sense he knew this was a match he was feted for. This young man in the 1840s and 1850s who is too big for his britches and he is arrogant and boorish, he came to realize that he was somehow a logistical genius. He had the support of the president and he had the support of another cranky man, the secretary of war stanton. Meigs never served in battle. He had gone out to bull run and saw the shooting and never led men in battle and he always felt bad about it. In a way, that is a good thing. If you are a military guy, you need to want to confront the enemy. Meigs was dispatched to tennessee when there was an emergency in chattanooga. They had to get men from washington in Northern Virginia down there to save the da