The Business of Civil War: Military Enterprise, the State, and Political Economy in the United States, 1850-1880

Histories of the American Civil War, both academic and amateur, have long offered narratives dominated by battles and soldiers. We know relatively little, however, about how the organized violence of the conflict was produced in an economic sense, or the extent to which the war presented problems in political economy. Even within the field of business and economic history, scholars have tended to focus on the question of whether the war boosted industrialization over the long run, rather than to investigate the dynamics of the war economy itself. ¹ In short, decades of research into the history of the largest military ² conflict in the industrializing world during the century before 1914 fail to sufficiently explain the economics and politics of the massive mobilization that outfitted and sustained Civil War armies.

My dissertation, which provides a history of the army procurement arena in the United States during the third quarter of the nineteenth century, demonstrates that the military struggles of the Civil War rested on a giant project of economic mobilization that was itself the object of high-stakes struggles over resources and power. Offering an extensive empirical investigation and analysis of the dynamics of army procurement in the wartime North, I not only revise the history of the Civil War, but also challenge traditional narratives of American economic and political development. Understanding the history of the military economy in the Civil War North, I argue, requires new interpretations of the history of the American state, business enterprise, and popular political economy.

I begin by tracing the development of a new era of army procurement after the United States' vast territorial acquisitions after the Mexican War and describing the emergence of a national war economy in the North during the first months of the Civil War. The leading managers of this national war economy, I argue, were military bureaucrats who spent the 1850s grappling with the logistics of continental empire in the new American West. Because these semi-autonomous military supply officers retained considerable authority over the procurement process in the North, the influence of Republican patronage politics within the war economy was remarkably limited. At a time when the spoils system in American politics was reaching its peak and when a single party dominated the White House andthe Congress, the largest program of public expenditures in American history to that date was directed by a group of career military officers who were not inclined to march to the drum of Republican politics.

Although it was by no means inevitable that military bureaucrats would hold such power in the Northern war economy, their wartime authority was made possible by the long-term development of a small but robust military bureaucracy within the early American state. Throughout the dissertation, I focus on the largest of the army supply bureaus, the Quartermaster's Department. During the 1850s, quartermasters were stationed at supply depots and forts throughout the new American West, where most of the small U.S. Army was located. Their biggest logistical challenge of the decade, besides the routine difficulty of supplying a network of forts across a vast territory without railroads, was the Utah Expedition of 1857-1858. The history of the procurement and logistical work that supported this muscle-powered overland military adventure, which bankrupted the largest military contractor in the United States, illustrates the state of U.S. military economy just before the Civil War. I trace the history of that military economy in the 1850s and the antebellum careers of the quartermasters who supervised it.

When the North went to war with the South in April 1861, it was not clear how to organize the military economy. For several months, both national authorities and officials in the various Northern states struggled to outfit dozens of new regiments, sometimes competing with one another over scarce...