Confederate Industry: Manufacturers and Quartermasters in the Civil War (review)

It's gotta be the shoes! Long before Spike Lee and Nike began hawking basketball shoes, southern quartermasters and political leaders began to realize that without industry and supplies—including adequate footwear—the Confederate States of America (CSA) was doomed. Harold S. Wilson documents the CSA's struggles to provide its troops with the shoes, clothing, and other necessities of what became a total war. The author credits the efforts of southern manufacturers and quartermasters, as well as lessons learned in the Civil War, for postwar southern industrialization. Wilson's primary focus in this top-down history is on the quartermasters and politicians who led the Confederate war effort.

In the preface Wilson sketches the historiography for Confederate mobilization and manufacturing, and he offers some intriguing ideas regarding manufacturers, government policy, technology, and labor. "A New South," he declares, "arose on the foundations firmly laid down in the old" (p. x). In the introduction Wilson supplies ample statistics on antebellum industry and introduces prominent southern industrialists. He concludes that southern manufacturers were "at the forefront of economic life," and he argues that in several important industries, the South was prepared for war (p. xix). Throughout most of Confederate Industry, however, Wilson relegates manufacturers to a supporting role, and he abandons the intriguing lines of inquiry previously mentioned.

Writing chronologically, he devotes six chapters to the war and two to the postwar South. The first three chapters concern the CSA quartermasters general Abraham C. Myers and his replacement (after the shoe debacle at Gettysburg), Alexander R. Lawton. The author contrasts Myers's poor planning—which led, for example, to the wool famine and winter clothing scarcity of 1861–62—to Lawton's efficiency during the CSA's final two years. Wilson provides the political and economic context in Richmond and throughout the Confederacy, and he incorporates major battles with supply emergencies. Unfortunately, he offers only fleeting comparisons to Josiah Gorgas's Ordinance Bureau and Lucius Northrup's Commissary Bureau. In contrast to his sharp focus on Myers and Lawton, Wilson mentions but does not engage in sustained analysis of southern manufacturers such as William Gregg, Daniel Pratt, and Edwin Holt. The reader does not learn much about the plight or plans of these men during the war.

In chapters 4 through 6, Wilson describes domestic manufacturing, foreign supply channels, and the impact of total war. He emphasizes the importance of importing and blockade-running firms in the procuring of CSA supplies late in the war, and he assesses the impact of the systematic destruction of southern factories by Union troops. Wilson more effectively balances the narrative between manufacturers and government in chapters 7 and 8. Investigating the origins of the New South, he speaks the language of industrial continuity, but his assertion of an industrial renaissance remains murky without a discussion of antebellum industrial subordination to agricultural interests. Wilson's analysis of the political interplay of the Andrew Johnson administration and southern manufacturers regarding pardons, freedpeople, and debt, while uncritical, contains valuable insights. The author concludes that antebellum and wartime experiences empowered southern manufacturers in their drive to create a New South.

Wilson's book is part of a resurgence of studies that look at the CSA as a business enterprise and a bureaucratic animal, and it enhances our understanding of the relationships between the CSA's political leadership, quartermasters, and southern manufacturers. It also advances the still slim scholarship linking Confederate mobilization with the New South. Evidence of industrial or business continuity points to potentially fruitful lines of scholarship. Many of Wilson's Confederate quartermasters, officials, and blockade runners emerged as postbellum business partners and New South industrialists. The author makes good use of manuscript collections and other primary sources, integrating, for example, Charlestonians (and future industrial entrepreneurs) Edward Willis and Theodore D. Wagner into the CSA supply structure. Business historians should mine the endnotes for abundant correspondence between manufacturers and CSA officials...