The American Future by Simon Schama Page A

fortification and ballistics; but West Point’s Visiting Board, appointed in Jefferson’s spirit, had insisted on it. And the academy became America’s only school of technology and engineering; the elite members of each class taking instruction from Dennis Hart Mahan, who, like Thayer, had had a European as well as American education, and then joined the United States Army Corps of Engineers. It was West Pointers who constructed America physically and materially in this period, Jefferson’s dream of a westerly-stretching empire of liberty a real possibility—through the pioneering survey maps; the building of roads, bridges, and canals; the dredging of harbors; the protection of ports from natural as well as foreign threats. That sense of patriotic vocation was what made Montgomery Meigs put up with the foul smells and the ferocious heat of St. Louis in 1837: the conviction that he was America’s centurion-engineer, out on the far provincial frontier, the limnes , creating and guarding the new Rome with as much integrity and tireless zeal as the ancients. Ten years later word would come to him of the exploits of Lee and other brother-officers from West Point in the Mexican War whereGeneral Winfield Scott was bringing slaughter to Mexico. But Meigs reassured himself that the peaceful work he was engaged in would ultimately redound more to the happiness of his country than the annihilation of the Mexican Army, the despoliation of their people, and the annexation of Texas.
    This was Meigs’s West Point talking: the ethic planted by Jefferson that, for American soldiers, sustaining life, repairing damaged social fabric, and building anew was as much part of the military mission as lessons in killing. Only in America was a corps of civil engineers instituted as the highest elite of the army. On the Web page of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers the spirit of Lee and Meigs on the Mississippi lives on, complete with images of levee restoration in Louisiana and bridge building (in every sense) in Afghanistan. In recent years, the corps has had to try to discharge its historic responsibilities with fewer resources, since it’s suffered the same kind of “streamlining” (a term used without any trace of irony for the great river-minders of the nation) as other branches of the government. Ironically, then, precisely the branch of the armed services that might have made the American presence more welcome in Iraq has been the one most starved of funds, which have gone to more purely military exercises. The war-winners have been seen, until very recently, as optional auxiliaries. Similar damage to the corps has been sustained at home, where over a hundred levees, dams, and dikes for which it has maintenance responsibility have been classified as in serious danger of breach. When the corps fails to deliver on the high expectations made of it, whether in New Orleans or in Baghdad, the sense of falling short is registered with painful acuteness at the place where it began, up on the Hudson Highlands. Go into a West Point classroom, and the odds are that you will find nineteen-year-old women and men grappling with hydraulics rather than ballistics.
    This, at any rate, was the kind of lieutenant that Montgomery Meigs became in the years after his expedition to the Mississippi with Lee: a master of the theodolite as well as ordnance. On his way back from St. Louis, Meigs had crossed the Alleghenies in a sleigh, had ridden the new Baltimore and Ohio railroad, and done the rest by boat and horseback. He knew exactly what it took to throw the American idea across the continent and still keep faith with it. It would never haveoccurred to him that the vocation of the army was not democratic nation building, beginning with his own.
    This did not preclude a strong military element in his work for, so American officers believed, there was still an obstinate and vengeful enemy that wished to do the United States