Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

was also Stanton who helped destroy George Brinton McClellan. “This army has to fight or run away,” Stanton growled to Dana, and Stanton took it upon himself to ensure that “while men are striving nobly in the West, the champagne and oysters on the Potomac must be stopped.”71

Determined to sweep up the entire War Department as his private fiefdom, Stanton began welding the various parts of the Department together into a unified and coherent machine. His first move in that direction was to have McClellan deposed as general in chief of the Federal armies in March 1862 and replaced in July with Henry Wager Halleck. In the process, Stanton sharply redefined the job of general in chief, so Halleck spent the rest of the war as little more than the means of transmitting Stanton’s policy directives down to commanders out in the field. To be fair to Halleck, there really was a need, in a civilian-run republic, for a reliable and competent organizer who could serve as that kind of liaison between the civilian leadership at the War Department and the military at the front, and Halleck performed the job superbly throughout the war. “Halleck was not thought to be a great man in the field,” wrote Dana, who joined the War Department as one of Stanton’s assistant secretaries of war, “but he was nevertheless a man of military ability, and by reason of his great accomplishments in the technics of armies and of war was almost invaluable as an adviser to the civilian Lincoln and Stanton.”72

In addition to the general in chief, Stanton next brought securely under his dictate the heads of the three most important War Department supply bureaus: the quartermaster general, Montgomery C. Meigs; the commissary general, Joseph P. Taylor; and the truculent chief of ordnance, James Wolfe Ripley. None of these men was more important to Stanton than Meigs, a forty-six-year-old Georgian who had only been promoted to brigadier general in 1861. The quartermaster-general was responsible for supplying the Federal armies with all of their basic hardware, including uniforms, tents, ambulance wagons, supply wagons, mules, cavalry and transport horses, and the forage to feed them—everything from hospitals to tent pins. And supplying the immense variety of the army’s goods was only half the challenge. The sheer volume of what was required of each of these items staggered belief. Already in September 1861, the Army of the Potomac needed 20,000 cavalry horses and a further 20,000 transportation horses just to do its daily business. On the peninsula, the Army of the Potomac needed 14,000 horses and mules (along with 26 wagons for every 1,000 men) to haul baggage and supplies. By the middle of 1862 that requisition had swollen to 1,500 horses weekly in six depots across the North, and by 1864 the demand had risen to 500 horses a day, with the government shelling out $170 per horse. Outfitting a new regiment with uniforms cost $20,000 per regiment (Brooks Brothers won a contract for 12,000 uniforms for New York state volunteers in 1861 at the discount price of $19.50 per uniform), and the uniforms could easily be worn out after three months of campaigning. Shoes were by far the worst problem, since the army could scarcely move without them, and when it did move, it consumed them at a rate of 25,000 pairs weekly.73

Since so much of this had to be done virtually at once, and by officers and clerks who had never before in their lives administered anything like it, the opportunities for mistake and oversight were legion. Individual states muddied the picture by launching their own procurement initiatives—Pennsylvania’s quartermaster general, R. C. Hale, set up a shop to cut and sew uniforms in Philadelphia, Illinois created a state arsenal, Massachusetts governor John Andrew sent a state agent to England to purchase 19,000 rifles—and Meigs had to struggle to wrench control from their hands in order to guarantee some semblance of standardization.74

At the same time, Meigs shied away from committing the government to the actual manufacture and production of its own supplies. Meigs was strictly a retailer; the actual production of the army’s goods remained in the hands of private civilian contractors. It also went without saying that, under these circumstances, the opportunities for fraud, kickbacks, and corruption were great. Nevertheless, Montgomery Meigs proved to be both tireless and incorruptible as quartermaster general. He reorganized the Quartermaster’s Department into nine division (for animals, clothing, transportation, forage, barracks, hospitals, wagons, inspection, and finance) and expanded the workforce in his office to 591 by the end of the war, with 130,000 other employees in depots across the North. At the same time, his expenditures rose over the course of the war from $40,631,000 in 1861–62 to $226,199,000 in 1864–65, and by the end of the war his department was spending nearly half a billion dollars a year. Despite the gargantuan size and frantic demands of his department, a congressional audit could not find so much as one penny unaccounted for in any major contract authorized by Meigs.75

Keeping the Federal armies clothed and equipped was one thing. Keeping them fed and armed was quite another, and those responsibilities fell to Commissary General Taylor and Chief of Ordnance Ripley. Neither Ripley nor Taylor ever won the praise awarded to Montgomery Meigs—Ripley because of his stubborn refusal to permit the introduction of the breech-loading repeating rifle into the war, and Taylor because Union army food was so consistently bad by civilian standards. Taylor was up against the fact that the technologies of food preservation, including meatpacking, canning, and condensed liquids, were still relatively new. What critics missed was the happier fact that although army food was bad, the Union armies rarely lacked for sufficient quantities of it. Something of the same could be said about Ripley. The ordnance chief’s insistence on sticking by the muzzle-loading rifle as the standard infantry arm, rather than introducing the breech-loading repeating rifle, was one of the most wrongheaded administrative decisions of the war. In