“Admiral Porter and General Meade” (Library of Congress).

Today George Meade notes the visitation from Washington, which Theodore Lyman wrote about more colorfully in yesterday’s letter. The admiral is David Dixon Porter, shown in a photograph above with Meade. I had believed this photo to be some sort of early composite, based on the way the background has clearly been cut away, but it appears genuine. An alternate version appears in volume six of the Photographic History of the Civil War.

The visitors would have traveled with Meade along the United States Military Railroad, a triumph of engineering that ran behind Union lines all the way from City Point, eventually extending 21 miles. The army used it to ship food, supplies and soldiers forward to the front and send the wounded back. Grant’s aide Horace Porter was struck by the way the line went up hills and down dales throughout its length. “Its undulations were so striking that a train moving along it looked in the distance like a fly crawling over a corrugated washboard,” he said. The stations were named after generals, including one that bore Meade’s name.

Yesterday General Grant came up in the morning with the Secretary of War, Secretary of the Treasury, the Collector of New York, Mr. Hooper, member of Congress from Boston, together with several military dignitaries. They spent a short time at my headquarters, from whence I took them to see a part of the lines, after which they returned to City Point, I accompanying them. At City Point I met Admiral Porter and Captain Frailey, each with his wife. As these ladies desired greatly to go to the front and see some rebels, I persuaded their husbands to return with me, and we stopped the cars near Hancock’s headquarters, inspected our line and the rebel works, and then went to Hancock’s headquarters, who got us up a comfortable supper, and after dark shelled the enemy’s lines. They seemed greatly delighted, and returned about 10 p. m. to City Point. Mr. Stanton was, as he always is, most kind and civil to me.

Meade’s correspondence taken from The Life and Letters of George Gordon Meade, Major-General United States Army, Vol. 2, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), pp. 234-5. Available via Google Books.