Civil War Logistics: A Study of Military Transportation by Earl J. Hess (review)

Earl Hess has once again contributed to an impressive corpus of scholarship, with important scholarly contribution, which now stands as the standard scholarly work on the topic. He not only places his subject matter in a global context but points toward further areas of more detailed research, particularly with regard to understanding logistics at higher levels of resolution concerning individual campaigns and smaller units. This is especially true of the Confederacy, which Hess points out left behind a less extensive documentary source base for the scholarly study of its logistical infrastructure. For the first time, in one succinct volume, Hess lays out the logistical underpinnings of both war efforts, and the scale of the federal war effort's successful conquest of time and space to provide the material means for military victory. In addition to his excellent, prizewinning work on tactics, field fortifications, and a bevy of battle and campaign studies, Hess further cements his position as the dean of Civil War military historians.

Logistics remain to a large extent the red-haired stepchild of military history as a whole, but Hess does cite a growing body of work on logistics to help place the American Civil War experience in a larger context. In particular, the American sectional conflict "became the first major railroad war, even though European contemporaries and latter-day historians tend to ignore that fact" (15). Hess points out in particular the scale and scope of Union innovations in railroad transportation, which compared favorably to the Prussian use of railways to mobilize their forces during the German wars of unification. Most importantly, however, Hess provides a comprehensive coverage of the larger logistical systems of both sections, which included not only railroads but also river-based steamers, wagon trains, the foot-power of individual soldiers, and, in the case of the Union war effort, coastal shipping. Not only does Hess cover each system or method of transportation, for which he uses a primarily topical form of organization, he also emphasizes the degree to which all these means of locomotion meshed with each other.

In a topic as well studied as the American Civil War, Hess of course draws on secondary literature related to the topic, but his study finally draws together different strands of literature while combining it with his own primary source research in both published and manuscript sources. For example, both Edward Hagerman's The American Civil War and the Origins of Modern Warfare: Ideas, Organization, and Field Command (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), and Mark R. Wilson's The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861-1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) cover topics related to logistics, but both have significantly different areas of emphasis and coverage. It is not that historians of the American Civil War have somehow ignored the importance of logistics—the topic runs through many battle studies and larger synthetic histories, including the reviewer's own one-volume military history of the war coauthored with Williamson Murray, the earlier work of Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, and as far back as Allan Nevins—but only Hess has examined the practical workings and mechanics of Civil War supply in rigorous analytical detail.

Unsurprisingly, Hess portrays the federal logistical effort as an impressive testament to organizational and technological acumen. For example, he cites statistics from federal quartermaster records indicating that its supply system moved nearly 4 million persons, over 700,000 animals, and nearly 9.5 million tons of supplies during the war's final fiscal year alone (261). Such feats occurred in wartime conditions, with substantial resources devoted to protecting and repairing federal lines of communication—in particular, vulnerable railways. The Confederacy logistical system looks feeble in contrast, hampered by both defects in underlying industrial capacity and organizational rigidity, but Hess points out that the Confederacy remained capable of its own impressive feats of supply and movement, including...