Confederate Industry : Manufacturers and Quartermasters in the Civil War

by Wilson, Harold S.

• ISBN13: 9781578068173
• ISBN10: 1578068177
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-09-01
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Mississippi

Summary

By 1860 the South ranked high among the developed countries of the world in per capita income and life expectancy and in the number of railroad miles, telegraph lines, and institutions of higher learning. Only the major European powers and the North had more cotton and woolen spindles.This book examines the Confederate military's program to govern this prosperous industrial base by a quartermaster system. By commandeering more than half the South's produced goods for the military, the quartermaster general, in a drift toward socialism, appropriated hundreds of mills and controlled the flow of southern factory commodities.The most controversial of the quartermasters general was Colonel Abraham Charles Myers. His iron hand set the controls of southern manufacturing throughout the war. His capable successor, Brigadier General Alexander R. Lawton, conducted the first census of Confederate resources, established the plan of production and distribution, and organized the Bureau of Foreign Supplies in a strategy for importing parts, machinery, goods, and military uniforms.While the Confederacy mobilized its mills for military purposes, the Union systematically planned their destruction. The Union blockade ended the effectiveness of importing goods, and under the Union army's General Order 100 Confederate industry was crushed. The great antebellum manufacturing boom was over.Scarcity and impoverishment in the postbellum South brought manufacturers to the forefront of southern political and ideological leadership. Allied for the cause of southern development were former Confederate generals, newspaper editors, educators, and President Andrew Johnson himself, an investor in a southern cotton mill.Against this postwar mania to rebuild, this book tests old assumptions about southern industrial re-emergence. It discloses, even before the beginnings of Radical Reconstruction, that plans for a New South with an urban, industrialized society had been established on the old foundations and on an ideology asserting that only science, technology, and engineering could restore the region.Within this philosophical mold, Henry Grady, one of the New South's great reformers, led the way for southern manufacturing. By the beginning of the First World War half the nation's spindles lay within the former Confed-eracy, home of a new boom in manufacturing and the land of America's staple crop, cotton.Harold S. Wilson is an associate professor of history at Old Dominion University. He is the author ofMcClure's Magazine and the Muckrakersand of articles published inAfrican American Studies,The Historian, theJournal of Confederate History, andAlabama Review. Learn more about the author at http://members.cox.net/haroldwilson/ .

Author Biography

Harold S. Wilson is an associate professor of history at Old Dominion University. He is the author of McClure's Magazine and the Muckrakers and of articles published in African American Studies, The Historian, The Journal of Confederate History, and Alabama Review

Table of Contents

Preface	p. vii
Introduction: Southern Manufacturing circa 1860	p. xiii
The Advent of Abraham C. Myers, Quartermaster General of the Confederacy	p. 3
The Reign of Quartermasters	p. 42
Confederate Mobilization	p. 93
Factories under Siege	p. 130
The Bureau of Foreign Supplies and the Crenshaw Line	p. 155
The Coming of Total War	p. 180
The Tortuous Course Toward Economic Reconstruction	p. 228
Forging the New South	p. 273
Abbreviations	p. 289
Appendixes
Abstract of Confederate Census of Major Lower South Factories--May 1864	p. 291
Abstract of Confederate Census of North Carolina Factories--November 1864	p. 293
Statistical Survey of Workers in Ten Savannah River Mills--June 1864-June 1865	p. 295
Assets of Selected Mills in the Summer of 1865	p. 297
Notes	p. 299
Bibliographical Essay on Selected Sources	p. 369
Works Cited	p. 377
Index	p. 395
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