#281 Montgomery C. Meigs: Master Builder of the Union Army w/ Robert O'Harrow Jr.

The Road to Now

Benjamin Sawyer

Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 628 Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2023

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Washington D.C. in the 1850s was a tale of two cities. It was the Capitol city of a rapidly expanding new nation while at the same time ground zero for a politically fractured and divided nation hurtling toward disunion. Standing in the middle of it all was Montgomery C. Meigs, a military engineer who led the construction of two massive public works projects at the same time: the expansion of the Capitol building and an aqueduct to provide water to the residents growing city. Meigs would go on to serve as Quartermaster for the Union Army under Abraham Lincoln. Meigs was an innovator, public servant, and one of the most important patriots of the nineteenth century.

This week Bob welcomes author and journalist Robert O'Harrow Jr. to discuss his 2016 book, The Quartermaster: Montgomery C. Meigs, Lincoln's General, Master Builder of the Union Army.

For thirty years Robert O'Harrow Jr. was an investigative journalist and contributing writer at The Washington Post and was among the first national journalists to cover cybersecurity. In 2017, he part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of notorious Alabama political Roy Moore.

This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The Road to Now. I'm Bob Crawford. Ben Sawyer is on assignment this week. He'll be back next week.
0:12.3	Today, I'm speaking with Robert O'Hara, Jr. For 30 years, he was an investigative reporter
0:20.7	at the Washington Post. Today, he's a
0:24.0	contributing writer at the Post. During his time at the Post, he was a part of a Pulitzer
0:29.1	prize-winning team for their 2017 coverage of Alabama politician Roy Moore. Robert also was our first privacy reporter in the country.
0:42.7	He is the investigative journalist who began and started writing about cybersecurity and
0:48.9	technology issues in a way that has become commonplace. So Robert O'Haro Jr., it's a pleasure to have you on the
0:58.5	road to now. Hey, Bob. Thanks for having me. It's an honor to have you here. And we're not going to talk
1:04.8	about cybersecurity today or any of these AI or technology issues. We could talk all day about those. I actually wanted to
1:14.2	have you on because you wrote a book about Montgomery Meigs. And the name of the book is
1:22.8	the quartermaster Montgomery C. Meeg's Lincoln General Master master builder of the Union Army. And Meigs was,
1:32.4	as the title says, he was the quartermaster of the Union Army during the Civil War.
1:39.3	But there is so much more to this man. And you and I met through a mutual friend, and I began to tell you
1:47.5	about my fascination with the 1850s. And of course, the Civil Wars in the 1860s, but Meigs is a very
1:57.5	important figure in that pre-Civil War, Civil War period.
2:03.0	So my first question for you is, how did you come about Montgomery Meeks?
2:10.2	Well, I should point out, and I made the same error in the pronunciation, a descendant
2:16.5	of Montgomery Megs named General Montgomery
2:20.1	Megs said, look, O'Hara, it's Megs like eggs. Get it right. All right. So I can,
2:27.4	I can, and I probably told you this when we first met a listener to this program called, I've been called out on pronunciations in the past.
2:38.5	And one of my most shameful and embarrassing was I said derogatype and not degarotype.
2:45.9	And if you are, if you have a history podcast and you, and you say these things,
	...

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