Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (59 page)

Since so much of this had to be done virtually at once, and by officers and clerks who had never before in their lives administered anything like it, the opportunities for mistake and oversight were legion. Individual states muddied the picture by launching their own procurement initiatives—Pennsylvania’s quartermaster general, R. C. Hale, set up a shop to cut and sew uniforms in Philadelphia, Illinois created a state arsenal, Massachusetts governor John Andrew sent a state agent to England to purchase 19,000 rifles—and Meigs had to struggle to wrench control from their hands in order to guarantee some semblance of standardization.
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At the same time, Meigs shied away from committing the government to the actual manufacture and production of its own supplies. Meigs was strictly a retailer; the actual production of the army’s goods remained in the hands of private civilian contractors. It also went without saying that, under these circumstances, the opportunities for fraud, kickbacks, and corruption were great. Nevertheless, Montgomery Meigs proved to be both tireless and incorruptible as quartermaster general. He reorganized the Quartermaster’s Department into nine division (for animals, clothing, transportation, forage, barracks, hospitals, wagons, inspection, and finance) and expanded the workforce in his office to 591 by the end of the war, with 130,000 other employees in depots across the North. At the same time, his expenditures rose over the course of the war from $40,631,000 in 1861–62 to $226,199,000 in 1864–65, and by the end of the war his department was spending nearly half a billion dollars a year. Despite the gargantuan size and frantic demands of his department, a congressional audit could not find so much as one penny unaccounted for in any major contract authorized by Meigs.
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Keeping the Federal armies clothed and equipped was one thing. Keeping them fed and armed was quite another, and those responsibilities fell to Commissary General Taylor and Chief of Ordnance Ripley. Neither Ripley nor Taylor ever won the praise awarded to Montgomery Meigs—Ripley because of his stubborn refusal to permit the introduction of the breech-loading repeating rifle into the war, and Taylor because Union army food was so consistently bad by civilian standards. Taylor was up against the fact that the technologies of food preservation, including meatpacking, canning, and condensed liquids, were still relatively new. What critics missed was the happier fact that although army food was bad, the Union armies
rarely lacked for sufficient quantities of it. Something of the same could be said about Ripley. The ordnance chief’s insistence on sticking by the muzzle-loading rifle as the standard infantry arm, rather than introducing the breech-loading repeating rifle, was one of the most wrongheaded administrative decisions of the war. In 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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These problems were exacerbated by a sheer lack of organizational talent in the upper echelons 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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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