Magic Touch

Overland Campaign, staff officer Theodore Lyman marveled at the skill of the Army of the Potomac’s chief quartermaster Rufus Ingalls. “How these huge trains are moved over roads not fit for a light buggy, is a mystery known only to General Rufus Ingalls, who treats them as if they were so many perambulators on a smooth side walk.” When Maj. Gen. George McClellan received orders on September 3, 1862, to assemble a field army to meet a possible Confederate invasion of Maryland, Ingalls was perhaps the most important soldier McClellan needed for that to happen. Napoleon purportedly once wrote that an “army marches on its stomach.” Another frequently heard. The complex calculations to haul this quantity of supplies efficiently with horse-drawn wagons to combat units spread across a front of nearly 30 miles can be imagined. Ingalls also had to determine deficiencies in clothing and equipment and do his best to meet the direst situations so units had a basic kit with which to fight. He needed to become familiar with the quartermasters for the 1st, 9th, and 12th Corps—none of whom had operated with the Army of the Potomac—and assess their needs as well as their organizational strengths and weaknesses. It was incessant work and demanded great skills. Ingalls related, without exaggeration: “The labor, however, of arranging and perfecting this system of transportation, of bringing to each depot the requisite amount, and the details of trains for the distribution of these vast supplies to the different portions of the army, was excessively onerous night and day.”