| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Mark R. Wilson. The Business of War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865. (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2006. Pp. xii, 306. $45.00.

This is essentially an institutional study of the Union Quartermaster Department in the American Civil War, and its central thesis is that "modern American business and government were shaped directly and indirectly by a military model of administration that had been on display in 1861–1865" (p. 4). While Mark R. Wilson convincingly argues that northern leaders such as Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs and his regional quartermasters skillfully waged war by exploiting Union advantages in technology and production to devise a vast bureaucracy that employed over one hundred thousand civilian workers, he is less convincing in showing that the lessons of this military economy were taken as a model by later Populist and Progressive reformers and Gilded Age business leaders. Certainly the North's military bureaucracy was prodigious; it made or procured one billion rounds of ammunition, one million horses and mules, six million woolen blankets, and ten million pairs of trousers, but such an outpouring was accompanied by an exhaustive internal debate between those who advocated a mixed economy based on government manufacturing at depots, or "quartermaster entrepreneurialism," and those who supported "the political power of the producerist vision of military economy," a free market supply system supported by laissez-faire Republicans (p. 173). Based principally on state and national archives and on Harvard's business collections, this work makes an excellent contribution to the general understanding of Union military institutions and supplements standard studies by Fred A. Shannon and Russell F. Weigley.

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