Ploughshares into Swords: Josiah Gorgas and Confederate Ordnance, and: The Journals of Josiah Gorgas, 1857-1878 (review)

book reviews163 One error—particularly unwelcome in a bibliographic guide—is the incomplete citation for Pea Ridge, Campaign in the West. Inexplicably, co-author Earl J. Hess is missing from the citation and annotation for this excellent book. This isolated error aside, the Guide to Civil War Books is a commendable work. Barbuto and Kreisel have made a durable and substantive contribution to Civil War bibliography. Kenneth Startup Williams Baptist College Ploughshares into Swords: Josiah Gorgas and Confederate Ordnance. By Frank Vandiver. (1952; reprint, College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1994. Pp. 368. $16.95.) The Journals ofJosiah Gorgas, 1857-1878. Edited by SarahWoolfolkWiggins. (Tuscaloosa: University ofAlabama Press, 1995. Pp. 360. $39.95.) Out ofprint since 1952, Ploughshares into Swords: Josiah Gorgas and Confederate Ordnance has been reissued in Texas A&M's Military History Series. In what has come to be rightly regarded as classic of Civil War history, Frank E. Vandiver attributed to Josiah Gorgas "a military career which was to contribute more than any other man, with the exception ofRobert E. Lee, to the success of the armies ofthe Confederacy" (3). Whether or not one entirely agrees with this assessment, none can deny that Gorgas possessed a "genius for military administration " that helped to keep the Confederacy afloat long after it should have, in Gorgas's words, "totter[ed] to its destruction" {Journals 75). As Chief of Ordnance of the Confederate States Army, he accomplished the seemingly impossible task of supplying "an almost completely agrarian nation with the arms, ammunition, and industries necessary to keep its armies in the field against a mainly industrial foe" {Ploughshares, 3). His bureau began with no supplies to issue and carried on with limited funds with which to purchase the cannons and rifles, saddle blankets and gun-slings that the army required. It was further burdened by a primitive and expiring transportation system, meager and crude manufacturing and mining facilities, and, to make matters worse, ruinous inflation, losses to Union military incursions, an unbelievable lack of cooperation from states-rights-minded governors, and the conscription ofthe few skilled machinists that the South could provide. Nevertheless, until the very last, Confederate armies never seriously lacked arms and ammunition, with Gorgas's bureau routinely performing minor miracles of substitutions, inventions, and ersatz. Under his administration the Confederacy established arsenals, powder mills, smelting works, foundries, and rifle and pistol factories. "Where three years ago we were not making a gun, a pistol nor a sabre, no shot or shell," Gorgas observed in 1 864, we now make all IÓ4CIVIL WAR HISTORY these in quantities to meet the demands of our large armies. ... I have succeeded beyond my utmost expectations" {Ploughshares, 240-41). Both more and less than a biography of Josiah Gorgas, Ploughshares into Swords is the history of the Confederate Ordnance Department, and although Vandiver assures us that to Gorgas, "family affairs were almost as important as official business" (128), we see little of his private life. Thus the reader is left with such questions as, why did this Yankee from Running Pumps, Pennsylvania , who had lamented to his superiors that he could "not be reconciled to a long residence at the South" (36), leave the United States Army to cast his lot with the Confederacy? Surely what Gorgas referred to as "the frankness of Southern manners" (45), his hatred of "black Republicans," and a disagreement with his immediate superior in 1861 are not the whole reason. Fortunately, the publication of The Journals ofJosiah Gorgas, 1857-1878, skillfully edited by Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins, goes far toward answering this and other questions regarding the private life ofthis unsung Southern hero and the culture that produced him. "The South has wooed and won me," he wrote in 1859. "Its blandishment have stolen my senses, and I am its willing victim" (xv). What Gorgas did not admit, and what the twenty-five-year-old Vandiver did not perhaps yet realize, was that, as Wiggins points out, by marrying into a well-connected Southern family, the young army officer had leaped into a social sphere closed to him as the son of a poor farmer, a sphere in which he quickly became quite comfortable. Identifying this economically and socially prominent...