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

of the Confederate government. As a former soldier and secretary of war himself, Davis was easily the superior of Lincoln in simple military experience. But Davis found it difficult locate competent officers and cabinet secretaries of the quality of Stanton or Meigs. Davis ran through four secretaries of war by November 1862, and the personal military acquaintances whom Davis appointed to the Quartermaster and Commissary Departments were far from the standards set by their Federal counterparts. Abraham Myers, whom Davis appointed as quartermaster general of the Confederacy on March 25, 1861, was convinced by May that “the resources of the Southern States cannot supply the necessities of the Army of the Confederate States with the essential articles of cloth for uniform clothing, blankets, shoes, stockings and flannel.”80

The Confederate solution was to retreat from providing uniforms and award a $21 uniform allowance to Confederate soldiers every six months that they could spend themselves—which resulted in either a confusing “medley of garments which would hardly be called a uniform” or else no uniforms at all, as the soldiers spent the money on more interesting goods and services. The problems this created led to the abandonment of the clothing allowance scheme in October 1862. Myers, as he had predicted, found it impossible to meet the Confederate armies’ clothing needs from the Confederate government’s resources. Southern mills failed to produce an adequate supply of wool cloth; worse, state governments in North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama embargoed any export of wool or leather beyond state boundaries and set about clothing their own troops themselves. The Georgia state legislature actually appropriated $1.5 million to create a Georgia Soldiers Bureau at Augusta to clothe Georgia’s troops; North Carolina did likewise, and managed to end the war with a surplus of 92,000 uniforms.81

Even more of a magnet for discontent was the Confederate commissary general, Lucius Bellinger Northrop, “an erratic old personage” whose “coat hangs as loosely as if it were four sizes beyond his measure” and whose chief recommendation for the job seemed to be his friendship with (and perhaps also his unusual physical resemblance to) Jefferson Davis. Two months after assuming his office, Northrop warned Davis that he might not be able to sustain the Confederate army’s food requirements, especially if he had to compete with state authorities in purchasing edibles. Until the spring of 1862, Confederate troops were sufficiently well fed to ward off criticism. It was not until mid-1862, after the Confederacy had lost control of the wheat- and meat-producing areas of the upper South, that Northrop began to signal the onset of shortages. Northrop was forced to start cutting the standard rations of the Confederate volunteer, and by the fall of 1864 it had fallen to one-third of a pound of meat and a pound of bread a day; even with this reduction, the Commissary’s main depot in Richmond was often as low as only nine days’ supply for the army. Northrop was forced to bear most of the blame for this situation as “the most cussed and vilified man in the Confederacy” and the “poorest of all apologies for a Chief Commissary,” and the vilification was aggravated by his 1863 enforcement of the Impressment Act, which authorized his agents to seize food supplies when farmers refused to sell them at the government rate.82

Even if we take Northrop’s critics at face value, the fundamental cause of the shortages lay less with Northrop than with the deficiencies of the Confederate rail system. The South did not so much lack food supplies—both Grant and Sherman found plenty of food to pillage in their invasions of Mississippi and Georgia in 1863 and 1864—as it lacked a means for getting them where they were needed. The unhappy Northrop was driven to distraction in August 1862 when he discovered that a shipment of meat from Nashville to Richmond had been delayed on the railroads by twenty days, during which the meat slowly spoiled into uselessness. Northrop vigorously defended his bureau as “near perfection as is possible under the general plan that has been adopted for all purchases,” but “its working has been constantly crippled” by the unwillingness of farmers to sell the goods and produce at government rates. “If the Army is not as well fed as the condition of the country will allow, or if at any time it should be without food, it will be the result of these influences in overruling an efficient and comprehensive system which has proved and maintained itself against constant and potent opposition”—which was as much as saying, in the eternal fashion of all good bureaucrats, that if the Confederate government would only apply more stringently the impressment policies that had caused the shortages in the first place, all would be well. The Confederate Congress demanded his removal. But Davis protected Northrop until almost the very end; he was not cashiered until February 1865.83

The one major exception to this gloomy schedule of inability in Davis’s war administration was the hard-driving chief of ordnance, Josiah Gorgas. A northerner by birth and director of the Frankford Arsenal in Philadelphia, Gorgas had married a daughter of the governor of Alabama and threw in his lot with the Southern cause. Resigning his commission in the U.S. Army, Gorgas took over the gun-manufacturing machinery captured at Harpers Ferry, seized the cannon abandoned at the Norfolk Navy Yard, and proceeded to build a Confederate ordnance supply from scratch. He hired agents to scour Europe for weapons and successfully ran 600,000 arms through the blockade on ships he had either bought or subsidized for the Confederate War Department.84

Gorgas also established new arsenals and workshops across the South. He built a chemical laboratory, a major gunpowder factory in Augusta, Georgia, and a new cannon foundry in northern Georgia, and organized a string of eight new arsenals from Richmond to Selma, along with several other smaller gunworks in the Carolinas. Together, the new plants were manufacturing 170,000 rifle cartridges a day, and his gunpowder factory produced 2.7 million pounds of gunpowder