A groundbreaking study of U.S. Army quartermasters during the wars of the nineteenth century. Historian John Wendt shows how the federal dollars exchanged between military personnel and civilians underwrote American expansion and had profound effects on the course of American military, economic, and social history.
The United States Army of the nineteenth century has been called many things—“conquerors,” “constabularies,” “peacekeepers,” and “professionals,” among others. Yet, despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars throughout the rapidly growing United States, rarely has the nineteenth-century Army ever been seen as a business. The Army’s quartermasters were almost entirely reliant on local banks, merchants, and markets to supply campaigns across North America, including the Second Seminole War, the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War, From this novel vantage point, John Wendt stitches together seemingly disparate military and economic events into a coherent narrative of military spending across the mid-nineteenth century.
The Army’s Quartermaster Department served as the Army’s chief military logistics agency, responsible for procuring transportation, clothing, and food. One quartermaster in particular, George Hampton Crosman, served in the department for nearly four decades of military campaigns, territorial expansion, and institutional transformation. Wendt allows readers to see through Crosman’s eyes how North American regions on the fringe of warfronts navigated the economic realities of financial crisis, western expansion, and industrialization. Significantly, he uncovers new insights into the numerous written and unwritten rules that governed the financial, logistical, and moral terms of civil-military relationships and sheds light on the individuals who quietly shaped the arc American history.
Table of Contents:
Series Editor’s Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Planning Procurement: The Expectations and Realities of Decentralized Procurement
2. “A Long Series of Petty Speculations”: The Case of Joshua B. Brant and Accountability in Military Procurement
3. Hunting the “Sedentary Infantry”: The Army’s Experiment in Accountability in the Twilight of the Second Seminole War
4. “Upon This Dangerous Coast”: The Environment and Economy of the Army of Occupation in Corpus Christi, Texas
5. Rivers of Silver and Gold: The Financial Logistics of American-Occupied Northeast Mexico
6. To Procure Victory: The Quartermaster Department Through Mobilization and Defeat
7. “Inconsistent and Tyrannical”: Federal Contracting, Labor, and the Limits of Centralized Procurement
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
John C. Wendt is Executive Director of the Pueblo County Historical Society in Pueblo, Colorado. He holds a PhD in history from Texas A&M University.
Review :
"John C. Wendt’s important and well-written new book resides at the nexus of military history and the history of capitalism and examines the career of army quartermaster George H. Crosman, whose work helped to shape the style and substance of the government’s procurement of army supplies from the Second Seminole War through the Civil War. Wendt’s innovative research and insightful scholarship illuminates the ways in which the strategy of high-ranking officers and politicians, the tactics of field commanders, and the fighting of enlisted men must be contextualized in the productive capacity of enslaved people and waged seamstresses, the distributive networks of merchants and manufacturers, the financial credit and capital of banks, and, most of all, the work of quartermasters who managed army transactions. Compellingly, Wendt also shows how quartermasters’ purchases infused capital into local and regional economies, fostered the process of industrialization, and propelled capitalist transformation."—Brian P. Luskey, author of Men Is Cheap: Exposing the Frauds of Free Labor in Civil War America
"Procuring Victory connects military, business, labor, and borderlands history, demonstrating both the power and perils of nineteenth century military procurement. Exploring the process across three wars, John Wendt adds great depth to accounts of military logistics focused on the Civil War. Constantly critical and insightful, well-informed from both army and business history perspectives, this book is essential for understanding the US military and its impact in the nineteenth century borderlands."—Samuel J. Watson, author of Peacekeepers and Conquerors: The Army Officer Corps on the American Frontier, 1821–1846
"Wendt uses impressive original research to illuminate the long career of one of the most important acquisition and logistics officers in the nineteenth-century US Army. Taking the reader from the swamps of Florida to the deserts of Mexico to the streets of Philadelphia during the Civil War, Wendt shows how George Hampton Crosman and other military professionals grappled with the near-impossible task of outfitting and sustaining armies in an era when cash was scarce and corruption abundant. This is a valuable new contribution to our understanding of American military history, with timely implications for the present day."—Mark R. Wilson, author of The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865
"This unique book offers insight into the workings of one important quartermaster of the US Army before and during the Civil War. Based on a mass of archival material, John C. Wendt explores how quartermaster George H. Crosman fulfilled his duties in the field, dealing with a variety of problems. It is a deep dip into one aspect of army institutional history during the mid-nineteenth century that will pay dividends to anyone interested in how the American army worked in the Civil War era."—Earl J. Hess, author of Shattered Courage: Soldiers Who Refused to Fight in the American Civil War
"This is a book that I wish had been written before I wrote either of my books. Scholars have long wondered where exactly money for the military ends up, and Wendt answers that by carefully assembling archival material in a compelling narrative. In the process, he also intervenes in political economy, borderland studies, and financial history, making this a must-read for a range of scholars and non-specialists."—Lindsay Schakenbach Regele, author of Flowers, Guns, and Money: Joel Roberts Poinsett and the Paradoxes of American Patriotism
