Restricted Labor, Race, and Technology in the Confederate Iron Industry

jgoodguy

Banished Forever
-:- A Mime -:-
is a terrible thing...
Don’t feed the Mime
Joined
Aug 17, 2011
Location
Birmingham, Alabama
Labor, Race, and Technology in the Confederate Iron Industry
Author(s): Anne Kelly Knowles
Source: Technology and Culture, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Jan., 2001), pp. 1-26
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the Society for the History of Technology
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25147645
Accessed: 13/09/2010 16:07

I have found several articles that suggest that Industrial Slavery was not as great as imagined. A problem with this is that like figuring out how great an independent CSA would be, all we have is wartime experiences. Likewise, much of the Industrial Slavery of the CSA happened in wartime. It is, however, all we have. The author contends that slave labor did not perform well in an industrial setting. We will see what they offer.

Southern iron manufacturing had to change in a hurry when the Civil War began. What had been a modest industry geared to producing mainly domestic and agricultural ironware was pressed into service to match the fearsome weaponry of the industrial North. The Confederate government effectively nationalized the region's iron industry by funding its rapid expansion and capturing the lions share of output in government con tracts. Richmond's Tredegar Iron Works, the most sophisticated iron-mak ing complex in the South, was greatly enlarged to increase the capacity of its rolling mill and cannon foundry. New mills were built deep in Confederate territory to produce iron plating for battleships and rails to move military supplies. New and enlarged foundries hastened to cast heavy can non for navy warships and coastal defenses. A new national laboratory at Macon, Georgia, strove to manufacture high-quality small-arms ammunition. The government commissioned geological surveys to find coal, iron ore, and niter, the latter being the key ingredient in gunpowder and the one kind of ordnance materiel the South had not produced before the war.1

According to historian James McPherson, this effort resulted in the one success story of Confederate industrialization. "Although often less well armed than their enemies," he writes, "Confederate soldiers did not suffer from ordnance shortages after 1862." He credits the Confederate chief of ordnance, Josiah Gorgas, "a genius at organization and improvisation," who scraped together necessary supplies from unlikely sources and created a domestic arms industry almost from scratch. As Gorgas declared in 1864, "Where three years ago we were not making a gun, a pistol nor a sabre, no shot nor shell (except at the Tredegar Works)?[not] a pound of powder? we now make all these in quantities to meet the demands of our large armies."2

Gorgas was being less than truthful in this boast. His own correspondence on behalf of the Ordnance Bureau reported that small arms were always in short supply; by September 1864 most were being imported from Europe.3 My aim in this article is not to debate the volume of Confederate arms production, but rather to illuminate the conditions under which arms manufacturers struggled to meet wartime demand, particularly for heavy ordnance. Judging from Confederate military correspondence and the detailed company records of the Tredegar Iron Works and the Shelby Iron Works, near Columbiana, Alabama, Confederate heavy ordnance producers suffered a sometimes crippling shortage of skilled labor that limited output and rendered some facilities inoperable. Those who managed to hold on to their skilled workforce, such as Tredegar and Shelby, were compelled to compromise principles dear to the cause of industrial slavery by courting and employing white immigrant artisans whose identity was anathema to Southern slave society. However bravely and creatively Confederate ord nance officers and manufacturers waged the battle of production, they lost the war for a slave society by demonstrating that a modern iron industry could not be based on slave labor.




 
Back
Top