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By Allen Chesney
Staff Writer
CONFEDERATE INDUS-
TRY: Manufacturers and
Quartermasters in the Civil
War. By Harold Wilson. Uni-
versity Press of Mississippi
288 pages. $45.
This book
examines how
the Confederate government
was able to keep its armies in
the field for four years in the
Civil War, despite a Union
blockade and continual fed-
eral conquest of Southern
industry and territory.
When the
South seceded
in 1861, the Confederate
government set up a quar-
termaster system to supply
the army and navy. Abra-
ham Myers, the first quar-
termaster general, was a
U.S. Army veteran and ran
things according to old-
style army regulations. His
office produced military
goods by the thousands, but
never the millions needed
to meet the needs of forces
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in the field.
Meanwhile,
Wilson says,
states such as Georgia and
North Carolina, manufactur-
ers and individual army units
were innovating means of
supplying the troops. South-
ern industry in 1860 was far
behind the North, but one of
its strengths was in the tex-
tile industry, and Wilson
shows how this industry was
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mobilized
— if not always
efficiently — to supply the
armies.
Although
Myers' system
was lacking, he had many
friends in politics and was
able to hang on as quarter-
master general until August
1863, a month after the pivotal
Battle of Gettysburg. At that
time Brig. Gen. Alexander
Lawton of Georgia was
named quartermaster general
Once Lawton gained con-
trol, the Confederate system
of supply became much
more centralized. Things
improved so much, Wilson
says, that the Army of Ten-
nessee marched to its doom
in the battles of Franklin and
Nashville in November 1864
as well clothed and shod as it
had ever been.
Wilson also
tells the story
of Confederate efforts to
import armaments, supplies
and industrial equipment
from Europe using blockade-
running ships. While the
blockade runners were the
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fastest
ships afloat, Union
raiders, corruption and waste
limited the impact of the mil-
lions spent by the Confedera-
cy.
With
General Order No.
100, issued on April 24,1863,
the Union Army adopted a
policy of total war against
the South. Army officers,
such as Gen. William Sher-
man, were authorized to
destroy the Confederacy's
means of production as a
way of winning the war. The
resulting devastation, as
detailed by Wilson, set the
South back many years.
The book
also details the
rise of industry in the "New
South" in the decades follow-
ing the Civil War.
"Confederate
Industry" is
meticulously researched and
has full footnotes and bibli-
ography.
Wilson, a
longtime Civil
War scholar, is an associate
professor of history at Old
Dominion University in Nor-
folk, Va.
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