| I've been a Civil War buff since I was a
Junior High School student in the late '50's. I was the youngest
member of the Central Texas Civil War Roundtable for several years. |
| I became interested in the logistics of
warfare when, as a new Ensign in the Navy, I served aboard an oiler
off Viet Nam. Without our fuel, passengers, mail, food, and spare
parts, the destroyers and carriers would have spent considerably
less time on station. |
| Almost the entire remainder of my 20+
year career was spent supporting Marines in amphibious warfare. My
specialty was never the fighting, but always the logistic support. |
| In the late '90's, I read Black's
Confederate Railroads. I began to wonder what impact different
logistic decisions would have made for the Confederacy. After much
thought, I decided that I did not have enough information on any
area of logistics support (mines, foundries, railroads, blockade running,
horses, salt, wagons, manpower, etc.) to make any reasonable
decisions. I decided to investigate several of these areas in detail
-- starting with the railroads (the address for the web site is www.csa-RAILROADS.com. I had intended to do a csa-FOUNDRIES.com,
a
csa-MINES.com, etc.). |
| Black, and others, make statements
without giving the facts to support them -- the statements may be
correct, but I could not decide without seeing the evidence for myself.
For example, the Confederate railroads were short of locomotives --
how many did they have? How many did they capture and manufacture?
How many did they need? I began to hunt for the necessary numbers in
various libraries. |
| Once I began to collect the information,
I needed a way to tie it together. Spreadsheets or a database were
not the answers, so I tried a web site. The easy linking to full
pages of data made it work. And if I put the data on a web
site, I might as well make it available and useful for anyone else
interested enough to find the site. |
| My wife goes crazy every time I make a
list of things to do on vacation or over the weekend, but I hope you
will find my obsession for facts and lists to be interesting and
useful. I also decided to transcribe all the period Confederate
railroad documents I could find -- I could see connections between
documents that I could not find mentioned in published works. If I publish the
documents (found scattered in dozens of places), maybe others will
see useful connections and increase our understanding of the
Confederate side of the war. |
| Fortunately, I live in North Carolina --
situated more or less in the middle of the documents I need (Selma,
Atlanta, Savannah, Tallahassee, Columbia, Raleigh, Richmond,
Charlottesville, Washington, D. C.). But I'm always looking for
assistance from anyone who knows of data or documents that I have
not posted. |
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