Not only had the South to provide from her seven millions of white
population an army larger than that of Imperial France, but from a
nation of agriculturists she had to provide another army of craftsmen
and mechanics to enable the soldiers to keep the field. For guns and
gun-carriages, powder and ammunition, clothing and harness, gunboats
and torpedoes, locomotives and railway plant, she was now dependent
on the hands of her own people and the resources of her own soil; the
organisation of those resources, scattered over a vast extent of
territory, was not to be accomplished in the course of a few months,
nor was the supply of skilled labour sufficient to fill the ranks of
her industrial army. By the autumn of 1862, although the strenuous
efforts of every Government department gave the lie to the idea, not
uncommon in the North, that the Southern character was shiftless and
the Southern intellect slow, so little real progress had been made
that if the troops had not been supplied from other sources they
could hardly have marched at all. The captures made in the Valley, in
the Peninsula, and in the Second Manassas campaign proved of
inestimable value. Old muskets were exchanged for new, smooth-bore
cannon for rifled guns, tattered blankets for good overcoats.
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