NF The Business of the Civil War

Non-Fiction

wausaubob

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Military Mobilization and the State 1861-1865
Mark R. Wilson Johns Hopkins University Press 2006.

Whether Wilson realized it, his book demonstrates that the Civil War pushed public and private resources to the absolute limit. The war rapidly sorted out methods and individuals. The inefficient and corrupt were sorted from the efficient and patriotic.
But his book also demonstrates the enormous amount of money made by both financial people and distributors who were able to deal with the government's patterns of slow pay and non cash payment. Especially at the end of the war the people who had purchased Quartermaster vouchers, and US promises to pay financed at 6% interest, made fistfuls of money. The people who had enough capital to buy bonds or had good enough banking connections to survive the War Department's cash shortages made money.
The exigencies of the war led to all possible methods being deployed to provide the quartermasters' needs. The government both produced directly in its own factories, purchased from merchants who did the search and purchasing for the government, and went into the markets as a wholesale buyer and purchased from local producers of horses and mules.
The scale at which the US Quartermaster and the US Navy operated, together with the telegraph and the railroads, changed the way people thought about the US and about business. Instead of thinking about separate sectional economies, the war, the modern communication methods, and the taxing into oblivion of private currencies finally produced the national common market that the Whig/Republicans wanted.
Wilson's research portrays a hidden dimension of the US Civil War: the intense ramping up of the military/industrial/distribution complex to levels that seemed spectacular.
 
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