Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

spite of this one majestic failure of judgment, Ripley turned into a surprisingly competent administrator. Once having made up his mind against the breech-loading repeaters, Ripley never failed to deliver sufficient supplies of muzzle-loaders or their ammunition to the Union army, and that was no small accomplishment.

Like Meigs, Ripley relied heavily on civilian contracting for weapons, including foreign contractors in England and Austria. At the beginning of the war Ripley had only about 437,000 muskets and rifles in his inventory of government weapons, with only 40,000 being of any recent vintage, and virtually no procedure for getting them into soldiers’ hands. He could count on only two armories capable of manufacturing arms, one at Harpers Ferry and the other at Springfield, Massachusetts. The Springfield arsenal could be pushed to manufacture 3,000 to 4,000 rifles a month, but the Harpers Ferry arsenal (with most of its manufacturing equipment) had to be abandoned to the Confederates after the secession of Virginia from the Union. With no other alternative but outside contracting and foreign purchases, Ripley managed to acquire 727,000 arms from foreign dealers over the next year, and let out contracts to a variety of smaller arms manufacturers who subsequently built their fortunes on wartime government purchases: Remington, New Haven Arms (which in 1866 changed its name to Winchester), Smith & Wesson, and Samuel Colt. Ripley also expanded the armory at Springfield to a production level of 300,000 weapons a year, and opened or enlarged nine other arsenals across the North. By the end of 1862 the Federal government was making enough weapons to meet its own needs without more foreign imports, and by September 1863 Ripley was able to report that the Springfield arsenal was now actually stockpiling surplus rifles.76

None of these success stories about the supply of weapons or clothing or food might have amounted to much if the War Department had had no way of moving them to where they were needed. As it was, though, the greatest administrative success story of them all was Stanton’s shrewd manipulation of the Northern railroad system. The North began the war with 22,000 miles of railroads compared to the Confederacy’s 9,000, and the rail lines carried with them the capacity to transport men and supplies at a cost almost a tenth of that of horse-and-wagon transport. Although Congress initially gave Lincoln authority to seize control of the northern railroads in 1862, Stanton instead set about striking a deal with the major rail operators, and less than a month after taking over the War Department, Stanton sat down in a Washington hotel room with McClellan, Meigs, and the most important northern railroad presidents. They set a basic troop transportation rate (they agreed on two cents per mile per soldier, with eighty pounds of baggage each) and agreed on standardizing gauges among the lines (they settled for the English gauge of 4 feet 8.5 inches), signaling systems, and freight rates.

These arrangements effectively discouraged rate wars and their attendant disruption by guaranteeing full-time operations to the rail lines, kept the military out of the railroad business by leaving all of the railroad companies’ officers in place to direct operations as normal, and moved the Union army and its supplies around the frontiers of the Confederacy fast enough to overcome the Confederacy’s advantage of interior lines. By 1865, Stanton’s deal with the railroads was moving 410,000 horses and 125,000 mules each year, plus 5 million tons of quartermaster, ordnance, and commissary stores.77

With the successful creation of a working staff within the War Department and the extraordinary accomplishments of Meigs, Ripley, and Taylor as the major department heads, the Union forces never seriously lacked for the materials necessary to win the war. On the Confederate side of the ledger, however, the case was less happy. Taking the inventories of all the small depot arsenals in the South, the Confederacy could lay its hands on no more than 159,000 firearms of all sorts, many of them obsolete. In a March 4, 1862, report to the Confederate Congress, Jefferson Davis estimated that the Confederate armies would need 300,000 more men than they then had enlisted, 50 ironclad gunboats, “ten of the most formidable war vessels to protect our commerce upon the high seas,” 750,000 rifles, 5,000 cannon, and 5,000 tons of gunpowder, but at the same time he had to admit that “it cannot be foreseen” how the Confederacy was going to obtain them. The Confederacy had only one-ninth of the industrial capacity of the North, and only a relative handful of major industrial plants—the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, employing some 700 hands, the Shelby Iron Works and the Brierfield Furnace in northern Alabama, and the complex of ironworks begun in Selma, Alabama, later in 1861. The Confederacy might have drawn some consolation from the fact that its lack of industrial promise was compensated for by the South’s substantial agricultural resources. Even then, much of the South’s agricultural produce was committed to cotton in order to pay for the Confederacy’s foreign imports, and its principal grain-growing and meat-producing areas lay in the upper Confederacy, which fell into Union hands early in the war.78

Not only was the Confederacy seriously deficient in railroad mileage at the onset of the war, but the two east-west rail systems that did manage to offer a fairly direct route across most of the Confederacy were both cut by the Union army before the summer of 1862. Furthermore, since so many of these lines had been built with only limited use in view, they had been allowed to make do with poor sidings and fuel facilities and even poorer-quality track, and by 1863 the excessive wear of wartime rail movement was chewing up the southern rail lines. With the southern ironworks already fully committed to manufacturing weapons, there were no means of also manufacturing new rail iron. Confederate officials were reduced to cannibalizing iron from unused branch lines to make repairs.79

These problems were exacerbated by a sheer lack of organizational talent in the upper echelons