The Politics of Procurement: Military Origins of Bureaucratic Autonomy

No U.S. history textbook mentions Robert Allen, George H. Crosman, John H. Dickerson, Thomas Swords, or Stewart Van Vliet. Yet in certain respects they were five of the most important government officials in the nineteenth-century United States. Each was a high-ranking officer in the Quartermaster's Department, a bureau of the U.S. army entrusted with military procurement. During the Civil War, the supply depots in which they worked—in Philadelphia, New York, Cincinnati, and St. Louis—were indispensable adjuncts to the Union war effort. The magnitude of the procurement project was unprecedented: in four years, these five officers alone paid contractors and civilian employees $350 million. This sum amounted to nearly one-third of the total of over $1 billion that the Quartermaster's Department as a whole spent to equip the Union army. No other single project, in either government or business, involved the expenditure of such an enormous sum. In an age in which few Americans made $2 a day, $350 million was equivalent to the total wartime income of one hundred thousand households. Adjusted for inflation, this was roughly equal to the entire federal budget during the administration of President James Buchanan (1857–61).

This essay surveys the role of the Quartermaster's Department in equipping the Union army during the Civil War. It contends that the army officers who coordinated this project—men such as Robert Allen, George H. Crosman, John H. Dickerson, Thomas Swords, and Stewart Van Vliet—were powerful economic actors who exercised considerable independence during a critical juncture in American history. This interpretation runs counter to what has long been the scholarly consensus. According to this consensus, the federal government in the nineteenth century was a state of "courts and parties" dominated not by government administrators but by party leaders, and in which political parties were sustained by the disbursement of patronage in the forms of contracts and jobs that were often referred to as "spoils." In this view, the apogee of the "spoils system" occurred during the Civil War, when party leaders took advantage of the war emergency to reward party supporters with reckless abandon. Since the Republican party controlled both Congress and the White House, Republican party leaders were assumed to dominate military procurement. In short, the economic mobilization of the Union to defeat the Confederacy—by far the largest government spending project in the United States during the nineteenth century—was nothing more than an outsized pork-barrel project for a party machine.¹

This consensus is shared not only by historians but also by an influential group of political scientists known as the "new" institutionalists. The new institutionalists have considerably refined our understanding of American state-building in areas as diverse as civil-service reform and public finance. Unfortunately, when they turned their attention to military procurement, they relied on scholarship that was more than fifty years old. The "great northern war machine," according to one new institutionalist, was "first and foremost a new party machine." The Union government, in the view of another, was essentially a "Republican party-state."²

This essay challenges this consensus. Although Republican party leaders had some influence over the shaping of the Union's war economy, their power was surprisingly limited. Far more important was the small yet highly effective cadre of career army officers that ran the Quartermaster Department's supply depots during the Civil War. In making procurement decisions, these officers followed their own agendas, which were in many instances only tangentially related to those of party leaders in Congress and the White House. In so doing, they exercised what political scientists call "bureaucratic autonomy"—that is, the power to make decisions relatively unconstrained by outside pressure. In peacetime, the bureaucratic autonomy of procurement officers remained latent; in wartime, it became manifest.³ In the very heyday of what is often called the "party period," there existed in the Quartermasters' Department a resilient, and potentially powerful, reservoir of bureaucratic autonomy that was distinct from, though never entirely unrelated to, the partisan imperative long assumed to have been the dominant political force...