This meeting will commemorate the lifetime and the contributions to the CWFMNY of one of our most beloved founding members, Charlie Schwarz. Charlie is pictured here in an iconic restful moment in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC during our group's trip there in 2013. He appears to belong in this gallery every bit as much as those pictured in the paintings that are hung on the walls around him! Charlie was the creator of the CWFMNY insignia pictured at the top of every email that I send out to the group, in addition to many, many other contributions he made during the founding years of our group. 

And now, on the agenda! The presenter at this meeting will be a familiar eight-time returning speaker... ME... hopefully looking very Floridian in this photo! 

Once again, as I did last January, I'll be repeating one of my six previous presentations, but since this one was first delivered eight years ago, it will be completely new to our newer members. It is a presentation about a most consequential Civil War general, yet one who I had barely known anything about before I began researching for the presentation in 2017. I was attracted to my subject after reading one single sentence, spoken some time after the war, by none other than William Henry Seward, a man perhaps more qualified than anyone except Abraham Lincoln to offer an exceptionally well-informed  "insider's" perspective on any aspect of the entire duration of the war. That sentence...

"The prevailing opinion of this country is that without the service of this eminent soldier, the national cause must either have been lost, or deeply imperiled." Now one might guess that such a statement was made about US Grant, or maybe, at a stretch, about William Sherman. But this "eminent soldier"of whom Seward spoke, with extremely high praise for a General who had never commanded a single soldier on a Civil War battlefield, was Montgomery Meigs, the Quartermaster General of the Union Army, who I've nicknamed here "The Union's Winning Edge."

Montgomery Meigs

The Confederacy simply never had a single person, not even at the individual Corps level, who came anywhere near approaching the proficiency at a continuously evolving and massively growing job that was displayed every hour of every day by Meigs! At this point I usually try to briefly summarize the speaker's presentation, but everything I learned about Meigs was so surprising and informative that I do not want to diminish the impact of my material by "spilling the beans" any further at this stage. I'm sure that this presentation will be highly informative to all who were not present when I first delivered it in 2018, so I'm going to leave it at that, and hope that you will be enticed into coming to the meeting. I will be very interested in hearing from any of you who have read either of the two, yes, only two, published biographies of Meigs that I was able to find! 

The meeting will take place on Monday, September 14th, at Draught 55, located at 245 East 55th Street, NY NY.  The cost of attendance plus dinner at our meetings is $65 per person. Our meetings start at 6:00PM sharp, but socializing at the pay bar is open from about 5:30. If you plan to attend please contact Ann Plogsterth at either 212-877-6814 or plogsterth@aol.com.  As always, your earliest possible reply greatly aids both our planning, and the planning by the restaurant, to furnish the correct number of meals, so please notify Ann as soon as you can. 

I hope to see you all there!  ...Jim

Jim Santagata  

Mobile: 718-930-0611