The Confederate ordnance manual plagiarized the U.S. Army ordnance manual, and submission of quarterly ordnance reports was required. I've seen references in diaries to Confederate officers having completed and submitted them. But, if the reports were ever compiled and survived the war no one has found them.
The closest surviving documents are Confederate Inspector General reports. By mid-1864 the Confederate Army had developed a standard printed form for reporting inspections of combat arms units. The Inspection Circular accompanying the form directed that regiments were to be inspected three times a month by the brigade inspector general, brigades twice a month by the division inspector general, and divisions once a month by the corps inspector general. In so far as possible, these inspectors general were to work together to avoid harassing the troops.
The top of one page of the inspection form contained the following, rather self-explanatory blocks:
“Arms . . . Kind
Caliber
Unserviceable
Deficient
“Condition of Arms . . . Clean ____________________________________________
Dirty ____________________________________________
Assuming that all his troops are armed, the two most important small arms logistical considerations for a commander are ammunition and spare parts resupply. Consequently, a relatively bright Confederate inspector general would have listed the type/model, caliber, and number of small arms present in a unit, as well as their condition. This was critical since large numbers of the small arms in Confederate units were not the product of interchangeable parts manufacture, and most Confederate infantry and cavalry units were not uniformly armed. Clearly numbers of the inspectors general were not relatively bright, however, because their reports contain the following in the arms block:
No description at all.
“Rifles
“Rifle muskets
“Rifles, Various
“Rifled arms
“Rifles .54, .57, .58”
While some Confederate inspection reports from the last year of the war were helpful in identifying Confederate units at the regimental or lower level equipped with Austrian arms, other reports were utterly useless to me, and probably to the Confederate commanders to whom they were addressed. Given the mythology of the Southern soldier as a gaunt, ragged man who maintained his weapon with meticulous care, one of the things which I found interesting in the reports was the large number of occasions in which units’ arms were characterized by the inspecting officers as being “dirty.” Fouling in muzzleloading arms is a particular problem because it makes them difficult to load, and because the corrosive properties of black powder fouling will render weapons unserviceable in very short order. Keeping equipment serviceable requires constant supervision of troops by a unit’s noncommissioned officers and officers. Ill-trained, incompetent, or unmotivated NCOs and officers are either not equipped to provide such supervision or are unprepared to do so, and the condition of a unit’s equipment is a clear sign of the competence of its leadership.
Regards,
Don Dixon