CHAPTER XXXII
THE PATH OF GLORY
Jefferson Davis had created the most compact and terrible engine of war set in motion since Napoleon founded the Empire of France. It had been done under conditions of incredible difficulty, but it had been done. The smashing of McClellan's army brought to the North the painful realization of this fact. Abraham Lincoln must call for another half million soldiers and no man could foresee the end.
Davis had begun in April, 1861, without an arsenal, laboratory or powder mill of any capacity, and with no foundry or rolling mill for iron except the little Tredegar works in Richmond.
He had supplied them.
Harassed by an army of half a million men in blue led by able generals and throttled by a cable of steel which the navy had drawn about his coast line, he had done this work and at the same time held his own defiantly and successfully. Crippled by a depreciated currency, assaulted daily by a powerful conspiracy of sore-head politicians and quarreling generals, strangled by a blockade that deprived him of nearly all means of foreign aid—he had still succeeded in raising the needed money. Unable to use the labor of slaves except in the unskilled work of farms, hampered by lack of transportation even of food for the army, with no stock of war material on hand,—steel, copper, leather or iron with which to build his establishments—yet with quiet persistence he set himself to solve these problems and succeeded.
He had created, apparently out of nothing, foundries and rolling mills at Selma, Richmond, Atlanta and Macon, smelting works at Petersburg, a chemical laboratory at Charlotte, a powder mill superior to any of the United States and unsurpassed by any in Europe,—a mighty chain of arsenals, armories, and laboratories equal in their capacity and appointments to the best of those in the North, stretching link by link from Virginia to Alabama.
He established artificial niter beds at Richmond, Columbus, Charleston, Savannah, Mobile and Selma of sufficient capacity to supply the niter needed in the powder mills.
Mines for iron, lead and copper were opened and operated. Manufactories for the production of sulphuric and nitric acid were established and successfully operated.