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Peculiarly, Perkins's military service came to an abrupt end by the summer of 1864. Citing “private affairs [in Ohio being left] in a very disordered state” (185), the captain tendered his resignation, which was at length approved on July 12, 1864. Returning home, Perkins over the next forty-seven years amassed a large fortune in banking, iron manufacturing, railroads, gas and water works, and real estate in Sharon, Pennsylvania, located just across Ohio's common border with the Keystone State; doubtless his experience as an army quartermaster, handling millions of tons of supplies valued at countless millions of dollars, prepared the erstwhile captain for success during the tumultuous Gilded Age.
The chief virtue of this volume is the great mass of official materials detailing the actions of Captain Perkins and the military departments he helped manage. Benefiting from the 1990 acquisition by the Summit County (Ohio) Historical Society of eight crates of Captain Perkins's army correspondence from family heirs, Taylor not only organized and catalogued the entire collection—consisting of some twenty thousand one-of-a-kind items—she has produced a first-rate narrative study that will likely serve as a model for future scholarly forays into the Civil War supply arm. There are, however, a few deficiencies that limit the work's general effectiveness. First, the regrettable dearth of private family correspondence leaves the reader yearning to know more about Perkins the individual in addition to Perkins the competent professional. For example, adequate explanation and analysis of the captain's sudden resignation from army life even goes unexplained within Taylor 's text. This shortfall is of course as unavoidable as it is lamentable. What is not is Taylor's failure at times to contextualize the captain's activities more thoroughly within the larger history of trans-Appalachian military operations, as well as more conclusively to demonstrate—utilizing the work of organizational and occupational historians—Perkins's role in parlaying his acquired expertise into lasting professional success during the post-bellum years. Nevertheless, Taylor 's work should without question stand on its own considerable merits. “The Supply for Tomorrow Must Not Fail” is an invaluable addition to any serious Civil War scholar's library. It should be especially welcome to those who focus their research/reading interest upon the conduct of the war's important (and still sadly underrepresented) Western campaigns.
United States Army Command and General Staff College
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