Embattled Rebel : Jefferson Davis As Commander in Chief (9780698176348) by McPherson James M

Author:McPherson, James M. [McPherson, James M.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin USA
Published: 2014-09-23T04:00:00+00:00

5.

WE SHOULD TAKE THE INITIATIVE

As commander in chief, Davis spent most of his time and energy on questions of strategy and command. But armies must be armed, fed, and supplied. Although he was reluctant to delegate authority on matters in which he took great interest, Davis did leave the main responsibility for logistics to his chief of ordnance, commissary general, and quartermaster general.

With the appointment of Josiah Gorgas as head of the Bureau of Ordnance, Davis made one of his best choices. Gorgas proved to be a master of organization and improvisation. He built an arms industry virtually from scratch and created an efficient fleet of blockade runners that by 1862 had ended the arms famine that initially crippled Confederate operations. Appeals went out to Southern churches and plantations to turn in their bells to be melted down and turned into cannon. Moonshiners responded to appeals to their patriotism and turned in their copper stills to make percussion caps for rifles. Southern women saved the contents of chamber pots to be leached for niter to produce gunpowder. The Ordnance Bureau located limestone caves in the southern Appalachians that contained niter deposits. Normally modest and self-effacing, Gorgas could not resist boasting of his achievements in the privacy of his diary. On the third anniversary of his appointment, April 8, 1864, he wrote that “from being one of the worst supplied of the Bureaus of the War Department,” the Ordnance Bureau “is now the best. Large arsenals have been organized at Richmond, Fayetteville, Augusta, Charleston, Columbus, Macon, Atlanta and Selma. . . . A superb powder mill has been built at Augusta. . . . Where three years ago we were not making a gun, a pistol nor a sabre—a pound of powder—no shot nor shell (except at the Tredegar Works) we now make all these in quantities to meet the demands of our large armies.”1

Gorgas’s pride in what he had accomplished was fully justified. Although he was a native of Pennsylvania (who had married the daughter of a governor of Alabama), Gorgas faced none of the anti-Yankee prejudice that stung other Northern-born officers. But even his genius could not overcome the accelerating deterioration of Southern railroads and the consequent bottlenecks of transportation that created shortages of everything except ordnance for Southern soldiers and civilians alike. Before the war the South had imported nearly all of its railroad iron and locomotives from the North or abroad. Some of the Confederacy’s prime iron-producing regions in Tennessee had been conquered and occupied by the enemy early in the war. When rails, engines, and wheels wore out, replacements were not available. Blockade-running vessels, built for speed and stealth, could not bring in such heavy, bulky freight. Gorgas was able to keep Southern soldiers well armed through the end of the war because weapons and gunpowder had priority on what rail capacity there was.

More problematic were the commissary and quartermaster bureaus. Davis appointed his friend from West Point and regular-army days Lucius B. Northrop as commissary general.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.