George Meade, The Life and Letters of George Gordon Meade, Major-General United States Army
George Gordon Meade, Ed.

[213] period of his career before the breaking out of the Rebellion. The surveying season on Lake Superior was verging upon its close, and the surveying parties had not yet returned, when he was relieved from the charge of the survey by Lieutenant James D. Graham, on August 31, 1861, and ordered to duty with the armies in the field.

The period immediately preceding the secession of the Southern States found Captain Meade quietly engaged in his duties in charge of the lake survey. He had watched with deep anxiety the current of events, eagerly scanning the political horizon for some glimmer of hope that the dreaded resort to arms might be averted. No politician, in the petty sense, he was, in the highest, penetrated with a pure love of country, and believed that, if only time could be gained for reflection, the sober second thought of the people would end in their return to common-sense and reason. In accordance, therefore, with his belief in the wisdom of the most conservative course, he had, in the presidential election of 1860, cast his vote for Bell and Everett.

The position at this time of officers of the regular army was an exceedingly trying one, especially for those who, like Captain Meade, were fully alive to the grave responsibility attaching to them as officers of the government, on whose example much depended. The defection of those officers who saw fit to cast their lot with the Confederacy caused the actions of all to be scrutinized, and often misunderstood, in the then excited frame of the public mind. In many instances the suspicions aroused at this period by the careful reticence of officers who felt the delicacy of their position led to want of due appreciation of their services even after they had signalized themselves in the war.

Captain Meade deprecated all violent language, as subordinating reason to passion, as productive of no possible good, and certain to entail evil. For his own part he calmly awaited the unfolding of events, which, if untoward, no action of his should have fostered, and to which, if favorable, he should have the satisfaction of knowing that his own temperate speech and counsel had contributed.

To his mind his own course was clear. He never for a moment doubted where his duty led him. In the strongest language of reason he denounced the Southern leaders who were goading their people into civil war. He expressed himself as deploring the necessity of using force, but as believing, if the necessity should come, in the employment promptly and energetically of the whole power of the government to prevent a disruption of the Union. But that