This wide-ranging, original account of the politics and economics of the giant military supply project in the North reconstructs an important but little-known part of Civil War history. Drawing on new and extensive research in army and business archives, Mark R. Wilson offers a fresh view of the wartime North and the ways in which its economy worked when the Lincoln administration, with unprecedented military effort, moved to suppress the rebellion.
This task of equipping and sustaining Union forces fell to career army procurement officers. Largely free from political partisanship or any formal free-market ideology, they created a mixed military economy with a complex contracting system that they pieced together to meet the experience of civil war. Wilson argues that the North owed its victory to these professional military men and their finely tuned relationships with contractors, public officials, and war workers.
Wilson also examines the obstacles military bureaucrats faced, many of which illuminated basic problems of modern political economy: the balance between efficiency and equity, the promotion of competition, and the protection of workers' welfare. The struggle over these problems determined the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars; it also redirected American political and economic development by forcing citizens to grapple with difficult questions about the proper relationships among government, business, and labor.
Students of the American Civil War will welcome this fresh study of military-industrial production and procurement on the home front—long an obscure topic.
Mark R. Wilson is an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Rise and Fall of a Federal Supply System2. The Formation of a National Bureaucracy3. The Making of a Mixed Military Economy4. The Trouble with Contracting5. The Middleman on Trial6. The Unacknowledged Militarization of AmericaAppendix A: Note on the Value of a Dollar during the Civil War EraAppendix B: Leading Northern Military Contractors in Selected IndustriesAppendix C: Note on Data Collection and Record LinkagesNotesEssay on SourcesIndex
What People are Saying About This
Merritt Roe Smith
An impressively researched and fresh contribution to the field, Mark Wilson's The Business of Civil War illustrates the role of the military in the American political economy, detailing how the army comes to the fore as orchestrator and manager of the wartime economy and how the Civil War experience may have laid the foundation for postwar developments.
— Merritt Roe Smith, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
From the Publisher
An impressively researched and fresh contribution to the field, Mark Wilson's The Business of Civil War illustrates the role of the military in the American political economy, detailing how the army comes to the fore as orchestrator and manager of the wartime economy and how the Civil War experience may have laid the foundation for postwar developments.—Merritt Roe Smith, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
