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.
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Rise and Fall of a Federal Supply System 2. The Formation of a National Bureaucracy 3. The Making of a Mixed Military Economy 4. The Trouble with Contracting 5. The Middleman on Trial 6. The Unacknowledged Militarization of America Appendix A: Note on the Value of a Dollar during the Civil War Era Appendix B: Leading Northern Military Contractors in Selected Industries Appendix C: Note on Data Collection and Record Linkages Notes Essay on Sources Index
""Readers will find Wilson's deeply researched account well worth the investment as a study of wartime political economy. It explores areas hitherto mostly neglected and rarely explored: readers will profit from learning how Union authorities procured the material means used to save the Union.""
