And while atlanta had some Key Facilities itself, like the rolling mill depicted here as a result of the abandonment of the city of atlanta in Early September of 1864 in ruins, atlanta was primarily an Administrative Center for the Confederate Military production. Offices here in atlanta contracted with firms large and small throughout the region. And then receive the product of those operations, and then distributed them to the armies in the field as needed. But one of the most important facilities in all of the atlanta complex was the quartermaster clothing depot, run by that tennessee now confederate quartermaster George Washington cunningham. Which had been sherman headquarters in nashville in late 1863, and early 1864. Cunningham operated a facility in atlanta that was capable of producing 130,000 complete suits of uniforms in a 12month time period. And the he did this mostly by piecework. He had male tailors and other staff cutting out fabric in warehouses in atlanta, and then al
Libraries, and there are lots of things that you can dig out of that volume. But by the spring of 1862, the powder works quickly constructed by incorporating the industrial capacity of much of the south by having the individual parts of the factory produced in different places, including some of the incorporating wheels, the big what you can kind of think of as grinding wheels in nashville, the drive shaft in the incorporating House Building which was in segments, which is almost 300 feet long, was cast in segments in chattanooga, and then shipped by rail to augusta and assembled in the complex. There was a refinery for refining, removing impurities from the principal component of gunpowder at that time, potassium nitrate. And then large cooling magazines, and also storage magazines. And the complex was laid out essentially so that all the materiel progressed from downstream to upstream, and the finished product, and also the most dangerous part of the product was also located furthest
Military history professor Christopher Gabel discusses the importance of railroads and Steam Powered locomotives to the union and confederate armies and explains how railroads made the scale of the civil war possible and describes how and why the confederacys powerful Railroad System broke down as the war progressed. The Kansas City Public Library hosted this hourlong event. Thank you very much for the kind introduction and for being here. Folks, you know when we look back at the onset of the american civil war, we view it through the lens of the war, itself. That shapes what were looking at. If you view the onset of the civil war a little more objectively instead of being all seeing all of the differences between north and south, youll tend to spot all the similarities. Think about it. The two sides in this conflict. It was a war of brother against brother and in some cases literally so. The two sides shared a common language. They had similar cultures and religions. They shared a ver
To maintain tight control and lipity explains defined foraging parties and centralized distribution systems, chaos could ensue, and the army could really descend into a sort of armed mob engaging in pillage and so forth. So whats interesting is that you would have expected lipity to use shermans march as his examples as hes making this complicated case. He doesnt. He actually goes back to napoleons russian campaign. In fact, though, he doesnt ignore the march when hes talking about how an army can descend into chaos. Thats where he uses napoleon. He actually defends shermans march and he claims at first that when seizing Household Goods the men carefully discriminated between and this is actually the language from shermans orders, discriminated between the rich who were generally hostile to us meaning the union, and the poor and industrious who were usually friendly or at least neutral, and he describes sherman as having this very organized system with rules and receipts, and he explai
Advantage for the north, maybe that statistic is not really important either. Its whether or not the railroads actually were that significant in the conduct and outcome of the civil war. And if the answer to that question is no, we can save a lot of time here tonight. Ok. Well, this is the game changer right here. Water turns to steam and expands 1600 well so what . People have known this for thousands of years. Ok . Well, in the 1820s somebody figured out how to take that expansion and turn it into forward motion. You collect excuse me you collect the steam. You send it down to a piston. The piston drives the rod back and forth. The wheels go around and around and it goes forward. All right. So what . Well, here is the so what. With a Steam Powered locomotive pulling a train, you can carry more cargo farther on the same amount of fuel than you can by muscle power. A sixmule wagon carrying 1 1 2 tons of cargo can go roughly 333 miles on one ton of mule fuel. So you multiply 1. 5 tons t