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Chief of Ordnance

en.wikipedia.org

Originally aired on July 12, 1996 - In part 98 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson profiles the Northern-born Confederate General Josiah Gorgas, who, as chief of ordnance, kept the Confederate armies supplied with weapons and munitions.

#98 – Chief of Ordnance – General Josiah Grogas

Genius is always desirable, but especially in war. Where the Southern Confederacy was concerned, popular opinion has elevated R. E. Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson to the level of genius. One individual behind the Southern lines easily belongs in the same class. He was a miracle worker named Josiah Gorgas. What he accomplished for the always hard-pressed Confederacy is unbelievable.

Gorgas was a Northerner, born July 1, 1818, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He was the youngest of ten children. A high graduate in the West Point class of 1841, Gorgas joined the ordnance department. His entire military career centered around military weapons and equipment. While commanding arsenals in the South, Gorgas met and married Amelia Gayle, whose father was governor of Alabama,

In February, 18621, Gorgas received an offer to be the embryonic Confederacy’s chief of ordnance. He agonized over the decision but eventually accepted the commission at a cost of severing all ties with his brothers, sisters, and legion of friends in the North. He began his duties with the rank of major; by war’s end, Gorgas was a brigadier general.

He started with little or nothing in the matter of ordnance stores. Yet Gorgas was determined to make an agricultural South able to defend itself. He improvised and he industrialized. A tireless worker, he established arsenals, armories, and munitions factories throughout the South. Gorgas imported arms from abroad, developed greater production from mineral and ore deposits, built a national powder works, and was never deterred by broken-down railroads or inadequate supply lines.

His ordnance officers roamed the South buying or confiscating whiskey stills for their copper to make rifle confiscating whiskey stills for their copper to make rifle percussion caps; they melted down church, school, and plantation bells for the bronze badly needed to build cannon; they scoured battlefields for lead to remold bullets and for damaged weapons that could be repaired. Gorgas was ever attentive to devising substitutes for necessary raw materials. He even established a facility at Selma, Alabama, for extracting uric acid from human urine to gain enough saltpeter for the manufacture of gunpowder.

How successful Gorgas was in the face of every obstacle is best seen in this statement by his biographer. The former “stocky farm boy with a soup bowl haircut had no real ambition to be a soldier”, yet in the Southern struggle for independence, he was “to contribute more than that of any other man, with the exception of Robert E. Lee, to the success of the armies of the Confederacy”.

“As Chief of Ordnance, (Gorgas) was to supply an almost completely agrarian nation with the arms, ammunition and industries necessary to keep its armies in the field against a mighty industrial foe. The soldiers of the South frequently were without adequate food, the winds knifed through the tattered rags which they called clothing, and their bare feet left bloody footprints on the rutted southern roads, but never, until the end, did they lack for munitions. The world has probably never seen such a miraculous transformation of ploughshares into swords.”

In the postwar years, Gorgas joined the faculty at the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, and soon became vice-chancellor. In 1878 he accepted the presidency of the University of Alabama. A year later, declining health forced Gorgas to relinquish the post for the lighter duties of university librarian. He died in Tuscaloosa in May, 1883.

Gorgas was a good soldier and hard worker. He also was a realist. In late July, following the twin Confederate defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, he wrote: “Yesterday we rode on the pinnacle of success – today absolute ruin seems to be our portion. The Confederacy totters to its destruction.”

That it did, in spite of Josiah Gorgas’s amazing accomplishments.

Dr. James I. "Bud" Robertson, Jr., is a noted scholar on the American Civil War and Alumni Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Virginia Tech.