Mobilization

By . .

A Question of Efficiency: Civil War Mobilization

On July 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln spoke to a special session of Congress, narrating a history of the war, even though it was only three months old. In this address, Lincoln famously dubbed the conflict a “people’s contest.” Although Lincoln had several goals in mind, more than anything else, he wished to remind Congress and the Union’s citizens that an epic task stood before them. He charged, “It is now recommended that you give the legal means for making this contest a short and decisive one; that you place at the control of the government, for the work, at least four hundred thousand men, and four hundred millions of dollars.”[1]

Lincoln underestimated the cost of the war in terms of money and manpower, but he understood a cold, hard truth. The price of victory could not be paid by merely counting up the nation’s blood and treasure. Additionally, the cost had to be paid by a synchronization of efforts with both the government and the people laboring in harmony toward triumph. Lincoln explained, “The evidence reaching us from the country, leaves no doubt, that the material for the work is abundant; that it needs only the hand of legislation to give it legal sanction, and the hand of the Executive to give it practical shape and efficiency. . . . In a word, the people will save their government, if the government will do its part, only indifferently well.”[2] In essence, concert of action would win the war. Lincoln spoke of a process that wartime nations of all eras know too well. He spoke of mobilization.

There can be little doubt that, for the Union and the Confederacy, the process of transforming societies from peace to war conjured up more trial, tribulation, emotion, and heartache than any other social transformation between 1861 and 1865, save only after-effects of the war’s death toll. Both the Union and Confederacy attempted something unprecedented. They raised armies and navies by the hundreds of thousands, reaching aggregate muster rolls of sizes yet unseen in American history. They spent uncountable sums of money, challenging their emerging industrial economies in dramatic ways. They hotly stoked fires of popular will, testing the resolve of people who had never known a war as costly as the war between the United States and the Confederate rebellion. A clever Philadelphia citizen spoke for many when he confided to his journal that, “Everyone is impressed with the conviction that the war is a very stern and serious reality.”[3] Yet, it was a conflict filled with glory—real or imagined—and that gusto took shape in front of its citizens in the rawest form. After watching a regiment depart the city, a reporter for the New York Times could not help but notice the tremendous outpouring of enthusiasm: “The neighboring thoroughfares were completely choked with people eager to catch a glance—perhaps a last one—of the familiar faces of friends before they should embark. . . . All along Broadway the multitude shouted their huzzas.”[4] The Civil War generation experienced mobilization like a typhoon. It was an epic moment never to be forgotten.

Oddly enough, Civil War era citizens, North or South, could identify mobilization, but they could not define it. What is mobilization? Simply, it is the mechanism that ensures the successful prosecution of a conflict. However, this is a modern definition. People of the nineteenth-century lacked the twentieth-century’s sweeping characterization of it. Although the term was contemporary to the period, it was not American in origin. According to Frank Schubert of the U.S. Army Center of Military History, the Prussians first used the term “mobilisierung” in the 1850s to describe the rapid expansion of their army from a skeleton force into a wartime force. In the United States, the term did not see popular use until the twentieth-century, when the exigencies of the Great War generated the need for an expression that could embrace the entirety of the multiple, simultaneous wartime modifications.[5]  

Citizens of the Civil War lacked the word, but they could describe mobilization by defining its constituent concepts. For instance, when they spoke of manpower mobilization, they used the term “raising” or “assembling” to denote the concept of creating armies and navies. When speaking of materiel mobilization, they preferred to use the word “equipping.” (Indeed, they even had a special word that denoted all manner of physical things needed for an army or a navy, “equipage.”) Finally, when citizens referred to the mobilization of popular will, they used the term “war spirit.” Modern terms that military historians use with flagrant ease, such as “military assets,” “propaganda,” “combat service support,” were unknown to the blue and gray.

Even though the word mobilization did not exist in the contemporary setting, the process of it went on through all four years of conflict, and the people understood that truth. From the outset, both sections raised their armies, recruiting, mustering, and organizing their militiamen and volunteer soldiers into companies, regiments, and batteries. By 1862, both sections formalized their troop-raising apparatuses by delineating “quotas,” the number of troops a given community could expect to provide when the national government called for volunteers. As the months rolled by, the Union and Confederate War Departments attempted to increase their control over manpower mobilization by initiating conscription to “fill” the “deficiencies.” The Confederacy went first, passing its conscription act in March 1862. A few months later, the Union followed with state-level conscription in the autumn of 1862, and then, federal conscription passed the next year, March 1863.

Most communities raised troops for the war, and some even supplied the necessary equipment to fight it. Those areas capable of industrial production produced uniforms, accouterments, weapons, ammunition, tents, and other items essential to service. Like manpower, materiel production lasted the whole war. As new regiments came into existence or as old regiments wore out their equipage, the communities of the two nations had to replenish their stockpiles.

Even if manpower and materiel mobilization did not directly shape the lives of citizens by drawing them into the ranks or encouraging them to labor at factories and shipyards, unnumbered residents who remained on the home front joined patriotic organizations to sustain their societies’  peacetime traditions, bolstering the overworked state and national governments. Citizens established relief societies, sewing circles, refreshment saloons, fund-raising fairs, and wartime charities all to confirm that patriotism flourished. Mobilization was not merely the outcome of early war enthusiasm, but it was a process, one that extended throughout the entire conflict, one that required a host of participants, and one that took an excruciatingly long time to execute. Throughout the war, the constant requirements of mobilization had a deeply saturating effect upon the local people. Not a day went by when they did not think of the war and what they had to contribute to it.

Surprisingly, Civil War historians have not been known to jump at the topic of mobilization. The first scholars ignored it altogether, assuming incorrectly that the North’s stronger economy foreordained Union victory. Robert E. Lee started this theory, in a sense, when he argued in his farewell address that he had been “compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.” Since then, various historians, from Edward Pollard in the nineteenth century, to Douglas Southall Freeman in the mid-twentieth century, offered an adaptation of Lee’s explanation.[6] Adherents to the “Lost Cause” preferred to ignore mobilization; to them, victory came from the eventual implementation of weighty numbers by competent generals. As Richard N. Current observed in 1960, “For the North to win, she had only to draw upon her resources as fully as the South drew upon hers; or, rather, the North had to make use of only a fraction of her economic potential. Her material strength was so much greater that she could, as it were, lick the South with one hand tied behind her back.” Current, like others who had preceded him, assumed the South “was all but beaten before the first shot was fired.”[7] Why study mobilization as an historical question if the answer seemed so obvious?

Things changed in the late-twentieth century. Civil War scholars became interested in mobilization, but only through the lens of “total war,” the notion that any modern society could assemble all of its military assets for the purposes of fighting a protracted conflict.[8] In 1971, the most influential theory came from the pen of Allan Nevins, who emphasized the Civil War’s “sweep of organization,” declaring that, “the formless, protoplasmic United States of 1861 emerged from the war four years later eagerly groping toward organization, and much more aware of the path it must take forward.” According to Nevins, the “forcing-blast of necessity and opportunity” caused the North to shift from “an improvised war” in 1861 and 1862 to “an organized war” in 1863 and 1864. Nevins built his argument around a top-down study of the U.S. War Department and a general military and diplomatic history of the Union’s path to victory, concluding:

Of all the changes effected by the war, this replacement of an amorphous, spineless society by a national life even partially organized for efficient action—organized first to win the war, and then to develop the continent—was perhaps the most striking[.] . . . As the first two years might be called the improvised war, the last two could be termed the organized war.  The transition from one to the other was a transition from the old America to the new, and not in material terms, but in psychological terms also.[9]

Under Nevins’s lead, the “Organized War” thesis became the primary way of examining mobilization. Historians believed the Union organized its victory, while the Confederacy did not. In recent years, thanks to a legion of adherents, most notably Richard Bensel, Mark Wilson, and Phillip Paludan, Nevins’s notion has held firm.[10]

In the 1980s and 1990s, social historians bounced into the discussion, analyzing mobilization as a force that shaped everyday life. Try as they might to come up with new theories, most of these community-level studies bore the imprint of Nevins’s “Organized War” thesis. Taken together, they emphasized manpower mobilization and the transition from community voluntarism to federal conscription.[11] The first studies examined small northern towns, but books about large northern cities soon followed. They too painted mobilization as something that started out disorganized but gradually became more efficient as the War Department imposed its rules of order. The Organized War thesis wailed loudest in J. Matthew Gallman’s Mastering Wartime: A Social History of Philadelphia during the War. In discussing recruitment, Gallman argued, “The North, in short, organized itself to fight as a single entity rather than a loosely joined federation of states.”[12] Another book, Ernest A. McKay’s The Civil War and New York City, echoed Gallman, arguing that Gotham’s mobilization had been an important cog in the Union’s victory machine. McKay paid attention to the city’s problematic draft resistance, but in the end, he swept it and other black marks aside, casting them as overplayed anti-Democratic whoopla. McKay wrote, “The city answered the reveille, but it was a strange reveille.”[13] Other books, Thomas O’Connor’s Civil War Boston: Homefront and Battlefield, Theodore J. Karamanski’s Rally ‘Round the Flag: Chicago and the Civil War, and Louis Gerteis’s Civil War St. Louis, did not focus exclusively on mobilization, but they repeated the same story: mobilization was chaotic in 1861; it was organized by 1865.[14]

Of course, not all historians believed in Nevins. Prior to him, in 1928, Fred A. Shannon completed his masterful two-volume The Organization and Administration of the Union Army. In it, he contended that the North adhered to an inefficient states rights philosophy, one that the Confederacy wisely abandoned at the war’s outset. In the Union, he explained, “State interest, therefore, dictated that the troops should be raised and managed, and that the war policies should be controlled, as far as possible, by the individual states. . . . But successful war could not be conducted on such principles. The South, wherein state differences were less pronounced, learned this lesson first and best. Accordingly, for three years she held at bay an army nearly twice the size of her own. The North, by the end of the war, was, as a result of the lessons learned from her blunders, being led toward the same solution.”[15]

Shannon viewed Union mobilization as anything but efficient, although he shared with Nevins a common assumption: with centralization came the glimmer of improvement. Other historians have since expanded on the idea that inefficient mobilization was a crime committed in many areas of the North. Using census data, Edward K. Spann’s book, Gotham at War: New York City, 1860-1865, argued that New York City did not contribute its full share of manpower to the Union cause. Spann pointed out that while New York City made up twenty-five percent of the state’s population, city dwellers accounted for less than ten percent of those state citizens who perished during the war.[16] An older, but lesser-known essay, Russell Weigley’s “The Border City in the Civil War, 1854-1865,” supported Spann’s explanation with reference to Philadelphia, dubbing the Quaker City’s wartime sacrifice “uninspiring.”[17] 

Unlike Union mobilization, Confederate mobilization has been a less-enticing subject for historians, but a few important studies have emerged. Just as northern studies stand in the shadow of Allan Nevins, Confederate histories stand in the shadow of Frank Owsley. Predating Shannon’s work, his State Rights and the Confederacy argued that a failure of centralization hindered Confederate efforts to marshal their forces.[18] Following this, other authors examined the disintegration of mobilization, emphasizing desertion, draft resistance, speculation, and extortion. Recently, studies of Confederate desertion have linked the Confederacy’s abortive manpower mobilization to an absence of nationalism. Paul Escott’s After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism argued, “Large-scale desertions were a tangible indication of Davis’ inability to provide conditions which would promote the spirit of Confederate nationalism.”[19] In general, historians present Confederate mobilization as a slow failure, a graduate disintegration, or a decelerating engine of war. A few recent studies by Charles Dew, Harold Wilson, and Mary DeCredico have challenged this by showing how Confederate industry offered some semblance of organization, but on the whole, scholars have been apt to use a critical lens to evaluate the massing of gray-coated legions.[20]

There is still plenty we need to learn. For the future, studies of mobilization need to withdraw from their present stereotypes that portray an efficient, industrial North waging war against a disordered, agrarian South. Perhaps it might help to emphasize some of the glaring inefficiencies of the Union and the surprising competence of the Confederacy. Second, as a subject, mobilization needs to become more comprehensive. Currently, historians view it through their own narrow lens, be it social history, military history, labor history, or economic history. Narrow analysis tends to weaken the importance of mobilization’s transformative power, casting it as an outcome of the Civil War’s violence, not as a process that shaped the lives of the people. Third, the Civil War is desperately short on naval histories. It is indeed surprising that this, the most technology-driven branch of service, has so few histories of mobilization to its credit.[21] Finally, as a topic, mobilization is due a collected volume, perhaps one that casts the Civil War’s uprising of manpower, materiel, and war fever against other well-known mobilizations.

[1] Abraham Lincoln, July 3, 1861, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Volume IV, Roy P. Basler, Marion Dolores Pratt, and Lloyd A. Dunlap, eds., (Springfield, IL: Abraham Lincoln Association; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 431-32.

[2] Ibid., 432.

[3] Sidney George Fisher diary, July 23, 1861, in A Philadelphia Perspective: The Diary of Sidney George Fisher Covering the Years 1834-1871, Nicholas B. Wainwright, ed. (Philadelphia: The Historical Society of Philadelphia, 1967), 397.

[4] New York Times, April 24, 1861.

[5] Frank N. Schubert, Mobilization: The U.S. Army in World War II (Center of Military History, Pub. 72-32, 1994), 3.

[6] Robert E. Lee, General Orders Number Nine, April 10, 1865, in The Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee, Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin, eds., (Boston: Little and Brown, 1961), 934-5; Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study In Command, Three Volumes (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942-4); Edward A. Pollard, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates (New York: E. B. Treat, 1866); Gary Gallagher, “Blueprint for Victory: Northern Strategy and Military Policy,” in Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand, James McPherson and William J. Cooper, Jr., eds. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 8.

[7] Richard N. Current, “God and the Strongest Battalions,” in Why the North Won the Civil War,  David H. Donald, ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960), 21, 35.

[8] Phillip S. Paludan, “What Did the Winners Win? The Social and Economic History of the North During the Civil War,” in James McPherson and William J. Cooper, Jr., eds., Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 174-200. Charles and Mary Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, Two Volumes (New York: Macmillan, 1927); and Louis M. Hacker, The Triumph of American Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940).

[9] Allan Nevins, The War For the Union, Volume 3: The Organized War, 1863-1864 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), 329-31.

[10] Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan, The Origins of Central Authority in America, 1859-1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Phillip Shaw Paludan, “A People’s Contest”: The Union and Civil War, 1861-1865, Second ed. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1996); Mark R. Wilson, The Business of War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861-1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

[11] Maris A. Vinovskis, “Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War? Some Preliminary Speculations,” and Thomas R. Kemp, “Community and War: The Civil War Experience of Two New Hampshire Towns,” both in Toward a Social History of the Civil War: Exploratory Essays, Vinovskis, ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1-77; for more recent community studies, see Russell Johnson, “ ‘Volunteer While You May’: Manpower Mobilization in Dubuque, Iowa,” and Mark A. Snell, “ ‘If They Would Know What I Know It Would Be Hard to Raise One Company in York’: Recruiting, the Draft, and Society’s Response in York County, Pennsylvania,” both in Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences, Postwar Adjustments, Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, eds. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 30-116.

[12] J. Matthew Gallman, Mastering Wartime: A Social History of Philadelphia during the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 52.

[13] Ernest A. McKay, The Civil War and New York City (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 313.

[14] Thomas H. O’Connor, Civil War Boston: Home Front and Battlefield (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990); Theodore J. Karamanski, Rally ‘Round the Flag: Chicago in the Civil War (Chicago: Nelson Hall, Inc., 1993); Louis S. Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2001).

[15] Fred A. Shannon, The Organization and Administration of the Union Army, 1861-1865, Volume 1 (Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark company, 1928), 22.

[16] Edward K. Spann, Gotham at War: New York City, 1860-1865 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 2002), xiv, 178.

[17] Russell F. Weigley, “The Border City in the Civil War, 1854-1865,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1982), 410.

[18] Frank Owlsey, States Rights in the Confederacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925).

[19] Paul Escott, After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 128. Other studies that emphasized Confederate desertion include: Mark A. Weitz, A Higher Duty: Desertion among Georgia Troops During the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000); Mark Weitz, More Damning than Slaughter: Desertion in the Confederate Army (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); and Ella Lonn, Desertion During the Civil War (Gloucester, MA: The American Historical Association, 1928).

[20] Harold Wilson, Confederate Industry: Manufactures and Quartermasters in the Civil War (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2002). Mary DeCredico, Patriotism for Profit: Georgia’s Urban Entrepreneurs and the Confederate War Effort (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). Charles B. Dew, Ironmaker to the Confederacy: Joseph R. Anderson and the Tredegar Iron Works (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999).

[21] One exception is William H. Roberts, Civil War Ironclads: The U.S. Navy and Industrial Mobilization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).