New----The Best Gun In The World Came From South Carolina

The Best Gun in the World: George Woodward Morse and the South Carolina State Military Works, Robert S. Seigler, University of South Carolina Press; 288 pages; 9 color photographs, 71 black and white photographs, notes, index, bibliography, $49.95.

From the Publisher:

A thoroughly researched account of weapons innovation and industrialization during the Civil War

A year after seceding from the Union, South Carolina faced the daunting challenge of equipping soldiers with weapons, ammunition, and other military implements during the American Civil War, a problem faced by the Confederate States government as well. In The Best Gun in the World, Robert S. Seigler explains how South Carolina created its own armory and then enlisted the help of a weapons technology inventor to meet the demand. Seigler mined state and federal factory records, national and state archives, and U.S. patents for detailed information on weapons production, the salaries and status of free and enslaved employees, and other financial records to reveal an interesting, distinctive story of technological innovation and industrialization in South Carolina.

George Woodward Morse, originally from New Hampshire, was a machinist and firearms innovator who settled in Louisiana in the 1840s. He invented a reliable breechloading firearm in the mid-1850s to replace the muzzleloaders that were ubiquitous throughout the world. Essential to the successful operation of any breechloader was its ammunition, and Morse perfected the first metallic, center-fire, preprimed cartridge, his most notable contribution to the development of modern firearms.

The U.S. War Department tested Morse rifles and cartridges prior to the beginning of the Civil War and contracted with the inventor to produce the weapons at Harpers Ferry Armory. However, when the war began, Morse, a slaveholding plantation owner, determined that he could sell more of his guns in the South. The South Carolina State Military Works, originally designed to cast cannon, produced Morse’s carbine and modified muskets, brass cartridges, cartridge boxes, and other military accoutrements. The armory ultimately produced only about 1,350 Morse firearms. For the next twenty years, Morse sought to regain his legacy as the inventor of the center-fire brass cartridges that are today standard ammunition for military and sporting firearms.

Robert S. Seigler, a South Carolina native, is a recipient of the Order of the Palmetto (the highest civilian honor in South Carolina) and is a fellow in the Explorers Club and the Royal Geographical Society. He is the author of eight books and several journal articles about South Carolina’s Civil War history. Seigler practices medicine in Greenville, South Carolina, where he is the medical director of the pediatric intensive care unit and a professor of pediatrics at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville.  

Publisher's web site for The Best Gun in the World University of South Carolina Press

News---Confederate Weapons Cache May Have Been Found In South Carolina River

Huge Cache Of Confederate Weapons Seized by General Sherman may have Been Found In South Carolina River, Washington Post, January 21, 20155

Drunk and rowdy, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s troops captured South Carolina’s capital on Feb. 17, 1865. It was nearing the end of the Civil War, and Sherman’s plan was to destroy the state where secession began.  “The truth is, the whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak vengeance upon South Carolina,” Sherman wrote to Gen. Henry W. Halleck. “I almost tremble at her fate, but feel that she deserves all that seems in store for her.”

Sherman’s 60,000-man army torched Columbia in retaliation for seceding from the Union. The blaze, which he later blamed on a Confederate general he said left cotton bales in the streets, destroyed a third of the city. Sherman’s troops made off with the Confederate armory. They confiscated cannonballs, rammers, sabers and bayonet scabbards. And, on their way out of town, they dumped whatever they couldn’t carry into the Congaree River.

Amid a massive toxic tar cleanup, historians have found possible evidence of the loot using sonar and metal detectors near the Gervais Street bridge in downtown Columbia, the city’s State newspaper first reported over the weekend. The munitions, if indeed they are munitions, are said to be buried in 40,000 tons of black tar that spilled into the river several years ago from a now-defunct power plant. Historians are trying to find the best way to retrieve the stash, with explosive experts on hand.

“Hopefully, none of it is going to blow up,” Joe Long, curator of the Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum, told the newspaper. Researchers located more than 200 sites in the two-foot-thick oil sludge as “exhibiting signature characteristics that could be associated with ordnance.”

Full Text is continued at Washington Post, January 21, 2015

CWL---The Confederacy: A House Divided Against Itself?

The Confederacy: A House Divided?, James M. McPherson, Chapter 3 in This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War, Oxford University Press, 2007.

Debates generated during the centennial anniversary decade of the American Civil War were many. It appears that they will continue into the sesquicentennial anniversary of the war. McPherson believes the interpretations fall into two broad categories: Why and how did the South lose the war? Why and how did the North win the war? Both R.E. Lee at the end of the war and Shelby Foote during the 125th anniversary era answered the question. The Confederacy was compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources (Lee); the Union fought the war with one hand behind its back and the Confederacy never had a chance to win the war (Foote).

If Lee and Foote are right about the inevitability, then should a question be asked? Was it folly and arrogance to enter a war that the South could not win? If the North's overwhelming resources defeated the South, then 'Yes' then South was foolish to enter the war. Secessionists in 1861 and scholars since have understood that other regions had won independence against long odds: Netherlands v. Spain, Greece v. Ottoman Empire, North American colonies v. Great Britain. Two Rebel generals, Joseph Johnston and Pierre Beauregard declared after the war that the South did not engage in the crime of undertaking a war it could not win.

If the South did not begin a war that it could not win, then did internal dynamics cause the defeat? McPherson cites several works as advancing the notion that internal social condition and politics caused the defeat of the South. Charles Ramsdell's Behind the Lines in the Southern Confederacy (1944, 1972, 1997)listed economic mobilization and shortages, war financing and inflation, and transportation and corruption difficulties weakened the armies to the point of necessary surrenders.

McPherson notes that two-fifths of the people living in the Confederacy were slaves who had a stake in which side won. Also, two-fifths of the people lived in non-slave holding families whose allegiance to a slave-holding republic may have been weak. Drew Faust in 1990 advanced these particular points in a Journal of American History article. William Freehling further advanced this issue in The South vs. The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War in 2001.

Freehling discusses the differences between the South (15 slave holding states) and the Confederacy (11 seceding states). He finds that about 90,000 Southerners fought for the Union and about 90,000 Union state residents fought for the Confederacy. McPherson takes exception to Freehling's conclusion that 1 out of 2 Southerners did not support the Confederacy; but he does allow that least 1 out of 4 Southerners did not support the Confederacy. McPherson does agree with Freehling that there were significant and debilitation race, gender and class issues tearing at the social fabric of the new Confederacy.

William Davis' Look Away! A History of the Confederate States of America (2002) attributes the defeat of the Confederacy to poor leadership at civilian and military levels, political factionalism, social dissensiona dna bickering among leaders with 'outsize egos and thin skins'. Also, Davis describes monetary inflation, the preponderance of the agricultural resources and the marginal industrial resouces as being the secondary causes of the Confederate defeat. The primary causes being the jealous, feuding politicans. McPherson notes that if this was true of the Confederacy it was also true of the Union. Taking the combined causes raised by Ramsdell, Faust, Freehling and Davis, McPherson wonders how the Confederacy last four years.

McPherson states that Gary Gallagher addresses this question in The Confederate War (1997) and Lee and His Army in Confederate History (2001). Gallagher marshalls sufficient evidence, note McPherson, to advance the theme of Confederate determination even in the face of extreme adversity and at the same time recognizing the social, political, economic race, and gender difficulties the Confederates faced. So why did the Confederacy lose the war if it was victorious within the first two years of the war as it suffered through multiple fractures in its governments, economy, and social classes?

McPherson rejects an answer that relies on the large generalization that the outcome of the war was inevitable. "It can only be answered by a narrative and analysis of unfolding events on the battlefields and the home fronts--in both the North and the South--that give due weight to such factors as political and military leadership, economic mobilization, logistics, strategy, war aims, morale, social strains and cohesion, diplomacy and the sometimes fickle fortunes of battle," state McPherson(p.48) He points to Brian Will's The War Hits Home, a study of southeastern Virginia, that integrates these factors into a regional history. The people of southeastern Virginia "sought to secure victory until there was no victory left to win." Though the North did have greater numbers and resources which were wielded with skill, determination and coordination during 1863-1865 did the Northern victory become inevitable.

defections, class tensions and