The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (30 page)

Distress and mob violence evoked both positive and negative responses. In Richmond the city council at first agreed with the
Whig’
s pronouncement that “violence before remonstrance is an unheard-of thing under the Southern sun. It will not be tolerated.”
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The city fathers passed a resolution blaming the April riot upon “outsiders” and “devilish and selfish motives” and offered rewards for testimony leading to the conviction of rioters. Later, however, when anarchy seemed abated, the Richmond City Council adopted a welfare program designed to identify the hungry and supply them with food at public expense. In Mobile, too, the local government took rapid steps to expand the city’s “free market” and feed the hungry. Mobile citizens also founded a Confederate Association to identify speculators in foodstuffs and mete out vigilante justice to those “convicted.”
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But efforts to alleviate want and forestall further bread riots enjoyed uneven success. In Petersburg, Virginia, a municipal supply agent traveled as far as northern Alabama in search of hogs, and thanks to his energy, conditions in Petersburg were tolerable. In Richmond, however, the sheer volume of supplies required often frustrated attempts at massive welfare. The city government eventually charged its board of supply to secure food “for the city”—not only the poor. But Richmond’s supply agents were not always able to locate, purchase, and transport the quantity of food necessary.
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Successful or not, though, the Confederate experience in local welfare programs was significant. Just as bread riots were indices of the failure of Confederate agriculture and of the tenuous nature of social solidarity in the South, so were free markets and Confederate associations indications of heightened social and economic conscience.

Paradoxically, while riot and makeshift relief schemes served notice that the nation of farmers was getting hungry, the Confederate industrial economy approached full stride. Sometime during 1863 the Confederacy achieved, by its own estimate at least, self-sufficiency in military-industrial production.

For a limited time, the government had been able to buy arms, ammunition, blankets, and such abroad. By the spring of 1863, however, it had become apparent that foreign purchases would not much longer sustain the Southern war effort. Confederate credit in Europe was overextended; Caleb Huse, the South’s most active European purchasing agent, had contracted debts totaling £592,–000. And the increasingly efficient Union blockade interfered with the shipment of war supplies from Europe to the South while it impeded shipment of cotton, the Confederacy’s most acceptable collateral, to European ports.
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In his report to the President in January 1863, War Sceretary Seddon took a sanguine view of the “increased stringency of the blockade by the enemy.” The diminution of foreign supply would compel the Confederacy to rely upon its own resources and eventually to become free from dependence upon foreign purchases. Seddon’s optimistic interpretation was perhaps the only one he could make in a public document.
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In fact, however, the War Department had already generated considerable industrial activity, and encouraged by circumstances and Seddon, the supply bureaus took far longer strides during 1863.

The government, or, more specifically, the supply bureaus of the War and Navy Departments, provided impetus and direction for Confederate war industry. The War and Navy Offices made contracts with privately owned manufacturing firms such as the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond; but Tredegar was unique, almost un-Southern, in that it was a prewar industrial plant which could readily convert to war production. The Confederate military, as soon as the illusion of a short war evaporated, had to begin generating other sources of domestic supply.
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The effort was more or less evenly divided between encouraging private manufacturers and opening or expanding government shops.
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Significantly, the government maintained control of the industrialization process in both the public and private economic sectors. There was too little time for a class of industrial entrepreneurs to ripen and flower “naturally.” Hence the Southern war industry remained almost exclusively under government control, and because time and the South’s laissez-faire heritage precluded the development of a broadly based socialized industrial economy, the Confederates centralized control and direction of war industry at the top, within the War and Navy offices.
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Given the magnitude of the enterprise, incredibly few men directed and managed Southern war industries. In the War Department, the bureaus of Ordnance, Quartermaster, and Nitre and Mining were responsible; the Navy Department had offices of Ordnance and Hydrography, Construction, and Provisions and Clothing. Beneath the decision-making level, however, the government employed large numbers of civilians, skilled and unskilled, white and black, slave and free, male and female. In Selma, Alabama, to cite only one example, more than 10,000 people were engaged in some form of war industry during 1863.
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Acts of Congress, administration policy, and “military necessity” allowed and encouraged government control of Southern war industry. In the beginning the War and Navy Departments assumed control of existing government shipyards, armories, and the like.
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In general the army and in particular Josiah Gorgas of the Ordnance Bureau were most energetic at expanding the manufacturing facilities of the “old Union” and establishing new works to serve the new nation. Gorgas began early, building, refitting, and moving ordnance installations throughout the South.
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By 1863 the other military bureaus and offices involved with the manufacture of war materials were following Gorgas’ example. By this time Navy Secretary Stephen Mallory, despairing of purchasing a navy in Europe, created a construction office and began in earnest to build Southern ships in the South. The navy also assumed control of a massive gun foundry at Selma in the spring of 1863 and began to cast large guns designed by the officer in charge of naval ordnance, John M. Brooke.
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By 1863 the Quartermaster Bureau of the War Department had set up a series of manufacturing establishments to produce uniforms, blankets, wagons, and the like. Some of the more successful of these combined the characteristics of urban and cottage industry. Quartermaster depots served as a kind of clearing house to which local women came to sell homespun thread and yard. Then other women took the thread and yarn and returned cloth. Still others took the cloth and patterns and returned clothing.
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Significantly, during the first half of 1863 the operations of the quartermaster bureau in Mississippi, one of the South’s least industrialized states in 1861, were sufficient to support a major Confederate field army at Vicksburg.
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In April 1863 the Nitre and Mining Bureau separated from the Ordnance Bureau, and under the direction of Colonel Isaac M. St. John continued its program of extracting and refining military minerals: coal, iron, copper, nitre, and lead.
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In pursuit of self-sufficiency, each military agency established and operated various sorts of industrial establishments. Taken together, government-owned war industries made an enormous impact upon Mississippi in the Confederacy: As They Saw It (Jackson, Miss., 1961), pp. 266–267. the Southern economy. A portion of this impact was quantitative—the generation of employment, production of manufactured articles, and infusion of Confederate money into the economy—but there was a qualitative impact as well, the transformation, in terms of war materials, of a preindustrial economy into an industrial economy.

In addition to stimulating government-owned industries, the war also called forth activity among private manufacturers. Government contracts, for example, allowed the Tredegar Iron Works to expand its labor force from 700 in 1861 to 2,500 by January 1863.
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Smaller firms, too, such as Cook and Brother Armory of Athens, Georgia, enjoyed increased prosperity because of government contracts.
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Characteristically, though, the Confederates maintained fairly stringent controls over private firms with whom the government did business. Acts of Congress set limits (75 percent at first, later 33.3 percent) on profits gleaned from government business. Public money subsidized creation or expansion of manufacturing establishments, but public law granted the government an option on two-thirds of the production of industrial contractors.
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Confederate military supply agencies were in a position to exercise considerable control over the South’s wartime economy, to the benefit of both public and private war industries. “Military necessity” gave the government de facto power over Southern railroads, and although priorities were often at issue and efficiency low, the military was usually able to direct or deny transportation of raw materials and finished products.
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Draft laws allowed the War Department, through the Conscription Bureau, to exempt or detail workers and thus channel labor into vital industries. The Impressment Act gave the military authority to seize raw and war materials and to dragoon slaves into service if necessary. Taken together these controls established the potential within the Confederacy of creating a planned industrial economy. The Confederates never realized this potential, but in terms of war industry at least, they approached it.
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The achievements of Southern war industrialists, both inside and outside the government, were indeed impressive. For example, during 1864 the state of Alabama produced four times more iron than any other state in the “Old Union.” The gunpowder factory at Augusta, Georgia, was for its time the largest in North America. The Confederate Navy laid plans for 150 ships and before the end of the war had constructed about a third of them, including twenty-two ironclads.
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And during 1863, Josiah Gorgas’ Ordnance Bureau, the largest producer of war supplies, doubled its production of small arms from the previous year and achieved self-sufficiency. Gorgas marked the event in his diary on the third anniversary of his appointment as bureau chief:

I have succeeded beyond my utmost expectations. From being the worst supplied of the Bureaus of the War Department it [the Ordnance Bureau] is now the best. Large arsenals have been organized at Richmond, Fayetteville, Augusta, Charleston, Columbus, Macon, Atlanta, and Selma, and smaller ones at Danville, Lynchburg, and Montgomery, besides other establishments. A superb powder mill has been built at Augusta…. Lead smelting works were established by me at Petersburg and turned over to the Nitre and Mining Bureau…. A cannon foundry established at Macon for heavy guns, and bronze foundries at Macon, Columbus, Ga., and Augusta; a foundry for shot and shell at Salisbury, N.C.; a large shop for leather work at Clarksville, Va.; besides the Armories here [Richmond] and at Fayetteville, a manufactory of carbines has been built up here; a rifle factory at Asheville [transferred to Columbia, S.C.]; a new and very large armory at Macon, including a pistol factory, built up under contract here and sent to Atlanta, and thence transferred under purchase to Macon; a second pistol factory at Columbus, Ga…. Where three years ago we were not making a gun, pistol nor a sabre, no shot nor shell [except at the Tredegar Works]—a pound of powder—we now make all these in quantities to meet the demands of our large armies.
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The record of Southern success at war industry was indeed noteworthy, and Gorgas did not understate his accomplishments. However, there were conspicuous failures as well among Confederate efforts to produce war supplies. Some of these failures were owed to circumstances so fundamental as to be all but insurmountable. For example the South’s production of pig iron never approached the capacity of Confederate ironworks to process it. The Tredegar Works was capable of handling about three times the amount of pig iron it was able to get during the war, and the Confederacy simply did not live long enough to develop its extractive industries to full potential.
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Other failures in the South’s new-found industrial effort were clearly avoidable and resulted primarily from human errors. For example neither of the quartermasters general, Abraham C. Myers and Alexander R. Lawton, who succeeded Myers in August 1865, was able to plan or organize the bureau sufficiently to achieve maximum production and distribution.
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An example of the combination of circumstantial and human failures in Confederate war industry was the operation of the railroads. Although the military could and did preempt private use of the roads, the Confederacy never nationalized railroads. As a result no centralized planning or organization developed, and field commanders, supply agencies, and civilian shippers competed for use of Southern rolling stock.
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Yet even had the government chosen to nationalize railroads, the Confederacy would have suffered from the basic inadequacy of the South’s rail network, the attrition of wartime overuse, and the want of time and capacity to make necessary repairs.

The shortcomings in the Confederates’ attempt to create instant war industry were obvious, and as the war wore on, military action accentuated weaknesses. When Southern armies retreated from battlefields, as they did with increased frequency during 1863 and 1864, they left behind many of the fruits of Confederate war industry. When Southern armies abandoned land area, they also exposed mines, depots, and factories to capture by the enemy and thus further limited the Confederacy’s ability to conduct an industrial war. But on balance the degree of industrialization achieved by the Confederate South was phenomenal. The Confederates sustained themselves industrially better than they did agriculturally and far better than they had any reason to expect in 1861. Symbolically, in April 1865, when Lee’s tired army marched and fought its way to Appomattox, the men exhausted their supply of food before they ran out of ammunition. In fact when Lee surrendered, the remnant Army of Northern Virginia had a sufficient average of seventy-five rounds of ammunition per man and adequate artillery shells.
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