Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 4.djvu/24

10 to employ eleven workmen and to use up annually the stupendous sum of $1,000 worth of raw material. The commonwealth was without a powder-mill, without any known deposits of niter, and without any supply of sulphur. Not an ounce of lead was mined, and hardly enough iron smelted to shoe the horses. One of the preliminaries to war was to buy a machine for making percussion caps. Revolvers and sabers, as Col. Wharton Green says, &quot;were above all price, for they could not be bought. Cartridge belts were made out of several thicknesses of cloth stitched together and covered with varnish. For the troops so freely offering themselves there were no arms except a few hundreds in the hands of local companies and those that the State had seized in the Fayetteville arsenal. These, according to President Davis, consisted of 2,000 Enfield rifles and 25,000 old style, smooth-bore guns that had been changed from flint and steel to percussion. After these had been issued, the organizing regiments found it impossible for some time to get proper arms. Some, as the Thirty-first, went to the front with sporting rifles and fowling-pieces; some, as the Second battalion, supplemented their arms by borrowing from the governor of Virginia 350 veritable flint-and-steel guns that nobody else would have; some organized and drilled until Manassas and Seven Pines turned ordnance officer and supplied them with the excellent captured rifles of the enemy. How ever, after the fall of 1862 there was no difficulty in getting fairly effective small-arms. But these difficulties never daunted so heroic a people nor led them to withhold their volunteers. &quot;None,&quot; says Governor Vance, &quot;stood by that desperate venture with better faith or greater efficiency. It is a proud assertion which I make to-day that, so far as I have been able to learn, North Carolina furnished more soldiers in —