Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 02.djvu/131

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Resources of the Confederacy in February, 1865.
121
Richmond, February 10th, 1865.

General—In making the report you ordered, upon the condition and wants in regard to transportation by railroad, it may not be improper to call your attention to the cause of the difficulties which have always attended it with increasing force as this city is approached.

In North Carolina and Virginia, where transportation bears the most heavily because of its increasing volume as you approach Richmond, the roads are the least able to bear it. They were constructed and equipped to transport that great stream of travel between the North and South; and with no expectation of a heavy freighting business, prepared themselves with such machinery as was adapted to carrying a light train very rapidly. So long as the army could draw supplies from any quarter, and the lines running south as far as Wilmington and Charlotte, were called on only to transport men, the work was performed promptly and well, but when supplies failed in Virginia and North Carolina, and Georgia and South Carolina had to furnish them, an immense business was at once created upon those lines, which they were unprepared to meet. Their engines were light and few in number, and their cars the same. Had the gauge of the tracks south suited, machinery might have been drawn from there; but this not being so, we have had to struggle against a heavy business with inadequate means of performing it. Under these circumstances any machinery will depreciate; it is overworked and not well attended to, and must inevitably grow less reliable. New cars are being built, though the difficulties encountered retard the progress very much, but new engines cannot be manufactured in the Confederacy.

It becomes all important, then, that those we have should be preserved in good repair, and here we meet the really great difficulties arising from the scarcity of mechanics and materials.

The hardships of the war, and the fear of conscription, have induced many of this class to leave the Confederacy; most of them were natives of the United States. Feeling but little or no interest in our country or cause, they are generally of a roving and reckless character, forming attachments to places but rarely, and impatient of restraint. Many of them enlisted and have been killed, so that the number in the country has been constantly decreasing. This deficiency cannot be supplied as in ordinary times by the instruction of apprentices, because the conscript law takes them for the army just at the period when they are learning to be useful, nor can they be induced to come from abroad at the present pay, and with the fear of the army before them.

To the want of mechanics is to be added the want of materials. Not a single bar of railroad iron has been rolled in the Confederacy since the war, nor can we hope to do any better during its continuance. The main lines will be kept up by despoiling the side lines, but if our lines should expand and the rails and machinery be taken away by the enemy, we could not replace them. But