The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861-1865 (review)

Over the last thirty years, historians and political scientists have devoted increasing attention to the development of national governmental and bureaucratic institutions in nineteenth-century America. Although military historians have portrayed the antebellum military as an important agent for national government intervention in the economy, the dominant narrative of American political development has described the national government before the Civil War as a state of courts and parties. The transformation of national administrative capabilities, according to conventional wisdom, occurred during the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. In this well-researched account of the Union procurement effort during the Civil War, Mark Wilson counters the prevailing view by demonstrating that the Quartermaster Corps of the U.S. Army was one of the most important organizations in antebellum America and that its efforts during the Civil War transformed American thinking regarding the role of the national state by exposing the public to a robust administrative bureaucracy and large-scale public enterprise.

The Union began the Civil War with a decentralized, state-led war economy. By early 1862, however, the Army's procurement bureaus had taken over management of the North's military mobilization. Wilson describes how local officials and businesses, fearing a loss of money and power, contested this transition from a federal procurement system to a national one. The transition was nevertheless successful, due largely to the Quartermaster Corps, which increased substantially in size during the war but retained its basic operating procedures and key personnel from the antebellum era.

The Quartermaster officers overseeing the Northern procurement effort were not content to leave the war to private enterprise. Instead, Wilson argues, they created a mixed military economy in which private enterprise dominated but public enterprise figured prominently. Union supply officers saw public enterprise as a way to lower costs, improve quality, and distribute social welfare benefits. Quartermaster officers also frequently abandoned the contracting process in order to rely upon smaller producers, thus circumventing middlemen and avoiding the concentrations of wealth and power usually associated with such intermediaries. Late in the war, public sentiment against middlemen became so negative that several quartermaster officers and contractors were court-martialed.

Wilson concludes by describing the rapid demobilization of the Union's procurement project and the effort's lasting effects. He argues convincingly that the massive Civil War mobilization altered the popular view of the relationship between the state and the economy. It also influenced the rise of big business by educating corporate leaders on the value of large-scale enterprises and the need for hierarchy and discipline to control them. Wilson also speculates that military institutions and the Civil War mobilization influenced the civil service reform movement, populist politics, and popular literature. A brief examination of how the experience of war shaped the views of Army officers, both inside and outside the Quartermaster Corps, regarding the national state's role in the economy and the military's relationship with private enterprise would have made an outstanding book even better. Anyone interested in the antebellum army, the Civil War, or the role of the military in the American political economy will find this book worthwhile.