Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 37.djvu/17

Rh Ordnance at Richmond, to set about the construction of the central laboratory, and with an assistant officer and a military store-keeper to supervise the erection of the buildings and prepare the specifications for the machinery, but also to personally visit at frequent intervals all the important arsenals, the headquarters of the principal armies in the field and the chief fortified seaports, in order to harmonize and improve the work being done, and by reports to the Chief of Ordnance to keep him informed of the relations of the different parts of the work. My original orders required that these visits should be made once a month to each point, but it was quite impossible to literally accomplish this, and I was often directed specifically to go to this or that point where some particular trouble had arisen. Thus I was several times ordered to go to Charleston during the height of the siege in 1863 to look into complaints as to the burning of time fuses and injury from dampness to ammunition in the bomb-proof magazines of Fort Sumter and on Morris and Sullivan's Islands. Some of the most striking pictures of the war which my memory preserves are of scenes beheld during these visits, as for instance the suffocating interior of the sand-bag bomb-proofs of Battery Wagner on Morris Island and the assault of this work on the 18th of July, 1863; the skirmishing in front of Rocky Face Ridge of Genl. Johnston's army in May, 1864, at the opening of the campaign from Dalton to Atlanta; and the Army of Northern Virginia just after it had taken position in front of Petersburg in July, 1864, after the memorable campaign of the wilderness, when I saw for the last time my well and affectionately remembered chief, General Rodes, killed in the following September at Winchester.

During the Civil War of 1861, the armament and warlike munitions of the world were very different from and much simpler than those of the present day. Armour-clad vessels and torpedoes had been experimented with, gun-cotton and nitroglycerine were known, but not in practical use, rifled cannon were being rapidly improved and brought into service, but there were no "machine guns," and there was as yet very little use made of waterproof metallic cartridge cases for small-arms; the main reliance was on gun powder as the only explosive,