Never for Want of Powder: The Confederate Powder Works in Augusta, Georgia (review)

Never for Want of Powder is a lavishly illustrated history of the Confederate gunpowder factory in Augusta, Georgia that operated between 1862 and 1865 and furnished the South's armies with over three million pounds of explosives. Published with support from the Watson-Brown Foundation, Inc., of Thomson, Georgia, the book describes how Colonel George Washington Rains, an engineer and West Point graduate, built a successful munitions factory in an agricultural region dominated by a plantation economy.

At the start of the war, Rains was the president of a New York steam boiler and engine manufacturing plant, who returned to his native region to join the Confederate army. A fellow West Point graduate, Josiah Gorgas, the Confederacy's chief of ordnance, recognized his potential and chose him to head the South's gunpowder program. Rains traveled the South during the summer of 1861 to identify a site and locate the necessary raw materials. He chose Augusta, Georgia, a town with both a rail line and a waterfront on the Savannah River. His greatest challenge was finding enough of the raw material, potassium nitrate, usually called saltpeter or niter, which he satisfied through seizure of existing supplies, importation through the Union blockade, and mining from limestone caves. By April 1865, his factory produced over 3,000 pounds per day of black powder for a variety of weaponry including guns, howitzers, mortars, and columbiads.

With fourteen essays by five different authors, the book covers the lives and contributions of the powder works' managers and skilled workers, its construction, and its production process. The latter proves to be the most worthwhile part of the book, providing readers with considerable details of the exacting procedures for manufacturing gunpowder. This section has forty-six valuable tables and charts on the amount and types of gunpowder produced and where it was shipped. There are also seventy-five plates reproducing its architectural drawings, which are expertly drawn and beautifully reproduced.

The authors correctly stress Rains' remarkable achievement. Without any prior experience in explosives, he constructed a successful factory from plans borrowed from a British pamphlet. He operated it for three years with only one serious accident, quite an accomplishment in the dangerous explosives industry. He devised a system of quality control that produced a reliable product, a necessary step in manufacturing different types and granulations of powder. In 1864, Rains dismantled his factory and shipped it to Columbia, South Carolina to avoid its destruction by an advancing Union army. Once the enemy headed in another direction, he brought the machinery back to its original location and began manufacturing gunpowder again.

The authors praise Rains's exploits, but fail to compare his factory's production to any other in a fashion that would help us understand its scale and scope. The four companies that supplied most of Union gunpowder—Hazard, Oriental, Smith and Rand, and DuPont—are seldom mentioned. At one point, the authors concede that two Northern factories together (including one of DuPont's) produced 30,000 pounds per day in contrast to 3,000 a day in the Augusta plant. The Confederate army may have had enough gunpowder from 1861 to 1865, but the authors do not speculate on how much longer it could have survived against this overwhelming Northern advantage. The book contains no mention of financial records.

Even though the authors do not directly address the role of this factory in Southern industrialization, they provide enough evidence to demonstrate that it was irrelevant. Its success rested on imported expertise and management, technology copied from a British publication, and capital from the Confederate government. Once the war ended, the factory closed and its timbers rotted before it was torn down in 1872...