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U.S. Army procurement of draft and pack animals in the Civil War era

Eastern Economic Journal, Winter 2003 by Sawers, Larry

The old adage attributed to Napoleon that an army marches on its belly reminds us of the importance of supplying an army in the field. Logistical supremacy cannot win a battle by itself, but adequate supply is necessary to the ultimate success of any military campaign. The North's naval blockade of the South and its overwhelming dominance of rail transport proved decisive in the outcome of the Civil War. Soldiers must be fed, clothed, and provided weapons, and these supplies must be carried from dock or depot to camp. During the Civil War, mules and horses transported most of the supplies that provisioned the combatants. The economics of the army's procurement of draft and pack animals is thus a crucial, though little studied, aspect of the Union's victory.

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Kyle Kauffman's 1996 article in this journal, "The U.S. Army as a Rational Economic Agent: The Choice of Draft Animals during the Civil War," returns to a theme that he has developed in several publications: the role of agency in the choice between the mule and the draft horse [Kauffman 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; Kauffman and Liebowitz, forthcoming; Galassi and Kauffman, undated]. He argues that the army chose the abuse-resistant mule instead of the horse-despite the mule's higher price-where soldiers using the animals were not closely monitored by officers and thus were more likely to abuse the animals in their charge. He finds a statistically significant and positive correlation between the ratio of enlisted men to all soldiers (enlisted men plus officers) and the ratio of mules to all draft equines (mules plus horses) in 486 U.S. army installations between 1863 and 1866, and argues that this correlation corroborates his hypothesis that monitoring costs determined the choice of military draft animal.

Kauffman describes two differences between horses and mules that are widely noted in the literature on equines. While the horse can be driven to the point of exhaustion or even death, the mule will stubbornly resist its handler's demands when it becomes fatigued or overheated. Additionally, the horse can make itself sick by eating and drinking too much, but the more sensible mule generally will not. For both these reasons, inattentive or incompetent animal handlers can injure or kill a horse more easily than a mule. Kauffman concludes that a rational army procurement strategy would have selected mules rather than horses in situations where the animal handlers could not be carefully supervised. Conversely, units in which soldiers were better monitored (that is, units with a higher ratio of officers to soldiers) would have preferred horses since they were everywhere about 10 percent cheaper than mules during the period in question [Kauffman 1996, 334]. There are several troublesome issues raised by Kauffman's agency hypothesis.

SOME PROBLEMS WITH THE AGENCY HYPOTHESIS

An examination of the army's procurement practices in the 1860s suggests that the army gave little attention to price, and that a 10 percent price difference between mules and horses was unlikely to have played an important role in the choice between the two animals. Fred Shannon's description of the effort to outfit the union army bears quoting: "Through haste, carelessness, or criminal collusion, the state and federal officers accepted almost every offer and paid almost any price for the commodities, regardless of character, quality, or quantity. . . . In the purchase of horses and mules... the most unblushing frauds were perpetrated" [1928, Vol. I, 55, 64, italics added]. Moreover, the army did not pay anything for many of the animals that it acquired, so did not have to pay the price premium for mules. From the beginning of the war, field commanders confiscated mules and horses (and other supplies) without compensation from those who could not prove their loyalty to the Northern cause [Simon, 1969, Vol. 1, 311; Vol. II, 388, 401; Shannon 1928, Vol. 1, 239-43]. Some of this foraging was against orders, but officers rarely disciplined those who took what was needed.

A second problem with the agency hypothesis is that it recognizes only part of the agency costs associated with equines. Although mules might survive rough treatment that horses could not, mules can become extremely difficult to handle once mistreated. The mule quickly learns to behave badly with inept, uncertain, or unkind treatment. Mules are legendary for their ability and eagerness to exact revenge with bites and potentially lethal kicks [Bradley, 1998, 315, 320-21, 337]. Soldiers can injure or kill horses, but mules can injure or kill soldiers. The mule has certain advantages if its handlers are indifferent or unskilled (it is a sturdier animal), but certain disadvantages as well (it more easily learns uncooperative behavior). The principal-agent hypothesis speaks to the advantages but not the disadvantages of using a mule that might face mistreatment, and thus overstates the importance of agency.

Even if one assumed that the military bureaucracy,1 widely regarded as archetypically inefficient, thoughtfully considered the relative merits of the mule versus the horse and decided which animal should be assigned to which kinds of units, it is not clear how quartermasters could have complied with the official procurement strategy, even if they knew of and wished to conform to that policy. Quartermasters would have been required to adjust the proportion of mules to the staffing ratio in each command, even though both of these ratios varied sharply from month to month, as battle casualties, disease, recruitment, and desertion changed the number of officers, enlisted men, mules, and horses in very different ways.

U.S. Army procurement of draft and pack animals in the Civil War era

Eastern Economic Journal, Winter 2003 by Sawers, Larry

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