The Quartermaster: Montgomery C. Meigs, Lincoln’s General, Master Builder of the Union Army by Robert O’Harrow Jr

The Quartermaster: Montgomery C. Meigs, Lincoln’s General, Master Builder of the Union Army by Robert O’Harrow Jr, Simon & Schuster

This book has received mostly good reviews. Here's the blurb from Peter Cozzens:

The Quartermaster offers a vivid and eminently human portrait of Montgomery Meigs, the brilliant and principled general whose mastery of supply and logistics on a grand scale contributed decisively to Union victory in the Civil War. Too long overlooked, Meigs deserves a place beside such luminaries as Grant and Sherman, as O'Harrow convincingly demonstrates in this fast-paced, bracing account. This is one of the most important Civil War biographies to appear in recent years.

An excerpt can be read on the publisher's page.

Allen Guelzo's review at The Wall Street Journal is behind a paywall, so I wanted to provide an excerpt from it since it mentions another book on Meigs' life. While Guelzo's review is largely positive, he did have some issues with it:

Mr. O’Harrow’s account is short and breezy, relying mostly on the published volumes of Meigs’s journals and the Civil War Official Records, with an occasional dip into Meigs’s papers at the Library of Congress. It will not displace Russell Weigley’s more thorough but more stodgy 1959 biography of Meigs, and it shares with Weigley’s biography a surprising absence of attention to the actual practices of wartime contracting. Nor does Mr. O’Harrow spend much time on how Meigs managed the vast network of subordinate quartermaster officers assigned to each corps, division, brigade and regiment of the Union armies.

Mr. O’Harrow also misses one of the more startling conclusions that Meigs’s tenure as quartermaster general offers—that he handled nearly all of the government’s supply needs through private contractors. Only when it came to organizing a military railroad system did Meigs substitute direct government intervention for the free market. This practice stands in contrast with that of the Confederacy, which preferred to nationalize industries, transport and suppliers, with the result that its armies went to war poorly clad, poorly equipped and hungry.

Even so, it sounds like a fun read of who James McPherson called “the unsung hero of northern victory.”

Additional links:

Reviews at Goodreads

Mark Greenbaum's April 12, 2013 piece on Montgomery C. Meigs at The New York Times

Robert O'Harrow Jr.'s talk at The National Archives was recorded and can be watched in the video below. (Introduction begins at 4:20)