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appendix฀c NoteonDataCollectionandRecordLinkages Published and unpublished contract registers of the Quartermaster’s Department, which were used to generate the tables in appendix B, contain valuable information about military contracting during the Civil War era. Typically, each entry in the registers contains the following data for each contract: date of contract, name of contracting o‹cer, place of contract, name of contractor, item to be supplied, quantity, and price. But readers should understand that the data contained in these contract registers has been processed selectively for the purposes of this book and that the registers themselves are imperfect sources of information about Northern procurement. The Quartermaster’s Department contract registers list very large numbers of transactions, some of which were very small in dollar value. Because of time and resource limitations, I did not compile every single registered contract. Instead, I used minimum cuto¤s to capture the larger contracts. Registered contracts were excluded in the following way: for the 1856–60 period, only those with a minimum value of $500 were included; for 1861, the minimum used was $1,000; for 1862–63, $5,000; for 1864, $10,000; and for 1866–70, $1,000. Although the use of di¤erent minimums for di¤erent years may seem arbitrary, it was intended as a crude way to adjust for inflation and changes in the scale of military contracting over the course of the period. In the end, this method captured some 7,850 separate contracts for 1856–70 period, with a total value of approximately $338,500,000. [Readers interested in tables generated with the antebellum and postwar Quartermaster’s Department contract data should consult my doctoral dissertation: Mark R. Wilson, “The Business of Civil War: Military Enterprise, the State, and Political Economy in the United States, 1850–1880” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2002). The dissertation also includes tables of leading contractors with the various Northern states, generated from state auditors’ reports and similar documents.] Because the wartime Quartermaster’s Department tended to buy in bulk, only a small fraction of the total value of all registered contracts was excluded by these methods. Nevertheless, the cuto¤s did exclude a significant fraction of registered contracts in some major military industries in which bulk purchasing was less common, such as 23฀ appendix฀c฀ those that supplied animals and wagons. Finally, such methods largely fail to capture the activities of contractors selling items of relatively low cost, such as thread, buttons , and hardware. There are inherent problems with using the contract registers as a guide to U.S. procurement activity. Some of these registers list ship leases or charters, but they rarely provide information about the size of transactions. Payments to railroads are not indicated in the contract registers. This means that transactions with rail and water-going transport contractors, which constituted a very large part of the Northern military economy, cannot be reconstructed using this source. Equally important, readers must recognize that the contract registers do not indicate all purchases. Leaving aside the problem of contracts that were never reported or registered for some unknown reason, there is the larger problem of open-market purchases. As chapter 4 suggests, openmarket purchases were used by the army to acquire large quantities of goods. But open-market purchases, unlike formal contracts, were not normally recorded in the registers. Finally, because the contract registers list initial agreements rather than final payments, even the transactions to which they refer may not always have been closed exactly according to the terms listed in the registers. All of this is to say that, although the contract registers (and any tables that might be generated from them) can be a rich source of information about army-supplier transactions in the Northern military economy, they certainly do not comprehend all such transactions. Finally, readers should note that information about Ordnance Department suppliers (presented in tables B.1 and B.2) is contained not in Quartermaster’s Department contract registers but in distinct Ordnance Department lists of purchases. These sources, which were eventually published for Congress, are cited in the tables. Some of the maps and tables presented in this book use data compiled from annual U.S. Treasury “Receipts and Expenditures” reports, which were sent regularly to the U.S. Congress and published along with other government documents. The expenditures portion of the “Receipts and Expenditures” reports proved valuable for several reasons. Because they are organized according to particular U.S. government bureaus, they may...

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