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Introduction T he American Civil War of 1861–65 was a giant economic project. In four years, the national government in the North spent roughly $1.8 billion in 1860 dollars, more than the combined total of all previous U.S. government expenditures.¹ Not only by domestic measures but also in global terms, the war’s economic scale was remarkable. The North’s war spending amounted to roughly four times the combined French and British outlays for the Crimean War of 1854–56, one of the largest conflicts of the period involving Europe’s great powers. Prefiguring developments that would emerge most explosively in the world wars of the twentieth century, the Civil War stood for a half century as the best illustration of the fearsomely destructive potential of military mobilizations conducted by industrialized nation-states.² As developments in the Civil War North showed, the tremendous powers of modern armies to kill, coerce , and destroy rested upon prodigious productive e¤orts on the home front. The North’s unprecedented monetary outlays of 1861–65 translated into a huge amount of matériel. Two-thirds of all U.S. war spending went to pay for goods and services needed to outfit and sustain its forces in the field. In four years, the Union supplied its soldiers with roughly 1 billion rounds of small arms ammunition, 1 million horses and mules, 1.5 million barrels of pork and 100 million pounds of co¤ee, 6 million woolen blankets, and 10 million pairs of trousers.³ Given such figures, it is not di‹cult to conclude that the millionman Northern army was, as one scholar has put it, “the largest, best equipped, best fed, and most powerful war machine ever assembled in the history of the world to that date.”⁴ Despite its evident significance, the North’s procurement project has long been something of a mystery. This book o¤ers some surprising new answers to old questions about the Civil War and, more generally, about the economic 2฀ the฀business฀of฀civil฀war and political development of the United States. Challenging the common assumption that the Union’s procurement project was part and parcel of a “spoils system” in which elected o‹cials used government jobs and contracts to reward party faithful, this book shows that the North’s supply system was managed by a military bureaucracy that was relatively independent of party politicians and their patronage networks.⁵ The organization at the center of this project was the Quartermaster’s Department, by far the largest of the army supply bureaus, which relied upon a decentralized national network of depots and o‹cers.⁶ One of the most important organizations in nineteenth-century America, the wartime Quartermaster’s Department was a major economic and political actor that was not simply a check-writing service for private enterprise or a servant of the White House or Congress. Instead, U.S. quartermasters and their counterparts in other military supply bureaus acted as creative public administrators, driven by ideas and institutional norms and pressures that set them apart from other leading actors in the wartime North.⁷ Shaped by a unique education through military institutions and antebellum careers on the western frontier, these o‹cers were at least as important as businessmen or elected o‹cials in the economic and political construction of the Union’s procurement system. The national supply system these army bureaucrats created in the North is best described as a mixed military economy. Far from being a party patronage machine or a triumph of unregulated capitalism, as some historians have suggested , the Union’s procurement project relied upon a combination of largescale public and private operations.⁸ Military supply o‹cers were not content to leave the business of war to private enterprise. Certainly, the North bought goods from hundreds of contractors in the private sector. But quartermasters and other supply o‹cers also created substantial wartime public enterprises that went well beyond the system of arsenals and navy yards that had existed on the eve of the war. By the middle of the conflict, the Quartermaster’s Department alone employed over 100,000 civilians, far more than any private American business enterprise of the era. Championed by supply o‹cers and war workers alike, the expanded wartime network of public enterprises accounted for a sizable fraction of all goods and services consumed by the Union armies.⁹ When they did purchase from contractors, Northern procurement o‹cers still faced di‹cult choices...

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