Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 298 - The Insane Corruption of the Union Army During the US Civil War

Episode Date: February 12, 2024

Union soldiers may have marched off to fight for the right side of the war but that didn't mean that every contractor and General in the north wasn't going to try to steal something from the military along the way. BUY JOE'S BOOK: https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-War-Military-Sci-Fi-Undying-ebook/dp/B0CQ6BH6BD/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3IDZ3WJXQ4CQJ&keywords=joe+kassabian&qid=1707120531&sprefix=%2Caps%2C236&sr=8-1 SUPPORT THE SHOW: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys SOURCES: https://www.americanheritage.com/lincolns-corrupt-war-department Micheal Thomas Smith. The Enemy Within: Fears of Corruption in the Civil War North. Journal of the Civil War Era. Vol 3, no. 1. Pp. 137-139 Tim Koenig. The Days of Shoddy: Wost Manufacturers of the Civil War. Civil War Quarterly. Vol. 3. no. 2.

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast, but I guess you probably already knew that. What if there was a war raging for a million years, but it was kept a secret? It's a question that Sarkis never considered. He was born as an upper-middle class man living in Prime City during the so-called millennia of peace. As far as he knew, or as far as anybody knew, humanity has no army, no weapons, and no wars. The people of Earth had been expanding into the stars as long as anyone remembered,

free of conflict, while the Techno King and his royal cabal enriched themselves in the backs of their labor. It was as it always had been. Then, Sarkis died. Unbeknownst to him, an app he used every single day of his life hijacks his consciousness and uploads it into a synthetic engine of war known as a sleeve. Along with countless others, he's been conscripted into the Undying Legion, charged with fighting a secret, unending war in the name of humanity. Their minds stolen, uploaded into war machines. They fight a secret war name of humanity. Their minds stolen, uploaded into war machines. They fight a secret war to preserve humanity. My new book, The Invisible War, comes out February 20th via Atheon Books and is now available for pre-order on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.

If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at www.patreon.com slash lionsledbydonkeys. Just $5 per month gets you every regular episode early, access to our community discord, a digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, as well as its audio book read by me, and over five years of bonus content. By supporting the show, you support us and allow us to keep our show as it has always been ad-free. Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Lions, led by Donkey's Podcast. I'm Joe, and with me, deep in the moist, dark caves of content, is Tom. How's it going, Joe?

Before we get into the episode, we have a very sad day. We have an announcement to make to all of the listeners. We've experienced a death on the show, specifically Joe's mic arm. Now, the mic arm has been a very special part of the show. I've spent a lot of time

cutting out the sound of Joe moving it in the middle of recording. It did kind of sound like it was rustic and falling apart because it was. And in respect to the mic arm and in keeping with the tone of the show we'd like to give it a proper send off.

So first Ready? Aim! Fire! Ready? Aim! Fire! Ready? Aim! Fire!

Ready? Aim! Fire! Ready? Fire! um and at this uh funeral while we press f to pay respects to the mic arm we would like to have a few words from the mic arms nco corporal joe kasabian i would just like to say it was the finest mic arm you could buy off Amazon for $15 five years ago it was never the best it in fact often times collapsed

onto my keyboard while recording and it broke multiple times before today however you don't know what you have until it's gone and today when I went to set up for recording and it exploded into ten pieces across my desk i did not expect to say goodbye much like a soldier stepping on an ied um it exploded into

lots of pieces and now we will have the folding and presenting of the flag to the mike's family from shenzhen china uh requiem and pache uh rip you know i uh i've been through a lot with this mic arm and anybody who's listened to this podcast for since almost the beginning has probably heard subtle squeaks um or or or the the doofing sound if i accidentally swing it too close and hit myself in the face. The amount of times I've had to cut out you hitting yourself in the teeth with your own microphone because the bit of

objects in the podcast may seem closer than they appear. Yeah, a bit of behind the scenes. The mic arm didn't actually hold the mic in place, so when Joee moved it it swung around yeah it was not made for this mic yeah so there was a few times where uh joe uh hit himself in the teeth but in my own uh respect to our fallen comrade the mic arm i am doing my soldierly duty

and popping a snooze uh popping an upper decky before we get into the episode this is a this is a new definition of the term upper decker that i am unaware of yep we're um we're using snooze we're uh we're evolving nicotine consumption technology we've moved on from vapes i don't want to get popcorn lung so So instead, I'm going to give myself gum cancer. That's why I've actually moved on to a large viscous chamber of nicotine liquid where I submerge myself in. And much like the Matrix, I can just breathe it in. It kind of sucks. I currently am not in a place where I can actually obtain a new mic arm, so I have to hold my mic in one hand, which is something I've actually really never done on this show other than, I believe, a couple episodes that you yelled at me about. Yeah, neither of us are in bad places.'re in jordan you're in uh armenia and i'm depressed

those are the same thing now um speaking of depressed that doesn't really work here um tom what do you know about industrial warfare oh pop quiz five minutes or less uh not a whole lot that i can say without uh getting raided by the police so i feel like we are a wrong kind of industrial warfare don't do that kind it's a federal crime or if your word tom lives a crown crime i don't know what they call it there it's not a real country yeah kirst armor is going to descend through the ceiling to put handcuffs on me and execute me by the senator. Me and all the XL bullies. Underground railroad but for large dogs going to

Scotland. Yeah, just doing that meme from the Lord of the Rings. I never thought I'd die beside an Irishman. I never thought I'd die beside an XL bully. Just chewing your leg off. Hey, my legs are juicy. We're not here to debate that.

Now, industrial warfare, as we often talk about on this show, it turns out is hard. And I know this sounds like a very stupid thing to say, because, well, it kind of is, but it seems to be something that people need to be reminded of

time and time again. We often have a joke on this show that is just me pointing to a giant sign that says logistics over and over and over again. Because it tends to be the one thing people throughout time tend to ignore, forget, or kind of half plan, half ass. And in my opinion, that is for a lot of reasons, and none of which are as simple as you'd think. For starters, and I don't agree with this concept, but logistics is not a sexy aspect of war, if you know what I mean. Officers and soldiers and politicians, whoever, lay people who consume pop war content, they always want to be seen as a war hero. Leading the charge into the throat of the enemy at sword point. leading a daring air raid, standing toe to toe with the hated enemy. You know, action movie stuff.

Yeah, everyone wants to be in the expendables. Yeah. Generally speaking, nobody wants to be the guy that is good at organizing wagon trains or supply routes. Yeah, who is organizing the cargo plane that the expendables are traveling on? Yeah, like red shirt number six. Yes, exactly. Call him Meany. That's who's doing it. Of course, a lot of this has to do with antiquated

ideas of manliness, what war is, and the done concept that war is at all, at any point, heroic. But it also has to do with simple recognition. Nobody wants to bust their ass doing a hard job with virtually no reward or even today logistics officers and soldiers despite being critical to any war effort more critical than literally anything else are never going to say lead the u.s military yeah the nerds don't get remembered by history. Right. They're never going to be promoted

over their infantry peers. They're going to top out quite lower than everybody else. They're expected to do an important job, shut the fuck up, and deal with being ignored. Who's your favorite nerd from military history? I mean, I consider Napoleon a pretty big fucking

nerd. I thought you were going to say yourself. I mean, I guess I'm biased. I'm certainly not my favorite. I mean, I consider Napoleon a pretty big fucking nerd. I thought you were going to say yourself. I mean, I guess I'm biased. I'm certainly not my favorite. I mean, like, guys who focus a lot on logistics tend to be more successful, and that's the kind of nerddom I respect. And I will admit, that is a new respect. When I was a soldier, I fucking hated supply people like everyone else. Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, world's deadliest neek i mean yeah i mean if oppenheimer told us anything is that scientists absolutely fuck as long as they look like killian murphy yeah like it's a great

time to be irish the uh cultural uh stocks of uh of being Irish are going up. Cillian Murphy won a Golden Globe. Barry Keoghan and Andrew Scott were also nominated, so, you know, it's a great time to be Irish. Gonna bring you back down a peg. Listen, being on this show does it already. Fuck you. I'm gonna replace you with, like, three British people now. Yeah, because it would take the work of three British people to do the same as me. Yeah, that's what I meant. Now, outside of this, industrial warfare is hard for other reasons. Namely, if you happen to be a country that's slapping people into uniforms in large numbers for the first time in your history, regardless of your industrial base, you're going to have a really hard time working out the kinks in that entire process on the fly. In fact, I'd

argue that is pretty much impossible to do. This combined with a government desperate to get any and anything into the field as fast as possible and little time or energy for the process of oversight, you could see how this has some pretty obvious loopholes for some shady shitheads to squirm into the middle of all of it and make a massive amount of money while supplying the government's armies with absolute horseshit. And that brings us to the Union Army's supply efforts during the early stages of the U.S. Civil War.

Oh. We're going back to literal mag wagon wagon manifests kind of we are kind of going back to the yield era of wagon manifests and you know maybe this will be one of the stranger episodes we've done but not in the way it's strange

like you know a president getting his butthole pumped up with beef broth but like strange in the idea that we aren't necessarily talking about any particular battle or weapon or anything, but just the Union army in general for about the first two years of the war. Now, when the Civil War kicked off due to some dipshits in the worst part of the United States deciding that owning black people as property was their unalienable right, it forced the Union, otherwise known as the North,

to do something that the US had never done before, namely organize a massive centrally controlled army as fast as possible. Now, I know we've talked about this before on the show, and everybody thinks of the US today as the globe-spanning empire of terror that it kind of is. But remember, this era, the U.S. was not a powerhouse. It barely had an army, and there's a reason for that.

Because the United States believed that an army could very easily be used for tyranny, and therefore, they didn't really have one. The only thing that got constant and ending funding and some kind of central base was the Navy because it's kind of hard to terrorize your own population with the Navy. And you use it to secure supply route,

shipping lanes, overseas interests, like the Tripoli campaign, like we talked about. An army was something completely different. Like there's a reason why we have an entire constitutional amendment saying that you can't make people garrison soldiers in their homes, which seems completely out of left field as far as constitutions are concerned. But that is like the concern that the United States and the early American population had towards a large standing army is they only saw them as like redcoats. Yeah. Yeah. Once

again, time is a flat circle. Being in the army in 18 whatever and now, nerd shit. Loser shit. Yeah. You gotta be in the Navy. Yeah. The only proper army. I love being on boats surrounded by other seamen. Everybody loves that.

Now, for example, example before this the largest force the u.s ever organized at once was the continental army during the american revolution which was never more than 48 000 people prior to the civil war the entire army you know before the split between north and south would shred these numbers, was 16,000 officers and soldiers. That is it. That doesn't seem like enough. They weren't exactly fighting a whole lot of people. The Mexican-American War is pretty much long since in the past.

They haven't quite created much of an empire. They're not fighting Spain yet. It's kind of like the pre-empire era they're too too busy genociding native americans right i mean 100 yes and you didn't need a massive army to do that when you know the regular population was helping you um now at the start of the civil war the union army Union Army only was flooded with 700,000 volunteers within months. Oh, shit. You could see how this entire thing could cause one hell of logistical Armageddon. And for people who don't know, prior to the war, the South was the beating heart of the American textile industry.

You know, on account of all the slave labor making it cheap and easy. Yeah, you know, like, cotton was very profitable and it wasn't like they were paying a fair wage. Yeah, it wasn't a lot of wages going around in general. It kind of kept the prices artificially low. Uh-huh. So in general, what do you do

when you have 700,000 people show up like, I'm ready to fight for fucking Uncle Sam. What's the first thing you need to do? Dress them at minimum? Put them in something that looks like a uniform? But that's kind of hard to do when you're suddenly cut off from your entire textile supply. You know, I feel like this episode is going to touch on pretty much every reason in any episode we talk about something goes wrong. Yeah, kinda. Now, later on in the war, the Union would find replacements for this sudden missing of textiles and whatnot, but in the very beginning, shit was grim. This started a flood of conmen, contractors, and flim-flam experts rushing to

Washington, D.C. to get contracts to supply the army. According- Take this tonic! It will make you strong! Good soldier, take this tonic! Make your dick hard and kill the South! You're just, like, describing the modern-day supplement industry.

Yeah, you need to take your glycine, beta-ine you know your creatine don't forget a little bit of trend and you'll turn into you know fucking captain america the entire union army having trend cough as they march south towards atlanta yeah captain america's so juiced up he can't wipe his own ass hell yeah now that's a flag i'll salute captain america is on lethal doses of accutane yeah these stupid bastards from back of the day falling for all these snake oil salesmen and flim flam uh artists i would never fall for that anyway i bought this eight hundred dollars worth of skincare regimen i saw on tiktok This will make me look like I'm 20 again. The Red Skull is doing

call-out posts on TikTok about Captain America not being natty. Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, natty or not. Well, do you know who wasn't natty? Fucking George Washington. That man had slave teeth. Yeah.

There's a reason why they tell American children they are just made out of wood. Yeah. It's terrifying. Now, according to the article, The Days of Shoddy, they, quote, hurried to assault the treasury like a cloud of locusts. They were everywhere, in the streets, in the hotels, in the offices, at the Capitol, in the White House. They continually besieged the bureaus of administration, the doors of the Senate, and the House of Representatives, wherever there was a chance to gain something. I like the idea that they were literal insects. Yeah, it's a bug's life.

Or ants, depending on your allegiance to Disney or DreamWorks. Military contractor ants. Hey, listen, to be fair, Ant a very subtle uh marxist movie so you know i i support the revolution shut the fuck up shut the fuck up now the government was so pressed to find literally anything for its soldiers they signed contract after contract without inspecting what they were signing a contract for in the first place. Of course, this entire system was supported by the military itself, who was either signing these contracts without oversight or working with corrupt contractors to get their offers in front of important people so they could then get a kickback. That sounds like every single government during COVID.

Actually, yeah. get a kickback that sounds like every single government during covid actually yeah like the fucking in the uk there was a there was a guy it was like after brexit who like got a government contract for a fleet of ferries for like shipping and logistics the man didn't literally own any boats or have a company really at all my fairies are all based on vibes yeah fairy vibes that meant in the beginning stages of the war northern military leadership was actively profiting from fucking over their own soldiers who had volunteered for the effort some things never change for the contractors themselves once they got the contracts they weren't going to handle that shit themselves that's fuck that they weren't going to handle that shit themselves that's fuck that that's below me they kicked that shit down to subcontractors

paying them a fraction of what the government had originally paid them in the first place civil war black rifle coffee company oh god that would 100 exists i mean it kind of did. Okay, hear me out. So the government only considered some things necessity, like boots, clothes, rifles, things like that. Things they didn't were like coffee and tobacco. So it created all these weird side industries that pushed coffee and tobacco. yeah it's like so there there could have been like a vet bro civil war uh like tobacco slash coffee company by like 1865 or whatever i don't know just some veteran of the war of 1812 shilling tobacco and coffee you guys are pussies back in my day we lost our wars shut up jebediah jebediah has one don't talk shit to me i got one good tooth is my can opening tooth he's got two one legs a one arm and like a hook jammed directly into his shoulder because he got ethered by a british cannonball outside the white house

he looked like a napoleon's horse so by the end of all this long string of corruption when the uniforms finally did get to the first union army camps in 1861 they were so badly made that they were missing sleeves buttons pockets pant legs and then would fall apart when they got wet i'm trying to imagine what so they didn't have pant legs, no sleeves. I think they shipped them a Union blue dickie. Just running around in long johns. Every Union soldier

dressed like in the Borat bikini, but it's made of like wool and cotton. Now when it comes to uniforms, and I say this from personal experience, the most important part of that entire thing for any soldier of any era, even today, is boots. You can go to war in shorts and a tank top. It doesn't fucking matter.

But nothing sucks worse faster than having a shitty fucking pair of boots. Hey, listen, they say an army marches on its stomach. I would argue it marches on its feet. Has this been tested? What if an army marched only on their hands? Once an army of mimes and gymnasts? If Cirque du Soleil occupied

Las Vegas, they hand-walked in. They were supported by the local cross-fitting population. Pagliacci was the one who assassinated Osama bin Laden. It can't be disproven. You didn't hear him coming. Can't be disproven, can it? They haven't released the footage.

Osama bin Laden's just like sitting in his compound watching Naruto and all you hear is like squeaking shoes coming up the stairs. A mime slowly closes in a rear naked choke, locks in the rear hooks. The helicopter crashes into the compound and like 50 clowns come out. That's why the Pakistani military didn't intervene. They're like, what the fuck is going on over there? The helicopter, instead of lights lights it just had a big red nose on the front it hits and crashes into the retaining wall outside of the bin laden compound instead of an explosion instead of smoke and fires here honk because the big red fucking nose

hits first i just confetti comes out of it. Clowns on the ground try to hold the confetti in as it pours from their insides. Pagliacci, like, taking aim up in Laden's head, pulls the trigger, and then just a bang flag

comes out of it. And then he fucking stabs him to death. Because Pagliacci likes to watch the light in their eyes fade out. No, he beats him to death with a bowling pin, but he's juggling them at the same time. This episode's absolutely fucking off the rails. Three pages.

We made it three pages. Thank God we started earlier than normal. So, you need boots, unless, of course, you are, like we've established through historical research the army of pagliacci the clown hey listen what is joining the u.s military except being a clown so so i can finally tell my mom i went to clown college she'll finally be proud of me hey you went to michigan state didn't you so you're already a clown oh there's worse things that went to Michigan State than me, so that's fine.

Now, once again, with people's feet in need of shotting, the contract machine went brr in order to pump out more boots faster than had ever been done in American history. It was supposed to be a simple, broken design, like three pieces of letter nailed together with a bottom part, right? In reality, in the beginning, what the soldiers got were already cracked or rotten. And sometimes they were made out of painted paper made to look like leather that the soldiers would discover for the first time was in fact paper when they wore them and they would just fall apart at the first sight of moisture. Okay, so very funny you should say this because by the time this episode comes out, at the start of this year, I was like, I want to take up something that isn't related to my job. And I always like the idea of making a wallet or that sort of thing.

Do you know what I enrolled in? Leatherworking? Yes a leatherworking and shoe craft. Wait does this mean you're gonna cure your own leather and piss at the back room? Yep. Fuck yes Um yeah a year long course where I will uh graduate at like

a low apprentice level of shoe making the final like thing that you do is you make your own pair of boots i want a pair of civil war era brogans that kill me just fuck my shit out of paper paper soldiers running around in paper mache shoes and they just start to dissolve that's the thing is it really does seem like making a a fake leather shoe out of paper in 1861 that would you know look and kind of feel like it's supposed to and even lace up and kind of be able to walk and would require more work than just making it out of shitty leather yep and you

know what like 50 years later converse is going to do that except with Converse. Yep. You got some real artisanal corruption going on here. There was also the flip side of all of this, where the army would sign contracts with all these people, pay for them, and then just none of this shit would show up. That's not so much as like, ha-ha, the old switcheroo with the paper boots says, I just stole your fucking money. Now, this happens so much that individual states would have to pick up the slack in order to clothe their men

from their specific states that were marching off the volunteer for the war effort. However, none of the states liked talking to one another, nor the government, when it came to how exactly they would clothe their soldiers. This led to reds, blues, yellows, and even grays all becoming a

standard uniform depending on what state someone is from this is where you get that like era of like incredibly weird civil war uniform like the zouaves and shit and it's because like new york you know 69th regiment of dipshits had to find their own clothes because the government's like we have this union blue dicky and these paper boots and states just said no we're going to make it look like the circus is on parade the new york regiment showing up in all black air force ones in a pulver jacket fuck yes i'm really happy p diddy funded a regiment bad boy but just like a p diddy music video he's at the back of the regiment the whole time doing the p diddy dance never really doing anything he's just dancing back there yeah now

when all these different units came together as joked they looked like a circus on parade due to all the colors and because everyone knew how bad central government uniforms were when these units were finally supplied with the you know the good old-fashioned union blues as we all know them today they just simply refused to wear them knowing that they would just fall apart and this would continue even beyond the point when the uniforms had been fixed this led to more than one case of one union army unit firing on another due to the fact that they were wearing fucking gray the standard color of the confederate army i love the idea of like one dude who was like fuck it he's like customizing his own uniform he's like running into battle but he's voguing at the same time that bit from family guy y'all are dumb they're gonna be looking

for people dressed like soldiers hey listen family guy's a good show i will defend family guy you can defend everything you want it doesn't make you right i am right tiktok family guy clips slap hard on tiktok fuck you hey listen thank god seth mcfarlane wasn't on that plane. You know what? Agree to disagree. Moving on. Outside of being shot by their own men, this led to another serious problem. As we often joke about, history is never a good time to go camping in the woods with tens of thousands of your homies. Badly made clothes, rain jackets and overcoats meant that when winter hit or even, you know, mildly bad weather, nobody was protected. And soon, thousands of soldiers

were mangled by the cold, the frostbite, and trench foot from the rain that soaked their paper fucking shoes. Well, like, you think paper shoes might help prevent trench foot because, like, paper is porous. I mean, until it gets completely waterlogged,

it just binds to your feet. Yeah. Then you really, you do have like paper mache shoes. Yeah. There's some dickhead soldier wearing Tom shoes. Like, Hey,

at least mine are ethical. Shut the fuck up, James. I'm going to beat you to death with your plimsolls. Shut the fuck up. You wicker basket wearing cunt. No, there's definitely a dude in like Birkenstocks.

I have a pair of Birkenstocks and I have to say I'm a convert, but I only use them for wearing them inside the house. Yeah, the man with the world's most fucked up feet loves Birkenstocks. There's a surprise. Just because my feet are so busted that my pinky toe goes under the rest of my toes doesn't mean you have to insult my shoes. That happened independent of my shoes.

And it's actually mostly related to much like we were just talking about, having a shitty fucking pair of boots in basic trading. Now your pinky toe is shy. It's just hiding. It's an itty. It was not uncommon for thousands of men to be sitting around in a camp for weeks or months waiting for literally anything. This is from the article Days of Shoddy. Quote, Indiana Governor Oliver Morton voiced his frustrations of the many northern governors at the government's faulty administration of supplies.

2,400 men in camp and less than half of them are armed. Why has there been such a delay in sending arms? No officer yet has mustered any troops into service, not a pound of powder or a single ball sent to any of us or any sort of equipment. Allow me to ask, what is the cause of all of this? I think that's the closest to ye olde what the fuck that someone could possibly come to. And

General Ulysses S. Grant ran into the same problems, pointing out when he finally did get weapons for his soldiers, they were completely unusable and the gunpowder didn't even work. Oh yeah, and he hadn't been given any fucking ambulances or wagons to even move his busted ass supplies if he wanted to,

so his army couldn't move. Now the government, the union government, was broke and hardly had enough inspectors to go around, but their corruption was so widespread, it warped around the inspectors who actually did their job. For example, if an inspector swung by an arms contractor to test a pistol or a rifle or a cannon or whatever and found them to be

unusable, the contractor would simply rename themselves, get another contract and try again in hopes that an inspector wouldn't come around this time or if they did the one that showed up could simply be bribed. It's like the dudes who signed up, got the enlistment bonus,

then ran away, pretended to be someone else, signed up again. Yeah, we call those the good old days. Failing that, they would simply bribe a general to pass off their busted-ass guns as good and get them into circulation. Because generals weren't exactly paid a whole lot back then, and there was a lot of fucking generals so like throw that guy 50 bucks or whatever like yeah

this rusted ass shit box of a pistol I just found is totally ready for cavalry service and there's not enough inspectors to go around so it's like fucking stamp that paperwork and like I point out this is both because of micro and macro corruption but also because of just some of the worst fucking management you could ever dream of starting

with the secretary of war himself a guy named simon cameron cameron was a guy that lincoln didn't even originally want in this position but ended up with him anyway due to like factionalism in american politics back then after his election. Something that thankfully doesn't happen anymore. Current events jokes. Despite the ongoing succession crisis, because the Civil War didn't just like happen. It was unfolding for a while. But despite the ongoing succession crisis already gripping the United States

at the time of Cameron's appointment, he didn't even show up to work for a while, but despite the ongoing secession crisis already gripping the United States at the time of Cameron's appointment, he didn't even show up to work for a fucking week. So, I'm starting to think he wasn't the best man for the job. Yes, it's a series of cascading events. Some would call that history. Fuck off!

Suck it! He didn't even really seem to have any interest in playing an active role in the war despite being, you know, the secretary of war, which it turned out was actually the best thing he could have done because when he did get directly involved, namely in contracts, everything got fucked up.

When the army was in need of things, he would simply reach out to personal friends in industry and give them contracts to pump something out. At one point, giving a contract to a guy named Alexander Cummings, who sold the army a bunch of rifles that are decades out of date and unfunctioning, the same guy got contracted by the US Navy for multiple ships. Because the US Navy is quite small, and now suddenly they have to blockade the entire South. They need more more ships so he got this massive contract for uh like i think it was like five or six ships or something like that and he paid 10 times more for them what they would have originally costs and then none of them are even seaworthy it just

just in time pricing you want something fast you got to pay for it i mean nowadays the u.s navy just has the littoral combat ships which are functionally the same exact things as the ships this guy just bought. But that was just at the surface. Cameron sold army positions. He sold ranks. He sold entire units to his friends or friends of a friend or simply political allies. He also made sure to funnel as much money to his political allies in the form of sending union supply trains and really weird routes that would pass through random towns and states as they went to make sure they could get kickbacks as they pass through cameron traveling salesman well he's a flimflam man he's a professional he's such a

flimflam man he became secretary of war he he literally by this tonic, his way into government. No one has ever grifted harder. I mean, yet. Cameron became so well known for his corruption while in office, people often joked, and openly, about it. Thaddeus Stevens, solid name and Pennsylvania representative, said, quote, Cameron would steal everything except a hot stove. And when Cameron demanded an apology, Stevens amended the statement, saying, Alright, he everything except a hot stove. And when Cameron demanded an apology, Stevens amended the statement saying, alright, he would steal a hot stove too.

Cameron would... Look, at this time, you know, how many people had a hot stove? You know, Cameron sure had a lot of them. His hand just burnt to shit. Man, I fucked my hands up, stealing all these stoves.

He's just walking out of people's houses with the stove still lit there's logs falling everywhere he doesn't even need it just for the love of the game man he's eating them now cameron was eventually fired and replaced with edward stanton but that didn't really fix all of the problems now not every company was being a dishonest pile of shit, selling the government stuff that didn't work. Some were just being dishonest piles of shit, selling the government stuff that did work, but for massively inflated prices, like Colt, famed gun manufacturer. Now, they sold a gun that would normally cost $15 for over

double that. Now, some of that money was used for kickbacks to politicians and military officers alike, so they'd overlook this overcharging while Colt made record profits. I mean, a good comparison for that is Remington made virtually the same exact gun, sold for much less, but got barely a fraction of the same government contracts because colt was grifting everybody's palms yeah they they used all that you know uh corruption money and then started brewing malt liquor finally a colt 45 i can respect now i don't mean to paint the corruption at play during the Union war effort as being a top down affair either. It was top down, bottom up and side to side as corruption within institutions tends to spread like a cancer once it takes hold. Individual officers and politicians were integral in spreading this corruption around completely on their own, independent from like the central structure of the government,

like the central structure of the government, especially in the case of one John C. Fremont, a one-time champion of genocide of the native populations of California and now commander of the Union Army's Western Department based in St. Louis. Fremont was so cartoonishly corrupt that one of his rivals said that he had surrounded himself with a, quote,

horde of pirates. Yar! Which honestly sounds kind of rad. Just like some dude who looks like Blackbeard showing up. He's like, oh, Dom, I wore the wrong uniform. He's going to get really confused when the Somali pirates show up. He gave contracts

to his friends and others and had others work without contracts and then just build the government randomly. He rented out mansions as command posts for himself and others he had italian and hungarian bodyguards shipped in from europe to protect him while wearing their traditional like shiny colorful european uniforms yeah the skin tight armani shirt and the skin tight white jeans that are both inextricably sparkly. Yeah, of course.

Like a rare Pokemon. Yeah, but who got the hair gel contract to supply the Italian guards? I assume Milan. Slicking my hair back with molasses. Get shot directly in the head with a.50 caliber musket ball just pingsed right off. They say his hair hasn't moved in 14 years he contracted rail cars that were broken

and horses that were blind along with rotting meat and flour that had been mixed with sawdust and then pocketed the difference that pemmican would have fucking sucked then there was his quartermaster general justice mckinstry now when McKinstry arrived, he was given authorization to buy anything regardless of the price. And he was also appointed the Western Department's Provost Marshal, or Commander of the Military Police. So, no conflict of interest there. Kind of modulate. McKinstry robbed the Western Department blind with bad contracts and also just literal theft. He would then use his position as Provost Marshal to threaten and intimidate anybody who dared look into it too hard.

They worked together to create what would become known as the Hull-Carbine Affair. The Hull's Rifle, or Hull's Carbine, was first developed about 50 years before the Civil War. And it was a revolutionary breech-loading design, which, without going into it, would have been really cool if it worked in time for the Civil War. But technology hadn't really gotten to the point with fine, repeatable, replaceable machined parts to make it reliable. So the Army rejected it for service years before the war started. However, there were still thousands of them laying around. thousands of them laying around. So John Pierpoint Morgan bought 5,000 of these rifles for around $3 a piece and then sold them to Fremont for $22 a piece,

with Fremont making a hefty cut to make sure the contract went through. And all this went through a middleman who didn't actually have the money to complete the initial purchase in the first place, but now the contract that had been signed meant the government was now on the hook for the whole price despite the fact they already paid for everything it's all profit baby this led morgan withholding thousands of rifles until he was paid by the government again to release the rifles that they had originally already paid for through the initial contract that had been robbed blind by Fremont and his middleman. And then the end result of that, they found that they had paid them twice for rifles

they had already rejected before the war had already began. For fuck's sake. Now, so you can see how many bad guns are filtering into the ranks of the union army we should look at the causes and impact with the soldiers outside the obvious thing of the fucking things don't work and will kill you if you're a soldier whose rifle broke it isn't like it is today i assume in most armies i want to speak for all of them on the face of the earth you go to your arms and be like yo my shit's busted and they give you a new rifle or they replace a part back then soldiers would have

to fucking pay for the repairs or replacement out of their own paycheck I'm sure that led to like a lot of dudes doing the most inventive repairs it did um making them even more wildly unsafe so

strapping four muskets together like Mo, I call this the quadra tap. So in essence, contractors were defrauding the government several times over because then they would steal more money from the government in the form of soldiers' paychecks in order to supply that same soldier with another shitty rifle that would break over and over again. Soldiers might be stupid, but they aren't dumb, and they knew about all of this. So did civilian camp followers who trailed behind the Union Army, known as Suttlers. These Suttlers had a license to sell soldiers whatever

they needed or wanted, from clothes to booze, tobacco, guns. I think you know where this is going. The settlers were as corrupt as everyone else, with the added knowledge that soldiers had nowhere else to turn to. They often charged an entire month's pay for something that only cost a few cents on the dollar. Every soldier knew they were getting ripped off, but the main difference was since the settlers stayed with the soldiers, their reputation actually mattered for quality. So while they were ripping everyone off, the shit they sold was good and it worked, unlike the thing that they were actually getting from their own quartermasters. This led one soldier to remark, quote, our settler is such a crooked snake. I hope he gets smashed out of business,

blown up with a cannonball. But not until I'm gone from here. They were a necessary evil. This nightmare scenario had a constant unwavering effect on the Union Army itself. Since the Secretary of War was stealing, and the generals were stealing, and the quartermasters were stealing,

why the fuck shouldn't I be stealing too a series of cascading events and this is something that like you see in armies but also like entire countries that have a massive endemic corruption problem once corruption worms its way into how things work

it spreads like the plague and every like because you have to be able to make it you have to like individual soldiers individual civilians in places with really bad corruption problems they have to find a way to survive within the system and when the system is corrupt the only way to make it work is through corruption hey as someone who's from ireland i am overly familiar with this literally yesterday it was announced that a vulture fund bought 85% of property in a single area in one purchase. I'm sure no problems are going to come from that.

Anyway, so how's the housing situation like in Ireland? Why do you think I live in London? This is where the common saying within the army or even the military comes from. and you still hear it today. There's only one thief in the army. Everyone else is just trying to get their shit back. get by with the men in the ranks reduced to fighting over literal scraps in order to survive, creating a culture of graft, corruption, stealing, and outright murder sometimes. Oh shit. This led to New York Representative Charles Van Wick to call for some kind of committee investigation into corruption and the contracts within the Union military. He said this is due to, quote quote the mania for stealing almost from

the general to the drummer boy and i just love the idea of a drummer boy stealing something stealing drumsticks this drum is full of contraband hey your drum sounds really weird yeah it's full of cloth that i stole my boots are made of paper my boots are made of paper i rode a blind horse on this someone fed me rotten beef and my gunpowder was made of fucking wheat dust fuck me my drumsticks are too rolled up newspapers van wick got what he wanted and a body was created to investigate all of these problems which promptly led to its own issues. Namely, investigators found that literally everyone was at fault across the political and military spectrum.

I was going to say, I would assume the investigators got corrupt as well. Also, yes. At the most basic level, contractors blame the inspectors for their shitty goods, saying if they sucked so bad, why did they pass inspection? While the inspectors point out they couldn't possibly inspect everything, and even if they could, contractors could just bypass them by using their contacts within the government

to get approved without any actual inspections anyway. So what was the fucking point? This led to said contacts within the government insisting that they would never do such a thing. And even if they would, the other party was doing the same thing. Folks, and to be was doing the same thing. Folks ache. And to be fair,

that is true. This led to constant infighting with one political faction accusing the other of targeting their political rivals, which again, may have been true, but also because

they were definitely guilty of having their hand in some form of corruption or another, from selling appointments to rerouting grain supplies to their own towns to get kickbacks, to pencil whipping contracts, faking inspections. Literally every single layer of the private and public sector was involved in corruption, stopping just short of President Lincoln himself, at least as far as anybody

could tell. Despite uncovering a literal rat king of corruption so thick virtually nobody would ever be able to be held accountable without literally imploding the union government and military structure, they were able to discover that around one-fourth of the total government spending on the military thus far during the war effort had vanished into a swirling morass of corruption like a fart in the wind. Though they did come up with some kind of fix for the issue, the False Claims Act of 1863. This bill banned the making of false claims to the government,

including forgery, embezzlement, and conspiracy to defraud the government and contracts. Punishment was pretty heavy for its day. Years in prison and up to $5,000 in penalty. And they could also be hit with a fine of double the amount that they stole, plus $2,000 for each false claim, which is a lot of goddamn money for 1863. That is... That's like millions of dollars today.

So, Joe, do you want to know how much just $100 is worth today? Shoot. $2,513. So $2,513 multiplied by 50. That is $125,650. Oh my God. And that isn't even counting a double fine for the amount they stole plus $2,000 for each false claim.

Yep. Now, it's 1863. The Department of Justice and any kind of prosecutorial power doesn't actually exist yet. Yeah. So that begs the question, how the fuck are they going to enforce this? Rats. Snitches. Oh, I thought they were like...

Whistleblowers. I thought they were weaponizing, like, rodents. Yeah, they're just going to give everybody the plague. I mean, it makes sense. If you can train rats, rats can get in anywhere. I mean, if you can train a rat to become a chef, I mean, you can train a rat to do a lot. Yeah, if you can train a rat to be a chef, you can train a rat to be a rat. They came up with the whistleblower enforcement arm, which is pretty fucking genius.

This bill encouraged people to rat out other people for defrauding the government. And that wouldn't be enough. But they promised them a share of the stolen money if the claim was proven. So you could go from just some guy working at a factory or a contractor to being literally a millionaire or fantastically wealthy by ratting out your boss, which is a dream that everybody has. your boss, which is a dream that everybody has. As the war went on and the shock of massive mobilization evened out, along with the resulting logistical networks needing to supply them, this law and the legion of people begging to be the next person to write out some Gilded Age business asshole for a bounty largely ended the endemic corruption within the Union Army. And of course, obviously, some still existed.

But at least soldiers were getting the bare minimum. Working guns, boots not made of paper, and food that wasn't, you know, going to kill them most of the time. Oh, and the gunpowder would generally work now too, which is important. Massachusetts Senator Henry Dawes probably put it best, saying, Massachusetts Senator Henry Dawes probably put it best saying quote there was never such a glorious cause so poorly served so utterly ruined through instrumentality

in about equal degrees of incompetence and knavery oh you know listen get it where you can I'm not faulting the people for stealing all that money and stealing all those wares. You know, do what you got to do. It is right to steal from large corporations such as Tesco, but it is also equally as justified to steal from the US government.

I don't disagree. However, steal from the government in innocuous ways, that ones that leads to like soldiers getting rotten food and dying from explosive shitting ass disease. Yeah, I suppose. Like that's like, you know, we talked about the littoral combat ship episode a couple months ago. And it's just like these people are very obviously dishonest hacks and don't give a fuck. But also now sailors are literally driving themselves insane on the high seas trying to get their shitty boat to keep working i mean that's a tale as old as time yeah and this one you just get everybody stealing and that's uh you know we've talked about this before in multiple multiple other series at this point other episodes as well of like the impact of endemic corruption

on any institution it could be a government it could be a military and if it's happening within the military it's of course happening within the government these things do not happen in a vacuum and most of the time americans are like ha ha ha wouldn't happen here and that's what it's always really funny because you generally don't expect this kind of stuff to happen in a functioning democracy because generally that kind of insane corruption happens in an insulated bubble in a place that generally like some kind of dictatorship, some vague form of authoritarian government. but in this case it was it how it's always you know envisioned and when it's taught to americans like the shining beacon on the hill the union you know crushing the slaver's rebellion and reunifying the country which is a really good way of looking at it because it's exactly what happened but also like it's not that the the union authoritarian, though. I mean, Lincoln did lead in that way on several occasions. But because you see that the rapid, rapid expansion of the union military,

there was absolutely no way you're going to go from a couple thousand dudes to 700,000 and have something like this not fucking happen. Yep. It's impossible. In the words of Cake, the funky morning DJ says democracy's a joke. Well, as long as we get the philosopher in on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There was a very searching look in your eyes there, Joe, when I said that. Now, Tom, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion, support the show on Patreon. At that point, you can ask us a question in our Patreon DMs, on our Discord, on Twitter, if we happen to answer that, but not that frequently. You can attach that letter to a blind horse that you've requisitioned for military service

and send it to the london studios and we will answer it on air and today's question is what is the pettiest hill you're willing to die on oh i'll let you go first um new metal is good i agree with you yeah but i am also known as being the person in the show with the worst taste in music so I don't know if that helps you or hurts you like new metal as an evolution of both combining of metal, hip hop, alternative rock

and new and it was new and it created a very unique music scene which because of the way that time works was eventually gave way to a lot of bad music but equally just as much good and it was something that was very very interesting i will counter this with a hill that i will die on that'll make you mad screamo music is also good that won't make

me mad screamo is good no i was kind of expecting like an absolute repulsed look on your face if you're talking like 2000s metalcore then yes if we're talking like attack attack I am like I'm gonna come through the screen and punch you okay hear me out attack attack second album fucking

whips and I stand by that listen we may or may not have gotten Joe to to the stick stickly dance uh crab crab core forever baby like you're just different versions of dumb guys look here's the thing when i say x is good it's not like i'm comparing it to chopin okay i'm saying i am entertained by it that's all i'm saying but i'm not it. That's all I'm saying. I'm not going to say it is quality. I'm not saying you're ever going to hear me listen to it outside of the confines of my earbuds.

I don't want to be judged. And if someone judges me for it, they have a point. Yes. I mean, I guess that like this is where I'm not sure if it counts as like I like this. And also it's a guilty pleasure because I don't actually believe in guilty pleasures. I believe some people just like different things and that's perfectly fine. I need to get, I need to look up your man's name to get this joke. Um, yeah, like to be fair, you are the podcasting equivalent of Max Bemis from say anything.

So I'm also okay with this comparison max bemis fucking rules i mean apart from like the insane misogyny on that first album well to be fair he is a insane person so i will openly admit it yeah he's very open with his problem like that's another thing is like i do accept that like emo and screamo music, which say anything is 100% an emo band, is deeply misogynist. But it is no more misogynist than most other genres of music. Yes, very true. I'm not saying that as a defense. I'm just saying music in general fucking sucks when it comes to that, especially music by men.

Yeah, look, Max Beam is very much a savant. The fact that he produced the second, first or second album, Say Anything is a Real Boy, all on his own and played everything is an achievement in and of itself. The man wrote a romance song about the Holocaust and it rules.

Yeah, listen, Jeff Mangum from a neutral milk hotel couldn't even do that a neutral milk hotel existing denotes the fact there could be a negative milk hotel i think we should probably end it here that's just my tummy after i have coffee with milk in it i can't wait for your tummy to cut its second album hot hot liquid shit negative milk hotel second album Tom thank you so much for joining me here for this very well put

together serious history podcast you could use this space in our positive milk hotel to plug your other show listen to Beneath the Skin the show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing uh we talk about interesting aspects of history and how it connects to tattooing we at the time of recording we'll have just put out an episode about um raymond

pedobon the artist who did all the black flag stuff so if you like that sort of thing it sounds interesting check it out and i host precisely zero milk hotels but i do host this show and if you like that sort of thing, it sounds interesting, check it out. And I host precisely zero milk hotels, but I do host this show. And if you like what we do here, consider supporting us on Patreon. You get episodes like this early. You get years worth of bonus content, our back catalog. You get every episode early. You get access to our Discord channel, first dibs on live show tickets and merch, and all sorts of other stuff and leave us a review

on wherever it is you listen to podcasts it helps us immensely and until next time milk that hotel