Ransom on Wilson, _The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861-1865_

[eh.net-review at eh.net]

Published by EH.NET (October 2007)

Mark R. Wilson, _The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and 
the State, 1861-1865_. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 
2006. xii + 306 pp. $45 (cloth), ISBN: 0-8018-8348-2.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Roger Ransom, Department of History, 
University of California - Riverside.


Virtually every account of American economic development identifies 
the decade of the Civil War as some sort of turning point in the path 
towards industrialization. Yet, as Mark Wilson observes, by "using 
chronology frames that begin in the 1870s many studies have ensured 
that the war years figure only as a part of a shadowy background." In 
this well-written and well-documented monograph, Wilson sets out to 
demonstrate that ignoring the changes brought about by wartime 
mobilization causes the conventional wisdom to greatly understate the 
impact of the war on the "Gilded Age."

Wilson begins by presenting figures to document the enormous demands 
for men and materiel resulting from the wartime mobilization. His 
table should satisfy those who demand quantitative proof rather than 
eloquent descriptions of economic change. His estimates show that 
expenditures for the army, the navy -- and everything else the 
government spent money on -- rose dramatically from 1845 to 1861 (see 
Table 2.1, p. 38). During the war years of 1861 to 1865, Federal 
spending on the Army and Navy totaled $3 billion -- more than seven 
times the cumulative total of dollars spent by the military between 
the outbreak of the Mexican War and Bull Run! Even allowing for 
inflation (roughly a doubling of prices) during the war, this is a 
binge of spending throughout the economy on an unprecedented scale.

However, Wilson is less interested in the macro picture of military 
spending. We all knew the Civil War cost a lot. Wilson's goal is to 
provide a detailed narrative showing how it was spent. To put all 
this in perspective, we must remember that in 1860 the United States 
Army had just over 16,000 men; most of whom were stationed in the 
trans-Mississippi West. By the end of the war, the North had 
mobilized over two million men. Simply clothing soldiers was a 
gargantuan task. Every Union soldier was allowed "one or two caps and 
one hat, two coats or jackets, three flannel shirts, three pairs of 
trousers and three pairs of drawers, four pairs of stockings, and 
four pairs of shoes" (p. 91). The Union Army spent twice as much 
money clothing soldiers as it did supplying them with weapons and 
ammunition. It also spent millions of dollars on draft animals, 
foodstuffs, and the logistics of transporting men and supplies across 
the country.

The task of meeting these demands fell upon the army quartermasters 
who worked out of sixteen major depots scattered in a broad arc from 
Boston to San Francisco at the beginning of the war. These depots 
formed the basis of the system of procurement and supply throughout 
the war. As the war expanded, operation of these depots evolved into 
a complex set of government and privately operated organizations that 
included both the production of goods in government-operated 
factories, as well as the purchase of goods and services through 
contracts supervised by military personnel. At its peak, this huge 
operation of supplying the war machine accounted for more than ninety 
percent of all government expenditures. The quartermasters were thus 
at the head of a vast operation that involved, in addition to their 
own employees, state officials who equipped many of the army units 
organized in the first year of the war; contractors seeking to sell 
directly to the army; middlemen acting as agents between the army and 
various large and small providers; and representatives of labor 
groups -- such as seamstresses and ironworkers -- concerned about the 
exploitation of individuals working for government suppliers or in 
government factories. To further complicate the picture, all of this 
was carried out under the watchful eye of congressmen anxious to see 
that their constituents were treated "fairly" in the distribution of 
contracts. Wilson provides a well-documented narrative of how the 
military procurement process dealt with these contending groups and 
how it eventually met the challenge of supplying an army that could 
win the war.

The underlying argument of Wilson's book is that the story does not 
end with Lee's surrender. The bureaucracy and methods of conducting 
the "business of war" developed in the four years of war were put to 
good use by the "captains of industry" who built the industrial 
organizations that emerged in the decades following the war. "More 
than is commonly acknowledged," he argues, "economic and political 
developments in the decades before World War I can be described as a 
process of militarization" (p. 209). This point is well taken. 
Indeed, if anything, Wilson probably understates the impact of the 
changes he examines by focusing on questions of supply in the war 
decade. He credits the experience of setting up a military 
bureaucracy with playing a role in the establishment of the civil 
service. An even more direct example of how wartime bureaucracy 
spilled over into the postwar economy, which he does not mention, 
would be the creation of a pension system after the war.

What I like most about this book is the manner in which Wilson 
manages to bring home the enormity of the task that confronted those 
supplying the armies. It's easy enough to simply cite the numbers 
showing that spending increased during the war. The story behind how 
the decisions were made to actually spend those dollars turns out to 
be a fascinating tale of tug of wars between large and small 
producers; between public and private provision of goods; and, of 
course, the struggle between capitalists, farmers, and laborers as to 
who should gain the fruits from the increased wartime spending. I 
confess that at times Wilson went a bit too far delving into the 
details; at one point I felt I had been personally introduced to 
every quartermaster in the Army in 1861. But such detail is a small 
price to pay for the wealth of information packed into this 
monograph. Perhaps the highest compliment I can pay the author is to 
say that after I finished reading his book I felt compelled to 
re-write the lectures in my Civil War course that I devote to 
mobilization.


Roger Ransom is the author of _The Confederate States of America: 
What Might Have Been_ (W.W. Norton, 2005).

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