The Business of Civil War
eBook - ePub

The Business of Civil War

Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Business of Civil War

Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access The Business of Civil War by Mark R. Wilson in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & American Civil War History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. List of Illustrations
  7. Acknowledgements
  8. Introduction
  9. Chapter 1 The Rise and Fall of a Federal Supply System
  10. Chapter 2 The Formation of a National Bureaucracy
  11. Chapter 3 The Making of a Mixed Military Economy
  12. Chapter 4 The Trouble with Contracting
  13. Chapter 5 The Middleman on Trial
  14. Chapter 6 The Unacknowledged Militarization of America
  15. Appendix A Note on the Value of a Dollar during the Civil War Era
  16. Appendix B Leading Northern Military Contractors in Selected Industries
  17. Appendix C Note on Data Collection and Record Linkages
  18. Notes
  19. Essay on Sources
  20. Index