Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T08:39:15.021Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Politics of Procurement: Military Origins of Bureaucratic Autonomy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2009

Mark R. Wilson
Mark R. Wilson
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

No U.S. history textbook mentions Robert Allen, George H. Crosman, John H. Dickerson, Thomas Swords, or Stewart Van Vliet. Yet in certain respects they were five of the most important government officials in the nineteenth-century United States. Each was a high-ranking officer in the Quartermaster's Department, a bureau of the U.S. army entrusted with military procurement. During the Civil War, the supply depots in which they worked—in Philadelphia, New York, Cincinnati, and St. Louis—were indispensable adjuncts to the Union war effort. The magnitude of the procurement project was unprecedented: in four years, these five officers alone paid contractors and civilian employees $350 million. This sum amounted to nearly one-third of the total of over $1 billion that the Quartermaster's Department as a whole spent to equip the Union army. No other single project, in either government or business, involved the expenditure of such an enormous sum. In an age in which few Americans made $2 a day, $350 million was equivalent to the total wartime income of one hundred thousand households. Adjusted for inflation, this was roughly equal to the entire federal budget during the administration of President James Buchanan (1857–61).

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 18 , Issue 1: Ruling Passions: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America , January 2006 , pp. 44 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. The characterization of Union military procurement as a pork-barrel project for Republican party leaders is based primarily on scholarship published before 1945–for example, Fish, Carl Russell, The Civil Service and the Patronage (New York, 1905), 158–172Google Scholar, and Carman, Harry J. and Luthin, Reinhard H., Lincoln and the Patronage (New York, 1943)Google Scholar. Echoes of this work reverberated in later scholarship–for example, Van Riper, Paul P., History of the United States Civil Service (Evanston, 1958), 43Google Scholar; Ingraham, Patricia Wallace, The Foundation of Merit: Public Service in American Democracy (Baltimore, 1995), 21–22Google Scholar; and Smith, Adam I. P., “Beyond Politics: Patriotism and Partisanship on the Northern Home Front,” in An Uncommon Time: The Civil War and the Northern Home Front, ed. Cimbala, Paul A. and Miller, Randall M. (New York, 2002), 169Google Scholar. Even thoughtful and perceptive recent calls to expand our understanding of nineteenth-century politics tend to reinforce the traditional consensus about party and patronage. See, for example, Formisano, Ronald P., “The ‘Party Period’ Revisited,” Journal of American History 86 (06 1999): 96–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a critical survey of the party-period paradigm that calls for a renewed emphasis on political economy, see John, Richard R., “Farewell to the ‘Party Period’: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Policy History 16:2 (2004): 117–125CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Neely, Mark E. Jr., The Union Divided: Party Conflict in the Civil War North (Cambridge, Mass., 2002)Google Scholar. Even in the New York Custom House, Neely observed—the very cynosure of the spoils system during the Civil War—Republican party leaders left dozens of Democratic employees undisturbed (21–27). On the adoption of the party-period paradigm by social scientists, see Holt, Michael F., “Change and Continuity in the Party Period: The Substance and Structure of American Politics, 1835–1885,” in Contesting Democracy: Substance and Structure in American Political History, 1775–2000, ed. Shafer, Byron E. and Badger, Anthony J. (Lawrence, Kans., 2001), 93–115Google Scholar.

The persistence of outdated stereotypes regarding Civil War military procurement had been impeded by the simple fact that several leading students of nineteenth-century government administration skipped over the Civil War. This is true, for example, of both Leonard D. White and Mark W. Summers. For example, White's four-volume administrative history of the United States jumped from 1861 in The Jacksonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1829–1861 (New York, 1954)Google Scholar to 1869 in The Republicans: A Study in Administrative History, 1869–1901 (New York, 1956)Google Scholar. Similarly, Summers's overview of political corruption took the story up to the Civil War in The Plundering Generation: Corruption and the Crisis of the Union, 1848–1861 (New York, 1987)Google Scholar, and then picked up in Reconstruction in The Era of Good Stealings (New York, 1993)Google Scholar.

2. Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York, 1982), 30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bensel, Richard Franklin, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge, 1990), 236Google Scholar. The presumption that Civil War military procurement was coordinated by Republican party leaders has been widely accepted by social scientists. See, for example, Bright, Charles, “The State in the United States during the Nineteenth Century,” in Statemaking and Social Movements: Essays in History and Theory, ed. Bright, and Harding, Susan (Ann Arbor, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Skocpol, Theda, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 86–87Google Scholar; Silberman, Bernard S., Cages of Reason: The Rise of the Rational State in France, Japan, the United States, and Great Britain (Chicago, 1993), 250Google Scholar; and Hannah, Matthew G., Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 2000), 34Google Scholar.

3. The concept of bureaucratic autonomy is developed in Carpenter, Daniel P., The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton, 2001)Google Scholar. Autonomy, Carpenter stressed, was never absolute: unrestrained autonomy was the “stuff of deities, not political actors” (18). Yet even the limited autonomy attained by certain late nineteenth-century middle-level administrators in the Post Office Department and the Department of Agriculture gave them the power to outmaneuver elected officials—even in a government that was ostensibly democratic, and thus under tight congressional control.

4. For a more extended discussion of the “mezzo” level of government administration, see Carpenter, Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 18–25.

5. Katznelson, Ira, “Flexible Capacity: The Military and Early American Statebuilding,” in Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development, ed. Katznelson, and Shefter, Martin (Princeton, 2002), 82–110Google Scholar. According to one leading historically oriented political scientist, Katznelson's essay “confirmed” the presumption that party leaders dominated the military in nineteenth-century America. Carpenter, Daniel P., “The Multiple and Material Legacies of Stephen Skowronek,” Social Science History 27 (Fall 2003): 469–470CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Carpenter's conclusion, however, is belied by Katznelson himself, who conceived of his essay as exploratory and an invitation to new empirical research rather than a summary of an existing consensus.

6. To bring the military “back” in would be, in the context of U.S. historical writing, anachronistic, since few historians have ever regarded the military as an agent of change.

7. Weigley, Russell F., Quartermaster General of the Union Army: A Biography of M. C. Meigs (New York, 1959)Google Scholar.

8. For basic biographical information on Allen, Crosman, Dickerson, Swords, and Van Vliet, see Cullum, George W., Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates of the U.S. Military Academy, 3d ed. (Boston, 1891), 1:345–346, 436–37, 651–53; 2:30–31, 313Google Scholar.

9. File 351, reel 34 (Swords), and file 49, reel 67 (Allen), U.S. Military Academy Cadet Application Papers, 1805–66, National Archives Microfilm Publication M688.

10. Morrison, James L. Jr., “The Best School in the World”: West Point, the Pre–Civil War Years, 1833–1866 (Kent, Ohio, 1986)Google Scholar.

11. Watson, Samuel J., “Manifest Destiny and Military Professionalism: Junior U.S. Army Officers' Attitudes towards War with Mexico, 1844–1846,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 99 (04 1996): 466–498Google Scholar.

12. The nineteenth-century army and its officer corps is the subject of two excellent books: Coffman, Edward M., The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime, 1784–1898 (New York, 1988)Google Scholar, and Skelton, William B., An American Profession of Arms: The Army Officer Corps, 1784–1861 (Lawrence, Kans., 1992)Google Scholar.

13. Myers, Harry C., ed., “From ‘The Crack Post of the Frontier’: Letters of Thomas and Charlotte Swords,” Kansas History 5 (Winter 1982): 184–213Google Scholar; Risch, Erna, Quartermaster Support of the Army: A History of the Corps, 1775–1939 (Washington, D.C., 1962), 278–280Google Scholar; Harlow, Neal, California Conquered: War and Peace on the Pacific, 1846–1850 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982), 201, 274–75Google Scholar.

14. Van Vliet to Jesup, 9 August 1857, box 1174, e. 225, Record Group 92 (Records of the Office of the Quartermaster General), National Archives, Washington, D.C. [cited hereafter as RG 92, NA]. The standard history of the Utah expeditions remains Norman Furniss, F., The Mormon Conflict, 1850–1859 (New Haven, 1960)Google Scholar.

15. Jackson, W. Turrentine, Wagon Roads West: A Study of Federal Road Surveys and Construction in the Trans-Mississippi West, 1846–1869 (Berkeley, 1952), 132–134Google Scholar.

16. Utah Expedition, 35th Cong. 1st sess., 1858, H. Exec. Doc. 71, serial 956; Dickerson to Jesup, 20 November 1857; Dickerson, , “Abstract of Quartermaster's Property in Possession of the Army of Utah,” 31 12 1857Google Scholar; both in box 1174, e. 225, RG 92, NA.

17. On the Quartermaster's Department during the Civil War, see Weigley, Quartermaster General, and Risch, Quartermaster Support.

18. On Ekin, see Biographical History of Eminent and Self-Made Men of the State of Indiana (Cincinnati, 1880), 1:13–16Google Scholar. On the Moulton-Sherman relationship, see J. K. Butterfield to John Sherman, 12 April 1864, reel 1, John Sherman Papers, Library of Congress (microfilm edition). On Samuel L. Brown and his father, see William H. Brown to Lincoln, 19 October 1861, in 2215 ACP 1882, RG 94 (Records of the Adjutant General's Office), National Archives; Hunt, Roger D. and Brown, Jack R., Brevet Brigadier Generals in Blue (Gaithersburg, Md., 1990), 83Google Scholar; and Jaher, Frederic Cople, The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles (Urbana, 1982), 461–462Google Scholar.

19. Recent research suggests there is still some disagreement about the relative importance of partisanship in the appointment of field officers. In Polsky, Andrew J., “‘Mr. Lincoln's Army’ Revisited: Partisanship, Institutional Position, and Union Army Command, 1861–1865,” Studies in American Political Development 16 (Fall 2002): 176–207, the importance of partisanship was downplayedGoogle Scholar. In Goss, Thomas J., The War within the Union High Command: Politics and Generalship during the Civil War (Lawrence, Kans., 2003), on the other hand, partisan politics loomed largerGoogle Scholar.

20. The long-accepted view that party competition helped the Union win the war has recently been challenged by Mark E. Neely Jr. See, for example, Neely, Union Divided, esp. 1–6, 173–201. The political division between officers and volunteers within the supply depots lends support to Neely's conclusion. Still, it is possible that the refusal of depot chiefs to purge Democrats may have bolstered the Union's war effort by increasing the legitimacy of the procurement project among the many northerners who remained less than enthusiastic about Republican control.

21. Weigley, Quartermaster General, 75, 131; Skelton, William B., “Officers and Politicians: The Origins of Army Politics in the United States before the Civil War,” Armed Forces and Society 6 (Fall 1979): 22–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Watson, “Manifest Destiny and Military Professionalism.”

22. The details of Van Vliet's purchasing activities were subsequently published: David D. Mitchell, 37th Cong. 2d sess., 1862, H. Rpt. C.C. 281, serial 1146.

23. Allen to Polk, 22 January 1846; Allen to Jesup, 6 March 1846 and 13 April 1846; all in box 27, e. 225, RG 92, NA; Crosman to [no first name] Eaton, 4 November 1858, box 13, Eldridge Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

24. Burnside to Stanton, 27 April 1863, box 504, e. 225, RG 92, NA. For more on Dickerson and wartime Cincinnati, see Terry, Clinton W., “‘The Most Commercial of People’: Cincinnati, the Civil War, and Industrial Capitalism, 1861–1865” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cincinnati, 2002)Google Scholar.

25. Hurtt Court-Martial, 43d Cong. 1st sess., 1874, H. Exec. Doc. 255, serial 1614, 289.

26. Government Contracts, Part II, 37th Cong. 2d sess., 1862, H. Rpt. 2, serial 1143, 155–59, 1372–97; M. Hall Stanton to Cameron, 22 March 1865, reel 9, Cameron Papers, Library of Congress (microfilm); “Mr. M. Hall Stanton,” Harper's Weekly 20 (12 02 1876): 127Google Scholar; Carman and Luthin, Lincoln and the Patronage, 290–92; The Great Libel Case: Opdyke vs. Weed (New York, 1865)Google Scholar.

27. For more detail, see Wilson, Mark R., “The Business of Civil War: Military Enterprise, the State, and Political Economy in the United States, 1850–1880” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2002)Google Scholar.

28. The importance of reputation is a central theme of Carpenter, Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy.

29. Although no one doubts that the Quartermaster's Department employed an enormous number of civilians during the Civil War, the precise size of this workforce remains uncertain. Van Riper and Sutherland put the total in 1865 at 130,000; Van Riper, Paul P. and Sutherland, Keith A., “The Northern Civil Service, 1861–1865,” Civil War History 11 (12 1965), 351–369CrossRefGoogle Scholar. One contemporary put the total in 1863–64 at 93,700. J. J. Dana to A. B. Eaton, 6 October 1864, vol. 80, p. 216, reel 48, National Archives Microfilm Publication M745 (Letters Sent from the Office of the Quartermaster General, Main Series).

30. “Observations in the Quartermaster's Department,” Cincinnati Daily Commercial, 2 December 1861; Report of Capt. C. E. Bliven, 30 September 1865, box 316, e. 225, RG 92, NA. See also Wilson, Mark R., “The Extensive Side of Nineteenth-Century Military Economy: The Tent Industry in the Northern United States during the Civil War,” Enterprise and Society 2 (06 2001): 297–337CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31. For Dickerson's testimony, see Government Contracts, part II, 741–43, 934–39.

32. Wilson, “Business of Civil War,” esp. chaps. 4–5.

33. For Swords's annual report for 1863, see vol. 5, e. 1127, RG 92, NA.

34. Allen to Meigs, 3 February 1862, in Records of Quartermaster William Myers, vol. 1, e. 381, RG 92, NA.

35. Crosman payrolls, e. 238, second subseries (oversize), 1864, RG 92, NA; Crosman to Quartermaster General's Office, 30 July 1864, vol. 23, e. 999, RG 92, NA; North American & U.S. Gazette, 27 July 1863, 24 August 1863; “Philadelphia Seamstresses—Meeting of Women Employed in the U.S. Arsenal,” Fincher's Trades Review, 8 August 1863. See also Gallman, J. Matthew, Mastering Wartime: A Social History of Philadelphia during the Civil War (New York, 1990), 243Google Scholar, and Seidman, Rachel Filene, “Beyond Sacrifice: Women and Politics on the Pennsylvania Homefront during the Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1995), 144–446Google Scholar.

36. Jesup to Justus McKinstry, 6 September 1859, vol. 53, p. 406, reel 34, M745.

37. For a related discussion, see Anderson, Fred and Cayton, Andrew, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000 (New York, 2005)Google Scholar.

38. For an overview of the combat operations of the U.S. military in the West during the nineteenth century, see Prucha, Francis Paul, The Sword of the Republic: The United States Army on the Frontier, 1783–1846 (New York, 1969)Google Scholar; Utley, Robert M., Frontiersmen in Blue: The United States Army and the Indian, 1848–1865 (New York, 1967)Google Scholar; and Utley, , Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1891 (New York, 1973)Google Scholar.

39. White, Richard, “It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West (Norman, Okla., 1991), esp. 57–59Google Scholar. See also Rockwell, Stephen J., “Building the Old American State: Indian Affairs, Politics, and Administration from the Early Republic to the New Deal” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 2001), 63–64, 88Google Scholar; and Katznelson, “Flexible Capacity,” 98–99. The pivotal role of the military in the making of the West—from exploration and road-building to military contracting and the administration of national parks—has long been emphasized by historians of the region. Jackson, Wagon Roads West; Prucha, Francis Paul, Broadax and Bayonet: The Role of the United States Army in the Development of the Northwest, 1815–1860 (Madison, 1953)Google Scholar; Hill, Forest G., Roads, Rails, and Waterways: The Army Engineers and Early Transportation (Norman, Okla., 1957)Google Scholar; Goetzmann, William H., Army Exploration in the American West, 1803–1863 (New Haven, 1959)Google Scholar; Unruh, John D. Jr., The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–1860 (Urbana, 1979), chap. 6Google Scholar; Frazer, Robert W., Forts and Supplies: The Role of the Army in the Economy of the Southwest, 1846–1861 (Albuquerque, 1983)Google Scholar; Miller, Darlis A., Soldiers and Settlers: Military Supply in the Southwest, 1861–1885 (Albuquerque, 1989)Google Scholar; Dobak, William A., Fort Riley and Its Neighbors: Military Money and Economic Growth, 1853–1895 (Norman, Okla., 1998)Google Scholar; Smith, Thomas T., The U.S. Army and the Texas Frontier Economy, 1845–1900 (College Station, Tex., 1999)Google Scholar; Tate, Michael L., The Frontier Army in the Settlement of the West (Norman, Okla., 1999)Google Scholar; and Klyza, Christopher McGrory, “The United States Army, Natural Resources, and Political Development in the Nineteenth Century,” Polity 35 (Fall 2002): 1–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40. Key works on the contributions of the army to nineteenth-century economic development include Hill, Roads, Rails, and Waterways; Smith, Merritt Roe, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change (Ithaca, 1977)Google Scholar; Shallat, Todd, Structures in the Stream: Water, Science, and the Rise of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Austin, 1994)Google Scholar; Dunlavy, Colleen A., Politics and Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States and Prussia (Princeton, 1994)Google Scholar; Wettemann, Robert Paul Jr., “‘To the Public Prosperity’: The U.S. Army and the Market Revolution, 1815–1844” (Ph.D. diss., Texas A&M University, 2001)Google Scholar; and Angevine, Robert G., The Railroad and the State: War, Politics, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America (Stanford, 2004)Google Scholar.

The influence of mid-level army officers in the shaping of early American foreign policy is imaginatively explored in Watson, “Manifest Destiny and Military Professionalism,” and Watson, , “United States Army Officers Fight the ‘Patriot War’: Responses to Filibustering on the Canadian Border, 1837–1839,” Journal of the Early Republic 18 (Fall 1998): 485–519CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41. Watson, Samuel J., “Professionalism, Social Attitudes, and Civil-Military Accountability in the United States Army Officer Corps, 1815–1846” (Ph.D. diss., Rice University, 1996)Google Scholar; Skelton, American Profession of Arms. In the first half of the nineteenth century, as Watson demonstrated, the navy lagged behind the army in establishing a service academy and instituting a formal administrative organization. On navy officers, see Karsten, Peter, The Naval Aristocracy: The Golden Age of Annapolis and the Emergence of Modern American Navalism (New York, 1972)Google Scholar; McKee, Christopher, A Gentlemanly and Honorable Profession: The Creation of the U.S. Naval Officer Corps, 1794–1815 (Annapolis, 1991)Google Scholar; and Chisholm, Donald, Waiting for Dead Men's Shoes: Origins and Development of the U.S. Navy's Officer Personnel System, 1793–1941 (Stanford, 2001)Google Scholar.

42. Watson, “Professionalism, Social Attitudes, and Civil-Military Accountability,” 728. For a similar conclusion, see O'Connell, Charles F. Jr., “The Corps of Engineers and the Rise of Modern Management, 1827–1856,” in Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience, ed. Smith, Merritt Roe (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 89–90Google Scholar; Hoskin, Keith W. and Macve, Richard H., “The Genesis of Accountability: The West Point Connections,” Accounting, Organizations and Society 13:1 (1988), 37–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Angevine, Robert G., “Individuals, Organizations, and Engineering: U.S. Army Officers and the American Railroads, 1827–1838,” Technology and Culture 42 (04 2001): 299CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although Angevine underscored the limited professionalism of the army engineers enlisted to help build railroads in the 1830s, he concluded that the army officer corps had become professionalized by 1846. Angevine, Railroad and the State, 109.

43. The physical isolation of army officers may have been at its peak in the 1850s, just after the seizure of huge new territories from Mexico. Before the U.S.-Mexico War, many officers had been posted east of the Mississippi, where contact with civilians was more common. On this point, see Watson, “Professionalism, Social Attitudes, and Civil-Military Accountability.” The physical isolation of army officers in the post–Civil War period is much debated: Gates, John M., “The Alleged Isolation of U.S. Army Officers in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Parameters 10 (09 1980): 32–36Google Scholar, and Gough, Terrence J., “Isolation and Professionalism of the Army Officer Corps: A Post-Revisionist View of The Soldier and the State,” Social Science Quarterly 73:2 (1992): 420–436Google Scholar.

44. Hewes, James E. Jr., From Root to McNamara: Army Organization and Administration, 1900–1963 (Washington, D.C., 1975), 1–6Google Scholar; Skelton, William B., “The Army in the Age of the Common Man, 1815–1845,” in Against All Enemies: Interpretations of American Military History from Colonial Times to the Present, ed. Hogan, Kenneth J. and Roberts, William R. (New York, 1986), 91–112Google Scholar; O'Connell, “Corps of Engineers and the Rise of Modern Management.” A good introduction to Calhoun's tenure in the War Department remains Wiltse, Charles M., John C. Calhoun, Nationalist, 1782–1828 (New York, 1944)Google Scholar.

45. Kiefer, Chester L., Maligned General: The Biography of Thomas Sidney Jesup (San Rafael, Calif., 1979), 67–118Google Scholar; Watson, “Professionalism, Social Attitudes, and Civil-Military Accountability,” 617–31; Wilson, “Business of Civil War,” chap. 1.

46. Again, this claim runs counter to the consensus among historians and political scientists. In addition to the sources listed in notes 1 and 2 above, see Wilson, James Q., Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It (New York, 1989), 240–241Google Scholar; Martin Shefter, “War, Trade, and U.S. Party Politics,” in Katznelson and Shefter, Shaped by War and Trade, 117–18. For a more nuanced discussion of army administration that highlights the bureaucratic autonomy of the military bureaus in Washington, see White, Jacksonians. For an important recent study that generally endorsed the “courts and parties” paradigm of the early state while acknowledging that certain “pockets” of the early state did not fit the paradigm, see Carpenter, Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 11, 42, 366. The Quartermaster's Department was one such “pocket”—before, during, and after the Civil War.

47. The influence on the pre-Civil War military of civilian control and partisan politics is a theme of Cunliffe, Marcus, Soldiers and Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America, 1775–1865 (Boston, 1968)Google Scholar; Crackel, Theodore J., Mr. Jefferson's Army: Political and Social Reform of the Military Establishment, 1801–1809 (New York, 1987)Google Scholar; and Winders, Richard Bruce, Mr. Polk's Army: The American Military Experience in the Mexican War (College Station, Tex., 1997)Google Scholar. See also Coffman, Edward M., “The Duality of the American Military Tradition: A Commentary,” Journal of Military History 64 (10 2000): 967–980CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48. Wilson, “Business of Civil War,” esp. chaps. 3, 6.

49. For a salutary call for more scholarly investigation of the mezzo level of government administration, see Carpenter, Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 18–25.

50. On gentlemanly conservatism and paternalism in the early army officer corps, see Watson, “Professionalism, Social Attitudes, and Civil-Military Accountability,” 610, 850, 1512. On the illiberal dimension of the late eighteenth-century policies that created the U.S. military, see Kohn, Richard H., Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783–1802 (New York, 1975)Google Scholar; Ebling, Max, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (New York, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Browne, Susan M., “War-Making and U.S. State Formation: Mobilization, Demobilization, and the Inherent Ambiguities of Federalism,” in Irregular Armed Forces and Their Role in Politics and State Formation, ed. Davis, Diane E. and Pereira, Anthony W. (Cambridge, 2003), 232–252CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51. Katznelson, “Flexible Capacity,” 83–84, 86–89. For a broader critique of the “courts and parties” paradigm, see John, Richard R., “Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking American Political Development in the Early Republic, 1787–1835,” Studies in American Political Development 11 (Fall 1997): 347–380CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and John, “Farewell to the ‘Party Period.’”

52. Katznelson, “Flexible Capacity,” 91–93. To be sure, several European countries spent more on military outlays, especially in peacetime. The ratio of military to civil expenditures, however, varied from country to country. For comparative statistics on military spending, see Rasler, Karen A. and Thompson, William R., War and State Making: The Shaping of the Global Powers (Boston, 1989)Google Scholar; Mann, Michael, The Sources of Social Power, Volume II: The Rise of Classes and Nation States, 1760–1914 (Cambridge, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Porter, Bruce D., War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics (New York, 1994)Google Scholar.

53. Katznelson, “Flexible Capacity,” 104.

54. The extent to which historians have marginalized the military is part of a more general problem. In virtually every period in American history, the military has been neglected even by those historians who regard state-building as a major focus of their research. On this point, see Hooks, Gregory, Forging the Military-Industrial Complex: World War II's Battle of the Potomac (Urbana, 1991), 4Google Scholar. This neglect is evident in an important recent collection that featured the work of a rising generation of leading political historians. Jacobs, Meg, Novak, William J., and Zelizer, Julian E., eds., The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History (Princeton, 2003)Google Scholar.

One reason for this neglect is the failure of military historians to highlight broad interpretative themes that go beyond the doggedly chronological recapitulation of key events. Examples of the latter include Weigley, Russell F., History of the United States Army (New York, 1967)Google Scholar; Hassler, Warren W. Jr., With Shield and Sword: American Military Affairs, Colonial Times to the Present (Ames, Iowa, 1982)Google Scholar; Hagan, Kenneth J., This People's Navy: The Making of American Sea Power (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; and Millett, Allan R. and Maslowski, Peter, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America (New York, rev. ed., 1994)Google Scholar.

55. The persistence of this exceptionalist strain in U.S. historiography distinguishes it from the dominant recent trend in European historiography, which is typically either anti-exceptionalist or post-exceptionalist. See, for example, Blackbourn, David and Eley, Geoff, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eley, , ed., Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930 (Ann Arbor, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bönker, Dirk, “Militarizing the Western World: Navalism, Empire, and State-Building in the United States before World War I” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2002)Google Scholar. This recent work differed markedly from such classic exceptionalist accounts as Craig, Gordon A., The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640–1945 (New York, 1956)Google Scholar. Craig's history of the Prussian army was clearly shaped by his interest in explaining the origins of a German “problem” that hastened World War II.

56. Katznelson, “Flexible Capacity,” 85–86; Brewer, John, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, Mass., 1988)Google Scholar.

57. Katznelson, “Flexible Capacity,” 104.

58. Van Vliet to Thomas W. Sweeny, 30 September 1891, Sweeny Papers, SW 714, Huntington Library; Warner, Ezra J., Generals in Blue: Lives of the Union Commanders (Baton Rouge, 1964), 524Google Scholar.

59. For an overview of state-society relations in many countries that echoed this characterization, see Mann, Sources of Social Power, 2:395, 424, 459.

60. For a classic statement of the centrality of big business to the restructuring of the federal civil service, see Wiebe, Robert, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York, 1965)Google Scholar. The primacy of big business in shaping the rise of the modern state is also a theme of two influential essays by Galambos, Louis: “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” Business History Review 44 (Autumn 1970): 279–290CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Technology, Political Economy, and Professionalization: Central Themes of the Organizational Synthesis,” Business History Review 57 (Winter 1983): 471–493CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61. The primacy of big business in the shaping of the modern administrative state is emphasized even by the several sophisticated accounts of American political development that are sensitive to the role of the political economy in the making of the modern United States. See, for example, Skowronek, Building a New American State, 13, and Bensel, Richard Franklin, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877–1900 (Cambridge, 2000), 289–291CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a rare dissenting view, see John, Richard R., Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, Mass., 1995)Google Scholar, and John, , “Public Enterprise, Public Good? Communications Deregulation as a National Political Issue, 1839–1851,” in Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic, ed. Pasley, Jeffrey L., Robertson, Andrew W., and Waldstreicher, David (Chapel Hill, 2004), 328–354, esp. 332–33Google Scholar. For a recent suggestion that political historians pay more attention to “organizational cultures” and “organizational repertories,” see Baker, Paula, “The Midlife Crisis of the New Political History,” Journal of American History 86 (06 1999): 160–161CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62. For an influential characterization of the post–Civil War army as organizationally backward and politically subservient, see Skowronek, Building a New American State, 86–97. Little changed, Skowronek posited, until the early twentieth century, when a number of outsiders—including the New York lawyers Elihu Root and Henry Stimson—recast the army by introducing the efficient methods pioneered by the nation's leading industrial corporations (212–47). See also Hewes Jr., From Root to McNamara, 6–15, and Barr, Ronald J., The Progressive Army: U.S. Army Command and Administration, 1870–1914 (New York, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

One of the few accounts of military reorganization that permitted military officers a modicum of agency is Karsten, Peter, “Armed Progressives: The Military Reorganizes for the American Century,” in Building the Organizational Society: Essays on Associational Activities in Modern America, ed. Israel, Jerry (New York, 1972), 197–232Google Scholar. Yet even Karsten concluded that the reorganization of the military—like that of many other organizations—followed a corporate template.

Breaking ranks with this consensus is a recent dissertation by Terrence Gough, which contended that Root, as secretary of war, had a good deal of guidance from military officers, and embraced business rhetoric for reasons that were tactical rather than substantive, and that grew out of a long-running power struggle within the military itself. Gough, Terrence James, “The Battle of Washington: Soldiers and Businessmen in World War I” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1997), chap. 1Google Scholar; Gough, “Isolation and Professionalism,” 421–28.

63. Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 204–205Google Scholar.

64. Kammen, Michael, “The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration,” American Quarterly 45 (03 1993): 23CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although many business historians have challenged Chandler's magisterial account of the rise of big business by underscoring the continuing vitality of small enterprises, few have questioned his related claim that big business pioneered modern managerial techniques. For a rare dissent, see John, Spreading the News; for a succinct restatement of John's claim that big government preceded big business, even in the United States, see John, “Private Enterprise, Public Good?” 332.

Among the many interesting recent books to focus on business enterprises other than the large corporation, see, in particular, Berk, Gerald, Alternative Tracks: The Constitution of the American Industrial Order, 1865–1917 (Baltimore, 1994)Google Scholar; Scranton, Philip, Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865–1925 (Princeton, 1997)Google Scholar; and Cohen, Andrew Wender, The Racketeer's Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900–1940 (Cambridge, 2004)Google Scholar.

65. Adams, Charles F. Jr., “An Erie Raid,” North American Review 112 (04 1871): 241–242Google Scholar. For a related discussion, see Ward, James A., “Image and Reality: The Railway Corporate-State Metaphor,” Business History Review 55 (Winter 1981): 491–516CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

For a recent call to revive the thesis floated a half-century ago by Allan Nevins that the Civil War accelerated in the United States the rise of Weberian rationality and bureaucratic organizational forms, see Fredrickson, George M., “Nineteenth-Century American History,” in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. Molho, Anthony and Wood, Gordon S. (Princeton, 1998), 177–179Google Scholar. Fredrickson also touched on this idea in his first book, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York, 1965), 209Google Scholar. For Nevins's thesis, see Nevins, Allan, “A Major Result of the Civil War,” Civil War History 5 (09 1959): 237–250CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66. See, for example, Fredrickson, Inner Civil War, 209. For a brief amplification, see Wilson, Mark R., The Business of Civil War: The Politics of U.S. Military Economy in the Era of the Civil War (Baltimore, forthcoming), chap. 6Google Scholar. The standard history of civil service reform remains Hoogenboom, Ari A., Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement, 1865–1883 (Urbana, 1961)Google Scholar. On the role of the military in providing an organizational template for late nineteenth-century government administration, see Carpenter, Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 76–102, and Carpenter, , “The Corporate Metaphor and Executive Department Centralization in the United States, 1888–1928,” Studies in American Political Development 12 (Spring 1998): 162–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67. Rodgers, Daniel T., “Exceptionalism,” in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. Molho, Anthony and Wood, Gordon S. (Princeton, 1998), 21–40Google Scholar. For a discussion of how the exceptionalist impulse has discouraged post–World War II social scientists from exploring the postwar American state, see Ciepley, David, “Why the State Was Dropped in the First Place: A Prequel to Skocpol's ‘Bringing the State Back In,’” Critical Review 14 (2000): 157–213CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a good discussion of the long-standing distinction between German “authoritarian militarism” and American “democracy,” see Steinisch, Irmgard, “Different Path to War: A Comparative Study of Militarism and Imperialism in the United States and Imperial Germany, 1871–1914,” in Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871–1914, ed. Boemke, Manfred F., Chickering, Roger, and Förster, Stig (Cambridge, 1999), 29–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68. For a thoughtful discussion of how the tragedy of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam has encouraged the nostalgic presumption that, in the period before 1900, the military remained contented to defer unconditionally to civilian rule, see Challener, Richard D., Admirals, Generals, and American Foreign Policy, 1898–1914 (Princeton, 1973), 401–410Google Scholar.

69. See, for example, LaFeber, Walter, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, 1963)Google Scholar; Horsman, Reginald, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass., 1981)Google Scholar; and Love, Eric T. L., Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill, 2004)Google Scholar.

70. On the distinction between militarization and militarism, see Gillis, John R., “Introduction,” in The Militarization of the Western World, ed. Gillis, (New Brunswick, 1989)Google Scholar. Prior to World War II, as noted above, the U.S. peacetime army remained significantly smaller than its counterparts in Great Britain, France, and Germany. So too did the size of its military budget. Still, a small army could be very effective, while, by the end of the nineteenth century the U.S. navy had emerged as a world-class fighting force with considerable ambition. On the latter, see Bönker, “Militarizing the Western World.” The army also figured prominently—in conjunction with state militias and the national guard—in the endemic management-labor clashes of the late nineteenth century—which contemporaries often termed a “war.” See, for example, Reinders, Robert, “Militia and Public Order in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American Studies 11 (04 1977): 81–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cooper, Jerry M., The Army and Civil Disorder: Federal Military Intervention in Labor Disputes, 1877–1900 (Westport, Conn., 1980)Google Scholar; Fogelson, Robert M., America's Armories: Architecture, Society, and Public Order (Cambridge, Mass., 1989)Google Scholar; Montgomery, David, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar; Cooper, , The Rise of the National Guard: The Evolution of the American Militia, 1865–1920 (Lincoln, Neb., 1997)Google Scholar; Hannah, Eleanor L., “Manhood, Citizenship, and the Formation of the National Guards, Illinois, 1870–1917” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1997)Google Scholar; Kaufman, Jason, “‘Americans and Their Guns’: Civilian Military Organizations and the Destabilization of American National Security,” Studies in American Political Development 15 (Spring 2001), 88–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Archer, Robin, “Does Repression Help to Create Labor Parties? The Effect of Police and Military Intervention on Unions in the United States and Australia,” Studies in American Political Development 15 (Fall 2001): 188–219CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Coan, Francis M., “The Connecticut National Guard, 1865–1919” (Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut, 2002)Google Scholar.