harm, namely the unreconciled British Empire. Hard as it might be to credit now, the Canadian frontier in the late 1830s and 1840s was an unstable and unpredictable boundary. The most militant American nationalists claimed the entirety of the northwest frontier up to the fifty-fourth latitude boundary of Russian Alaska, a presumption the British had no intention of conceding. Since the attempt in the 1812 war to take lower Canada, the British had every reason to be vigilant about American designs on the colony, especially when there were Canadian rebels actively seeking the support of American irregulars. Despite official American neutrality, skirmishes occasionally turned into real battles, seizures of ships on the rivers and lakes, raids and retaliations across the shifting frontier. As long as the border was unsettled, Congress neither wanted to stamp on the action, nor wanted to give the British provocation for a full-scale third American war. What it needed, either way, were forts, and in 1841 Congress finally appropriated funds for a chain of them across the northern frontier.
That was Montgomery Meigsâ first major posting after the Mississippi. Following the work with Lee, the Corps of Engineers had returned him to Philadelphia which meant a reunion with his family. Amid the domestic comfortsâgardens, songs at the piano, promenadesâMeigs fell in love. Louisa Rodgers was graceful and lively rather than conventionally pretty. Photographs of her taken by her keen photographer-husband show an attractively strong faceâa powerful nose and jaw, dark complexion, and thick black ringlets. Louisa was vivacious and forceful like his mother, Mary, and her grandfather Commodore John Rodgers was the most famous naval hero in American history after John Paul Jones. They married, the children came quickly and often, and in 1841, Meigs took his family northwest to the Detroit River, on the edge of the British war zone. There, Meigs spent eight years building Fort Wayne, named for âMadâ Anthony Wayne, the general under whom his great-grandfather Return Jonathan Sr. had served at Stony Pointâand who hadtaken Detroit from the British. That enemy still seemed to be at the gates of the United States. Should its troops cross the lakes and scatter the modest frontier force, they would never, Meigs thought, be able to take Fort Wayne. Everything he had learned from Mahan at West PointâRoman and French fortification science, especially the work of Louis XIVâs pet genius, Sebastien Vaubanâwent into the formidable structure. Built from primitive, economical materialsâpacked earth, fronted with thick cedar rather than masonryâits star form, taken from Vaubanâs classicism, allowed for projecting artillery bastions on each of the protruding points. Bearing in mind the British habit of burning and razing everything in their way, Meigs turned the barracks into an inner stronghold: its walls, made from local limestone rubble, twenty-two inches thick. The barracks, gabled and pedimented in American-Palladian grand style, still stand by the river at the end of Livernois Avenue in a tough area of the city, the property of the city of Detroit, which opens them on summer Sundays for Civil War reenactments.
So while brother West Point officers were pushing the American Empire south, carving a path in fire and blood all the way to âthe halls of Montezumaâ in Mexico City, Meigs became Captain Meigs, the American Vauban, unrenowned in the world, but rapidly acquiring a reputation for engineering competence and integrity as solid as Fort Wayne. In Washington, the Army Corps of Engineers knew all about the formidable Meigs: his unhelpful aversion to the bribes and kickbacks that were a routine part of frontier construction; his omniscience; his eagle-eyed passion for minutiae. Nothing doubtful got past his scrupulous inspection. It was at this time that Meigs began filling small green
That was Montgomery Meigsâ first major posting after the Mississippi. Following the work with Lee, the Corps of Engineers had returned him to Philadelphia which meant a reunion with his family. Amid the domestic comfortsâgardens, songs at the piano, promenadesâMeigs fell in love. Louisa Rodgers was graceful and lively rather than conventionally pretty. Photographs of her taken by her keen photographer-husband show an attractively strong faceâa powerful nose and jaw, dark complexion, and thick black ringlets. Louisa was vivacious and forceful like his mother, Mary, and her grandfather Commodore John Rodgers was the most famous naval hero in American history after John Paul Jones. They married, the children came quickly and often, and in 1841, Meigs took his family northwest to the Detroit River, on the edge of the British war zone. There, Meigs spent eight years building Fort Wayne, named for âMadâ Anthony Wayne, the general under whom his great-grandfather Return Jonathan Sr. had served at Stony Pointâand who hadtaken Detroit from the British. That enemy still seemed to be at the gates of the United States. Should its troops cross the lakes and scatter the modest frontier force, they would never, Meigs thought, be able to take Fort Wayne. Everything he had learned from Mahan at West PointâRoman and French fortification science, especially the work of Louis XIVâs pet genius, Sebastien Vaubanâwent into the formidable structure. Built from primitive, economical materialsâpacked earth, fronted with thick cedar rather than masonryâits star form, taken from Vaubanâs classicism, allowed for projecting artillery bastions on each of the protruding points. Bearing in mind the British habit of burning and razing everything in their way, Meigs turned the barracks into an inner stronghold: its walls, made from local limestone rubble, twenty-two inches thick. The barracks, gabled and pedimented in American-Palladian grand style, still stand by the river at the end of Livernois Avenue in a tough area of the city, the property of the city of Detroit, which opens them on summer Sundays for Civil War reenactments.
So while brother West Point officers were pushing the American Empire south, carving a path in fire and blood all the way to âthe halls of Montezumaâ in Mexico City, Meigs became Captain Meigs, the American Vauban, unrenowned in the world, but rapidly acquiring a reputation for engineering competence and integrity as solid as Fort Wayne. In Washington, the Army Corps of Engineers knew all about the formidable Meigs: his unhelpful aversion to the bribes and kickbacks that were a routine part of frontier construction; his omniscience; his eagle-eyed passion for minutiae. Nothing doubtful got past his scrupulous inspection. It was at this time that Meigs began filling small green
Similar Books
