C. L. Bragg, Charles D. Ross, Gordon A. Blaker, Stephanie A. T. Jacobe, Theodore P. Savas. Never for Want of Powder: The Confederate Powder Works in Augusta, Georgia. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007. xvi + 318 pp. $44.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-57003-657-6.
Reviewed by J. Tracy Power (South Carolina Department of Archives and History)
Published on H-Southern-Industry (December, 2007)
Confederate Industrialization: Creating Something Out of Nothing
Chief among the many daunting obstacles facing the Confederacy in the spring of 1861 was the prospect of producing sufficient manpower and materiel to fight a war that soon became much larger and lasted much longer than anyone imagined. The enormity of that challenge, often ignored or minimized by many of its leaders and almost all of its citizens, was not fully appreciated for the first year of the Civil War. One of Jefferson Davis's earliest appointments--making Josiah Gorgas chief of the Ordnance Department--not only addressed that challenge, but also was one of his best appointments as Confederate president. As chief of the department, Gorgas, who had been an ordnance officer in the antebellum U.S. Army, faced chronic shortages in raw materials and supplies, unreliable transportation, inadequate manpower, and irregular funding. He was, however, an efficient and innovative administrator, who rose to the grade of brigadier general by the war's end. Gorgas recruited some of the brightest minds in the South as his subordinates and gave them assignments that must have seemed all but impossible at the outset. Together, they furnished the arms, ammunition, gunpowder, and accouterments that allowed Confederate armies to contend with larger and better-equipped federal armies for four years.
The Confederacy's eventual failure on the battlefield was due in large part to its inability to keep its armies filled with enough soldiers, but its generals could not blame the Ordnance Department, which managed, against all odds, to supply them with everything they needed to wage war. In the spring of 1864, Gorgas proudly wrote in his diary, "'I have succeeded beyond my utmost expectations.... Where three years ago we were not making a gun, pistol nor a sabre, no shot or shell (except at the Tredegar Works)--a pound of powder--we now make all these in quantities to meet the demands of our large armies.'"[1] Emory Thomas has called such unprecedented military industrialization by a predominantly agrarian society "phenomenal," observing that the "Confederates sustained themselves industrially better than they did agriculturally and far better than they had reason to expect in 1861."[2]
When the war began, the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia, in operation since the 1830s, was the only large-scale manufacturing complex in the South capable of making rails for the region's railroads, artillery for its armies, and heavy machinery for producing small arms in significant numbers. Most arms initially issued to state or Confederate units were already on hand or hastily purchased by state governments, captured from federal arsenals, or bought in the North or abroad. Tredegar concentrated on heavy ordnance and machinery, allowing smaller Southern arsenals and private manufacturers to produce shoulder arms, other small arms, and ammunition. Neither Tredegar nor the smaller works made real progress for almost one year, and all of them struggled to maintain production for the rest of the war.
Arms and ammunition were useless without reliable gunpowder, but in the spring of 1861, the Confederacy had no manufacturers capable of making enough of it, no matter what the quality. Gorgas estimated shortly after the fall of Fort Sumter that the Ordnance Department had only enough powder, gathered from all sources, to last about one month. What powder he acquired in the first few months of the war came from the same sources as arms and ammunition did. Small government-sponsored powder mills were soon opened in several states, and those in Nashville and New Orleans furnished significant amounts of powder before those cities were captured by federal forces in the spring of 1862. For the remainder of the war, however, these mills generally made enough powder to meet local demands and only occasionally furnished it to the armies in their region.
The establishment, design, construction, and operation of the Confederate States Powder Works on the Savannah River in Augusta, Georgia, was the most significant achievement of Gorgas's Ordnance Department. The Confederacy never lost a battle because an army ran out of powder--hence the book's title--and it is no exaggeration to say that its armies would have been destroyed in 1862 or 1863 without the powder made in Augusta. Never for Want of Powder is a remarkable chronicle of this impressive complex. From the time it began production in April 1862 until just before the war ended in April 1865, the works, often called simply the Augusta Powder Works, produced 3.16 million pounds of powder for Confederate armies, an astonishing record little appreciated at the time but even less appreciated since. Authors C. L. Bragg, Charles D. Ross, Gordon A. Blaker, Stephanie A. T. Jacobe, and Theodore P. Savas, each of them experts on one or more aspects of the Augusta Powder Works, give the works and the men who built and operated them their due at last.
In July 1861, Davis and Gorgas chose Maj. George Washington Rains to superintend the site selection, construction, and operation of a massive powder works, the largest in the world when completed. Rains, like Gorgas, was a graduate of West Point, but had resigned from the army in 1856 to pursue a career as an inventor, engineer, and manufacturer, becoming a partner in two iron works in Newburgh, New York. Rains's combination of military and civilian experience made him an outstanding choice to establish the Confederate States Powder Works. Within days of his appointment, he had chosen a location and began assembling a team of architects and engineers to design and build the facility. He was promoted to colonel by the end of the war.
Augusta on the Savannah River--the border between Georgia and South Carolina--was an ideal location for the powder works. It was in the Confederate interior, secure from threats from federal armies. It was a town large enough to have a population from which workmen could be recruited, but not so large and densely built that an explosion at the works would endanger houses or commercial and public buildings. It was on a main railroad line, canal, and river, all important transportation routes and in the last instance a source of power as well. And, it was in a region with a mild climate, allowing for year-round operation. Furthermore, Augusta was served by railroads to Atlanta, Savannah, and Charleston, ensuring that the powder produced there could be shipped from those three cities throughout the Confederacy.
Under Rains's close supervision, work began in September 1861 on a complex that would eventually stretch two miles along the Augusta Canal. Raw materials were received at the end of the works nearest the city, then were processed through a series of complicated steps from one building or portion of a building to the next, so that the finished powder arrived at the powder magazine at the other end of the complex ready to be shipped to its destination. Rains, who admitted he knew almost nothing about making gunpowder when he undertook his assignment, nevertheless found the men and the means to succeed. He acquired a pamphlet detailing the process at the British Royal Powder Works at Waltham Abbey, the largest powder works in the world at the time. He was also fortunate to have Frederick Wright, an Englishman who had worked at Waltham Abbey, on hand for the first several months of the project. Wright, the chief powder maker at a powder mill in Tennessee in the fall of 1861, was likely the only man in the South who had firsthand knowledge of the process required to make powder on a large scale. Rains appointed Wright to the same position in Augusta, and he remained there until the summer of 1862.
The chief architect and engineer for the Augusta Powder Works was C. Shaler Smith, who held a civilian position for most of the war until he was appointed as a captain of the local defense troops. Smith, though not yet thirty, had extensive experience as the chief engineer responsible for track and bridge construction on railroads in Tennessee and North Carolina, and was later described by Rains as having "genius of a high order" (p. 252). He took Rains's basic plans and rough sketches and finished them, then supervised construction with the assistance of Albert L. West and Miller B. Grant. The powder works, most notably the refinery, was designed in the castellated Gothic revival style--specifically, the Norman style popularized by the Smithsonian Institution, built in 1855--because it was considered as handsome as and less expensive than the classical revival style so common in public buildings of its day. West, an architect and civil engineer, produced many of the superb drawings reproduced in this book, while Grant, a civil engineer, helped Smith with the completion of the refinery, incorporating mills, laboratory, and the rest of the powder works complex. Capt. Isadore P. Girardey, later promoted to major, was an artillerist chosen by Rains to serve as the manager of the Augusta Powder Works, the Augusta Arsenal, and the Government Foundry and Machine Works, a post he held until the last weeks of the war.
The Augusta Powder Works was surrendered to federal troops in May 1865. The property was transferred to the Freedmen's Bureau and later sold by the U.S. government to local entrepreneurs. Its machinery was sold to a powder mill near Nashville, and its buildings were torn down and the bricks salvaged in the 1880s to build two textile mills nearby. The only structure extant is the brick obelisk chimney of the refinery building, with a marble tablet added in 1882 to commemorate the powder works.
This book, with fourteen chapters and four appendices, is the result of exhaustive research and painstaking analysis that combines architectural and engineering history, the history of science and technology, military history, and local history. Its introductory chapters provide valuable context for the significance of the powder works; its architectural, technical, and statistical chapters are both thorough and accessible; and its essays on the war in Augusta and on the men responsible for the powder works, most notably Rains but also Smith, West, Grant, Girardey, and others, are valuable contributions as well.
Never For Want of Powder is an elegant book as well, featuring seventy-four stunning color plates--seventy-three of them architectural drawings executed by architects, engineers, and draftsmen between 1861 and 1864. These drawings, from the Augusta Museum of History, the Southern Maritime Collection, the Museum of the Confederacy, and a private collection in Texas, are a fascinating record of the only permanent buildings designed and constructed for the Confederate government.
In 1882, Rains gave an address to the Confederate Survivors Association in Augusta on the history of the Confederate States Powder Works, saying that during the war the "great extent" and "immense capabilities" of the complex was "the admiration of all visitors" (p. 260). The great extent of this book and the immense capabilities of its authors in collaborating to research and write it, as well as the University of South Carolina Press to produce it, should earn the admiration of all readers interested in one of the great underappreciated stories of American industrial history.
Notes
[1]. Quoted in Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation, 1861-1865 (New York: Harper and Row, 1979): 210-211.
[2]. Ibid., 212.
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Citation:
J. Tracy Power. Review of Bragg, C. L.; Ross, Charles D.; Blaker, Gordon A.; Jacobe, Stephanie A. T.; Savas, Theodore P., Never for Want of Powder: The Confederate Powder Works in Augusta, Georgia.
H-Southern-Industry, H-Net Reviews.
December, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13934
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