OBITUARY NOTICES. 
473 
but which to the older ones and to every American who 
has passed middle age, is filled with personal memories of 
things suffered and done, and of emotions which can hardly 
by any event be awakened in such intensity again. 
Who that remembers the feeling excited by President 
Lincoln’s first call for troops—the first realization by us of 
the North, that the inevitable had come, and that civil war 
was on us—can describe that mental breaking up of the 
fountains of the great deep ? No one can describe it; but 
only its consequences; and these, with a new order of things, 
brought forward into universal recognition new merits in 
new men. Among these was Meigs, who had reached middle 
age in comparative obscurity, but who was now destined 
to take a prominent part in the public life and events of 
those hours when history was being made. 
We here have all of us seen him in his old age; some of 
us, like myself, in his old age only, and I have tried to find 
from those who knew him in the culminating point of his 
activities, what he was like then. 
One of my informants, himself a partaker in those events, 
tells me that General Meigs was at that time a man of re¬ 
markably fine presence and dignified carriage. The hair 
that we have known white was then notably black, and 
borne by a man in the vigor of middle life, whose conversa¬ 
tion was agreeable and not devoid of a gentle humor. A 
man, said my informant, who made a good impression from 
the first. 
Another witness, a soldier and junior comrade of Meigs, 
tells me that he was captain of engineers under circum¬ 
stances and at a time when the position might have led him 
to the command of an army if not of our armies; but that 
when he became instead a brigadier general, in charge of 
the Quartermaster Department, he did not seek the place, 
but the place sought him, not only for his high integrity 
and acknowledged capacity for business, but on account of 
the strength of his personal character. 
I know from others that in this position he had to de¬ 
fend the Government purse, not merely against fraudulent 
62—Bull. Phil. Soc., Wash.. Vol. 12. 
