Prisoners Vote for Lincoln
The article “Voting for Uncle Abe,” by Frank J. Williams in the November/December 2006 issue, was unusually insightful as to the 1864 presidential election. It drew an interesting contrast between soldier and civilian votes in that election and clearly explained the broader political issues in the contest between Lincoln and McClellan.
In my forthcoming book The 101st Pennsylvania in the Civil War: Its Capture and POW Experience, I cite a story from the history of the 101st written by John Reed in 1910, noting that when the officers of that regiment were POWs in Camp Sorghum in Columbia, S.C., the Confederate officers, all too aware of the assumed differences between McClellan’s and Lincoln’s positions on the continuance of the war, suggested that the imprisoned officers hold a mock election before the actual election. They promised the results would be published in the local civilian newspaper. The mock election led to a spirited debate. When the results were in, Reed, himself a prisoner there at the time, wrote that McClellan had just 167 votes and Lincoln had 1,250.

The outcome no doubt surprised and disappointed the Confederates — and the results never appeared in print! When the results of the real election were known, the prisoners undoubtedly gritted their teeth, more determined than ever to cope with their privations as POWs, as they had cast their lot with “Uncle Abe.”

Harold B. Birch
Columbia, S.C.

Gorgas Not a Technocrat
Jeffry Wert gave deserved credit to the work of the puzzling chief of Confederate ordnance Josiah Gorgas in “Turning Points” (January 2007). Few men have had a more difficult task. Gorgas was responsible for arming the land forces of an infant nation, in the midst of war, that was deficient in industry and supported by a precarious economy based on cotton that had to be shipped out from ports ever more tightly blocked.

Although Gorgas was an ordnance officer prior to the Civil War, the technical concerns of his branch of service did not seem to be of any particular interest to him. In The Journals of Josiah Gorgas 1857-1878 he is virtually mute concerning the problems facing his bureau. So scant is such information that I did not use Gorgas’ journals as a source in my biography of a Gorgas subordinate, James Henry Burton. Gorgas makes no mention of Burton, superintendent of all Confederate armories, or of George W. Rains, the powder maker at the Augusta Arsenal. Only one wartime mention is made of chemist John W. Mallet. Gorgas wrote more on the death of American man of letters Washington Irving than on any ordnance topic. His comments on the Franco-Prussian War and the later Russo-Turkish War, both important because of their use of modern ordnance, addressed only political aspects.

Gorgas did not have to be a technocrat himself to handle the ordnance concerns of the Confederacy. His success was as an administrator, and that success would have been impaired had he dabbled in mechanical tinkering. His greatest achievement was his ability to provide arms to the Confederacy from abroad rather than from the hesitant and frequently interrupted supply of arms from Confederate armories. For example, in July 1863 as a result of the two Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Gorgas cited in his journals a loss of 70,000 arms. These were recouped: “Recent arrivals from abroad have given us a fair supply of arms, and will enable us to equip all the men we can raise” (Journals, P. 76). The highest number of rifle muskets produced at the Richmond Armory in any one month was 1,700 for April 1863. Production there for the remainder of 1863 was: August, 860; September, 922; October, 1,200; November, 1,218; and December, 1,000.

Gorgas and others in the Confederate government did the Confederacy a disservice by building a large permanent armory in Macon, Ga. Fully aware that this mammoth facility could not begin to produce arms for several years at the earliest, Gorgas gave his support to building this permanent armory instead of building temporary facilities exclusively. It drained much manpower and supervision that could have been used elsewhere. This huge white elephant never made a single one of the arms that it was intended to produce, and few of any other. While Gorgas clearly disapproved of the Confederate manpower policy (Journals, P. 92), he permitted manpower to be devoted to quarrying, cutting, laying and shipping building stone to Macon on the overtaxed railroads; making millions of bricks; and furloughing soldiers with masonry skills to build this facility devoted to making an obsolescent muzzleloading arm.

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