Montgomery Cunningham Meigs (; May 3, 1816 – January 2, 1892) was a career United States Army officer and civil engineer, who served as Quartermaster General of the U.S. Army during and after the American Civil War. Meigs strongly opposed secession and supported the Union; his record as Quartermaster General was regarded as outstanding, both in effectiveness and in ethical probity, and Secretary of State William H. Seward viewed it as a key factor in the Union victory. Meigs was one of the principal architects of Arlington National Cemetery; the choice of its location, on Robert E. Lee's family estate, Arlington House, was partly a gesture to humiliate Lee for siding with the Confederacy. Early life and engineering projects Meigs was born in Augusta, Georgia, in May 1816. He was the son of Dr. Charles Delucena Meigs and Mary Montgomery Meigs. His father was a nationally known obstetrician and professor of obstetrics at Jefferson Medical College. His grandfather, Josiah Meigs, graduated from Yale University (where he was a classmate of future dictionary creator Noah Webster and American Revolutionary War general and politician Oliver Wolcott), and later was president of the University of Georgia. Montgomery Meigs' mother, Mary, was the granddaughter of a Scottish family from Brigend (with somewhat distant claims to a baronetcy) which emigrated to America in 1701. Meigs' father apprenticed as a physician in Philadelphia until 1812, at which time he moved to Athens, Georgia. He enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania in 1815, the same year he began to practice medicine in Georgia. Charles Meigs received his MD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1817, and that summer he moved his family—which now included one-year-old Montgomery—to Philadelphia and established a practice there. The Meigs family was wealthy and well-connected, and Charles Meigs was a strong supporter of the Democratic Party. Meigs had extremely good memory, and his father instilled in him a sense of duty and a desire to pursue honorable causes. Young Montgomery received schooling at the Franklin Institute (then a preparatory school for the University of Pennsylvania). Meigs learned French, German, and Latin, and studied art, literature, and poetry. He enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania when he was only 15 years old. A hard worker, he was one of the top students at the university. The Meigs family had extensive ties to the military and to West Point, the United States Military Academy. Montgomery