Robbed of Victory

One of the underlying premises of Burnished Rows of Steel is that the Union can raise and arm millions of men, to fight both the Confederacy and the British at the same time. If the Union cannot arm these men, then the timeline falls apart. So how would TFSmith respond when his premise that the United States was 'pretty much an autarky from independence on', 'as close to a functioning autarky in the Nineteenth Century as I think any nation ever could have been', and had 'plenty of slack' in its economy, came under attack?


Most here are probably familar with the Rob Craufurd rifles trilogy, which looks at the Union's ability to manufacture weapons in the event of a Trent War. It has three parts: Rifles, Trade and Blockade (published on 21 June 2016); A Further Note on Barrels (published on 17 September); and Executive Document 99 (published on 24 September). In effect, these three essays more or less demolish the idea that the Union could produce weapons without imports of iron from Britain. Needless to say, this is pretty devastating for TFSmith, who needs the Union to have over a million weapons in the hands of troops within a few months of war breaking out. As such, he set out almost immediately to overthrow this Rob Craufurd thesis.

On 22 August, a couple of months after the publication of the first part of the thesis, TFSmith asked another forum:

Anyone have links to useful sources on the question of where the iron and steel used in manufacturing in the US pre-1861 and used north and south afterwards came from? The 1860 census of manufactures is on-line, and includes detail state by state for production of pig iron, steel, wire and cable, etc., but anything specific regarding firearms and artillery manufacturing would be appreciated.

As an example, where did the iron and steel used at Springfield come from? Thanks

He later claimed that he had 'reached out to the NPS at Springfield; their response is the iron and steel came largely from Pennsylvania (some steel was imported from Europe, as well)'. However, by the end of the thread, he apparently had no reason to challenge his earlier conclusion:

There's 526-page [sic] long NPS history of the Springfield armory alone that dates from the 1980s and touches on some of these issues; it is public record, but I don't know if our host wants random material uploaded here...

I'll add some excerpts this weekend; interesting reading. Lots of unanswered questions, despite the length. Bottomline is the US - although certainly happy to import materials from Europe because of sunk costs, quality issues, and procurement urgency - was an autarky. The only power that compared in the 1860s was Russia.

Unfortunately, TFSmith never fulfilled his promise to post extracts from the history. This may well be because, on page 221, it states the following:

The barrel rolling process depended on use of suitable iron. In 1858, there was only one source of this iron, Marshall's works near Birmingham, England, from which the Armory made repeated orders. When the Civil War began in 1861, Springfield was in the awkward position of being entirely dependent on overseas sources for gun iron as well as steel. Abram Hewitt undertook to make gun iron for Springfield at his Trenton Iron Company, on being guaranteed a price no less than that paid for English iron, and succeeded on making useable iron only after a visit to Birmingham and much technical difficulty.

(Compare, for the sake of argument, Rob Craufurd's treatment of the issue:

it was only in 1858, when the Springfield Armoury bought an English rolling mill, 50 tons of English iron and a Birmingham operative by the name of William Onions to supervise the work, that the Armoury successfully rolled its first barrels... English iron was as important as English machines to this roll-welding technique: only the iron produced by a single English firm was sufficiently homogeneous... Put simply, at the time of the Trent Affair the United States could not produce a modern musket without British assistance... It was only after Hewitt travelled to Staffordshire on a personal project of industrial espionage, pleading with off-the-clock Marshall and Mills workmen in a local pub to give him the secret of making their iron, that the United States was capable of producing its own gun-barrels... his confident statement disguised the significant flaws Trenton iron possessed. By February 1864, Springfield was complaining about the uneven quality of the new product...)

This 'interesting reading' does not appear to support TFSmith's thesis about the US being an autarky, or that it was 'sunk costs, quality issues, and procurement urgency' that led them to import materials from Britain (not Europe). That is, unless by 'sunk costs' TFSmith actually means that there wasn't a manufacturer whose machinery could make a barrel out of domestic iron; 'quality issues' means 'a gun that would fire without the barrel blowing up'; and 'procurement urgency' means that the Union wanted to make some guns before 1864.

That TFSmith was left somewhat unsure of his premise may be judged by the fact that, just over a month later, he created a thread entitled 'Prewar production of long arms in US'. He first asked 'Anyone have additional information on prewar rifle and musket production in the US?', then added 'Wonder where all the barrels came from?' two hours later. When provided with information on total production, he asked two separate individuals almost identical questions:

'were the barrels for these weapons produced by Springfield and Harper's Ferry, by domestic (US) contractors, by foreign contractors, or all of the above?' (1)
'were these manufactured as such by Springfield, by contractors domestically, imported as finished or semi-finished products, or a mix of all three sources? Seriously, I'm curious' (2)

Of course, TFSmith's official position has, and probably will, never change. The Union was an autarky, which could easily replace the iron it purchased from Britain- which it only bought because it was cheaper and easier, of course, and not because Britain was the only place capable of making it. Yet it is clear that his faith has been shaken, sufficiently to ask for evidence about the source of iron and steel, and then to look into where barrels had been produced before the introduction of barrel-rolling - presumably in the hope that these old sources of barrels could be revived in the event of a war.

It is even more telling that we find him later complaining that such a study has not been 'subject to academic peer review', not produced by 'an academic with standing', and is not a 'scholarly work'. TFSmith is supposedly an academic. If Rob Craufurd's claims are incorrect, why can he not peer review and disprove them himself? This blog is written by rank amateurs, and yet we have been able thoroughly to debunk TFSmith's understanding of prize law and Anglo-American trade. It should be a mere matter of hours for TFSmith to take Rob Craufurd's work to pieces, particularly given the large number of footnotes which it includes. However, despite direct appeals for him to do so, TFSmith seems to be no closer to overthrowing the thesis than when he started.

We will deal with TFSmith's other tools for inflating the size of the Union army in a series of future posts. For the time being, however, bear in mind that TFSmith's only means to respond to the Rob Craufurd thesis is to complain that an academic didn't write it - and unless he knows Rob Craufurd's true identity, even this ad hominem may not be true.