Any large city especially with it's population swollen with war refugees will be challenging to supply. If the Confederacy is to become a viable nation it must hold on to Richmond at all hazards.
If the pork is properly salted and packaged it should be safe to eat for quite a while. Not sure why the Confederacy would pay scarce internationally convertible currency or specie to transport inedible pork?
A flag in and of itself doesn't do much for a nations war effort. Has mentioned racially intergrated armies were nothing new by 1861.
Another factor limiting Lee's logistics in Virginia was a labor shortage. The Governor of Virginia stated that 3/4ths of the adult male slaves in Northern Virginia were gone.
And to think it's been argued that slaves were delighted to be serve their masters. Wonder where the heck these loyal slaves went?
If you have a better word, I am up for it.
Massive stupidity on the part of the Confederacy comes to mind.
I can't count the number of times I have read that it was the most privileged slaves that were the first to run off. Slave-holders were genuinely shocked that their "friends" would abandon them.
Slaves became experts on judging the behavior of white people, as if their lives depended on it.
Salt pork & beef would spoil if the brine (salt water) leaked out of the barrel.
The meat you refer to had been siting in Bermuda for over a year before it was given the priority to run the blockade.
Maybe you do, but your earlier post implies that the South just needed to hire a black gang to build a needed RR. If that was not your intention, you post was not clear.
Not really. If the Confederacy can't hold on to Virginia then it gives the Union to many advantage's such has more African American soldiers and easy access to invading North Carolina. President Davis needs to quickly know what the AnVs status is at all times not be in a communication glitch if the telegraph is not working.
One would think supplying food to the Confederacy would be the number one priority but apparently for some reason it wasn't. Not sure why good supplies was a lower priority.
What was needed was to mobilize the workforce & put it to work on war critical projects. As the documents I posted show, that is exactly what the Union army did. The requisition for six laborers & the list of impressed men was something Confederate officers in Nashville could not do. I suppose the powerful import of those documents is not as clear as I assumed they are.
Quartermaster General of the Confederacy was, probably, the most incompetent public servant in American history. There was plenty of food in the Confederacy. There was a tax in kind levied on farm production. Thousands of tons of precious food rotted at collection points due to the unimaginable mismanagement of the CSA commissary dept.
Lead, caps, blankets, shoes, rifles (especially after Vicksburg/Gettysburg/Chattanooga) all had higher priority. There was just too much that needed to be imported, that the South could not produce in sufficient quantities, to give space to food. It is generally agreed that sufficient food was grown in the South, it just could not be processed (lack of salt and lack of hogs) and transported.
The census of 1860 has a county by county breakdown of Southern agricultural production. Hog production reaches Carl Sagan Numbers in certain regions.
Bringing the