For slavery was a holdover from the old colonial era, and in the increasingly mechanized, highly organized world of the mid-nineteenth century it could survive only by mutual consent. As Mr. Dumond remarks, “Few … institutions were ever so dependent as slavery upon tranquillity.” When the guns opened on Fort Sumter America’s tranquillity was violently shattered, and the conditions under which slavery could live no longer existed. Perhaps the real depth of the tragedy which followed lies in the fact that the nation destroyed slavery without first discarding the belief in racial inequality.

In the violent convulsion of the Civil War, it is significant that the hard blows were struck not so much by the dedicated abolitionists as by the military and industrial technicians who brought the North’s overwhelming strength to bear on the Confederacy’s basic weaknesses. One of these—a man who had a far larger part in the final Union victory than he usually gets credit for—was the devoted, hard-working quartermaster general of the Union Army, Major General Montgomery C. Meigs, whose biography is presented by Russell F. Weigley in an excellent study, Quartermaster General of the Union Army .

A career soldier and an engineer officer of distinction, Meigs had one of the key roles in the Northern war effort. It was up to him to outfit and equip the Union armies: shoes, wagons, tents, steamboats, uniforms, horses, mules, hospital equipment, railroad rails, pontoon bridges—the all but infinite list of things the Union armies needed was made up, bought, and distributed under Meigs’s direction, and during the war he was responsible for the spending of more than $675,000,000. All things considered, he performed his job with remarkable efficiency. Toward the end of the war the job actually looked like simple routine.

In effect, it was Meigs’s task to take the enormous potential material strength of the North and transform it into actual strength that could be applied on the battlefield. In doing this he had to make certain not only that the stuff was produced but that it was distributed to the places where it was needed, and it was here that Meigs did his best work. As the war progressed, the Confederate services of supply progressively collapsed; those of the Union continued to improve, and the striking contrast between the condition of the two armies on the Petersburg front at the end of 1864 is profoundly significant. The Northern states not only had much the greater resources to draw on, but they did a far more effective job of using what they had.

Meigs was an odd mixture. As Mr. Weigley emphasizes, he was in many ways a man of the new day, “of the materialistic, mechanically and scientifically inclined America born in the second half of the century of industrialization, urbanization and technological change”; but at the same time he was a dedicated sort of person, convinced that slavery was a profound moral wrong, almost mystically devoted to a vision