Author Q&A: Theodore Savas and "The Indispensable Man"

The site's long-running Q&A feature ends its rather long hiatus with the return of Theodore Savas. Ted wore his publisher's hat for our 2007 interview, but today we will be talking about his newest work on the authorial side of things: The Indispensable Man: George Washington Rains, the Confederate Powder Works, and the Civil War You Never Knew.

CWBA: Welcome back, Ted. It has often been said that no Confederate army lost a battle because of a lack of arms, powder, and shot. However, a wider reading uncovers a number of challenges to that long accepted claim. For example, antiquated arms were a key factor in the early-war Confederate defeat at Mill Springs and, accurately or not, bad powder was blamed for the mid-war loss to a much smaller Union force at Honey Springs. Also, in a general sense, defective shells and obsolete artillery dramatically impacted Confederate hitting power on a multitude of battlefields. What are your thoughts on the matter?

TS: This first question deserves a full reply, so here we go.

You’re right to challenge it, and so do I. That line is one of the most durable myths of the war. It survives and thrives because of what I call reverse-engineered thinking: the Confederacy fought for four years, none of the big-name battles were lost because of a lack of munitions, so it always had the means to fight a long war. It didn’t have the means to fight a war at all in 1861, and it lost a lot of engagements because of a lack of powder. Let me dig into this a bit more.

When George Rains sat down in a Richmond hotel room with Jefferson Davis and Josiah Gorgas on July 8, 1861, for what was essentially a final job interview in a meeting no one has ever written about, not a pound of military-grade powder was being made anywhere in the South. Davis put him in charge of locating, designing, and building a mammoth central government gunpowder mill from scratch to supply the entire war effort east of the Mississippi. We will come back to this later.

You noted Mill Springs. General Crittenden attacked in the rain on January 19, 1862, at the far eastern end of Johnston’s line three months before the Augusta Powder Works began production. We don’t have precise records of what the Confederates fighting there had at that time, and the powder they did have was probably subpar—wet and poorly made. The previous October, General Zollicoffer and some of his officers were complaining that they did not have two rounds of ammunition per man, and that artillery had arrived with empty shells.

After the Augusta Powder Works went into operation in April of 1862, no significant defeat east of the Mississippi River took place because of a lack of gunpowder. Before that, during the war’s first year, there are multiple examples of major defeats in several states directly related to a lack of powder. Rains and the Augusta mill, except for one small shipment, did not send powder to the Trans-Mississippi, but I have a significant amount of information about just how bad the powder was out there and the consequences.

Take Honey Springs. That was a quality problem, and the evidence is stronger than “accurately or not” suggests. That summer, Gen. William Steele complained that the powder he received from San Antonio “looks well when first opened, but attracts moisture to such an extent that exposure to damp weather converts it into a paste. The troops have no confidence in it.” Gen. Kirby Smith wrote about this in March 1864: Mexican powder made with nitrate of soda instead of nitrate of potash “caused our troops to be defeated on the Arkansas, and resulted in the loss of the greater portion of the Indian Territory.” None of that powder came from Augusta; it all came from Mexico by order of Richmond.

You’re right about “hitting power,” though that term has different applications. At Charleston in 1863, Beauregard complained that not more than one-fifth of the fuses he’d been sent “burst properly or with accuracy.” Rains watched the batteries engage the Union fleet and was alarmed by what he witnessed: “I regret to say that of the many shells I saw fired from our batteries at the enemy from the 10 inch Columbiad, but few fuzes took fire and hence the ammunition and projectiles were expended without effect.” But the problem was never Augusta powder, which was routinely tested. The lack of “hitting power” in my view came not only from bad fuses but from weak powder made in smaller state-run or quasi-private mills, especially in New Orleans. I mention this in more detail in a later answer below.

To summarize: once Augusta was running at full stride, from April 1862 and thereafter, the claim holds up reasonably well for quantity and quality east of the Mississippi. There was neither quantity nor much quality during the first year of the war anywhere, and this was true west of the river as well for essentially the entire war.

CWBA: There are a lot of senior Confederate/militia officers named Rains for Civil War readers to keep track of, including Gabriel Rains of the torpedo bureau, James E. Rains (killed leading his brigade at Stones River), James S. Rains (a Missouri State Guard brigadier primarily known for his alcoholism and military incompetence), and your Rains, George Washington Rains. For those not familiar with him, can you provide a short capsule bio?

TS: Even the newspapers couldn’t keep them straight. In July 1861, while George Rains was meeting Tennessee’s governor in Nashville, papers from Buffalo to Dallas were arguing over whether the “Gen. Rains” fighting in Missouri was the Major Rains who had been running an iron works in New York and had gone South. He wasn’t.

George Washington Rains was born in New Bern, North Carolina, in 1817, the younger brother of Gabriel of torpedo and landmine fame. Their father built fine furniture and cheap caskets, went broke, and moved the family to Alabama one step ahead of his creditors. George graduated from West Point first in chemistry and third in the class of 1842 (Longstreet, Rosecrans, D. H. Hill, and Abner Doubleday were classmates; Mansfield Lovell was his roommate).

He served as an engineer and artillery officer, taught chemistry at West Point, and had a remarkable Mexican War career as a spy, engineer, and combat staff officer for Gens. Winfield Scott and Gideon Pillow. In 1856, George married into one of the richest families in America (that’s a crazy story), resigned from the U.S. Army, and moved to upstate New York, where he helped manage and grow his father-in-law’s Washington Iron Works at Newburgh. He was a wealthy man by the time his home state of North Carolina seceded. He was also in communication with Richmond, which was trying to get him to join the Confederacy for a specific task. He left his wife and young daughter in June 1861 and traveled to Richmond, a move that permanently estranged him from his father-in-law; his marriage never fully recovered.

While designing and building the two-mile-long Augusta mill complex, he traveled to every state east of the Mississippi. He turned Tennessee’s lone blasting mill into a viable operation late in the year and helped design a second mill from scratch; without these, Albert Sidney Johnston could not have maintained any Western Theater line.

The Augusta mill was the only permanent industrial complex or construction project the Confederacy finished. Rains had a myriad of complex important duties, eventually commanded several arsenals, and during the war’s final weeks served as the Confederacy’s de facto chief of ordnance. He ended the war as a colonel but was probably promoted to brigadier during the final days.

He remained in Augusta, taught chemistry, served as dean of the Medical College of Georgia, and wrote several textbooks. He returned to Newburgh in 1894 after his father-in-law died, and died there himself in 1898.

CWBA: The Indispensable Man is clearly more than a Civil War biography that follows the standard format. How would you describe what kind of book it is?

TS: It is three books, threaded together under the primary rubric of biography.

First, it’s a full biography. George Rains led five very different lives: birth to West Point, a distinguished career in the Old Army, a prosperous stretch as an industrialist and family man in New York, four years as the Confederacy’s powdermaker, and three decades as a teacher and college dean in Augusta. His prewar years are covered in full because you can’t understand what he was able to achieve during the Civil War without understanding how he built his talent stack.

Second, it’s an industrial and logistics history. That might sound boring, but it’s edge-of-your-seat front-row coverage of a shadow war you have never known. You’ll learn more about powder than you probably want to, but you must be versed in this if you study the war at any serious level. Most historians have no idea how hard and complex powder was to make, and why pistols, small arms, field artillery, and coastal guns all needed different grains of powder. They aren’t interchangeable. Making it and distributing it to where it needed to go was a nightmare that never ended. That gap in knowledge has distorted what historians have written, and how they and we have read and understand the war. Please note that this is not a criticism. I didn’t know much about this either until I began studying it.

Third, and this is what surprised me most, The Indispensable Man is a history of the strategy of the war told through the lens of gunpowder. Rains and the Augusta Powder Works are inextricably linked to grand strategy, and not indirectly. I have the firsthand accounts to prove it.

There were eye-popping shortages everywhere, at every level, nearly all the time during the war’s first year. This was true even in Virginia, where the Confederates hoarded most of what they seized from the U.S. arsenals and forts.

All of this raises a hard question about the other side: what did the Lincoln administration know and when did it know it? Lincoln and everyone in any position of power knew the South had very little powder and could not replace what little it had. Major newspapers like the New York Times explained the complexities of making powder, why the Confederacy could not make it quickly, and it specifically warned Lincoln not to give Jefferson Davis what he needed most: the time to develop a central mill to reach a war footing.

Despite all this knowledge, the United States adopted a long-war strategy for a conflict that could have ended quickly regardless of who was tactically victorious in the field. Pulling triggers and yanking lanyards anywhere—even vigorously sustained skirmishing—would have drained the Confederacy within weeks. I know that statement raises eyebrows, but I cover this in depth with numbers and firsthand accounts. Everyone of consequence on both sides knew this. The Confederate War Department reports it produced for itself and for the Congress shocked everyone—and not in a good way. The math was undeniable. If Lincoln pressed them, the war was over. You have never heard or read this because it never made it into the books.

The footnotes are almost a fourth book. They are deep and explanatory, and I urge everyone to read them carefully. All my work is there.

CWBA: In your introduction, you recount your experience of one of any scholarly endeavor’s greatest frustrations: being flatly denied access to key manuscript material. Did that top official with the county museum you referenced offer a reason why you couldn’t examine the Rains papers they held?

TS: Not specifically, but I think he was embarrassed that I flew in from California and had to point out what was jammed into drawers on an upper floor and what they really were. He called them “some Confederate drawings.” I explained what they were, why they were important, that only a few had ever been seen, and that they were the Rosetta Stone of Confederate industry. He was English, not American, and he was more interested in geology and dinosaurs than he was in history. He was not a helpful man. It was maddening.

The good news is that the story didn’t end there. Years later the museum had a new curator, Gordon Blaker, who understood exactly what he had. Those drawings became the foundation of Never for Want of Powder (2007).

CWBA: What was it about Rains’s background and skill set that made him a strong fit to manage the Augusta Powder Works?

TS: No one else in the Confederacy combined what he brought to the table, and no one else could have performed that task. That is not hyperbole. He had broad and deep experience in chemistry, science in general, math, teaching, engineering, and military science, as well as combat experience and years spent managing a major industrial complex in New York, where he learned business, logistics, shipping, hiring, firing, management, production schedules, and a lot more. If he had never married into the Ramsdell family and run the Washington Iron Works, he could never have designed, built, and managed the Augusta Powder Works. New York was a dress rehearsal, but of course he didn’t know that at the time. Quite literally, no one else had that talent stack. No one. And Rains used all of it to achieve what he did.

CWBA: You mention that this is a book decades in the making. One of the stops along the way was the publication of Never for Want of Powder: The Confederate Powder Works in Augusta, Georgia (U. of S. Carolina Press, 2007) that you co-authored. Between then and now did you discover new sources that revised your understanding of what was presented in the 2007 study?

TS: Great question. Never for Want of Powder was a team effort led by Chip Bragg and blended several disciplines. My part was the Rains biographical chapters. The main subject was the works themselves: the architecture, the machinery, the process, and Charles Ross’s careful reconstruction of the production records. That research holds up, and I cite it often in my new book. What I found in the years following its publication changed my understanding of Rains and all that he did and why, and changed the book I thought I was writing into something quite different.

In 2010, I obtained a 30-page handwritten memorandum Rains wrote during the war’s final months. It had never been published or used in any manner. Unfortunately, like a lot of Rains items it ends mid-sentence, so it could have been 100 pages. I have no way of knowing. The candid memorandum walks through his entire service in personal and opinionated terms. It confirms his meeting with Davis and Gorgas and that he left Richmond for Nashville the same afternoon he got his orders. It explains all he did and why and offers chilling descriptions of how Albert Sidney Johnston was completely unprepared for combat of any kind for months on end during the fall and winter of 1861-62, and how worried Johnston, Rains, et al. were that Union forces would advance and force them to expend what little powder they had.

Second, the advent of digital research unlocked scores of sources and connected the dots. In January 2020, I started running keyword searches in the Official Records. If a document isn’t in the index, you’ll never find it, and the index is far from complete. Searching for “powder” and other keywords important to my study turned up letters, telegrams, and reports I’d never seen, from generals, governors, arsenal officers, citizens—you name it. I ended up compiling my own index of all 128 volumes, tailored to my study.

All these documents said the same basic thing: we have no powder, few or no shells, and if attacked cannot hold our positions. This was true of virtually every fort, city, coastal area, and field force large and small. The first time or two I read that I thought, “Huh, that’s interesting.” Then I learned that the Confederate War Department knew the problem was widespread. The common reply from Richmond was that it would send powder only to whomever was being threatened or attacked—when and if it could get powder. Meanwhile, hold on and show a bold front. The “Huh, that’s interesting” morphed into “My God, this was everywhere, and they could not hold, if pressed, anywhere.”

Searches in newspapers (worldwide) and letter books from arsenals and depots, compiled service records, and more uncovered a deeper treasure trove that supported and expanded on all this. I found so much I could not even use it all. My research produced a picture of a very different war than the one in the books.

The third was the discovery of a critically important, misfiled Jefferson Davis document that tied all this together to strategy. As far as I can tell, no one had ever used it, including his biographers and any other writers who would have had a deep interest in doing so. It’s not even in his collected papers. I shared it with a couple of Davis historians, and they admitted that they had never seen it. William C. Davis, a good friend of mine who read my manuscript, told me it surprised him and raised serious questions, especially about how the first year of the war was fought.

To summarize, these sources unlocked and explained two things. First, they put Rains’s heretofore unknown work for General Johnston in Tennessee (and in other states) in 1861 in proper context, and second, they reframed the strategy of the entire first year of the war. (I won’t get into it here, but it also alters, in my opinion, how we must look at the last eight or so months of the end of the war.) I have studied the Civil War for 50 years. I had never seen any of this.

CWBA: You estimate that Rains’s facilities produced over 3 million pounds of quality military-grade powder between April 1862 and April 1865. Of the combined total of domestically produced powder and that imported through the blockade over the length of the war, around what percentage was manufactured at Augusta?

TS: I’d love to give you a clean number, but no one can do it honestly, and I’d be skeptical of anyone who claims to be able to do so. It was clearly the large majority of all the powder available after April 1862.

The Augusta side of the equation is solid. Charles Ross worked through the daily ledgers and found the works made 3,168,450 pounds between April 1862 and April 1865, nearly half a million pounds more than Rains himself claimed. The import side is not. We know about individual cargoes, but there is no complete count, and the surviving figures often disagree. Estimates of the powder the Fingal brought into Savannah in 1861, for example, range from 17,000 pounds to 48 tons! In addition, a lot of imported powder arrived wet and often ruined. Much of it had to be reworked. How much was ruined or lost is unknown.

What I can say with confidence is that among domestic producers east of the Mississippi, Augusta dwarfed everyone else. The two Tennessee mills Rains established and/or reorganized and equipped were vital but small affairs and short-lived. Records for the mill at Columbia, South Carolina, have never been found, and that powder was for the Navy. The two North Carolina mills (one private and the other a quasi-state affair) blew themselves up repeatedly, and records are scarce. The two small South Carolina blasting mills at Pendleton and Walhalla turned out powder that was so bad that the Confederate government stopped working with them early in the war. Mansfield Lovell eventually erected two mills in New Orleans. Neither produced good powder. One blew up at the end of 1861, and the powder from the other was so bad that gunners watched their shells arc out of the barrels and drop into the water.

CWBA: With demand for Augusta powder coming from all parts of the Confederacy, how was distribution prioritized?

TS: Calls came routinely from all compass points, all the time. We know to the pound where it went, and it was mostly dictated by threat and need. A significant amount of correspondence among Rains, Josiah Gorgas, and the War Department, of course, is missing, but Richmond decided where the big shipments went, and that often meant whoever was in the most danger that month. When John Pemberton needed powder for Vicksburg in January 1863, for example, he didn’t wire Augusta. He wired Gorgas: “Please order General Rains, at Augusta, to send me at once 30,000 pounds of powder. Must have it immediately.”

Most of the powder went to arsenals. Richmond, Charleston, and the Augusta Arsenal received the most, and they turned it into the cartridges and fixed ammunition for the main field armies and the heavy guns. Beyond them, Rains shipped to about two dozen points east of the Mississippi. The records are detailed enough, for example, that we know what the major posts received, to the pound, and when. The daily records are incredibly detailed, and I include a full appendix breaking down the racial makeup of the employees and the skilled and unskilled laborers who ran the mill.

The priorities shifted with the fighting. Tons went to Lee before the Gettysburg campaign, and then more in its aftermath. Rains sent 100,000 pounds of columbiad powder to Mobile in the months preceding Farragut’s attack in 1864, and several tons to Wilmington in the run-up to Fort Fisher’s fall. There was often a cost to these choices. In April 1863, for example, with most of the powder cars headed up the coast to Charleston and Lee, the Macon laboratory (and I think an arsenal or two) shut down for a time for want of powder of all types. That meant the Army of Tennessee and other forces suffered a shortage, temporarily.

Geography set its own limits and restrictions. Getting powder to Selma, Alabama, or Jackson or Vicksburg, Mississippi, meant unloading trains onto wagons, then boats, then trains again, because the railroads didn’t connect. Rains had picked Augusta partly because it sat at the hinge of the Southern rail network between the two halves of the Confederacy, but even the best location couldn’t fix a railroad system that was never designed to work as one united artery.

CWBA: You also mention that Rains’s efforts in Tennessee over the latter half of 1861 are equally deserving of approbation. What did he accomplish during that time and how do you rate its significance?

TS: This is part of his story virtually no one has ever heard about, and I might rank it as important as Augusta. The completion of the Augusta Powder Works made it possible for the Confederacy to fight a long war. Rains’s work in Tennessee helped the Confederacy survive the first year to finish the Augusta mill so it could fight a long war. But for his work in Tennessee and the Western Theater (while he was simultaneously building the Augusta complex), the war would never have stretched beyond one year. Indeed, he, Johnston, and others were shocked they made it through the fall of 1861. Previous writers focus on Johnston’s lack of firearms (and only occasionally mention powder, though without context of what it really meant). That was not really the issue. Even if the Confederates had had triple the number of rifled muskets and artillery pieces they needed, it would have done them no good because they had no gunpowder and little or no niter to make it.

As Rains often noted, Johnston (and his lieutenants) could not fight more than a long skirmish. “There was no remedy,” wrote Rains, “until I could manufacture it for him [Johnston].” Without those mills and the niter refinery Rains built in Nashville (you can’t make military powder without pure niter, and it was the only refinery in the entire Confederacy at that time), there’s no defense of Kentucky, no defense of the major rivers, no Forts Henry and Donelson, no New Madrid and Island No. 10, and no Shiloh. By the time Johnston died at Shiloh, his army had the powder it needed for a major battle or two, and nearly all of it can be traced back to what Rains built from the ground up in Tennessee during the second half of 1861 and early 1862.

Fortunately for the Confederacy, it was at that precise moment in time (April 1862) that the Augusta Powder Works came online. It had taken nine months to finish, and the first month of production was woefully inadequate. Had the works come online just one month later, say in May 1862, Lee probably could not have fought the Seven Days’ Battles to save Richmond. It was that close. It’s not a coincidence that the Confederates were able to gather a large army around Richmond, fight there, and then carry the offensive north all the way into Maryland. None of that would have been possible if Rains had failed, or if President Davis had not had the foresight to erect a massive central powder mill.

All of this spans multiple chapters in great depth in my book. I don’t want to give too much away, because I think it is important for students to read and grasp all of this new information, and I am only sharing a tiny slice of what I have discovered. And as I noted earlier, all of this is in the notes so readers can look it up themselves.

CWBA: Thanks, Ted. You've left us with much to ponder. I am sure I join a great many in wanting to read more about these matters. Readers, The Indispensable Man is scheduled for release from Savas Beatie in the latter half of November so keep an eye out for it next month.