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

In the otherwise voluminous literature of the Civil War, books on the logistics of military supply are comparatively rare. Historians have largely overlooked the administrative arrangements necessary to outfit, feed, house, transport, supply, and communicate with the enormous Civil War armies, emphasizing instead the Union's superior resources, such as railroad mileage, or linking the logistics of supply to patronage, profiteering, and political corruption. Mark R. Wilson's excellent The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861—1865, addresses this gap in Civil War history with a compelling account of the political economy of Northern mobilization. Wilson contends that the Quartermaster Department was a key political and economic actor in the Union war effort that was relatively independent of the party and business interests. He argues for the long‐term impact of Northern mobilization, making the case that it influenced state formation, political reform, and the development of industrial capitalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

Between April and December 1861, the US Army grew from 16,000 to more than 700,000 men, an unprecedented mobilization that rapidly shifted power from the states to the national government in a process that Wilson describes as "the rise and fall of a federal supply system."(7). Initially, state governments supplied the volunteer regiments that served under federal authority, but the scramble for resources resulted in maldistribution of needed material and drove up prices. By the fall of 1861, the War Department ordered states to stop purchasing, a step that appears rational and logical in retrospect, which was at the time, an extraordinary transfer of power that challenged the antebellum political and economic arrangements.

Facilitating this transfer of power was a well‐developed Quartermaster Department, able to assume the process of procurement. This department had, for decades, been handling the logistics of transport, communication, and supply over long distances and difficult terrain of the Western territories. The long tenure of Quartermaster General Thomas S. Jesup, who served from 1818 until his death in1860 and outlasted many a Secretary of War, provided administrative continuity and political independence that protected his department from excessive patronage and personnel turnover. When war broke out in 1861, the Quartermaster Department had a corps of veteran officers, trained in the West, and experienced in functioning as public entrepreneurs and managing large‐scale, complex operations who became "the leading managers of the Northern military economy" (p. 55). Although not diminishing the extraordinary leadership of Montgomery C. Meigs, who became quartermaster general in June 1861, Wilson shows that Meigs did not have to create an organization, but expand an existing one.

The Union developed a nineteenth‐century version of a military‐industrial complex that combined public and private enterprise, and centralized authority without centralizing production. Expanding existing public facilities, the government manufactured clothing and other supplies, employing thousands and spending millions. Public enterprise was contested as workers and others noticed government spending as a way of ethically distributing the benefits of military spending through jobs and higher pay. In the end, problems with cash flow, the need to contain public spending, and ideological considerations tilted procurement toward private enterprise. However, the practice of contracting for supplies never ceased to be troublesome, raising on‐going questions about the role of "middlemen," or profit‐making intermediaries, and leading to pressures for open market purchasing. Courts‐martial of suppliers and quartermaster personnel punished profiteering, but also symbolized the ambiguous ethical boundaries of a wartime economy.

Rapid demobilization that quickly erased the effects of the Union supply system, and the retirement of most of the generation that had masterminded it, soon after the war's end, obscured its importance. Wilson argues that its long‐term effects were indirect, but far reaching, asserting that "economic and political developments in the United States in the decades before World War I can be described as a...