the first electronic network, the telegraph, allowed for the creation of national news media and the national financial system. announcer: watch the communicators monday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span two. announcer: next on american point historyst instruction major david lambert discusses how gunpowder was outsourced and manufactured in the mid-19th century. affairsyork military symposium hosted this event. it is about one hour and 40 minutes. >> thank you so much for the introduction. and thank you all for being here tonight to learn a bit about civil war gun powder and logistics. as always, although i am a major in the united states army, nothing i say tonight is the opinion or policy of the d.o.d. all views are entirely my own. so that gives me a bit of free reign to tell some great stories

and answer some great questions. now here's what we're all here for. gun powder. i thought about bringing samples. shannon said i couldn't unless i brought enough for everyone so unfortunately there won't be any goodie bags of explosives tonight. that said though hopefully we're going to learn about it and there will be great information tonight that matters for your own research and understanding of america through the antebellum period and through the civil war. so the question i usually get from my students when i first bring up this topic is why gun powder? why does it matter and why should i sit through an hour of you talking about it? first, it's really cool stuff. as my job, i'm a tanker, tank commander, so i have a lot of experience on being on the back end of cannons. what that means is you develop a real appreciation for what it actually takes to make a round go down range. you start to see the ways that what goes into the cannon affects what comes out. its accuracy, performance, how

far it travels. and its effects. understanding that is critical for understanding as a military historian. but beyond simply the application, gunpowder has so much more to it than simply being used in canons. gun powder in so many ways becomes the commodity of empire when we consider military history in the gun powder age. gun powder is what powers the world. we have different goods that, like food, that power individuals. but gun powder in so many ways powers the system of creating food. it clears land, it's the main way in premodern societies that have access to it that you clear out things like tree stumps. it produces infrastructure. it is used to mine, to dig, to blast ways for railroads. to level hills. it's the key substance for mining. ats you start to need coal in order to power your locomotives or steam boats, gud powder is the commodity that enables you

to obtain that. it's a key good in diplomacy in the united states history. it is one of the main items that native american tribes want to trade for. one of the reasons why they actually maintained a relationship with the indian agents who were put in place by the united states government t -- to supervise the reservations or to supervise trade relations with them. and finally, the obvious one in so many ways, gun powder is the key good for war. it is a good that drives the formation of state throughout the period where it is accessible. to simply put, an idea of the scale of what's required for a state to maintain a gun powder industry, look at the experience of a place like venice. thousands of miles away from the united states during the 17th century. venice is going to maintain a military establishment just in the single fortress that costs 44,000 dockets a year to keep

their cannons. that will be more than they spend on their entire army on the italian mainland and in their mainland provinces. so gun powder is this key commodity that is driving states to become larger, to tax more, to develop bureaucratic systems for how they'll maintain supplies for their armies. now, not much research has been done looking at how this applies to the united states and whether we fall in the same sorts of dilemmas, in the same sorts of governmental choices that are made by european powers as they adjust to the gun powder age. my research is focused on answering that question. i'm looking to what extent the experience providing gun powder , salt peter and ordinance to the united states army has changed our government, has changed america and changed our economy. and i think this is a critical period for understanding both the military but also the industrial complex that support it. that's the topic of my research

and my focus tonight. now, before i can do the fun parts of that we need to get the science lesson out of the way and to talk about what gun powder is and where it comes from. so these are the ingredients of gun powder. gun powder is a compound mixed from three basic ingredients. the first one and most largest as far as constituent portion is nitrate. now, the photograph here shows sodium nitrate, it is from a different time period than we're going to talk about and we'll get to the point of why sodium becomes an option but in history the compound used to manufacture gunpowder is pastorate -- is potassium nitrate. it's still a compound that you probably encounter in your everyday life. it is commonly as a preservetive and more commonly sold almost pure as stump remover in a local hardware store. so those are directions you encounter it.

the other two constituents are charcoal and sulfur. charcoal and sulfur very anywhere from 15% to 10% of the compound each respectively. the basic recipe will remain the same but small tweaks in the proportions will happen based on time and manufacturer to give the powder different characteristics. within the compound, charcoal and sulfur are the fuels. they're what's actually burned up when gun powder is ignited. instead serveste as the oxidizer. when potassium nitrate is heated to come it gives off more oxygen than it takes to burn it. that oxygen goes into the combustion process of the charcoal pencil suffer and makes them burn faster. so much more oxygen is generated by the potassium deep composition -- decomposition that the charcoal and sulfur start to burn at a vastly quicker rate and undergo a low explosion. what that means is that they

burn at slower than the speed of sound than higher than the speed of sound. because of that they produce very little chamber pressure o -- on a gun, allowing black powder to be fired from weapons that are relatively weak in construction. so talking about the manufacturing process. i'll try not to be too technical with this but a few key differences will be pointed out as we consider how the american powder industry is changing. these are the steps with pictures provided by the dupont corps who will be our largest black powder manufacturer throughout the period we're studying. in the first step those raw materials you saw would be incorporated. in incorporation those materials were dumped into a large wheel mill and then moistnd with water -- moistened with water to prevent an explosion. the compounds are already flammable if you just put them in the wheel mill, so the water makes them workable and less likely to explode. despite that, work in the powder mills continue to be exceptionally dangerous throughout the time period we're

studying. during the civil war, dupont had 100 employees tpwh their primary -- in their primary powder production facility in wilmington, delaware. they lost 26 of those workmen to explosions over the course of the civil war giving them a 26% casualty rate. the casualty rate was about 20%. so let's put that in perspective right there. that working in the powder mills might have been as dangerous as being on the battlefield. now, after these materials were mixed, the second stage was to press the resulting material into cakes. so this wet mix slurry would be moved from the mixing wheel over to the pressing mill. now, the pressing mill would be two plates that would squeeze the powder inside a box to improve the density, and better mix the material. what came out was called a milk cake.

mill cake. the mill cake was a slab about the size of this podium of pure gunpowder. but that was way too big and didn't have enough surface area to be used to shoot anything. so the next stage had to be corning. the mill cake would be fed into a grinder and ground up to the approximate size of the powder that was desired for the application used. grinding was one of the key steps to the process. so gun powder is an interesting substance. it forms these little grains when you grind it up. based on the size of the grain, that is how quickly it's going to burn. gun powder will only burn at its surface. if you have many teeny tiny grains in a pound of gun powder it will burn far quicker than if you have very big larngrains. -- large grains. that mattered for different applications of weapon. for a rifle which has a relatively short barrel you would want the powder to burn before the bullet exited the barrel and stopped getting any faster based on the powder burning. for an application like an 11-inch naval gun, though, you

would want a much larger corn of powder because you had much larger for the powder to burn and accelerate the project tile. if it burned too quickly it would produce too much pressure and burst the barrel, which would happen repeatedly throughout the time period. so those big powder kernals or the small kernals decided the use. the next step was to try to find a way to keep them at the appropriate size. powder could expect to have a very rough life, espectly in military use. it could expect to be exposed to water, jostled, bumped along roads, stuck in some poor soldier pose a cartridge -- soldier's bag and eventually fired at the enemy. to survive that abuse and moisture it need add protective coating called a glazing. so powder would be moved from the corning mill to the glazing mill. it would be rotated inside a large drum with a powder made of graphite typically applied.

the graphite would form a protective layer and the powder grain and the grain itself would have any little knicks, crannies, any sort of points that were on that grain sheered off. the reason why that mattered is that matter would be removed from the glazing barrel. if that matter remained in the powder, it would break off during transport and you would have a lot of small when you attempted to put it in the cannon that dust would burn quickly and probably burst your cannon, which is one of the reasons why properly stored and transported powder was so much safer to use than powder that had been abused. the final step of the production process would be packaging. so the powder would be pulled from the glazing mill and moved over and loaded in casks or cart -- cartridges and barrels that would be shipped to field armies. those powder barrels were

typically around 100 pounds although they had a capacity for 120 pounds to allow space for the powder to settle and to shift during transport instead of being hard braced into its barrels. it made it more likely to survive transport and expand as it encountered moisture. now, making powder is difficult. don't get me wrong. but it was relatively easy to understand as a mechanical process. with a mill, with a press, and with a grinder it could be done on almost any scale. although the best quality powder came from industrial concerns, you could actually do it in your basement or in your cabin or in the backwoods of kentucky as many people would do during this time period. like if this is so hard why is it worth learning about? why can't the union confederacy just do this and get all the powder they need? there's a second problem that

factors into this. that's the problem of raw materials. so the first raw material was charcoal. we can all probably make it. all we need to do is burn wood in a controlled environment. does not have enough oxygen. the material after that is sulfur. sulfur's a little more difficult. i don't have any sulfur sitting room my house but there's a number of production sites around the u.s. sulfur springs. there's one in every state. there's also large deposits of sulfur located in texas that will be exploited throughout this time period but almost all the sulfur used by the united states is going to come from sicily. sicily has large deposits and there will be a major industry shipping sulfur to the united states to make weaponry. now there's a thing about sulfur though. it's also good for a few other things. one of the biggest things is sugar refining.

so sulfur is still used today to make bleached white sugar. because of that at the beginning of the civil war there are massive stocks of sulfur located in the confederacy. the confederacy will have about half a million pounds of sulfur located at various sugar refineries throughout louisiana and it will rapidly impress those supplies, move them to centralized magazines and move them throughout the war. the north will maintain trade relationships with italy and be able to maintain transport. you also only need 10% as the gun powder you want to make. the confederacy's existing stocks in 1861 are enough to make 5 million pounds pounds of gun powder which is about what they're going to use during the entire civil war. so sull if you are is not the limiting reagent. what ends up being the problem for both and for policy makers throughout u.s. history is is the supply of niter. niter or saltpeter it's an interesting material. it presents the perennial

problem of gun powder supply for countries around the world. now, saltpeter can come from a lot of places though. one nice thing you don't have to be able to mine it, you can make it yourself. there are three main methods. the first are saltpeter diggings. so i threw a picture of someone doing that process. saltpeter is going to be formed any time that you have soil where organic matter is decomposing and protected from water. these conditions are common in the premodern world. think about the barnes, the basements, the dung piles that exist in the pre-modern society. well, the problem is it's highly soluble so you need ones protected from water. like ones under a roof. and the other problem is that the great places you find this are someone's barn or basement. now, if you're looking to acquire saltpeter, you have a choice to make. how do i get someone to let me

dig up their basement? because that's what i need to be able to fight a war. that's stuff that comes from their basements. how do i make someone let me tear down their barn? states will use a number of different methods. the united states in 1776 will offer large monetary incentives. the european answer is simpler. that's to say that the king has possession of all saltpeter and has a right to give a commission for officers to dig up your basement undermine your house, , take the saltpeter there as long as they put the dirlt back -- dirt back when they're done. that might not do me a lot of good after they already dug up my foundation, destroyed my house or knocked down my barn. but that right today is the foundation of the saltpeter industries in both england and in france. in england, henry viii begins to assume that right when he

authorizes his first diggers to go out and begin digging up people's homes. but in the english experience there will be great resistance. the actions of diggers are one of the items that's cited in the great remonstrance of parliament during the revolution. there is a vast amount of unhappiness with digging up people's homes to make your gunpowder. who knew? there's one other place you can find it that no one knows and that is caves. saltpeter will form in caves mainly through the contact of bat guano or bird droppings with the limestone that makes up most caves around the world. that will form a compound known as calcium nitrate. if it is mixed with wood ash or pot ash, it forms potato tassium -- potassium nitrate the magic , salt we're looking for. but the problem is there's only so many caves around the world. you know what would be great? if we could make our own artificial cave conditions.

so we're going to see people start doing that, predominantly in the netherlands and germany. the two big reasons are the prevalence of war and an inability to access sources of niter during wartime. so that will become a method, i call grow it. the formation of salt peter trenches. these are big piles of organic waste. it's nasty stuff. it's rotten vegetables, wood ash, dead animals and feeses. they'll collect up large amount cities tond urine in place on to these trenches. but over time and with several very unhappy workmen working to flip these piles, it grows saltpeter. vast amounts of it. and this is a way that you can make your own saltpeter but it's very expensive, it takes a lot of centralized control, and european states are going to be reluctant to do this because of how much money it costs to have a bunch of workmen who are permanently there tending these

saltpeter beds and collecting up waste. so the third method is going to honestly be the most preferred one for a lot of world history. that's going to be trade for saltpeter. now, it kind of sounds like we're outsourcing our problem. we have to have someone else doing one of these methods. there are places in the world where saltpeter is more common. the primary one used through our time period is going to be india. there are areas of india where there are large amounts of saltpeter-producing microbes that naturally occur in the soil, aren't found anywhere else in the world. so it turns out if enough urine goes into this soil, be it human or animal, you're going to get a crust of pure saltpeter out of it. now, indians princes will be using their own production of this to supply their armies throughout the 17th century, but someone else will find out about

it in 1624, the east india company. and with that their first shipments will begin to go back to england, removing the need for england to do this and cause another revolution. with the battle of plesee in 1757, the english gained virtual dominion over the area of india that produces all of this explosive. it's very easy to manufacture. the east india company sets up a caste whose job in india is basically to pay taxes in the form of saltpeter and to provide it to the east india company. so they receive free supplies basically of this massively important military resource. and they will ship this home by the shipload. everyone thinks that the india trade is dominate by all those goods, tea and calico. those may make up a lot of the value of those east india men.

more than 50% of the cargo is going to be bags of saltpeter. they're both the ballast and a way that the east india company is paying its obligations to the british state. the french have gotten in on this too. they have their own niter mines located in their areas of india and the dutch have set up their own production areas in the dutch east indies. but there will be a tragic accident for that for the french. they're going to fight this little thing called the 7 years war. during the 7 years war the french supply of niter will be heavily interrupted. they won't be able to get any ships through and they will blame their loss in the 7 years war on a lack of gun powder and niter supplies. the solution that's adopted by the french court beginning in 1773, chosen by this fine guy is going to be to find a brilliant chemist. he will be known for several things.

first off he's the first guy to , do a scientific investigation why things light on fire. prior to his study the big theory they produce this magical substance and it is the substance that burns. it's this gas that's exuded by things that are flammable. he's the first man to demonstrate that really it's the presence of atmospheric oxygen that makes things able to burn. but he's also going to make his career as the best powder man that france has ever seen. he'll revolutionize the manufacturing techniques of gun powder, help introduce the glazing technique and set up the first major niter farms in france. this is where napoleon's gunpowder comes from. in terms of scale france will go , from being able to produce around 800 tons a year during -- using it digging system with a lot of heart ache, to being able to produce almost 1700 tons

of saltpeter a year without having to dig up people's basements. this is the gun powder that will power napolean's armies and the reason why he didn't need permanent access to india. throughout the napoleonic wars, england is going to be using imported indian saltpeter. that link to india always present a key weakness for the british military as it considers its world position and we move through this time period. now, let's bring this to the u.s. experience because i think this is sort of why many of us are here today. the u.s. is going to focus on many of the same dilemmas as britain. so the u.s. will declare its independence in 1776. two years before that we've gone through a process of trying to figure out where our war supplies are going to come from. now, americans have been attempting to find their own sources of saltpeter ever since 1629 when virginia passes its first ordinance requiring prospecting for saltpeter and for all those fine james

-- jamestownions to preserve all of their urine, feces and wood ashes to set up niter beds in the colony. none of those actually pan out though. with the british navy able to bring almost an unlimited supply of saltpeter from india it doesn't seem like there's a need for us to be independent in that good. then we plan on declaring independence. and it probably doesn't seem like the british are going to want to give us an unlimited supply of gun powder to shoot at them so we need to figure out what we're going to do. that becomes the great question prompting the first continental congress to choose one of these three options when they establish their first committee on saltpeter in 1774. they'll put some really intelligent guys on the committee. guys like benjamin franklin and benjamin rush and task them with figuring out how america is going to be able to produce enough explosives to take us through the revolutionary war.

they have these three options on the table. but each of them has a problem. they're all scholars of why england had its own revolutions and civil wars. they know that people really didn't like having their homes dug up, so that was probably right out. we just said we were going to have a revolution over unreasonable searches and seizures, over government agents taking over our homes. that's probably not going to work. ok. option two. we could set up these big very complex beds and start farming our own niter. but we're going to need a lot of bureaucrats and a lot of workers who are willing to devote a lot of time to running these and , we're going to need to pay a lot of money and plan ahead. those don't really seem like things we're going to be able to do in 1774. the final solution is to trade for saltpeter, but the guys who own all the saltpeter are the ones that we're about to declare independence from. hmm. in the end, what americans try

to do is to go with digging salt peter but to do it through a system of economic incentives by paying massive bounties over the market price of saltpeter david to put this in terms, americans are paying almost a 400% markup on this key military good through 1775. so for example, it's around 40 cents for one pound of massachusetts saltpeter. i doesn't sound too bad but east , india was trading about 6 cents in 1774 prior to the revolution. on top of thatm there are major payment bonuses for delivering this commodity in bulk. so you can get a total of around 16 pounds just for turning in 100 pound sack of saltpeter on top of what we're already paying you on the value of the saltpeter. now, pluses and minuses. this is an enormous economic incentive and it brings in a lot of people you don't traditionally think of as involved in war industry. the principal into factors of

this are going to be women. think about the things it takes to produce saltpeter. you need to dig up earth, put it in a kettle, boil it for a long period of time, strain off the liquid, and then watch that and boil it down until you get salt from the bottom of your pot. well, a lot of women know how to dig. a lot of women have these kitchen implements and a lot 06 -- a lot of women are looking forward a supplemental income source during the early days of the revolution. instructions on how to do this process are published all across churches, all across newspapers, and even in bars in the united states based on that saltpeter committee's recommendations. so this becomes a focus of female manufacturing during the revolution. you even have high profile women like abigail adams for example trying her hand at making her saltpeter for a quick extra buck. although i don't abigail adams is doing the actual digging part. so we'll see women involved in this process heavily. the government will also start

advancing capital to any fine entrepreneurs who think that they can produce their own saltpeter works. massachusetts will attempt to set up a state-funded saltpeter farm. and in virginia, we'll see exploitation of saltpeter caves in the west of virginia. but virginia has an interesting way of doing this. they don't have much money but they have a source of labor they can direct to these producers. in 1776, virginia will remand all slaves currently held in state jails to a saltpeter manufacturer and give him this free labor source in addition to a bounty of any saltpeter as a method to attempt to produce more saltpeter. the other method is bring major financial incentives to virginia. as a result, many tobacco barns will be dug up. the labor force is also enslaved african americans but it will create this competency in saltpeter manufacture among the enslaved that will stick with

americans through the next 50 years. and many of the small producers we'll see later on in our story will be enslaved, but they'll remember the revolutionary experience and how it produced war material. now, the revolution doesn't last forever. although america is never really able to get self-sufficient in powder -- let me put some numbers. by the united states produced 1777, 115,000 pounds of domestic saltpeter for these programs. sounds pretty impressive. that's a pretty good number. in the same period, we imported half a million pounds from france in 1.5 million pounds from the powder works. so we win our independence with other people's gun powder. but to many americans it proves that it is possible with enough effort and enough difficulty for america to become self-sufficient on military goods.

we have lots of guns. the guns we have after the revolution will be good for 20, 30, 40 years as we see it. if we have the gun powder to power them, maybe we could be self-sufficient militarily. we make enough food, we make enough trade goods. it's that lack of security , according to adams, that stops us from shutting aurs off from -- shutting ourselves off from the world. if we could do that, if we could provide security on our own, maybe we're a success. the post revolution world is going to test that, though. the biggest reason why is that the bottom will fall out of the saltpeter market after the revolutionary war. the niter beds in massachusetts and the saltpeter caves of virginia will be very, very competitive at war prices.

in the post war world the east india company begins coming back and trading. normal trade will resume in 1782 and continue through about 1792 with prices dropping. but something is going to ruin that unlimited supply. in 1789, the french begin to have their own issues again and a revolution. with england and the rest of europe pulled into that war, all of a sudden the powder supplies begin to dry up and it looks like the u.s. government is going to need to stockpile this critical material to provide for our own defense. you get a lot of creative plans. my personal favorite ever was put out by a guy named john kerry in 1791. he recommended to thomas jefferson, you know that new u.s. capital you want to build? i have a great idea. we're going to dig an enormous basement underneath and we're going to fill it full of saltpeter. saltpeter comes from caves, caves are cold. therefore, if i pass the air to ventilate the capital through that saltpeter, it's going to work like air conditioning. thomas jefferson saw several problems with packing the

basement of the u.s. capital with explosives. first, it probably wasn't going to cool things down. second, it was going to be really flammable. so thankfully the basement of , the capital isn't currently packed with explosives. we have thomas jefferson to thank for that, i guess. but thomas jefferson was one of the people who was pushing for increased u.s. stockpiles of powder. both hamilton and jefferson began advocating for those increased stockpiles as early as 1790. the thing that undercut their case for developing a major government stockpile was the passage of the treaty in 1794. jay's treaty is one of the things that my students glaze over when we discuss. it just seems like it's fixing a bunch of forts that don't matter in shifting some borders. there is a kicker in the treaty. jay's treaty opens up india to u.s. trading vessels. now, the problem with why gun powder was so short in europe wasn't the amount of gun powder

that could be produced in india. there was all the saltpeter you ever needed. it was a lack of east indian men during the napoleonic wars able to carry the material to england and her allies. but now that the u.s. could send its own ships, the market was completely open. so all of a sudden there's a major trade moving from massachusetts to india to carry back this key strategic resource to build up stockpiles as the u.s. begins to worry about being pulled in to the napoleanic wars. the u.s. also began to prospect for more of its own supplies, not necessarily to exploit them but to be prepared in case we were pulled into the wars. it leads to another thomas jefferson story. i am absolutely full of them. as you know, thomas jefferson was perpetually in debt. but one of the big sidelines he attempted on his crazy attempts to make money was setting up his own saltpeter refinery so he could begin making gun powder. there were several caves that

were located near monticello in virginia. he partnered with the saltpeter prospector named will carruthers and sent out teams of guys around to see if there were any resources he could exploit. carruthers and his prospectors enough i very much in the way of saltpeter that was actually worth exploiting to make money off. but the weirdest thing was they kept going into these caves and finding these strange giant bones preserved. but these bones were unlike anything else we had ever seen. they had massive claws and huge teeth and other weird features that didn't look like any known living animal. they began to take these bones back to thomas jefferson and showed him and ask what do you , think this is? thomas jefferson corresponded with a number of his friends in philadelphia and they started to decide that these bones looked like they came from some sort of a giant sloth. i know it's crazy. like a sloth that's the size of a cow.

but that's exactly what it was. these saltpeter prospectors were one of the groups that birthed modern paleontology. they discovered the first specimens. some of the first and specimens of preserved mammoth bones and sabertooth tiger bones. paleontology comes out of the source for explosives. who knew? now thomas jefferson wasn't able to get his own gun powder off and saltpeter refinery off the ground. one of his friends did. he was very close friends with french exile tennis year samuel samuel dupont. now, he had a son who he considered kind of good for nothing but who was very intelligent. because of that he sent his son to intern at the french site throughout the 1770's and 1780's.

this son would emigrate to america during the reign of terror with his family and establish the dupont corporation in delaware. dupont would become the major gun powder provider for the u.s. government from 1802 up through the end of the gun powder era. it is here the dupents enter our -- duponts enter our story. the duponts were able to set up a manufacture relatively quickly and produce high quality powder as long as the raw materials kept coming in. but that proposed its own problems because of some other policies enacted by thomas jefferson. although importing saltpeter worked very well, there were a number of issues that began to emerge with england as they carried on the napoleonic wars. by 1804 and 1805, the issue of england impressing american seamen was becoming a major problem. thomas jefferson's problem was nonimportation, later followed

by the embargo act. wts beginning of the embargo act all of a sudden the unlimited supplies of saltpeter dried up. so we had to figure out where american saltpeter could come from. luckily for thomas jefferson, at the same time more and more americans were moving in to kentucky, tennessee, and the limestone caves of america's karst region. what they found were some mammoth caves like located in modern day kentucky. these became the primary site of saltpeter production for america from 1805 through the war of 1812. these caves themselves are fascinating to study. entire communities arose around these caves. you had hunters, miners, people responsible for moving explosives used to mine the explosives. , winemakers people

folded to make sure presses were set of the can squeeze every last ounce of saltpeter out of the cave earth that was mined. the caves had several problems as well though. labor was never plentyful in frontier kentucky. the solution adopted by many cave owners was using the resource that knew something about refining saltpeter. enslaved african americans. they were bought in and purchased on long-term contracts traditionally for around one , year at a time. what's interesting is in the dark of the caves owners had almost no ability to supervise. because of that a very different system emerged. slaves would typically be paid either based on the amount of saltpeter they were able to produce or pay a bonus for good performance and good behavior in period of time. so although the owner of the slave received pay for the labor contract the slaves themselves by expect $10, $15, $20 after

performing some sort of labor in the case as long as there was , good behavior and didn't damage the equipment. the other form that this took though was simply teams of two to three slaves that were sent out as saltpeter prospectors. there were a large number of those in the literature of the period. good examples are monk estil who were small producers by themselves. so one or two slaves would be sent out by their masters and told that in exchange for producing saltpeter they could keep half of the value of whatever they produced. with saltpeter selling for nearly 70 cents a pound during the embargo if a slave could , produce around four pounds a day, they assured themselves a good income of around $800. $800 was also the price of your freedom on the kentucky frontier in that time period. so saltpeter manufacturing skills developed during the war of independence became a route for freedom for many of the african americans enslaved

in kentucky. now mammoth cave was well and good. we have an unlimited supply of saltpeter forever. a couple problems. first off, the soil itself from the cave would have to have been put back in place to regenerate saltpeter otherwise there's just , bare rock. you can't get any saltpeter out of that. well, it takes a lot of time and not too profitable to do that. with the operators of these caves did instead was to just build up huge piles of soil underneath the vats that they reason to leave soil. they would carry it up, put it in the vat,

immediately after the war with mexico there's gold and all

these new opportunities on the western planes. there are new native american tribes to trade with. there's new land occupied. the powder business never goes down after the mexican war. industry is on a straight upward trajectory from it to 48 all the way through the beginning of the civil war.

which begins to bring us to our interwar developers. technology hasn't been static during this time period. a new explosive is developed. america has a lot of those things, but there's a problem. it's just too explosive. guncotton it is a summit gas that it was saturday can and shattering musket of the period. until ways are developed, we will have to figure out ways for the time being. the two other changes that will happen in gunpowder manufacturing is the discovery in 1857 of a method to make saltpeter out of her guano -- bird 10 -- bird guano. he will be active in developing new forms of powder. he will develop a new form of mammoth powder with grains that are the size of a golf ball that can be used in larger can than anything the united states has ever seen before. that takes us to the beginning of the war. at the beginning of the civil

war, four companies control 70% of the union's power supply that powder supply. it is a unique commodity. it's the one thing the union actually produces enough of you i find itself to take that out of all the custom of the union is scrambling for shortages, the companies don't need to get any bigger with the outbreak of the war. what they do is they convert over lines that have been making blasting powder out of bird guano outlines these more expensive saltpeter. there's a problem with that. the government has a stockpile of 3 million pounds of saltpeter. that's more than we ever have before. there's no way we will go through 3 million pounds of

saltpeter. they have given out that between union army -- between arming the union army -- we are completely out of saltpeter for you we need to get more saltpeter quick. all the saltpeter we have comes from england. let's just go over to england. we are going to send some representatives. one of the representatives is lamont dupont. he is working on behalf of the head of the dupont family. he's from my alma mater. graduated in the west point class of 1833, served exactly one year active duty, then he

felt he was called to a higher duty. his duty to run the family business. he never forgets west point training. so he keeps a copy of his west point drill book. as soon as the civil war begins, he's nominated as a major general in the delaware militia. he has a solution of how he's going to handle delaware. it still has 100 enslaved african-americans and a number of plantations. henry's solution is simple, he called together 300 employees with the company and tells them you can either take an oath of allegiance, or take your hat and get out. if you take the old of allegiance you are going to get a pay raise. that one is a pretty easy sell. he forms these gentlemen into two companies of militia. the delaware economy depends on that. they party ceased wilmington. as major general henry goes, so

the state of delaware goes in the civil war. he's approached by the war department early on because of his interests in the gunpowder manufacturing industry and his known loyalty. he's going to send his best man for it. he's going to send the gifted chemist. dupont doesn't have enough money to do a full purchase. secretary of state seward gives lamont dupont a ship loaded with half a million dollars in u.s. gold bars from the treasury. they send them over to england to buy as much saltpeter as england will sell. you have to feel sorry for this guy. he is 29 in 1861. we are sending a 29-year-old over to england on a ship loaded with gold bars and doubloons and

telling him we want you to buy the saltpeter you and he does an amazing job of it. lamont will show up in england on november 19. he has a lot of trouble. he needs credit. he will walk into the primary banker for the u.s. government in london, and he will tell them i need my family's line of credit. no one believes him. no one believes that some 29-year-old kid has just shown up and has a multimillion dollar line of credit in london -- it takes him three days to prove who he is. he needs to go through litigation to get help from charles adams.

once his identity is sorted out, he completes his mission. literally walking into the evening the adobe offices and saying i would like to buy the saltpeter, i want the saltpeter, all of it. so they have two thousand tons currently in their warehouses. also i want everything that's currently on a ship coming to england. he will purchase not just the cargo in england but all of the cargo that's coming to england over the next year. he corners the world market on saltpeter in the afternoon. he begins to load this up and ship it back to the union. there is a problem, no plan can go this well.

a november 8, a mail packet was stopped. on board it were to representatives of the current best of the confederate government. these gentlemen will retain contraband. this caused a massive international incident. england retaliated for the u.s.'s actions. it dispatched 10,000 soldiers to canada. they locked down lamont dupont's cargo in the london ports. that's all the gunpowder the union needs to fight the war. without gunpowder you can't have an army. this becomes the first big time when saltpeter is threatened during the u.s. civil war. cooler heads will eventually prevail.

by december 26, lamont is back in washington dc. he received some very interesting letters according to dupont family lore. none of this is proven when we're looking at dupont biographies. he will tell his son that he was given two letters by the secretary of state. one threatened war. the other letter instructs charles francis adams to break off diplomatic relations with britain if britain isn't willing to continue exporting military material to the united states. should they not be exporting military material to anyone? if they ever enforce that, all of a sudden the union does not have supplies of gunpowder. lamont has several plans to get around this. here's what i'm going to do, i'm going to buy a bunch of confederate flags, i'm going to put them on all of my ships, i'm going to sail out like on a blockade runner, then i'm going

to send a signal to cousin francis, the guy who runs the union blockading league. luckily he doesn't need to make this happen. he's allowed to export his cargo. stripping virtually all of the saltpeter from england. it exposes the key weakness in the union. many people within the united states government, particularly in the united states navy, will realize the union can't afford to depend on england alone. if england ever shuts down the tap on key materials, the union software efforts would grind to a halt.

we can't have sieges, we can't have battles. so we need some alternative sources, places england can't interdict. let's go to japan. japan has guns, japan is open up to trade in 1855 by matthew perry. the naval department will send a series of naval ships led by the uss wyoming to japan in 862 to open a secondary source of this material that isn't coming from england. when it's testing it will turn out to be really low quality. the reason why is the japanese aren't willing to sell good quality saltpeter to the united states. they are kind of gone through their own thing right now are you they've just open to the west and begun modernizing their own military technology, to try and produce their own military that can stand toe to toe with the west this plan follows that

falls through. birds, lots and lots of birds. when you have this many birds together for a long period of time, they poop a lot. it will build up to mountains. if this poop isn't affected by water, it will build up a massive amounts this is good be in that massive amounts. it won't be economical to convert this material, but a new process will be developed in 1863 by another chemist, working with the united states navy. a chemist named john white will develop a new method of refining seabird guano effectively into gunpowder.

the price is going to be a bit higher than what imported from england. english saw peter cost around $.11 a pound in 1863. but guano cost about $.14 and it comes without having to be nice to the british. from 1863 on he's producing potassium nitrate out of sodium nitrate at the same costs as importing potassium nitrate from england. he's producing it in massive batches of around 500 tons at a time. he's producing 500 tons of the stuff per year. the entire confederacy with all of their efforts to launch a crash nitrate production process is making about 20 tons less than a single guy is at one factory. he hasn't bothered to scale this

up yet and he still able to meet all of the union's requirements for nitrate out of it. this doesn't provide all of the union gunpowder, but it is a supply independent of england that gives the union additional leverage. there are several other issues that crop up with this. are the gunpowder producers for the union price gougers? they are making every possible effort they can to squeeze every possible dime out of the united states government. it is really hard to price couch the united states government. only time you've ever heard that from an economic talk, right?

although four big companies dominate 70% of the supply, there's another 30% of countries that don't traditionally get military contract's. those companies are tending to use the civil war to break into a lucrative market. they regularly offer their gunpowder at lucrative rates. they are also forced to sell the powder below the rates of sporting powder or civilian powder in the markets where they are trading. the u.s. markets are actually getting gunpowder at a two cent discount in 1863. the other big problem is the government keeps insisting that it's maintaining its own saltpeter stores. the dupont's would love to buy the saltpeter for the u.s. government and rolled the price. instead it's the navy department and the war department authorizing major purchases of

saltpeter in europe and the conversion of sodium nitrate into potassium nitrate. because they are issuing those contract and giving the powder to dupont's, they will only charge a commission on what it takes to manufacture the powder, rather than rolling the entire thing into a price. although there's a voluminous correspondence between dupont and other manufacturers in the time period, the government purchasing agents keep targeting them down. they keep testing the powder for a quality. dupont has a large number of shipments that are sent back for failing to meet powder a quality standards through 1862 and 1863. if they start sending their saltpeter to other manufacturers you are out of luck.

you're going to see an enormous amount of competition between powder manufacturers and really low prices in the union for this key commodity throughout the war. it's a fascinating second way to understand powder manufacturing in america. the confederacy is about half a million pounds of powder in various government magazines. sounds like a lot. the confederate head of ordinance is going to compute with what they need to survive in 1861. the confederacy has 1500 c artillery pieces. he's going to need 600,000 pounds of powder to the set off the existing canons. he will need another 105,000 pounds. for 10 million small arms cartridges, and of to the confederate line infantry, he will need another 125,000 pounds of powder. he comes up with a figure of about 850,000 pounds of powder.

that's before he's even shot one round. that's enough to fill up a cartridge boxes and ammo wagons. a confederacy has not made a single pound of powder since the war of 1812. and it doesn't make any saltpeter. this will become one of the greatest crash production programs in american history. he's going to select a west pointer. he has a bit of experience in chemistry but has never run a powder works before. by 1862, he will go on to found this giant monstrosity behind us. the augusta powder works is going to be a phenomenal facility in many ways. it's going to be incredibly

inundated as far as the technology to produce powder. it will use a new steam infusion system to waft the saltpeter straight into the charcoal. he will have new safety measures that make it one of the safest powder works in the united states. buckets will be set up over each of the mills. large ones able to douse the content in case of any explosion to prevent a chain reaction. if anything happens in the mills, preventing the sorts of chain reactions that are causing all the injuries in dupont. this is an amazing building. over the course of the were it will produce 3 million pounds of powder. this powder will be tested as a uniformly export quality. a third of that is going to became an powder and a third of that will be rifle powder. he's covering all his bases.

it will restart partial production in columbia, south carolina in 1865 before the powder works is broken down. raines faces the same problem, and that's the question of supply. the confederates will have to turn back to those three great tactics. you can dig it, you can grow it, or you can trade for it. trade will require running saltpeter through the blockade. the other 25% can be produced in the confederacy as they attempt to establish their independence from international trade. the confederacy will start -- remember i told you that dupont

is around $.10, and even $.14 from this manufacture chemical. they are paying a massive premium. they will discover they still aren't getting enough and it will be made to be way more intelligent to produce it for themselves. the confederacy will create this bureau, which i know you've had previous talks about. the bureau will be led by st. john. he's going to pursue a diversified strategy. he's going to find all the caves in the south that contain it and mine it out. he's also going to follow two other strategies.

go into the basement where necessary and the final strategy. he's going to set up a massive series of saltpeter beds across the confederacy. there seems to be this myth about the confederacy that they don't like centralized government. when it comes to producing explosives, they are all about centralized government. their explosives come from one massive state-of-the-art manufacturer paid for by the central government. they will establish a network of 18 government owned caves and 18 beds with a total of one million cubic feet of capacity. the richmond alone has capacity for 256,000 cubic feet of waste. these will contain a total of about 4 million pounds of saltpeter. but there's problems. there's always problems when talking about manufacturing saltpeter.

in order to produce that, raines needs to run a constant operation, bringing in fresh waste both human and animal. he's going to establish a network of chamber pots across the confederacy. they can them to contribute urine and feces to the confederate war effort. it will be supplied mostly by women. in the case of selma he is going to round up all the stray dogs in alabama, drive them into a packed out into the beds and kill them. these become the sorts of measures that the confederacy will turn to in order to maintain a supply of this material. they are collecting up the garbage from cities, from raw sewage. 4000 confederate men are going to be employed attending these trenches and caves.

at a time when that manpower is army. inth the despite their efforts we have to evaluate the performance of the confederacy. they are able to produce a lot of what they need. the problem they will repeatedly face is the question of how much it's going to cost. that's the great comparison between the confederate effort and the union effort. the confederate government is using these methods and a lot of support from their populace that they were willing to provide this. and the finished one cost around $1.08 per pound. it's high and quality come up the production is from nose to tail by the confederate government. it's a dollar eight cents per pound. the union contract is relying on most entirely on private enterprise with government contracted provision of the raw materials.

but they're costing only $.13, and that's for british independent source and $.10 from the east india company. the powder is going for $.20 a pound. you can get 5.5 pounds of union powder for what the confederacy is paying for a single pound. it's interesting that the union will ultimately seize the confederate nighter works. and they decided it wasn't economical to manufacture powder using the confederacy's method. following the civil war, all of the manufacturing materials in the united states will be dismantled. as will those confederate powder works. the union army is willing to shed what's left and issue it out to the u.s. army in the xts during the reconstruction. from that point on, the union army is running entirely on their own supplies.

these four successful corporations have been able to corner that market. with those contracts drying up, more coming in from purchasing agents, and they control more and more of the supply from u.s. government contract's, as well as the civilian market, because they got bigger during the war. in many ways you can ask what's the application. tactically, the confederacy is going to rely on a very consistent product from its own powder work. another 2.5 million pounds of powder from the confederacy's going to come through the blockade.

who knows what you are shooting on a given day. the difference in the powder coming through the blockade can be up to 10 or 15% velocity. think about artillery. i'm shooting at an enemy 1000 yards away, so i set a one second fuse. if my velocity is 900 meters per second, my shells are blowing up 100 yards in front of where i want them to. that lower velocity can be the difference between a naval cannon pushing through the armor of a combatant. or the alabama versus the kiersarge. on a strategic level, one of the questions is what country the united states wants to be and how independent do we want to be of the world? the answers that come out are,

we can be france with a centralized production system, or we can be england and outsource this dirty good. we decide to be england. we make exceptions to that. during the war of 1812 and the embargo, for example. it's not that it is impossible to be self-reliance, but it costs so massively that it is not so po -- not supportable for a long time. the us army turns back to its supplies of our materials and we become a world looking army, once again. in a way, america did never cut itself off, because the good that provides a, our livelihoods, the good that allows us to build railroads, comes from abroad. that remains -- that is why this remains important. thank you so much for your

attention. [applause] >> thank you for your explosive talk. [laughter] love it. as far as thomas jefferson being against having saltpeter under the capital with that acting as air-conditioning, you totally destroyed the fact that thomas jefferson was in favor of small government because i can't think of a better way of small government than putting saltpeter under the capital. i'm curious, if you look at the environmentalism of the first international treaty we had, regarding birds. the guano islands act.

as a good exhibit at the american museum -- smithsonian museum of american history. i recognized the pictures. one thing that is interesting, it seems to me that environmentalism, which is never talked about as environmentalism, is that it is connected to warfare. if you look at sweden, they prevented the cutting down of oaks trees because they were necessary to the war effort. i'm curious if you see that elsewhere. also, the selling of urine back in the middle ages was also tied to its being used for tanneries. what about gunpowder? in 1957, there was in afghanistan geological survey that identified the rare earth

metals in afghanistan. i think it is one of the reasons we are there now. were there any additional surveys done in india that caused them to know this is there? we also saw that in the middle east, as far as them understanding there was sources. >> the question of guano is the first one. the guano aspect is fascinating. guano is one of the big commodoties pulling americans in this period. fact is not targeted at supplies of gunpowder.

the first research that produces practical guano powders is not produced until later. what is so interesting is that the person investigating the process for making guano into gunpowder found no economic incentive for doing it. what begins to change by the time we get to 1857 is a much larger market for blasting powder. additionally, during the civil war, the loss of british supplies was a potential issue with intervention in the war. i think it is fascinating. i can't directly see the conservation being linked to our protection of seabirds. fs fresh seabird guano isn't going to get you what you want. the places that make gunpowder bird poop is nations like the islands.

for enough nitrate to build up in the soil, it has to be protected from water. these are areas where it is incredibly arid but has large populations of seabirds. those fall outside of the original international treaties. conservation is such an interesting counterpoint to the ethos of the men manufacturing gunpowder during the civil war. there's an anti-conservationist ethos. they see a good market and they want to extract as much as it as quickly as possible, even if it is inefficient. mammoth cave and saltpeter cave are almost entirely deluded by the time you get to 1812 and 1813.

they could have just put the stuff back, left the bats alone for a few days, and probably would have had a better product and more sustainable business model based on that. that was never the goal, the cousin wanted to make as much money as possible before trade reopened with england. the people producing saltpeter were not necessarily the people who had incentive to maintain a long-term supply for the united states government in case of war. it's interesting how the duponts show more interest saying we should leave the saltpeter case alone until they regenerate. they begin taking that stance in the 1830's. it's fascinating how it is not the people that are utilizing the resources want to preserve it, it are the -- it is the people one or two steps down the chain. another question was buying and selling of urine. from my research, there is

definitely buying and selling of urine in the german states by around 1545. that's when i can find evidence of it in england with henry the eighth attempting a bunch of experiments using a german manufacturer. there is definitely a market for urine, but it is difficult to quantify. the french works don't to be using urine, they are using raw sewage from paris. they are not buying stray dogs like the confederate example. it is interesting seeing that aspect waste become the commodity. you see traces of that, but there is so little preserved from the early german experiments.

>> as i understand it, chile, peru, and bolivia have a nasty little war on islands in guano. was the u.s. involved? >> i don't think they were involved in the guano war. we had naval warships observing it. one thing that will happen, by the time the guano war occurs, the u.s. is shifting his powder production away from black powder. there's about a five, tenure period when the u.s. army is shooting off the extra -- 5-10 year period when the u.s. army is shooting off the extra powder. we see new powders enter the market. the first french smokeless powder begins production in the 1850's. it's common by the 60's and 70's. cordite is produced in the 18th -- 80's and 70's as well. there is less of an incentive to

keep investing this technology and fighting wars over it as we have these alternate technologies providing a troll. the 1870's is the period where trade relationships with britain are good, so there is not that incentive to diversify away from saltpeter. >> can you tell me, what was the relationship between disease and these beds, wherever they were, especially in the 16th century? they didn't figure out the cause of cholera until later. maj. lambert: when you set up a bed, you don't want any of the

niter to leak out. the way these beds are set up, they almost always had a clay base underneath the bed to stop any of that valuable saltpeter from getting out. they would have a roof or tarp over them to prevent them from having water come in. niter beds weren't making a lot of runoff. you had to leech and boil the saltpeter. there's a number of accounts of people saying how horrible it was to work at the niter beds carrying around large amounts of urine. they don't have much that points to a large disease burden i can locate.

>> thank you for your service and thank you for your briefing tonight. my question concerns thomas jefferson. did he continue his interest in making gunpowder after his presidency, when he left the government, or did he do that at secretary of state or president? maj. lambert: he did throughout his life. thomas jefferson remained close to the dupont family throughout his entire life. pierre was a correspondent of his, there were several dozen letters between him and pierre discussing saltpeter manufacturing. he had an interesting relationship with pierre's son. part of the reason i say interesting is because going to thomas jefferson's papers, i get this feeling that pierre is trying to bribe him. there are so many points where

he is attempting to send jefferson new gunpowder recipes. thomas jefferson keeps complaining he hasn't received a bill for all of the things he has received. the dupont's maintain a sideline as traders with france during this time period during the early 1800s. they also provide thomas jefferson a lot of his wine cellar. the agents in france are doing a lot of his purchases at very beneficial rates from napoleon, who wants to set up an american powder industry. he was a prolific builder, so his mills were constructed with powder. he had to make sure he had the right powder to dig out the mill raises. he has a bunch of correspondence asking questions and recommending different options.

he remained an enthusiast. >> i listen to your training tape, s3 training tape, that you made when you were a lieutenant. that is excellent. i think it is online. everyone should listen to that. >> i think you have greg lambert. he was one of my friends. he was stationed in anbar. >> i know that, but i think there is something you made in 2003, 2004 about s3. i think it is online, but thank you for your service. i would like to talk about the marble man, quickly.

he is the most competent tactical leader. how well is an army executed the logistics field sanitation's and manage personnel furloughing legal requirements. mccullin was a gifted trainer, organizer, and manager.

appreciated by his soldiers and established the foundation in in which the army of the potamac's success was later done. if the south had all the -- this gunpowder, why wasn't it getting to the people necessary? in terms of the north, the main problem with the north seems to be personnel. they didn't have people. they needed people. can you answer that question? maj. lambert: absolutely. the part i had the most to contribute is why isn't the south gunpowder getting to where it needs to go and why does it not seem to do what it is supposed to do when he gets

there? part of the problem is that the confederacy centralizes their production in augusta. from a bureaucratic standpoint, as a guy who sits up armies in the supply line, that works perfectly. i can be sure they are producing a persistent good, control its tightly, and all of my supply lines run from this one place. the problem is that my supply lines, i am entirely dependent on rail transport to get my gunpowder to my armies and this imported raw material. i am never making enough on my own. i have to fill the gap. i fill the gaps of my own production of this high-quality good with whatever works its way through the blockade or whatever people are able to make in their basement that seems like a comparable product. that's not a good way to run the army. as a guy who shoots tanks for a living, it's amazing what a small change and how fast a projectile is going can do to what it hits.

there's this entire article asking why isn't confederate artillery shooting as well? the artillery takes the back burner. part of the reason is why the inconsistent quality is nearly impossible to make good fuses to train well and how far -- know how far your rounds are going to go when you shoot with low-quality powder. the powder is insufficient. it'll will be 1000 pounds a powder just to be able to equip an army. in one engagement, you will shoot out a field armies worth of that, almost 300,000 pounds. the 300,000 pounds is a lot to move. in all five years, the confederacy is only producing 3 million pounds. you shut off a 10th of everything you can produce in a single battle. how long until the next set of

powder gets in? the union can draw on multiple producers. on a robust transportation network. if dupont doesn't have the powder, as it has the powder, and if they don't have the powder, yandle has the powder. if you are lee, you are depending on these shipments, but they may not be there when you need them. after a battle, you shot off all of the powder in your cartridge boxes, powder and your casings, and they are waiting -- you are waiting for that replacement. that explains considerate -- confederate powder shortages. >> you mentioned the head of the effort to get the gunpowder.

there was a doctor with tha t name who helped build the panama canal. is there any relation? maj. lambert: i'm not sure. i would have to look that one up. but at times, i never give the confederacy of enough credit. if we think about the confederacy and things they achieved, one of the greatest things they achieved was building a program from scratch reducing technologically advanced weaponry. it questions our narrative of what the confederacy was if we admit that. people like to think the confederacy is about personal freedom, that it was decentralized. all of these other myths that have built up. in actuality, they have

incredibly, tightly, bureaucratic weapons production system producing high-quality modern goods, but entirely directed by the government. the union is the group relying on individual initiative in these individual companies in a less controlled way to produce weaponry. >> thanks for a great lecture, major. i have been to reenactments, and one of the things you see every enactments is the safety procedures for handling the powder and how much smoke it creates. talk about the smoke on the battlefield problem and if there was anything you could do in the manufacturing process that would reduce that smoke so you can see more than 50 yards. if you think this is an obscure subject, anyone that has been to broadway or seen the production of 1776 will know there is a song between the john adams and abigail adams characters.

talk about the smoke aspect. maj. lambert: sure. black powder is different than smokeless powder for many who have shot modern rifles. in smokeless powder, it is smokeless. the reason why it is smokeless is that the materials that make up the smokeless powder are almost completely transformed into a gas as the powder burns. black powder doesn't do it. black powder has an accelerant and a fuel. the accelerant makes the fuel burn faster, but does not completely combust it. about 50% of your black powder char is going to come out as soot and cinders. that is what makes the dark black smoke. the way you minimize the smoke is by making the powder with the right proportions, as close as possible.

you have to have enough oxidizer because unburned or smoldering material is going to create more soot and smoke. 50% of your char will come out as sender no matter what you do. you can also attempt to minimize the water in powder. if you see a lot of soot as a reenactor, it means your powder is damp. poorly glazed or manufactured powder would absorb lots of water. absorbing the water makes it smokier and less powerful. as a result, you can see reductions around 10-20-50 percent of your muzzle velocity because of damp powder. think of a springfield rifle, 1100 meters per second muzzle velocity. because it has a strong arc to its trajectory, a springfield rifle at 300 yards, has a trajectory that takes in three feet above the level of the target you are aiming at. if you are using slower powder, that arc becomes more pronounced.

you will need a higher lot to hit a target with more dead zone or your round will fall short. so, you have little chance of hitting the target. poorly manufactured or smoky powder is a good indicator that you are not going to hit anything if you fire with it. it was one of the key things they attempted to prevent. as a reenactor, you are probably lucky. i have done a few talks with reenactors. they're using that can in charge, typically, for a six pound cannon. the rule used by civil war

armies is a quarter of as much powder is around you are firing. the charge should be about a pound and a half. even though the powder might have been worse or smokier, particularly if we talk about confederates, you should be burning about five or six times as much at your reenactment. think about what that would do to the smoke problem. that's why so many of these civil war battles are so confused. after three or four rounds of battles, we couldn't see anything. that is what they did. they focus on moisture, composition, glazing. >> if we can go parallel now to their rare metal. as far as i understand, the u.s. government gave away a big mine. it was somewhere, i don't know

where, but chinese bought these mines. if you have information about it, can you draw a parallel? maj. lambert: i'm not sure what mines we are talking about. are we talking about the local production of the saltpeter sources? we saw there the u.s. government would purchase an interest in some of the saltpeter refineries, but they focused on controlling the imports of these goods. they would purchase or contract for the purchase directly from companies like the mine operators and store it in centralized warehouses like philadelphia -- in warehouses like philadelphia -- in centralized warehouses like in philadelphia. they always maintain these strategic resources. the equivalent for us is the strategic petroleum reserve.

we don't have enough it, in a way, and the government decides when prices are high enough and needs to release this key material to support u.s. economics or industry, or diplomacy. in many ways, saltpeter filled that role, essential for warfare and economic functioning in this period. >> in the napoleonic period, there was a big problem for cartridges and muskets and cannons. a lot of the charred was wasted because it wasn't directed at any particular decision or direction. also, there is a high chance of a misfire. are there any technological changes, like the construction of the cartridges themselves, that increase the odds of not having it fire or directing more of the force in all directions.

the biggest thing happening as a technological change from the 1840's to the 1860's is that mercury follmann eight -- folmanate is the primary resource. in terms of the amount flame produced, it was a much better system. that became the standard on the u.s. infantry weapons. cannons use friction primers and

that is manufactured by the same arsenals we look at. the dupont's had a sideline manufacturing area. the friction primers would use a pressure compound together with a pyrite or other sparking material. there is a cord that would be pulled causing a number of sparks to go down into the cannon barrel. the powder got better at firing when they got better and manufacturing it. it was primarily a question of primer technology. [applause] maj. lambert: thank you. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org]

american history tv is live next weekend from historic for its theater with a daylong abraham lincoln symposium. clinton -- speakers include lincoln's scholars. our live coverage begins at 9:00 a.m. eastern here on c-span3. >> next, on "the presidency," university of virginia professor william hitchcock talks about his book, "the age of eisenhower: america and the world in the 1950s." later, mr. hitchcock sits down with former abc news white house correspondent ann compton for a conversation about the life and legacy of the nation's 34th president. the white house historical association hosted this event. it's an hour and 10 minutes. >> and now to the lecture part of our program. our speaker tonight is dr.