INVENTION AND INDUSTRY AT THE SOUTH. 385 



scanty supply of medicines and hospital stores made him fertile 

 in expedients of every kind. I have seen him search field and 

 forest for plants and flowers whose medicinal virtues he under- 

 stood and could use. The pliant bark of a tree made for him a 

 good tourniquet ; the piece of a green persimmon, a styptic ; a 

 knitting needle, with its point sharply bent, a tenaculum, and a 

 penknife in his hand, a scalpel and bistoury. I have seen him 

 break off one prong of a common table fork, bend the point of the 

 other prong, and with it elevate the bone in depressed fracture of 

 the skull and save life. Long before he knew the use of the por- 

 celain-tipped probe for finding bullets I have seen him use a piece 

 of soft pine wood and bring it out of the wound marked by the 

 leaden ball. Years before we were formally told of Nelaton's 

 method of inverting the body in chloroform narcosis, I have seen 

 it practiced by the Confederate surgeon. Many a time I have 

 seen the foot of the operating table raised to let the blood go by 

 gravitation to the patient's head when death from chloroform was 

 imminent, and I will add that in the corps to which I was attached 

 chloroform was given over twenty-eight thousand times, and no 

 death was ever ascribed to its use." The talents which the stern 

 necessities of war called forth in medical science were exhibited 

 in every other department by the Southern people. It has been 

 said that " one of the compensations of war is a swift ensuing 

 excitation of the mental faculties/' and in this instance it would 

 seem to have been so. The outbreak of the civil war in 1861 

 found the seceding States with a population of eight millions, 

 about one half of whom were negro slaves, as against twenty-four 

 millions in the non-seceding States. The disparity in population 

 between the two sections, however, great as it was, was not greater 

 than that of their equipment in the implements of warfare. A 

 widely separated, almost exclusively agricultural people, without 

 manufactories or skilled labor, were to contend with a people 

 accustomed to the handling of machinery of all sorts, operated by 

 the highest class of trained mechanics, and in whom the inventive 

 faculties had been developed to their utmost. One of the greatest 

 curses of negro slavery was not only that it was in itself an inef- 

 ficient labor for the higher classes of work, but it also served to 

 drive out white labor of the better sort, which invariably shunned 

 the black districts. A striking instance of the scarcity of skilled 

 labor in the South was furnished in the matter of making gun- 

 powder with which to carry on the war. In the spring of 1861 

 Mr. Davis authorized Colonel George W. Rains to undertake the 

 construction of powder works for the Confederacy. These mills, 

 begun in September of that year at Augusta, Ga., were finished the 

 following April. For the first year of the war the Confederates 

 were almost entirely dependent upon the powder captured from 



TOL. XLIV. 30 



