Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 16.djvu/289

 Southern Genius. 283

other advantages. There was no general government; no organized army or navy ; no quartermaster, subsistence, ordnance or medical department; no vessels of war; no arms or ammunition or other war material, except such as fell into her hands with the capture or surrender of United States forts, arsenals or magazines within her borders; no levies to draw upon, except her own sons, to supply the ranks of her armies and ships, when called into being; no money, except that supplied by the States in their individual capacity.

I think, therefore, it may be safely claimed the North had every advantage except in the pluck and prowess and patriotism of her soldiers.

A distinguished German, Colonel Von Scheliha, Lieutenant-Colo- nel of Engineers in the Confederate Army, in his Treatise on Coast Defence, states the conditions of the two sections very fairly and fully when he says :

" As an almost exclusively agricultural region the South had left to the North not only the manufacture of arms, powder, shot, and, in general, implements of war, but also of the necessary accessories railroad iron, locomotives, cars, wagons, steam-boilers and engines, telegraph wire, carpenters' and entrenching tools, spikes and nails, chains and cordage, harness and saddles, cotton and woolen fabrics, shoes, agricultural implements, chemical preparations and drugs ; in fine, of all the things absolutely necessary for the maintenance of an independent warfare.

" For this reason the South was still wanting in manufacturing establishments of all kinds when the first gun fired at Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor, gave, on the I2th of April, 1861, the signal for the commencement of hostilities in good earnest. Necessity, the mother of invention, taught the Confederates who, by a strict blockade of all their ports, were soon to find themselves isolated from the balance of the world to develop the rich, heretofore hardly imagined, resources of their land.

" Foundries, powder mills, and other establishments for the manu- facture of implements and equipments of war sprang up as if by magic; but here another difficulty was encountered, in the fact that the tide of immigration had hitherto turned almost entirely to the Eastern, Middle, and Western Stales, the inducement of higher wages offered by certain Southern capitalists being, in the opinion of the immigrants, more than counterbalanced by the greatly exaggerated ger of climatic diseases.

II The South thus found herself, in a great measure, deprived of