Robbing saltpetre to pay Paul

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Union of 1861 was in possession of a great number of men, but was in need of a large quantity of war materials. Specifically, steel, gun-iron, and saltpetre- all of which it could only obtain from Britain. Needless to say, these material constraints play no part in Burnished Rows of Steel. But perhaps the most egregious treatment is that of saltpetre, the integral component of gunpowder.

In chapter 1, the British government had chartered the S.S. Adriatic to carry the Guards out to Canada. However, the foolish British neglected to check the ownership of the vessel! It is, in fact, American, and the heroic and patriotic owners of the vessel instead load it with part of duPont's purchase of saltpetre, use threats of legal action to terrify jobsworth British customs officers into ignoring the government's ban on the export of warlike stores, and ship it to the US with the incompetent British shaking their metaphorical fists impotently in the ship's wake. A stirring story, with only one or two slight flaws.

For a start, this coup is based entirely on one paragraph in Amanda Foreman's A World on Fire- which TFSmith misread to boot. He believes that the Adriatic was owned by an American firm and chartered by the British government solely for the Trent voyage. In fact, the quotation states that 'the Adriatic had been purchased from an American shipping firm and refitted in such haste that the US flag could still be seen on the paddle box.' Had TFSmith done any due diligence, his mistake would have become clear. The Adriatic was in fact owned by the Atlantic Royal Mail Steam Navigation Company, AKA the Galway Line, and had been purchased in March 1861.

TFSmith handwaves the suggestion that the British might be competent enough to stop the shipment:

their agents argued that since the shipment had already been approved, and is supposed to be ultimately delivered to the Argentine, it was unlawful to prohibit the shipment, and someone at the Customs House agreed... Presumably with the attention of the government on the Prince Consort’s funeral, certain communications were set aside

In reality, the British were more than capable of stopping the saltpetre shipment. At no stage was there any prospect of duPont getting it out of the country, through whatever underhand means he tried:

'By November 29 four vessels had been engaged to carry the saltpeter to New York. The first ship to load, the Moses Grinnell, was receiving its cargo on the thirtieth when the dockmaster announced that shipment of saltpeter to America was prohibited! Du Pont made an attempt to evade the ban by arranging to ship four hundred tons to France, from whence they could be re-shipped to the United States. But the British immediately forestalled this ruse by declaring that a second order banned the exportation of the commodity to any place' (Harold B. Hancock, Norman B. Wilkinson, '"The Devil to Pay!": Saltpeter and the Trent Affair,' Civil War History, Volume 10, Number 1, March 1964, p.24)

Note that a second order was present banning 'the exportation of the commodity to any place,' and therefore the delivery to the Argentine would have had no effect on the Customs House's views. More importantly, the ban on the export of saltpetre was in direct response to one individual: DuPont.

The magnitude of Du Ponts purchases had not escaped official attention. On November 27 a certain J. Mackenzie wrote Lord John Russell, Foreign Secretary, that three thousand tons of saltpeter had been bought in Mincing Lane for export to New York. One thousand tons were to be loaded the very next day, the twenty-eighth.

Russell immediately forwarded a copy of this note to the Secretary of the Treasury with instructions that it be sent to the commissioners of customs. A second message arrived from the observant Mackenzie listing the names of the American vessels preparing to load saltpeter, and expressing fear that it might be difficult to prove that the purchases had been made for the United States government rather than for private parties. Almost identical notes were addressed to Russell on the twenty-eighth from a J. Howel Jones of London and from an anonymous informant in Glasgow, each repeating the gist of Mackenzie's messages. (Hancock and Wilkinson, 'Devil to Pay' p.24)

To lose one message may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose two looks like carelessness. To lose three, and presumably also a fourth message from the customs office to the British Government asking for permission to flout the law, looks like an author who considers his subjects to be complete mouth-breathing morons. Or, alternatively, one who is worried that his preferred side might not actually be able to manage without British saltpetre, and is therefore determined to give them a little helping hand.

Certainly the secondary literature is entirely clear on the Union's ability to manage without British saltpetre. For instance, from Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., 'Du Pont, Dahlgren, and the Civil War Nitre Shortage,' Military Affairs, Vol. 13, No. 3. (Autumn, 1949):

'the Southern story is worth at least brief consideration in that it shows forcibly what the situation might have been in the North if England had put an effective embargo on nitre destined for Northern ports... Only by tremendous effort and at enormous cost was the South able to keep her armies supplied with sufficient powder.' (p.142)
 'Shortly after the firing on Fort Sumner... The Army... had a stock of 3,800,000 pounds of nitre which it felt was ample for any possible emergency... By October the price began to rise rapidly. It was apparent that the Army's reserve stock soon would have to be put into use.' (p.144)
 'Although the voluminous literature on the Mason and Slidell affair makes no mention of saltpetre or nitre, there seems little doubt that this vital military material did play a part in the peaceful settlement of that affair. Seward who had authorised DuPont's trip to England knew full well the importance of this nitre stock to the Northern cause... That he was worried about the embargo can be seen from the fact that he wrote the Navy Department for information on other possible sources of saltpetre outside of British India. In all probability Seward's decision to release the envoys was strongly influenced by the British embargo on DuPont's nitre. Moreover Seward undoubtedly used the argument that the North's powder supply was in British hands as an effective means of bringing Lincoln and most of the Cabinet to his more pacific way of thinking.' (p.145)
 'It was through Seward and the DuPonts that the War Department acquired a large part of its essential stock of nitre.' (p.145)
 'The Ordnance Department, of course, was delighted with its windfall. Its problem concerning the most critical of raw materials was solved. It somewhat optimistically estimated that it now had a three year supply on hand and from that time on never gave the nitre problem any serious thought.' (p.146)
 'When Captain John A. Dahlgren took command of the Bureau of Ordnance in that month [July 1862] he realised that the shortage of saltpetre was still critical... McClellan's costly Peninsula Campaign had cut into the Army's stocks... the Navy Bureau of Ordnance, with no nitre of its own and with little chance of drawing on the somewhat diminished Army stocks, had... even to consider the possibility of war with the power that had a monopoly on the world's nitre supply.' (p.146)

TFSmith never actually resolves these problems, instead choosing to hand-wave the problem with the bald claim by Ripley that 'we can draw both upon cave niter, which is found in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, and Western Virginia, and niter beds'. Cave nitre had not been used since 1812, when it had been capable only of supporting a much smaller army: in Kentucky both the Mammoth Cave and the Great Saltpetre Cave were abandoned at the end of the war, and an overall history of the period demonstrates that 'Following the 1812 boom period.... in Kentucky local industries of nitrate mining and gunpowder production collapsed permanently... [during the Civil War] little mining occurred in the state during the period.' The Confederacy, which had the overwhelming majority of nitre caves,was under no illusions about its priorities:

The supplies of Saltpetre are from 1st Running the Blockade, 2nd The limestone caves of Va., Tenn., etc 3rd The Nitre Beds-- The last will hardly yield anything for a year to come, and the supply from No. 2 is very uncertain. (source)

Moreover, the example of the Confederacy also shows that nitre beds could not be set up quickly enough to meet the Union's needs. Smith Stansbury's estimate that it would still be a year before the Confederacy could produce domestic nitre from its beds proved to be optimistic: as the head of the Confederate Nitre and Mining Bureau General I. M. St. John wrote after the war, 'We never extracted nitre from these beds'.

There is a simple question which those who believe domestic sources could replace British saltpetre imports must answer. On 27 July 1862, Captain John A. Dahlgren of the Union Navy's Bureau of Ordnance, placed a newspaper advertisement asking for bids to supply the Navy with domestic saltpetre. By the August deadline, 'Only two firms, Charles W. Copeland and Company of New York City and the New Haven Chemical Company, John W. Dwight, president, [had] answered... Both proposed to manufacture potassium nitrate from sodium nitrate and potash.' (Chandler, Civil War Nitre Shortage p.148)

If nitre beds or cave mining were viable domestic sources of saltpetre, why did no company even consider it worth bidding for this lucrative contract?