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CHAPTER 2: The Formation of a National Bureaucracy
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chapter2 TheFormationofaNationalBureaucracy W hen state military supply departments and governors gave up their procurement authority in late 1861, the Northern war economy became national. At state capitals such as Albany and Columbus, U.S. military o‹cers arrived to take charge of the work that state authorities had handled previously. At the same time, national o‹cers at the War Department in Washington and army supply depots in major Northern cities—including Philadelphia, New York City, Cincinnati, and Saint Louis—consolidated their control over procurement. By the beginning of 1862, most state capitals no longer served as important war supply centers and state governments no longer purchased significant quantities of military goods. This transition, accepted quickly in some states but resisted for weeks in others, gave control of the Northern procurement project to o‹cers of the U.S. government. The shape of the North’s national war economy would now depend on the identity of the national o‹cers who ran it and the sort of procurement policies they chose to pursue. The Republican Party, a national organization with members at all levels of government, was apparently in a good position to manage the transition to national control in a way that might have limited the significance of the end of procurement by the various states. The secretary of war in 1861, Simon Cameron, was himself a patronage-minded Republican politician from Pennsylvania. Although he insisted by the end of the year that all states cede control to U.S. o‹cers, Cameron knew it was not good party politics to alienate Republican governors. Meanwhile, President Lincoln and other top Republicans, having taken control of the White House in early 1861, were using their patronage powers to give hundreds of U.S. government jobs across the North to loyal Republicans.¹ If the Republican Party determined theformationofanationalbureaucracy 35 the identity of the U.S. o‹cers who took full control of procurement by the beginning of 1862, the di¤erence between a federal war economy and a national one might be minimal. In fact, however, elected Republican Party o‹cials ended up having surprisingly little direct control over the North’s military economy during the Civil War. Instead, veteran military o‹cers managed the national war economy that emerged by early 1862. These o‹cers sta¤ed U.S. military supply departments , which were longstanding bureaucratic institutions that traced their roots back to the beginning of the century. To be sure, as these supply departments ballooned in size during the war years, they came to employ dozens of Republican-appointed o‹cers. But the most powerful Northern procurement directors were men like Asher Eddy, the regular army o‹cer who had struggled with Illinois supply o‹cials in late 1861. Reared in Rhode Island by a widowed mother, Eddy had become facile enough with mathematics as a boy to allow him to enter the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, from which he graduated in 1844. After teaching math at West Point as a young lieutenant, Eddy had spent the 1850s at posts in Florida and California. When he was dispatched to Illinois in 1861 by Quartermaster General Meigs, Eddy had already spent two decades in the army o‹cer corps.² To understand the workings of the North’s war economy during the Civil War, one must look back to the antebellum era, when Eddy and his peers were educated. Well before 1861, the U.S. military supply bureaus were among the most stable, most bureaucratic, and most important governmental institutions in America. After the end of the Mexican War of 1846–48, the army’s Quartermaster’s Department had become the primary manager of the United States’s new continental empire. During the years before the Civil War, most army quartermasters were stationed at far-flung posts in the great West, where they handled small-scale procurement and long-distance logistics. In 1861, after years in the West, these supply o‹cers headed east to take charge of the Northern military economy. Members of an unusual American elite, formed largely at West Point and in the antebellum West, these o‹cers ran the Civil War economy according to principles they had learned on the job of supervising continental logistics. Although they worked side by side with new, Republican-appointed volunteer o‹cers in 1861–65, the career o‹cers carried into the war a distinctive understanding of the American state...