Confederate industry : manufacturers and quartermasters in the Civil War / Harold S. Wilson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wilson, Harold S., 1935-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Manufacturing industries--United States--History--19th century.

Manufacturing industries.

History.

United States--History--Civil War, 1861-1865.

United States.

Quartermasters.

Physical Description:

xxii, 412 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2002]

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. However, 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 Confederacy, home of a new boom in manufacturing and the land of America's staple crop, cotton.

Contents:

The advent of Abraham C. Myers, Quartermaster General of the Confederacy

The reign of quartermasters

Confederate mobilization

Factories under siege

The Bureau of Foreign Supplies and the Crenshaw Line

The coming of total war

The tortuous course toward economic reconstruction

Forging the New South.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [377]-394) and index.

ISBN:

1578064627

OCLC:

48851193