Bureaucracy in America: De Forest's Paperwork

Abstract

Bureaucracy in America:De Forest's Paperwork Amanda Claybaugh (bio) John W. De Forest is remembered, when he is remembered at all, as the first important novelist of the American Civil War (1861-65). When the war broke out, De Forest was already the author of a handful of novels and travel books. During his three years in the Union Army, while serving as a captain first in Louisiana and then in Virginia, he published a number of essays about his wartime experiences in the major northern magazines.1 These essays came to the notice of a general, who detailed De Forest to his staff and charged him with publishing accounts of the battles in which the general's men had fought. In the final months of the war, this soldier-author became an administrator. He was discharged from active duty and transferred to the Reserve Veteran's Corps, and after the war had ended, he was assigned to work in the reserve corps' headquarters in Washington, where he was responsible for overseeing nine clerks in the personnel office. He was also charged with writing a report defending the corps against the generals, Ulysses S. Grant among them, who wanted it to disband. It was during this time that De Forest finished writing what would be his great Civil War novel, Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867). De Forest's career as an administrator then continued into Reconstruction (1865-77). In July 1866, he was transferred to the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, usually referred to as the Freedmen's Bureau. He served two months in the bureau's headquarters, also in Washington, where he was part of a committee that drafted regulations specifying the precise extent of bureau authority in the occupied states. He was then assigned to a local bureau office in Greenville, South Carolina, where he served from October 1866 to January 1868, overseeing all matters concerning the nearly eighty thousand people in his district. De Forest would publish six essays about southern [End Page 203] society in the aftermath of the war and an array of short stories on southern themes, as well as four essays about his own experiences working in the local bureau office.2 To recall that De Forest served as an administrator as well as a soldier is to recall that the Civil War and Reconstruction period entailed a remarkable expansion of government. The Civil War had been fought, after all, over the question of federal power, and the demands of fighting a vast war meant that the Confederacy no less than the Union saw government centralize over the war's four years. Nor did the end of the war reverse this process. The demands of overseeing and rebuilding the occupied southern states, as well as integrating the freed men and women into the new political order, meant that the federal government would continue to grow in size and take on new functions. For the first time the federal government assumed responsibility for aiding citizens in need, both by providing pensions to wounded soldiers and their families, and by providing food, clothing, housing, and medical care to the freed people. And new executive departments were established, among them the Departments of Justice and Agriculture, and the number of federal employees multiplied, from roughly 24,000 in 1860 to 126,000 at the turn of the century.3 This expansion of government drew new attention to bureaucracy. The major northern magazines, which voiced and set elite opinion, were filled with descriptions of bureaucracies, in particular those of the Union Army and the Freedmen's Bureau. Tracking these descriptions, I have recovered an evolving nineteenth-century discourse about bureaucracy. For the most part, this discourse was quite critical of both bureaucratic institutions and bureaucrats, but not entirely so in the United States of the 1860s. The Civil War and Reconstruction prompted at least some people in the north to see possibilities in bureaucracy as a mode of both allocating authority and of structuring organizations, but also, and more surprisingly, as a mode of literary representation. It was only in the 1870s, when the conservative backlash against Reconstruction gave rise...