by Carole E. Scott

Copyright 2004

No matter how great is the ability of battlefield commanders and how heroic are the men whom they command, an army cannot be successful whose quartermaster corps cannot provide them adequate and timely supplies. And no matter how great is the ability of a quartermaster, he is limited by the capacity of farmers and manufacturers to provide what the troops need.

The Confederate Quartermaster Bureau was responsible for providing army units with such things as clothing, equipment other than ordnance, transportation, and forage for horses and mules. It also handled the paying of soldiers; secured prisoners of war; stored commissary stores; and inspected impressed materials before they were paid for. The government's largest agency, most of its spending flowed through this bureau. Among the items supplied the Confederacy's armies by the Quartermaster Bureau were uniforms, shoes, blankets, mess gear, tents, knapsacks, canteens, horses, mules, harnesses, horseshoes, portable blacksmith shops, and supply wagons.

Four Confederate bureaus, Quartermaster, Ordnance, Commissary, and Medical and state agencies supplied the army's needs. Department and army commanders requested from the appropriate bureau the supplies that they needed. The power of the heads of these bureaus was great, as they controlled how sometimes inadequate supplies were parceled out.The outstanding management of the Ordnance Bureau under Josiah Gorgas created a series of arsenals throughout the South that kept its troops well supplied with munitions. Largely as a result of an inadequate transportation system and poor political and military management, the troops frequently suffered from an inadequate supply of food.

Manufactured goods were sent from the factories where they were produced to base depots. From there they were shipped to advanced depots that were usually located on a major transportation artery located in an area remote from the enemy. When a campaign was in progress, temporary advance depots were established. From an advance depot they were carried by wagons to field units. Poor administration may have accounted for more problems than did inadequate supplies, and fraud and embezzlement were a constant problem.

Although privately-owned businesses provided most of the manufactured goods consumed by the Confederate army, the Confederate government took over or built some of the factories that supplied its armed forces. Therefore, the Confederate government was engaged both in acquiring supplies from domestic and foreign suppliers and producing the supplies itself. Depots for the manufacture of supplies were established in San Antonio, Texas; Fort Smith, Arkansas; Enterprise and Columbus, Mississippi; Huntsville and Montgomery, Alabama; and Atlanta and Augusta, Georgia.

Men seeking glory do not flock to the quartermaster corps. Glory is also not the reward of the men who stand even further behind the men with the guns: farmers and businessmen.

The problems South Carolina textile mill owner William Gregg (1800-1867) faced were typical. Gregg was the founder and president of the Graniteville Manufacturing Company, which is located near Aiken, South Carolina and not far from Augusta, Georgia. Graniteville was the second South Carolina cotton mill that Gregg owned. Unlike the majority of its contemporaries, this business long survived the war, celebrating its 150th anniversary in 1996.

In his day, Gregg, known as the Father of Southern Cotton Manufacture, was probably the most well known manufacturer in the Deep South. His Graniteville operation consisted of a mill with 12,000 spindles, a sawmill, a grist mill, 83 houses, two dams, two churches, a school, and a hotel. In 1860, the mill village surrounding this mill had a population of 830.

Gregg, a successful jeweler and watchmaker and a member of the South Carolina state legislature, founded the Graniteville mill because he thought that the South should produce cotton cloth, rather than shipping cotton to the North and then buying it back as cloth at a much higher price. He thought Southern mills could be competitive if, as his was, they were established in the up country where they could tap with a water wheel the power of falling water and employ inexpensively formerly unproductive whites. His concern for the well being of his workers, who, for example, he required send their children to school, was unusual.

Like many other Southern manufacturers, Gregg initially opposed secession, but when he saw that abolitionism had become a "religious sentiment," he decided that the South should separate from the North. This, he said, "brings us to the question: Are we prepared for separate nationality? ...It is absolutely necessary that we should make, within outselves, all the prime necessities of life, in order to secure independence."

Gregg, an advocate of a protective (high) tariff, was accused of benefitting to the tune of $80,000 a year from tariff protection before the war. Pre-war tariffs that protected American manufacturers from foreign competition were cited at several secession conventions as one of the reasons for leaving the Union. There was widespread dissatisfaction among Southern manufacturers with the free-trade orientation of the planter-dominated Confederate Congress that drafted a constitution that did not call for any encouragement of domestic industry.

The Confederate Congress relented and passed a tariff similar to the 1857 United States tariff and made duty free all imported machinery used to produce cotton and woolen cloth. This legislation proved to be of little benefit because the Union blockade of Southern ports dashed Southern hopes for the opening of substantial direct trade between the South and the rest of the world. (Prior to secession, most of the South's trade with the rest of the world moved through Northern ports.)

In a March 1861 letter to a machinery manufacturer in Massachusetts,Gregg argued that it would impossible for the North to stop, not only the South's trade with foreign countries, but contraband trade with the North via the Mississippi River and railroad connections with Northern states.

In 1861, Graniteville's business was so poor that he assembled his stockholders to decide whether to close the factory. Their decision was to "run with all its power, taking the risk of piling up the goods." Gregg was able to drum up so much business in trips to Nashville, Memphis, New Orleans, and Richmond that he ended up with more orders than he could fill.

In the Spring of 1861, Company F of the 7th Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers (infantry), which was composed of men from Graniteville and commanded by Gregg's son John, left for the front. The loss of men to the army in the Spring of 1861 forced the closing of the mill for a few days. Later that year another company, Company B of the 6th Cavalry, whose ranks were partly filled by men from Graniteville and led by his son James, was formed. (John died of pneumonia in Virginia.)

In 1862, the Graniteville factory was enlarged and improvements in its equipment made that assured that little time would be lost when the water level was low. (Like most mills in those days, Graniteville's spindles were powered by a water wheel that would not work if the water level was too low. A few mills were powered by steam.)

Manufacturers were hamstrung by being cut off from Northern and foreign markets and sources of machinery, and there was concern over the policies of the Confederate quatermaster general, whose controls were viewed as being too extensive, stringent, and arbitrary. Early in the war production was threatened by workers volunteering for the army. Later conscription became the problem. Particularly harmful was the loss of skilled workers. Unlike some manufacturers, Gregg seems to have benefitted little from the wartime relaxation of restrictions on how many hours employees could work.

After conscription was inaugurated, the quartermaster general essentially gained control over all men of military age, allocating them between the army and civilian employment as he saw fit. Factories with government contracts could request that workers be exempted from the draft or returned from the army, however, in exchange, they had to accept the control of their prices and profits by the quartermaster general. The tradeoff faced by the quartermaster was that while taking a man from the mill increased the army's firepower, it reduced the mill's ability to supply the army with essential goods.

Price controls were the product of the belief of many people that manufacturers were harvesting obscene profits as a result of the rapid rise in prices brought about by the scarcity of goods and huge increases in the supply of money. (The Confederate government financed itself by borrowing, taxation, and printing money; the latter dominating. The resulting substantial increase in amount of currency in circulation coupled with a reduction in the amount of goods available for purchase produced an ever higher rate of inflation that late in the war reached a level so high that it disrupted the economy.)

Quartermaster General Col. Abraham C. Meyers, a West Point graduate whose performance as a quartermaster during the Mexican War gained him promotion from first lieutenant to brevet lieutenant colonel, reported that within six months of the capture of Fort Sumter the price of cloth rose by 100 percent. Early in the war General Lee refused to give up men Col. Myers had promised to Gregg. This forced Myers to anull a government contract with Gregg, thereby technically placing the army in breach of contract. Complaints about Myers, some of which were based on his Jewishness, led to him being replaced in the summer of 1863 by a former successful field commander, General Alexander R. Lawton, a West Point graduate who before the war had been a Georgia lawyer/planter/businessman.

The destruction of Southern factories by Union troops led Gregg and other factory owners to form militia companies to protect their property. An October 1862 act of the Confederate Congress authorized the creation of such units, which were to be composed of factory workers, detailed men, old men, and boys.

His son, James J. Gregg, told the War Department that "we are working on tent cloth, driving our mill night & day, supplying Mr. Schley of Augusta, who is filling a large tent contract for the Government," and he said that despite having received exemptions from the draft for some of our workers, the mill had "barely enough [men] to keep our machinery in motion." The death of one of the mill's best and most experienced workers had brought to a halt half of the mill's night operations, and to resume it would require the return of two men in the army.

Gregg told a group of manufacturers gathered in Augusta that "had it been the design of Congress to restrict the advance of manufacturing industry, and confine it to a limited and stickly existence, they could not have adopted a more certain means of reaching that object than they obtained by the Conscript Act." This act, he said, undertook to regulate and limit the price of manufactured articles in the hands of the producer, while it left everyone else to speculate on and sell such articles for all the market would offer."

"If, he said, "Congress and the State Government desired to limit production, they could not pursue a more certain policy to effect that end, than that of restricting prices, and every such step taken by our rulers will tend to embarrass and ruin our country." He pointed out that by restricting what manufacturers could sell their products for merely meant that speculators could earn more than they otherwise could by buying goods from manufacturers and then selling them.

Prices, he said, were determined by the divinely ordained law of supply and demand, and that high prices are self corrective because they bring about increased production, which would force prices down. He complained of rising costs of production, and that he sold to the government at 20 cents what he could sell at auction for 65 cents. Of the 3.7 million yards of cloth produced at Graniteville in 1863, the Quartermaster Bureau got 38,000.

Gregg believed that it was essential that a large amount of tools and equipment be imported and many new factories established. The Union blockade of the South's ports prevented the former, and he claimed that the latter did not take place because the great profitability of speculation diverted capital from factory building to purchasing and holding goods for later resale (speculation) and blockade running.

In late 1862 the Company gave $7,000 for the relief of the poor in its community and its vicinity and $3,000 for soldiers' relief. Early the following year it contributed $40,000 of profits for the Graniteville school and poor. It also sought to secure food for the community with cash or by bartering for it with cloth. In September 1864, it gave $6,000 to charitable institutions in Charleston.

Nonetheless, Gregg was denounced as an extortioner. The "Columbia Carolinian" denounced "Graniteville, Saluda, Batesville, and Bivingsville, and a host of others of our cotton manufacturers." According to the owner of the Saluda, South Carolina factory, he sold it at a loss in August 1862 in order to escape being denounced as an extortioner.

Famed diarist Mary Chestnut complained that "we, poor fools, who are patriotically ruining ourselves, will see our children in the gutter while treacherous dogs of millionaires go rolling by in their coaches--coaches that were acquired by taking advantage of our necessities."

Gregg countered his critics by pointing out that if farmers found that they could increase the prices they charged for their crops, they did, and nobody called them extortioners. Rather than being called extortioners, blockade runners were considered to be public benefactors.

The South Carolina legislature passed a bill in February 1863 that levied a fine of up to $1,000 and imprisonment of up to one year for charging high prices for manufactured goods. It was left up to juries to decide what was too high a price. The law did not apply to manufactured goods brought in through the blockade.

In 1863, Gregg began fearing for the safety of his property when stragglers from Confederate General Joe Wheeler's command and white and black civilians began plundering Graniteville. On February 10th the Company's warehouse was plundered. Thirty-three thousand yards of the cloth that was taken was part of what had been set aside for soldiers' wives and children. The cook's stores were also sacked.

Gregg wrote Theodore D. Wagner of John Fraser's company in Charleston on July 27, 1863 that, "If the Yankees ever reach Augusta they will be apt to make a raid to this place to burn our factory. Can you transfer stock to English houses and claim British protection for the property if the Yankees shall come." Also, to decieve the Yankees when and if they arrived, Graniteville kept a double set of books, and the one prepared for the Yankees showed that Graniteville did not manufacture goods for the Confederate army.

Quartermaster General Lawton on April 9, 1864 ordered the Atlanta quartermaster to take control of all the factories in Lower South through the use of exemptions, impressment of goods, or via the rationing of raw materials. The Atlanta Depot was given the sole power to contract with factories and to "regulate the price, proportion of product to be delivered on govt account & other matters connected with these establishments."

On July 22, 1864, Graniteville's directors resolved that, because the Confederate government owed the Company $650,000 for goods delivered through July 1 and would owe $800,000 if goods were delivered to date, no more goods were to be delievered until arrears were paid. In addition, it was resolved that in the future Graniteville would not give more than thirty days' credit on the two-thirds of the mill's output demanded by the government.

The quartermaster general offered a compromise: to pay one-fourth of the debt up to August 1, provided Graniteville wold accept for the remainder certificates of indebtedness. Graniteville's directors accepted this proposal provided that the government would in the future settle before the goods were delivered. No reply was received to this offer, and Graniteville's treasurer was instructed to sell the goods laid aside for the government until the arrears were paid with the exception of the one third laid aside for the government gratis.

After General William T. Sherman invaded Georgia, Gregg began moving goods away from Graniteville. Shortly after the war ended he was able to ship cotton to England that he had invested in over the objections of many of his stockholders and had secreted away from the mill. After Columbia was burned by Sherman's troops, Granitevile's directors ordered that two large wagons of flour and some cloth be sent to help its citizens.

Unlike a great many of the South's factories and mill villages, the Graniteville mill and village survived the war intact because in his march through Georgia General Sherman by passed Augusta, and after he invaded South Carolina, at Aiken Confederate General Joe Wheeler's cavalry turned back their frequent opponent, Union General Hugh Judson Kilpatrick's cavalry. Reportedly, General Kilpatrick escaped capture or death by fleeing clutching his horse's neck. What remained of Graniteville's Company F of the 7th Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers surrendered with General Johnston's army at Greensboro. War's end found the Graniteville factory with worn out machinery and deteriorated buildings.

Graniteville paid dividends to its owners throughout the war; paying them in the form of Confederate currency and cloth. Near the war's end it was difficult to make purchases with Confederate currency, but it was easy to trade cloth for whatever you wanted to buy. As early as 1863 Gregg had reported to the company's stockholders that cloth had been bartered for for food for the mill's operatives (employees).

Stockholders' demands forced Gregg to pay larger dividends than he wished during the war because he preferred to invest more than they did in the factory, stocks of cotton, and British sterling. Some contend that if a manufacturer had plowed his profits into real property that was not destroyed, rather than holding it in the form of Confederate bonds and currency, which became worthless when the war was lost, he would have profited handsomely from the war. At the end of the war Gregg held a substantial amount of his wealth in the form of Confederate securities, and his estate in 1867 amounted to only $149,135.

On June 28, 1865, President Johnson pardoned Gregg for participating in rebellion. On January 19, 1866, the Freedman's Bureau restored to him his estates on John's and Kiawha Islands provided he make suitable labor contracts with the two freedmen on the land.

Gregg's outlook for the post war period is made plain in a letter written to Graniteville's treasurer on September 27, 1865, in which he said that "We purchased during the war 150 fine rifles for the defense of our property against insurrection and raids. The government took them, leaving us with but 40. They will be more needed now than ever, & I think that a petition to the President will cause this private property to be restored to us."