George G. Meade

George Gordon Meade was born December 31, 1815, in Cadiz, Spain, where his father worked as a naval agent supplying Spain during the Napoleonic wars, a business that soon collapsed and left the family in debt. Richard Worsam Meade died in 1828, when George was twelve, and the boy moved between relatives' schools before West Point admitted him in 1831. He graduated nineteenth of fifty-six in 1835, with 168 demerits, thirty-two short of dismissal. He quit the Army after a year in Florida, spent seven years as a civilian surveyor, then returned when Congress barred civilians from the Topographical Engineers. He married Margaretta Sergeant in 1840 and spent over a decade building lighthouses along the Delaware and Florida coasts before he saw combat again, in Mexico in 1846.

Meade took command of the Army of the Potomac on June 28, 1863, roused before dawn by a messenger he assumed had come to arrest him. Three days later he fought and won Gettysburg, reading the ground well enough to hold Cemetery Ridge and Little Round Top against Lee's assault, then surviving a contentious council of war, a 150-gun bombardment, and Daniel Sickles's unauthorized advance that nearly broke the Union line. He did not pursue Lee's battered army across the swollen Potomac afterward, and Lincoln never fully forgave him for letting it escape. Grant arrived in March 1864 to direct the war from Meade's own headquarters, taking the public credit while Meade ran the army underneath him through the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, and the Petersburg siege, then spent his final years commanding Reconstruction governments across the Deep South.

His own staff called him the old snapping turtle, and the temper was not incidental. Daniel Sickles, humiliated at Gettysburg for disobeying orders, spent years lobbying Congress to claim the victory for himself and to paint Meade as a general who wanted to retreat before the fighting even started; a congressional committee investigated and found nothing, but the accusation followed Meade anyway. He offered to resign after Gettysburg and again when Grant arrived to oversee him, and was passed over for promotion to lieutenant general behind two of his own subordinates, William Sherman and Philip Sheridan. He carried a wound from Glendale in 1862, shot through the arm and back, for the rest of his life, and newspapers under his own army's shadow learned to print his name only when something had gone wrong.

Meade died of pneumonia on November 6, 1872, at his Philadelphia home, weakened by wounds two decades old. The Army named its largest East Coast post, Fort George G. Meade in Maryland, for him, along with counties in Kansas and South Dakota, and four statues went up in Philadelphia and Washington within decades of his death, more than most Union generals received. None of it bought him the recognition Grant or Lee still carry; his name survives more reliably on maps and forts than in popular memory. Historians generally credit him with the tactical decisions that won Gettysburg while agreeing that his caution afterward, whatever its military logic, cost him the larger reputation Lincoln wanted from the victory.

George G. Meade's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Brandywine Shoal Light building
  Lighthouse engineering along the Delaware coast before the war 1850
• Hydraulic signal lamp invention
  Standard lighthouse lamp design adopted along the American coast 1858
• Battle of Gettysburg mission
  Commanded the Army of the Potomac to a decisive defensive victory, July 1-3 1863
• Overland Campaign mission
  Commanded the Army of the Potomac in the field under Grant's direction 1864
• Third Military District other
  Oversaw the restoration of Reconstruction governments in Georgia, Alabama and Florida 1868

• December 31, 1815 aged 0 Born in Cadiz, Spain, to an American naval agent
• 1835 aged ~20 Graduates West Point 19th of 56, with 168 demerits
• December 31, 1840 aged 25 Marries Margaretta Sergeant on his 25th birthday
• 1846 aged ~31 Fights at Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma and Monterrey in the Mexican-American War
• June 28, 1863 aged 47 Given command of the Army of the Potomac, three days before Gettysburg
• July 1, 1863 aged 47 Wins the Battle of Gettysburg Holds Cemetery Ridge and Little Round Top against Lee's three-day assault.
• March 1864 aged 48 Grant establishes his own headquarters with Meade's army
• January 6, 1868 aged 52 Takes command of the Third Military District in Reconstruction Georgia
• November 6, 1872 aged 56 Dies of pneumonia at his Philadelphia home

• Robert E. Lee 1807–1870
  Confederate commander whose military reputation and later commemoration became central to Civil War memory and the Lost Cause. defeated at Gettysburg
• Ulysses S. Grant 1822–1885
  18th President and Union Army general whose leadership was decisive in winning the Civil War. served under
• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. criticized by
• William Tecumseh Sherman 1820–1891
  Union general whose campaigns through Georgia and the Carolinas helped destroy the Confederacy’s capacity to wage war. passed over for promotion behind