A Quartermaster's Business: Military Procurement and the Developing American Economy in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This dissertation traces the interaction and development of the American national economy and state by examining military spending from 1835 to 1865. During these years, the United States Army engaged in three major wars: the Second Seminole War (1835-1842), the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), and the American Civil War (1861-1865). Over these thirteen years of fighting, the United States expended thousands of lives and billions of dollars in pursuit of its policy aims of conquest over the peoples of Florida and Mexico and of sovereignty over seceding southern states. Throughout these conflicts the U.S. Army Quartermaster Department exemplified the overlap of American expenditure in blood and treasure. The Quartermaster Department was the Army’s chief military procurement agency, responsible for supplying troops with transportation, clothing, and forage. The decisions made by individual quartermasters while navigating the grey areas between military and financial policies, local markets, and wartime demands shaped local economies and military campaigns across its three major wars from 1835-1865.

This dissertation follows the career of one quartermaster, George Hampton Crosman’s experiences in the Quartermaster Department. In following Crosman’s career two systems of military procurement emerge, neither of which were formally codified in military policy or Congressional acts. This project defines them as pre-industrial procurement and industrial procurement to reflect the centralizing and technological innovations that shaped military procurement and civilian business from 1835-1865. Pre-industrial procurement, adopted in the early days of the Second Seminole War, placed significant amounts of financial responsibility in the hands of junior level assistant-quartermasters who often acted alone across the American frontiers. Industrial procurement, emerging in 1862, was marked by technological and financial innovations like the telegraph, railroad, and new forms of treasury notes called certificates of indebtedness which combined to create a revolution in military purchasing power. These innovations facilitated, for the first time in Army operations, a close coordination between demands of generals in the field, quartermasters in four major northern industrial cities, and hundreds of civilian contractors. Through the experiences George Crosman seemingly disparate military and economic events align into a coherent narrative of military spending across the mid-nineteenth century.