structed, the number of miles and location of telegraph lines constructed, and the number of vessels chartered or employed.

Records of appointments and assignments include those relating to acting assistant quartermasters from 1863 (13 vols.) and to volunteer officers, 1861-65 (6 vols.). There are also lists of quartermaster clerks, superintendents, wagon masters, printers, etc., as of Sept. 30, 1865; lists of civilian clerks and messengers in the Quartermaster General's Office, 1861-70; and a volume relating to the battalion of clerks of the Quartermaster General's Office, Cos. A-C, 1864.

Ninth Division (Records and Correspondence)

This Division was legally responsible for all correspondence, returns, reports, and records received and kept in the Office of the Quartermaster General and for their referral to other divisions of the Office and to government departments. In point of fact, however, its principal duty was to examine the accounts of disbursing officers and officers responsible for public property, except for the accounts examined in the Second Division (Clothing and Equipage). During the 4-year period July 1, 1861-June 30, 1865, the Division received 176, 402 accounts and examined and sent to the Treasury 63, 259. "These are not single vouchers," the Quartermaster General reported in 1865, "but accounts, many of which contain hundreds, and some of them thousands, of single vouchers. They represent the expenditure of over one thousand millions of dollars in money, and the use and application of the property purchased therewith."

Col. Benjamin C. Card was Chief of the Ninth Division during the Civil War. He also headed the Seventh Division.

Record Group 92. --Extant records of this Division, except those incorporated in the consolidated correspondence file described above, consist principally of officers' money accounts from 1864.

Western Gunboat Fleet

In 1861 and 1862 the Quartermaster's Department built a fleet of ironclad gunboats and one of steam rams, which were officered and manned by the Navy and War Departments "conjointly. These fleets were of great help in military operations along the Mississippi River and its tributaries. The gunboat fleet was transferred from the War Department to the Navy Department under an act of July 16, 1862 (12 Stat. 587); the fleet of steam rams, however, continued under the War Department. (AGO General Order 150, Oct. 1, 1862, ordered the Chief Quartermaster of the gunboat fleet, Capt. G. D. Wise, to "settle up all indebtedness of the fleet to the 1st of October, make the usual returns and . . . close his accounts, and report by letter to the Quartermaster General. ") In ordering the transfer Secretary of War Stanton noted that the "brilliant and important services of the gun-boats at Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, Columbus, Island No. 10, Pittsburg Landing, Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez, Baton Rouge, and generally in independent action or in cooperation with the Army on the Western rivers, will constitute one of the brightest pages in the history of the war.

Captain Wise, in his final report of Sept. 14, 1863 (printed as part of the Quartermaster General's report for 1865), confirmed that the "flotilla was under the command of naval officers, and subject to naval rules; while at the same time its whole organization was a part of the army, and its

expenditures paid from that department." Final transfer was not made until Sept. 30, 1862.

Warren D. Crandall and Isaac
D. Newell, History of the Ram
Fleet and the Mississippi Marine
Brigade in the War for the Union on
the Mississippi and Its Tributaries;

the Story of the Ellets and Their Men (St. Louis, 1907); report of the Chief Quartermaster, Western Gunboat Fleet, cited above.

Record Group 217. --Records of and relating to the Western Gunboat Fleet (or "Flotilla") that were forwarded to the Third Auditor of the Treasury are described under Treasury Department.

Record Group 92. --A volume entitled "Vessels of Mississippi Marine Brigade and Ram Fleet," 1862-64, is available. Other related records are principally in the consolidated and other correspondence files of the Quartermaster General's Office.

Quartermaster Depots and the Field Organization

The Quartermaster General considered the field organization of his Department to be "simple and efficient." Each corps, brigade, or regimental quartermaster took orders and instructions both from the commander of the troops to which he was attached and from his immediate superior in the Quartermaster's Department. Officers were assigned also as chief quartermasters of military departments or of principal depots. These officers, under the direction of the Quartermaster General's Office, contracted for and purchased supplies and provided for their inspection, storage, safekeeping, and transportation from the principal depots in the loyal States to subordinate or advanced depots established on the border or in areas won from the Confederacy. In addition to the principal depots at New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, other depots for manufacture and purchase were established during the war at Quincy, Ill., Steubenville, Ohio, and Milwaukee, Wis. At important army posts, garrisoned by troops, regimental quartermasters attached to the garrisons usually acted as post quartermasters.

Record Group 92. --The considerable quantity of field records of the Quartermaster's Department include records of all command levels for the Civil War period. Many of these relate to supply problems during war and reconstruction. Especially significant are the records of the principal quartermaster depots at Philadelphia (Schuylkill Arsenal) and Cincinnati. The relatively complete records kept at Philadelphia include letters sent and received, inspection books, and records of purchases. (Other records of quartermaster installations or of quartermaster officers serving in the field during the Civil War are in Record Group 98, Records of the United States Army Commands.)

OFFICE OF THE PAYMASTER GENERAL

An act of May 8, 1792 (1 Stat. 279), provided for a "paymaster to reside near the head-quarters of the troops of the United States"; and an act of Apr. 24, 1816 (3 Stat. 297), established a Pay Department headed by a Paymaster General. During the Civil War the Paymaster General, under the direction of the Secretary of War, was responsible for the administra

tion of the Pay Department in all its details. The subordinate paymasters, whose exclusive duty was the disbursement of public money, were subject to orders only of the Secretary of War, the Paymaster General, and the senior officers of their own geographical departments. They were, however, subject to arrest by the senior officer of the command to which they might be assigned. Any such arrest had to be reported immediately to the Paymaster General so that he might bring the case before the Secretary of War.

The Pay Department was the only one within the military establishment that needed no law for its expansion during the Civil War; sec. 25 of an act of July 5, 1838 (5 Stat. 259), had authorized the President, whenever volunteers or militia should be called into the service of the United States, to appoint additional paymasters to serve as long as needed to pay the new troops. The number of such additional paymasters in the service in 1864 was 319; they had been appointed on recommendations of examining boards at Washington, Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis.

The Paymaster General established pay districts that generally corresponded in number and geographical limits to the military departments. In each pay district a corps of paymasters was constituted and was made responsible to a selected officer. This single officer received all the funds required for the payments, distributed them to his subordinate paymasters, directed and arranged the payments to the troops, and superintended the performance of all the duties required of the Pay Department.

In allusion to the "onerous" duties of the Department, the Paymaster General in his fiscal year 1864 report emphasized the immense labor involved in disbursing, necessarily at stated periods and in small sums, the "large annual sum" of $350, 000, 000. In his report on the last year of the war, when praising the members of his immediate staff, he described their wartime work as follows:

With payments simultaneously progressing at sixty different points, widely separated, with the necessity of keeping each one supplied with funds from day to day, and a necessity also that each should have no more than required for immediate disbursement--drawing from the treasury at the rate of $20, 000, 000 per week, and compelled to make close estimate and careful watch of its daily distribution, so that the demand at each given point should be surely supplied, and yet no more than supplied; telegrams and letters continually pouring in, noting the movement and destination of troops, and repeating these notices to the proper points of rendezvous; applications and appeals constantly arriving, requiring immediate answers; new questions arising and referred to this office for instructions etc. --kept our thoughts, our pens, our press, and the telegraph in constant requisition by day and by night.

The maximum number of paymasters employed at any one time during the war was 447. Total disbursements during the war were over $1, 100, 000, 000. Within the three months of June, July, and August of 1865 the Pay Department made final payment of approximately $270,000,000 to some 800, 000 men--a task of which the Paymaster General wrote in his report:

When the manner of these payments is observed, with a knowledge of the particularity required in each case, the accounts varying in

amounts, each to be separately computed in its several items of pay, clothing, bounty, &c., with such stoppages as may be chargeable deducted, the final amount stated and the signature of each officer and man to be appended in duplicate to the receipt rolls, a just appreciation may be formed of the stupendous labor involved. No similar work of like magnitude, regarding its immensity both as to men and money, and the small limit of time in which it has been performed, has, it is believed, any parallel in the history of armies.

The rapid disbandment of volunteer regiments at the close of the war threw upon the Pay Department a great accumulation of "referred claims" transmitted for adjustment of payment. These had arisen chiefly from the inability of muster-out officers to compile a complete history of the pay, clothing, bounty, etc., because of the large numbers of enlisted men. In such cases no final settlement was possible at the time of discharge. The Division of Referred Claims, established in the summer of 1865, comprised a group of 12 paymasters and 64 clerks operating under a chief supervising paymaster. Each claim sent to the Division required search in previous payrolls on file in the Paymaster General's Office and in the Office of the Second Auditor of the Treasury Department, besides referral to the Adjutant General's Office. From 1866 the Office was responsible for the examination of accounts to establish eligibility of former soldiers to receive additional bounty authorized by an act of July 28, 1866 (14 Stat. 322). Actually, however, "in consequence of the pressure upon the treasury, (Second Auditor,) and . . . of what was considered to be the greater facilities of the pay department," the Paymaster General's Office had paid most of the bounties accruing during the war except those due to deceased officers and men. In 1866 a board of officers prepared rules for bounty payments, to include those for colored soldiers (see Claim Division, under Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, below).

Paymasters General during the war:

Col. Benjamin F. Larned, in office when the war began.
Maj. Cary H. Fry (acting), July 15, 1862.
Col. Timothy P. Andrews, Dec. 11, 1862.
Col. Benjamin W. Brice, Nov. 29, 1864.

Civil War annual reports of the Paymaster General, appended to those of the Secretary of War;

H. Rept. 5, 40 Cong., 2 sess., Serial 1357; H. Rept. 33, 40 Cong., 3 sess., Serial 1388.

Record Group 99. --The letters sent by the Paymaster General during the Civil War are in a series of volumes of miscellaneous letters sent, 1808-89, for which a volume of "Digests of Important Letters, " 1808-71, constitutes a partial but important finding aid. Letters received, 186165, are abstracted in registers and are indexed; these constitute parts of a series, 1799-1870, alphabetically arranged by name of writer, then by year. There are also registers of and indexes to letters "Received From Departments" (that is, other bureaus of the Government), 1862-65 (4 vols.), and copies of endorsements made on letters received, 1860-69 (4 vols.). Four other volumes, 1865-66, register "Letters Received Claims." Decisions, opinions, etc., recorded in the correspondence are indexed, 180893 (7 vols.), and are digested on record cards, 1808-1912 (3 ft.).

Wartime or war-related fiscal records consist of general ledgers,

1864-77, for pay of the Army, pay of officers, pay of volunteers, pay of officers at the U. S. Military Academy, and payment of bounties; registers of requests for funds (part of 12 vols., 1854-1912); records of receipts and expenditures (part of 12 vols., 1838-71); a register of paymasters' accounts rendered and transmitted to the Treasury Department's Second Auditor, 1863-73; registers of payments to officers (part of 125 vols., 18261913, with name index), to troops (part of 14 vols., 1841-1913), to discharged soldiers (part of 40 vols., 1839-1916), to hospital nurses and stewards (3 vols., 1859-80), to enlisted men on Treasury certificates (1 vol., 1862-94), to sergeants and post noncommissioned staffs (part of 13 vols., 1861-1915), and to various detachments of artillery, infantry, etc. (part of 7 vols., 1849-73); paymasters' accounts of drafts, 1865 (1 vol.); and a record of soldiers' deposits, 1865-68 (1 vol.).

Personnel records include personal histories of paymasters, 1848-89 and 1863-67 (2 vols.), and of additional paymasters (part of 7 vols., 18611910); registers of paymasters, 1815-68 and 1861-64 (2 vols.); board proceedings for the examination of officers for the Pay Department, 1864-67 (1 1/2 ft.); personal reports of paymaster clerks, 1864-65; and lists of civilian employees of the Office (part of 9 vols., 1861-1911).

National Archives, Preliminary Inventory [No. 9] of the Records of the Office of the Paymaster Gen

eral, comp. by Roland C. McConnell (Washington, 1948).

Record Group 92. --After the Office of the Paymaster General was abolished and its responsibility for paying the troops was transferred to the Office of the Quartermaster General in 1912, the latter office removed many documents from the Paymaster General's general correspondence files for interfiling with Quartermaster General's records in a consolidated subject file. Insofar as they relate to the Civil War these are described in this Guide under Office of the Quartermaster General.

Record Group 217. --The records of the Second Auditor of the Treasury Department include the following original records of the Paymaster General, which were transferred to the Second Auditor's Office in 1889: registers and abstracts, in several series and consisting of many volumes, of payments to soldiers, 1863-66; registers of auditor's certificates paid, 1865-85 (42 vols.); and a few series of war-related claims registers.

SURGEON GENERAL'S OFFICE AND THE MEDICAL DEPARTMENT

An act of Apr. 4, 1818 (3 Stat. 426), gave to the Medical Department for the first time a permanent chief with the title of Surgeon General and an act of Mar. 2, 1821 (3 Stat. 616), prescribed its peacetime organization. The Department was variously named, both before and during the Civil War. An act of June 21, 1860 (12 Stat. 67), referred to the "medical corps"; one of Aug. 3, 1861 (12 Stat. 288), to the "medical staff"; and one of Apr. 16, 1862 (12 Stat. 378), to the "Medical Department" in its title and the "medical corps" in its text. An act of Dec. 27, 1862 (12 Stat. 633), speaks of the "medical inspector's department" as a part of the "medical corps. Early in 1861 the medical staff of the Army comprised the Surgeon General, 30 surgeons, and 83 assistant surgeons; but when war began, 3 surgeons and 21 assistant surgeons resigned and 3 other assistant surgeons were dismissed for disloyalty.

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