CONFEDERATE INDUSTRY: YES, THERE WAS SUCH A THING

Publication: Richmond Times-Dispatch

Byline: Ray McAllister

Date: 02-27-2003

Edition: City

Section: Area/State

Harold Wilson calls his book "Confederate Industry," which - let's be honest - sounds like an oxymoron.

Confederate industry?

Was there any?

Wasn't the South the land of agriculture? Wasn't the lack of industry part of the reason the South lost the Civil War?

That is indeed the stereotype, Wilson said yesterday during a phone interview.

"And, sure, Massachusetts was the most industrialized state in the country," he said. But the question shouldn't be whether the South was as industrialized as that state but whether it was industrialized enough for its purposes, he says.

Wilson, an associate history professor at Old Dominion University, examined records at 50 archives from the District of Columbia to Texas.

The resulting book - "Confederate Industry: Manufacturers and Quartermasters in the Civil War" (University Press of Mississippi, $45) - was selected an alternate monthly selection of the History Book Club for December.

Wilson didn't start out doing a Civil War book.

"I grew up at a time when the South was not so very well-developed," he explained. College textbooks were filled with data underlying it, showing, for instance, Southern income was two-thirds that of the rest of the country.

But he knew it had not always been that way.

"My first focus was on the antebellum period," he said. "For instance, in Richmond and Petersburg, by the 1840s, there were probably seven or eight textile mills in operation." There was also a successful iron industry.

But prewar records of the South were difficult to come by. "I really had to scrape around on my belly and find things," Wilson said.

So he moved forward in time to the Civil War, where more records exist. He went into microfilms of records apparently never studied - and practically needing decoding.

But he found some surprises.

"The South had probably half a million spindles in the woolen and cotton industries - modern spindles, very efficient - and every state had a fairly developed iron industry; they could do casting and tooling of various types."

The Confederate government commandeered more than half the South's goods for the military.

Wilson indicates shortages were at least partly a result of decision-making, especially before a controversial quartermaster was replaced.

But it was the strength of Southern industry that kept the army going as long as it did, he said.

So why the perception that there was no industry?

During and after the war, the North destroyed much of it, Wilson said. The South, too, intentionally destroyed some of it. It all contributed to postwar idea that the South had not been industrial.

Wilson's research took well over a decade - he wrote a first draft in the 1980s - but he hopes it will lead to a second book as well, on the prewar era.

There's one thing more he'd like.

"What we need is more papers, business papers, from this period," Wilson said. "A lot of this material is still around people's houses - even old ledgers are helpful." He hopes people will donate it to the state library.

Records from Richmond and Petersburg are almost wiped out, he continued. He can find scores and scores of names of business people without finding anything about them.

And the story is surprising enough already.

For more on Wilson and his book, go online to: http://members.cox.net/haroldwilson/.