George Gordon Meade and the Boundaries of Nineteenth-Century Military Masculinity

It is one of the Civil War’s most enduring if not altogether endearing vignettes. During the 1864 Overland campaign, an officer in the Federal Army of the Potomac, embittered by taunts hurled at him from the rank and file, approached its commander, Maj. Gen. George Gordon Meade, to see that such disrespectful behavior be stopped. The general, just then consumed by the administrative duties attendant to running a field army and in no mood to hear his subordinate’s protest, looked up, grabbed hold of his spectacles, placed them firmly upon his large, aquiline nose, and cried out in exasperation: “Well, what of that? How can I prevent it? Why, I hear that, when I rode out the other day, some of the men called me a ‘d——d old goggle-eyed snapping-turtle,’ and I can’t even stop that!” Though perhaps apocryphal in its details as recalled in Horace Porter’s 1897 memoir, Campaigning with Grant, its colorful depiction of Meade as an irascible (and sometimes toxic) leader remains dominant in the memory of the general whose victory at the battle of Gettysburg vaulted him into historical prominence.¹

Contemporaries affirmed the general’s seismic temper and the often deleterious effect it had upon those he commanded. Staff officer and Meade loyalist Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman noted only half-jokingly, “I don’t know any thin old gentleman, with a hooked nose and cold blue eye, who, when he is wrathy, exercises less of Christian charity than my well-beloved chief!” His critics were more severe in their views. Brig. Gen. Marsena R. Patrick, the army’s choleric provost marshal general, wrote before Petersburg, Virginia, in June 1864 that “Meade is showing himself up as he really is, a very mean man,” noting the following month that “he has learned that his Staff would, all, gladly leave him, on account of his temper, and he has become desperately cross.” That summer, Meade protégé Maj. Gen. Gouverneur K. Warren acknowledged a decay in their once-warm rapport. “I believe Genl Meade is an unjust and unfeeling man,” the Fifth Corps leader observed unhappily to his wife as command tensions at Petersburg rose proportionate to the army’s mounting casualty lists, “and I dislike his personal character so much now that it is improbable that we shall ever again have any friendly social relations.”²

A more sensitive appraisal of Meade’s temperamental defects appears in Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs. The Union general in chief would likely have concurred with early nineteenth-century Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, who wrote in his seminal study, On War, that “inflammable emotions, feelings that are easily roused, are in general of little value in practical life, and therefore of little value in war.” Indeed, Grant indicated Meade’s fiery nature as a marker that his subordinate lacked the self-possession required of the most successful field commanders. Though lauding the general as a “perfectly subordinate” officer whose bravery and diligence earned him widespread respect, Grant nonetheless believed that Meade “unfortunately was of a temper that would get beyond his control . . . and make him speak to officers of high rank in a most offensive manner.” Writing deftly, Grant thought Meade possessed self-awareness enough to regret his explosive outbursts, yet his character defect “made it unpleasant at times, even in battle”—when an officer’s composure was most needed—“for those around [Meade] to approach him even with information.”³

Later writers too found paradoxes within the balding and bespectacled general. Leslie J. Perry, onetime Union officer and co-compiler of the War Department’s Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, described Meade as “a singularly fretful man” whose “very unpalatable language toward those with whom he came into contact . . . made him many enemies.” Still, Perry echoed Grant’s assessment in claiming that Meade’s professional capacity was typically held in esteem by those to whom he gave individual offense and “in carrying out military operations this hot-headed commander, so quick at trigger in personal...