next on american history tv, west point history instructor major david lambert discusses how gun powder was outsourced and manufactured in the mid-19th century. the new york military affairs symposium hosted this event. it's about an hour and 40 minutes. major david lambert is a native of chicago, illinois. following high school he enrolled in the united states military academy at west point, new york and there he majored in history and graduated with honors in 2007. he commissioned as an officer and served as a tank platoon leader and company executive officer at fort hood and in mosul, iraq from 2008 to 2010. in 2011 he deployed to the republic of korea and commanded a tank company and a battalion

headquarters company on the demilitarized zone between north and south korea. in 2014 he was selected for advanced civil schooling at georgetown university in washington, d.c. he graduated with a masters degree in history in 2016. and assumed the position as an instructor in the department of history at the united states military academy at usma. he taught courses in both military and united states history. and currently directs the academy chorus civil war america, which studies america's society, politics, economy and military from 1816 to 1877. he's joined tonight by his wife shannon and together they've got three kids, nate, liam and

elizabeth, 12, 2 and 1 years old. turn over things now to major lambert. thank you. [ applause ] thank you for the introduction and thank you for being here to learn 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. that gives me free rein to tell great stories and answer great questions. 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. unfortunately there's no goody bags of explosives tonight. that said, though, hopefully we'll learn about it and there will be a lot of great information that matters for your own research and your understanding of america through

the civil war. the question i usually get from my students when i first bring up this topic is, well, why gun powder? why is it worth learning about? why is it matter and why should i sit through an hour of you talking about? first off, 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. it's accuracy. it's performance. how far it travels and its effects. and understanding that stuff can be critical for your understanding as a military historian. but beyond simply the application gun powder has so much more to it than simply being used in cannons. 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 pre-modern societies to have access to it that you clear out things like tree stumps. it produces infrastructure. it's used to mine, to dig, to blast ways for railroads, to rev level hills. it's the key substance for mining. as you start to need coal in order to power your locomotives or your steam boats, gun powder is the commodity that enables you to obtain that. it's the key good of diplomacy in the united states' history. it's one of the main items american tribes want to trade for and one of the reasons why they fwactually maintain a relationship with the indian agents who were put in place by the united states government to supersi super vise reservations. and finally the obviously one in

so many ways gun powder is the key good for war. it's a good that drives the formation and the growth of states throughout the period where it's accessible. to simply put an idea of the scale of what's required for a state to maintain the gun powder industry, look 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 cost 44,000 duckets to keep their cannons in gun powder, more than they spend on the entire army in their mainland provinces. gun powder is this key commodity that's 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 and 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. now, looking to what extent the experience providing gun powder, salt pewter and ordinance to the united states army has changed our government, as 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 in a way and to talk about what gun powder is and where it comes from. so these are the ingredients of gun powder. it's 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's from a little bit different time period than we're going to talk about tonight and we'll get to the change why sodium becomes an option. but in u.s. history from 1776 through 1863 the compound used to manufacture gun powder is potassi potassium nitrate. it's still a compound you encounter in your everyday life, it's commonly used as a preservative in items like cured meat and it's sold as stump remover in a local hardware store. those are the directions you encounter it. the other two constituents of gun powder are charcoal and sulfur. charcoal and sulfur vary anywhere from about 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 period 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. potassium nitrate instead serves as the oxidizer. when potassium nitrate is heated it gives off more oxygen than it takes to burn it. that oxygen then goes into the combustion process of the charcoal and the sulfur and makes them burn faster. so much more oxygen is generated by the potassium's decomposition that that charcoal and that sulfur start to burn at a vastly quicker rate and undergo a low explosion. what that means is they burn at slower than the speed of sound instead of higher the speed of sound. because of that they release very little chamber pressure 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 through the course of tonight but a few key differences will be pointed out as we consider how the american powder industry is changing.

so these are the steps with handy dandy pictures provided by the dupont corps who will be our largest black powder manufacturer throughout the period we're sturding. in the first step the raw materials you saw on the last slide would be incorporated. and incorporation, those materials were dumped into a large wheel mill and moistened with water to prevent an explosion. the compounds are already flammable if you just put them in the wheel mill so the water both makes them workable and less likely to explode. despite that working the powder mills continued to be exceptionally dangerous throughout the time period we're studying. the production facility had 100 employees in wilmington, delaware. they lost 26 of those workmen to explosions over the course of the civil war, giving them about a 26% casualty rate. the casualty rate at antetem in

the union forces was 20%. 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 to the pressing mill. now the pressing mill would typically be two plates that would squeeze the powder inside a box to increase its density, fill in air pockets and better mix the material. what came out was called a mill cake. the mill cake was a slab about the size of this podium of pure gun powder. but that mill cake 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. that 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 of the powder production 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 large grains. that mattered for different applications of weapon. so 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 projectile. if the powder burned too quickly in that bigger gun it would produce too much pressure and burst the barrel which would happen repeatedly throughout the time period. so those big powder kernels, or those small powder kernels decided the use the powder would be put to.

now, the next step with those powder kernels, though, is to try and find a way to keep them at the appropriate size. powder could expect to have a very rough life, especially in military use. it could expect to be exposed to water. it could expect to be jostled, bumped along roads, stuck in some poor soldier's cartridge bag and eventually fired at the enemy. to survive that abuse, it needed a protective coating on the outside called the glazing. it 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 applied, that would form a protective layer on the outside of the powder grain and the powder grain itself would have any little nicks, 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 very small powder grains and dust mixed in with your large powder grains. when you attempted to put it in a cannon that dust would burn very 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 powder production process would be packaging. so the powder would be pulled from the glazing mill. it would be moved over to a packaging mill where it would be loaded in casks or barrels that would then be shipped to field armies. the powder barrels were around 100 pounds although they had a capacity for 120 pounds to allow it to settle and shift instead of being hard braced into the barrels. made the powder more likely to survive transport and able to expand as it encountered moisture without bursting the barrels or its storage space. now, making powder is difficult.

don't get me wrong. but it was relativity 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. it's like if this is so hard why is it worth learning about? why can't the union confederacy do this in someone's basement and get all the powder they need? there's a second problem that factors into this and that's the problem of raw materials. so the first raw material is charcoal. okay, we can all probably make charcoal. all we need to do is burn wood in a controlled environment where it doesn't have enough oxygen. we've got that. the material after that is sulfur. sulfur is a little bit more difficult. i don't think sulfur is sitting around my house but there's a number of production sites in the u.s. at locations, typically

named sulfur springs, one in pretty much every state. there are also large deposits of sulfur located in texas exploited throughout this time period. but almost all of the sulfur that's going to be used by the united states is going to come from sicily. sicily has large volcanic deposits of sulfur and there will be a major industry of shipping to the united states to make weaponry. there's a thing about sulfur though. it's also good for a few other things. one of the biggest things sulfur is good for is sugar refining. 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 repress those supplies and use them for gun manufacturing. the north will maintain open trade relationships with italy and be able to import sulfur

throughout the time period also. you also only need 10% as much sulfur as the gun powder you want to make. the confederacy's existing stocks in '61 are enough to make 5 million pounds of gun powder, which is about what they're going to use during the entire civil war. so sulfur's not the limiting reagent. what ends up being the problem for both the union and the confederacy, and honestly for policymakers throughout u.s. history is the supply of knighter. sa saltpeter, presenting a perennial problem for gun powder supply for countries around the world. saltpeter can come from a lot of places. one nice thing, you can make it yourself. there are three main methods used to produce it. the first are saltpeter diggings. so i threw a picture of someone doing that process up there. saltpeter is naturally going to be formed anytime that you have soil where organic matter is

decomposing and it's protected from water. these sorts of conditions are really common in the pre-modern world. think about all the barns, think about the basements, think about the dung piles that exist in a pre-modern society. well, the problem is, it's highly soluble. so you need ones that are protected from water, ones that are under a roof. and the other problem is that the great places you find this are in someone's barn or someone's basement. now, if you're a state looking to acquire saltpeter by this method, 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 for individuals to do it. the european answer is simpler though. the king has possession of all

saltpeter and he has a right to give out commissions for his officers to dig up your basement, undermine your house and take the saltpeter there, as long as they put the dirt back when they're done. well, that might not do me a lot of good after they've already dug up my foundation and destroyed my house or knocked down my barn. but that right to dig, is the foundation of the saltpeter industries in both england and in france. in england henry viii assumes that right in 1492 when he authorizes his first saltpeter diggers to go out and begin digging up people's homes. in the english experience there will be great resistance to this. the actions of saltpeter diggers are one of the items cited in the great remonstrance of parliament. there's a vast amount of unhappiness of digging up people's homes to make gun

powder. there's one other place you can find it, that is caves. saltpeter will naturally form in caves, mainly through the contact of bat guano with the limestone that makes up most caves around the world. that will form a compound known as calcium nitrate. if calcium nitrate is mixed with wood ashes or potash it forms potassium nitrate, the magic salt we're looking for that makes gun powder. 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 why they'll do that are the prevalence of war and an inability to access imported sources of niter during wartime. that will become a method i call growing, the formation of saltpeter trenches, these are big piles of organic waste. it's nasty stuff.

it's rotten vegetables, wood ashes, dead animals. and it's feces. they'll collect up large amounts of feces and urine in their cities to place onto 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 how much money it costs to have a bunch of workmen who are permanently there tending these saltpeter beds and collecting up waste. the third method is 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 these methods. there are places in the world where saltpeter is more common. the primary one that's going to

be used through our time period is going to be india. there are areas of india, specifically in bihar or modern day bengal where there are large amounts of saltpeter microbes that naturally occur in the soil, aren't found anywhere else in the world. so it turns out if enough urine goes into the soil, be it human or animal you're going to get a crust of pure saltpeter out of it. now, indian 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 plessy in 1757 the english gained virtual dominion over the area of india that produces all of this

explosive. it's very easy to manufacture. and the east india company sets up a cast 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 ship load. everyone thinks that the india trade is dominated by all those goods we learned about, by tea and calico. well, those may make up a lot of the value of those east india men, more than 50% of the cargo on your average east india men is going to be bags of saltpeter. they're both the ballist and a way the east india company is paying its obligations to the british state. the french had gotten in on this too by the 1750s. they had their own niter mines located in their areas of india and the dutch set up their areas in the dutch east indies.

there will be a tragic accident for that for the french. they'll fight the seven years war. the french supply of niter will be heavily interrupted, they won't be able to get ships through and they'll blame their loss in the seven 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 named barron trugo is going to be to find a brilliant chemist who is known for several things. first off, he's the first guy to do a scientific investigation of why things light on fire. prior to his study the big theory is that they produce this magical substance known as flagistan, the substance that burns, this gas exuded by things that are flammable. this scientist demonstrates it's the presence of atmospheric

oxygen that makes things burn. he makes his career as the best powder man. he introduces the glazing technique and he sets up the first major niter farms in france. so this is going to be where napoleon's gun powder comes from. in terms of scale, france will go from being able to produce around 800 tons of saltpeter a year, using its digging system, with a lot of heart ache from the people it's dug from to being able to produce almost 1,700 tons of saltpeter a year without having to dig up people's basements. this is the gun powder that will power napoleon's armies and the reason why he doesn't need permanent access to india. throughout the innapoleonic war england will be using india. that link to india will be a

weakness for them as 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. will focus on dilemmas as britain. we've gone through a process of trying to figure out where our war supplies are going to come from. americans are attempting to find their own sources of saltpeter ever since 1629 when virginia passes its first ordinance requiring prospecting for saltpeter and people are to preserve their urine and feces and wood ashes to set up niter beds in the colony. none of those pan out though. with the british navy able to bring unlimited supply 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're going to need to figure out what we're going to do on that. 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 that committee, guys like benjamin franklin and benjamin rush and task them with figuring out how america's 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. well, 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 one's probably right out. i mean, we just said we were going to have a revolution over unreasonable searches and seizures, over the government's

agents coming in and taking over our homes. that one's probably not going to work. okay, 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 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 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 it are the ones we're about to declare independence from. hmm. in the end what americans try to do is to go with digging saltpeter, but to do it through a system of economic incentives by paying massive bounties over the market price of saltpeter. 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.

doesn't sound too bad but east india company saltpeter was trading at about 6 cents in 1774 prior to the revolution. and on top of that 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. pluses and minuses. this is an enormous economic incentive and it brings in a lot of people you don't think of as involved in war industry. the principal manufacturers of this good are going to be women. think about the things that 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 salts on the bottom of your pot. well, a lot of women know how to dig. a lot of women had these kitchen implements and a lot of women are looking for 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 saltpeter for a quick extra buck. i doubt she's doing the digging part of that. 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 on any saltpeter he produces as a method to attempt to produce more saltpeter. the other method that will be tried is offering major financial incentives in virginia. as a result many tobacco barns or other shelters will be dug up. the labor force on that 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 will see later on in our story will be enslaved. but they'll remember the revolutionary experience and how to produce war material. now, the revolution doesn't last forever. although america is never able to get self-sufficient in powder -- let me put some

numbers on that. by 1777 the united states has produced 115,000 pounds of domestic saltpeter through these crash production programs. sounds pretty impressive, right, that's a pretty good number. in the same period we'll have imported half a million pounds from france and a million and a half pounds of completed powder produced by those fine powder works set up by levossier. 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 ourselves off from the world. 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 of massachusetts and the saltpeter caves in virginia will be very, very competitive at war prices. in the post-war world the east india company begins coming back and trading again. normal trade with england will resume in 1782 and it's going to continue through about 1792 with prices continually dropping. but something's going to ruin that unlimited supply. in 1789 the french begin that have they'ir own issues again a a revolution. 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 how to stockpile it. my personal favorite plan ever relating to this stuff was put out by a guy named john kerry in 1791. he recommended to thomas jefferson, i've got 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 off, it probably wasn't going to cool things down. second off, 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 was the passage of jay's treaty in 1794. now, jay's treaty is one of the thing that my students always have their eyes glaze over when we discuss. it seems like it's fixing a bunch of forts that don't really matter and shifting around a few borders. there's a kicker in jay's treaty if you ever read it though. 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. there was the lack of east india men that were able to carry the material to england and her allies. now that the u.s. could send its own ships the market was completely open. so all the 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 into the napoleonic wars. the u.s. began to prospect for more of its own supplies, not to exploit them, but to be prepared in case we were pulled into the wars engulfing europe. it leads to another great thomas jefferson story. i'm full of them. as you know thomas jefferson was perpetually in debt. one of the big sidelines he attempted on his crazy attempts to make money was setting up his own saltpeter refinery to begin making gun powder. there were several caves located near monticello in virginia. he partnered with will ca ruters and he sent out teams of guys to see if there were any resources he could exploit. caruthers and his prospect fors didn't find much in the way of saltpeter worth exploiting money

over. but they kept going into these caves and finding strange giant bones preserved in the caves. the bones were unlike anything else we'd seen, massive claws and huge teeth and other weird features that didn't look like any known living animal. they began to take the bones back to thomas jefferson and to show them to him and ask what do you think this is? thomas jefferson corresponded with a number of his friends in philadelphia and he started to decide that these bones looked like they came from some sort of a giant sloth. i know it's crazy, a sloth the size of a cow. but that's exactly what it was. these saltpeter prospectors that birthed modern pail yentology. they found the first specimens of preserved mammoth bones and saber tooth tiger boons. so peleontology comes out of the

birth for explosives. thomas jefferson didn't get saltpeter refinery off the ground but one of his friends did. he was close friends with pierre samuel dupont. he had a son who was very intelligent. because of that he sent his son to intern with vossier, the powder production site throughout the 1770s and 1780s. this son named eluthier duepont. he would later establish the dupont -- becoming the major gun powder production for u.s. it's here the duponts enter our story. the duponts were able to set up

a manufactury relatively keeply as long as materials kept coming in. that proposed its own problems because of policies enacted by thomas jefferson. although importing saltpeter worked well there were a number of issues that began to emerge with england as they carried on the napoleonic wars. the issue of england repressing american seamen was becoming -- thomas jefferson's attempt to solve was nonimportation and the embargo act. the limitless supplies of indian saltpeter dried up. 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 into kentucky, tennessee and the limestone caves of america's carst region and what they found

were some mammoth caves, like mammoth cave located in modern day kentucky if anyone's been there. these caves became the primary site of saltpeter production for america from 1805 through the end of the war of 1812. these caves themselves are fascinating to study. entire communities arose around these caves to provide for the saltpeter works. you had hunters. you had miners. you had people responsible for moving explosives used to mine the explosives. you even had people whose job was simply to tend the vats or skilled french wine makers who were pulled in to make sure that presses were set up that could 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 plentiful in frontier kentucky. the solution adopted by many cave owners was to use a labor source that knew something about refining saltpeter. enslaved african-americans. they were brought in, and purchased on long-term

contracts, traditionally for around one year at a time. what's interesting, though, is in the dark of the caves owners had almost no ability to supervise their slaves. because of that, a very different system of slave supervision different vision of slave supervision emerged. slaves would be paid either on the amount of saltpeter they were able to produce or they were paid a bonus for good performance and good behavior in the cave over a set period of time. although the owner of the slave received the pay for the contract itself, the slave themselves might receive $10, $15, $20 at the end of the performing some sort of labor in the cave as long as they didn't damage the equipment in the caves. the other form this took was simply teams of two to three slaves that were sent out as saltpeter prospectors. there were large numbers of those in the literature of the period. good examples are people like

monk estelle who were small producers themselves. with saltpeter selling for nearly 70 cents a pound during the embargo, if a slave could themselves a monthly income of around $800 -- sorry, a yearly income of $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 to freedom for many of the african-americans enslaved in kentucky during the embargo time period. mammoth cave was well and good. we have an unlimited amount of saltpeter forever. couple problems. first off, the soil itself from the cave would have to have been put back in place to generate saltpeter. otherwise it's just bare rock. you can't get saltpeter out of that. it takes a lot of time and it's not profitable to do that. what the operators of the caves

did was build up huge piles of soil underneath the vats they were using to leech soil. they would carry the soil up, put it in the top of the vat, and after the saltpeter was extracted, pull the sieth in the bottom, and raise up the manufactories again. the soil isn't going back. so, it's not regenerating. the other problem is that this stuff was produced by bats defecating making guano on the rock. but the bats stop sleeping there if people are in there 24 hours a day running a factory. and then there's the final problem, nature gets a vote on this too. the vote it will take is the new madrid earthquake of 1811. those vats are on top of big loose piles of wet earth. as soon as the earthquake hit they sank straight into the spoil piles and were ruined. although there will be efforts to restart production from 1811 to 1812, the u.s. government by

this point had built up a stock of around a million and a half pounds of saltpeter which was sufficient for it to fight the war of 1812. in 1815, the napoleonic wars were at an end and there was a far greater supply of east india saltpeter coming into the united states. so, the manufactory dried up. what's funny is almost the impressions and sorts of predictions made by manufacturers when this happened. you have the duponts, for example, who had been using the supply of saltpeter saying we should stop mining the caves. we should save that saltpeter in case we ever have another war that we fight that's going to require us to use domestic sources if we can't rely on england. huh. well, that won't be the next war because the next war is the mexican war. during the mexican war, dupont was able to sell 1.2 million pounds of gunpowder to the united states government, all manufactured using english saltpeter. but a funny thing had begun happening to the u.s. gun market during that time period.

it doesn't go down anymore. more and more companies had entered the market, companies like laflin & rand or the hazard powder company. even as that happened there were these amazing new railways and canals. during the war of 1812 a number of small powder producers sprung in kentucky to supply the u.s. army and the western territories. they were outcompeted by eastern producers with cheaper access to indian saltpeter. beyond that though, we'll fight a war with mexico. but immediately after the war with mexico, there's gold. and there's all these new opportunities on the western plains. there are new native american tribes to trade with. there are mines to open in colorado. there's new land to occupy through the mexican secession. so, the powder business never goes down after the mexican war. it only goes up. that's compounded in 1853 with the beginning of crimean war

where even britain can't produce powder fast enough to meet the demands of itself and france in the war with russia. so, the power in america is on upward trajectory through to the beginning of the civil war which begins to bring us to our interwar developments because technology hasn't been static during this time period. this new explosive has been developed called gun cotton in 1846. it's created by treating cotton with nitric acid. okay. america has a lot of both of those things, but there's a problem. it's just too explosive. gun cotton explodes so rapidly and produces so much gas that it'll shatter a cannon or shatter a musket in the period. so, until new metallurgical techniques are developed, we'll need to figure out something else for the time being. the two other big changes that'll happen in gunpowder manufacturing are the discovery in 1857 of a method to make saltpeter out of bird guano

instead of bat guano. that'll be discovered by a dupont chemist named lammot dupont, the grandson of the founder, ei dupont. he'll be active in developing new forms of cannon powder. he'll develop a new form called mammoth powder with grains that are the size of a golf ball that can be used in larger cannons 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 powder supply. it's a unique commodity in civil war studies too. it's the one thing the union actually produces enough of. someone else can probably stop me on that, but i find it so entertaining that out of all the goods the union is scrambling for on shortages, the powder 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, so this

low-grade gunpowder, out of bird guano into lines that use more expensive saltpeter and produce higher grade cannon and rifle powder. but there's a problem with that. the government has a stock pile of three million pounds of saltpeter. all right. that's a lot of saltpeter. that's more than we've ever had before, right? there's no way we're going to need to go through three million pounds of saltpeter. we've gone through three million pounds of saltpeter by the end of 1861. the government has given out all the saltpeter to the power manufacturers to be able to produce gunpowder and between arming the union army, the navy, and all the fortifications all around the union, we're completely out of saltpeter quick. so, we need to get more saltpeter quick. but all the saltpeter we have in the union comes from england. that's okay.

well, let's just go over to england, right? we're going to send some representatives. one of the representatives we send is lammot dupont, but he's working on behalf of henry dupont, the head of the dupont family during that period. he's a fascinating guy. he's from my alma mater. he's a proud west pointer. graduated in 1833, served exactly one year active duty. and then he felt he was called to a higher calling, a higher duty, his duty to run the family business. although he's the head of the dupont family, he never forgets his west point training. as soon as the civil war begins, he's nominated as a major general in the delaware militia. he has an interesting solution to how to handle delaware. delaware is a border state. it still has several hundred enslaved african-americans and a number of plantations and several counties that favor secession. henry's solution is very simple. he calls together all 300 employees of the dupont company

and tells them you can take an oath of allegiance to the united states right now or you can take your hat and get out. if you take the oath of allegiance you're going to get a pay raise. that's an easy sell for a lot of these powder workers. as soon as he's done that, he forms these gentleman into two companies of militia. with dupont and his workers on side, the delaware economy heavily depends on them. and you've already seized wilmington where dupont is located with a military force. so, as major general henry goes, so the state of delaware goes during the civil war. now, he's approached by the war department relatively early on because of his interest in the gunpowder manufacturing industry and because of his known loyalty. and they tell him about this problem they're having supplying enough saltpeter. okay. he's going to send his best man for it. he's going to send lammot, the gifted chemist. but, well, dupont doesn't really have enough money to do a bulk purchase. it's okay. it's okay.

secretary of state seward, secretary of war cameron give lammot dupont a ship loaded with half a million dollars in u.s. gold bars from the u.s. treasury, and they send him over to england to buy as much saltpeter as england will sell. and you have to feel sorry for this guy. he's 29 in 1861. he's had a bit of career as a chemist, but we're sending a 29-year-old over to england on a ship loaded with gold bars and i presume dabloons and telling him we want you to buy the salt peter. i'm sorry, how much saltpeter do you want me to buy? we want you to buy all the saltpeter. wow. and he does an amazing job of it. so, lammot will show up in england on november 19th. he has a lot of trouble. so, while the gold's unloaded he needs credit in order to make his purchases.

he walks into bearing brothers primary banker for the u.s. government in london, and he tells them i'm lammot dupont. i need my family's line of credit. no one believes him. no one believes 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, and he needs to go to the american litigation and get help from charles adams in order to prove his identity. once his identity is sorted out, he completes his mission of buy the saltpeter, literally walking into the east india company offices saying i would like to buy the saltpeter. how much saltpeter? i want the saltpeter, all of it. well, okay. so, they have 2,000 tons currently in their warehouses. okay. i'll take it. snaps it all up. but also i want everything that's currently on a ship coming to england. he'll purchase not just the cargo in england of the key commodity but all of the cargo that's coming to england over the next year. he corners the world market on

saltpeter in an afternoon. and he begins to load this up and ship it back to the union. interestingly, getting there before confederate purchasing agents who were sent with the same mission. there is a problem. no plan could go this well. on november 8th before he even set foot in england, a mail packet named the trent was stopped by the san jacinto. on board the trent were two representatives of the confederate government, mason and slidell. they were detained as contraband by the san jacinto. this caused a massive international incident for england. england retaliated by dispatching 10,000 soldiers to canada in attempt to govern it. but the other big thing that england did was promote an embargo on saltpeter exports to

the united states. they locked down lammot dupont's cargo in the london ports. but that's all the gunpowder the union needs to fight the war. without gunpowder, you can't have an army. you would be armed with nothing but clubs. so, this becomes the first big time when the u.s. saltpeter supply is threatened during the civil war. now, cooler heads will eventually prevail after all of the war talk. by december 26th, lammot dupont is back in washington, d.c. he receives some very interesting letters according to dupont family lore. none of this is proven in biographies, but an interesting aspect is he'll tell his son he was given two letters by secretary of state seward. one threatens lord palmerston with war if the saltpeter isn't released. the other letter threatens to break off diplomatic relations with britain if britain isn't willing to export materials to the united states.

britain claimed neutrality, right? shouldn't they not be exporting military materials to anyone? but if they ever enforce that, all of a sudden the union doesn't have supplies of gunpowder, of this critical material we need to fight the war. well, lammot has several plans to get around this. you know what he thinks the english like? they really like confederates. 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 my ships taking gunpowder to the union. i'm going to sail out like i'm a blockade runner and then i'm going to send a signal to cousin francis, the guy who runs the union blockading fleet and he'll pull us in and we'll get impounded and i'll give the saltpeter to the guys who paid for it in the first place. luckily he doesn't have to do this. mason slidell are released by the u.s. government and he's allowed to export his cargo, in doing so stripping virtually all the saltpeter from england.

have fun with that confederates. but it exposes this key weakness in the union war effort. many people in the united states government particularly in the united states navy will realize that the union can't afford to depend on england alone for saltpeter because if england ever shut down the tap on the key material, the union's war effort would grind to a halt. without gunpowder we don't have cannons. we don't have a navy. we don't have rifles. we can't have sieges. we can't have battles. so, we need alternative sources, places that england can't intradict. got a good idea. let's go to japan. japan has guns. japan was opened up to trade in 1855 my matthew perry. maybe the japanese are willing to export saltpeter. so, the naval department will actually send a series of naval ships lead by the u.s.s wyoming to japan notary public 1862 to attempt to open a secondary

source of this material that isn't coming from england. they'll have mixed success. they'll be able to buy about 300 tons of the material, but when it's tested it turns out to be low quality. the reason why is the japanese aren't willing to sell good quality saltpeter to the united states. they're kind of going through their own thing right now called the boshin war. they've just opened to the west and began modernizing their own military technology and sucking up vast amounts of gunpowder and vast amounts of resources to try and produce their own military that could stand toe to toe with the west. sorry union, we like your money, but we're not sending you the good stuff. so, this plan falls through. luckily there's a third option. birds. lots and lots of birds. when you have this many birds together for a long period of time, they poop a lot. the poop will build up into mountains. and if this poop isn't affected by water that will leech out the

nitrates, it'll build up massive, massive amounts of niter in it. this is going to be in the for of sodium nitrate instead of potassium nitrate and for a long time it won't be economical to convert this material. a new process will be developed in 1863 by another chemist working with the united states n navy. a chemist named john dwight will develop a new method of refining sea bird guano effectively into gun powder. so, the price is going to be a bit higher than what's imported from england. english saltpeter will cost around 11 cents a pound in 1863. but dwight's guano will only cost about 14 cents, and it comes without having to be nice to the british. by 1864, dwight's process is producing potassium nitrate at the same cost as british imports because of raises in the price.

so, from 1863 on, he's producing potassium nitrate out of sodium nitrate at the same cost as just importing potassium nitrate from england. he's producing it also in massive batches, around 500 tons at a time. he's producing 500 ton of this 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 this single guy is at one factory. he hasn't even bothered to scale this up to more than one factory, and he's still able to meet all the union's requirements for nitrate out of it. so, although this doesn't provide all of the union gunpowder post-1863, it's a supply independent of england that gives the union additional leverage in their diplomacy with britain from 1863 onwards. now, there's several other

issues that crop up with this and the biggest ones i get when i teach this lesson to my students: are the gunpowder producers for the union price gouging? you know what's interesting? they're making every possible effort they can to squeeze every possible dime out of the united states government, but it is really hard to price gouge the united states government. only time you've ever heard that from an economic talk, right? there are serious problems with it though. although four companies dominate the supply, there's another 30% of companies that don't get military contracts. those companies are attempting to use the civil war as an opportunity to break into a lucrative market, so they regularly offer their gunpowder at below market rates. to keep contracts, the duponts and hazards are also forced to sell the government powder below the rates of sporting powder or civilian powder in the markets where they're trading. so, the u.s. market is actually

getting gunpowder at two cent discount versus civilian rates per pound in 1863. the other big problem they have is that the government keeps insisting that it's maintaining its own saltpeter stores. the duponts would love to buy the saltpeter for the u.s. government and just roll the price into everything else and charge a commission on it. instead though it's the navy department and war department that are authorizing major purchases of saltpeter in europe and the conversion of sodium nitrate into potassium nitrate. because they're issuing those contracts and giving the power to the duponts, they only allow them to charge 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 the duponts and hazards between the prices and fixing prices, the government agents keep bargaining them down. and they keep testing the powder for quality. dupont has a large number of

vats that are sent back or large number of shipments of powder sent back for failing to meet standards in 1862 and '63 by the ordinance department. and the ordinance department's attitude is since there's enough capacity to manufacture powder in the u.s., if they start sending saltpeter to other manufacturers, you're out of luck dupont. so, despite what looks like an oligarchy as far as the market you're going to see an enormous amount of competition between the union powder manufacturers and very low prices in the union for this key commodity throughout the war. let's talk about the other side of this though because it's a fascinating way to understand powder manufacture in america. let's talk the confederacy. at the beginning of the civil war, the confederacy is about half a million pounds of powder in various storehouses. sounds like a lot. here's the problem. josiah gorgas is going to

compute exactly what the confederacy needs each year to survive in 1861. he'll compute that the confederacy has 1,500 ce artillery pieces. with 40 rounds per gun, he needs 600,000 pounds of powder just to set up the existing cannons. for his field artillery, he'll need 125,000 pounds and for 10 million small arms cartridges enough to equip the confederate infantry, he'll need another 125,000 pounds of powder. he comes up with a figure of 850,000 pounds of powder, and that's before he's even shot one round. that's enough to fill cartridge boxes and fill ammo wagons on the confederate artillery. he's only got half a million pounds. and the confederacy has not made a single pound of power since the war of 1812. and it doesn't make any saltpeter. so, this will become one of the greatest crash production

programs in american history. gorgas is going to select a west pointer named george w. rains. rains has a bit of experience in chemistry but has never run a powder works before. he'll get the opportunity to test a small pilot program, but in 1962, he'll go on to found this giant mon monstrosity behind us, the augusta powder works. it's a phenomenal facility in many ways. it's incredibly innovative in the terms of technology to produce powder, far more than the north. it will use a steam infusion system instead of grinding to waft the saltpeter straight into the charcoal that's being impregnated with saltpeter. he'll have new safety measures too that make it one of the safest to work in the united states. buckets will be set up over each of the mills, large ones able to douse the mill contents in case

of any explosion to prevent a chain reaction. they'll be set off by the pressure of explosion if anything happens in the mills preventing the sort of train reactions that are causing the deaths and injuries at dupont. so, this is an amazing building and it's amazingly productive too. over the course of the war it'll produce 3 million pounds of powder. and this powder will be tested as a uniformly excellent quality. a third of that is going to be large cannon powder for columbia, a third is cannon powder, and a third is rifle powder. so, he's covering all his bases thus far. it stops production in 1864 when augusta is threatened by sherman's march. it restarts partial in 1965 but only produce about two months before the powder works is broken down. rains faces the same problem that dupont is facing in the north though, and that's the question of niter supply. so, the confederates will have to turn back to the three great tactics we talked about. you can dig it, you can grow it, or you can trade for it.

trading will require running saltpeter through the blockade. blockade runners are expensive and saltpeter is heavy. even so this is about 75% of the confederate's supply of saltpeter. the other 25% is going to be produced in the confederacy as they attempt to establish their independence from international trade. so, the confederacy will start by following the revolutionary war experience and offering bounties. they'll offer approximately 75 cents per found of niter by 1862. remember i told you that duponts are paying around 10 cents and even 14 cents for this newfangled manufactured chemical niter. so, they're paying a massive premium. but they'll discover because of that premium they still aren't getting enough and it'll be way more intelligent to produce it themselves. the confederacy will create what's called its niter and mining bureau which i know you have had previous talks about.

the niter and mining bureau is led by major isaac saint john. he's going to go and find all the caves in the south that contain it and mine it out. but he's also going to follow two other strategies. he's going to begin going into barns and basements where necessary and impressing niter from areas that aren't entirely positive on the confederacy. and the final strategy he's going to try is 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. well, when it comes to producing explosives, they are all about centralized government. their explosives come from one massive state of the art manufactory paid for by the central confederate government. and the niter beds are the same way. they'll establish a network of 18 government owned caves and 18 niter beds with a total of a million cubic feet of capacity.

the bed enrichment alone has capacity for 256,000 cubic feet of waste. by the end of the war, these niter beds will contain a total of about 4 million pounds of saltpeter. so, more saltpeter than dupont will manufacture into gunpowder during the entire civil war. but there's problems, right? there are always problems when we talk about manufacturing saltpeter. this is one of the big ones. in order to produce all of that niter,s rains needs to run a constant operation bringing in fresh waste, both human and animal. so, he's going to establish a network of chamber pots all across the confederacy begging people to contribute their urine and feces to the confederate war effort. that's primarily going to be produced by women during this time period since so many soldiers have entered the confederate armys. the other problems are a supply

of animals. his big solution is going to round up all the stray dogs in selma, alabama, drive them to the niter beds and kill them and throw them in the niter beds. so, these become the sorts of measures that the confederacy will turn to in order to maintain a supply of this material. beyond that, they're collecting the garbage from cities and raw sewage, and 4,000 confederate men are going to be employed in tending these trenches and caves at a time when that manpower is desperately needed in the confederate armys. despite their efforts we need to evaluate the performance of the army meeting the niter dilemma. they're able to produce a lot of the niter they need. but the problem they'll repeatedly face is the question of how much it's going to cost. and that's the great comparison between the confederate effort and the union effort. the confederate government is

producing niter using these methods and a lot of support from their populous if they're willing to provide this at around 75 cents a pound and the finished powder costs around $1.08 a pound. it's high in quality. the production is owned from nose to tail by the confederate government, but it's $1.08 a pound. the union is relying almost entirely on private enterprise with government contract and provision of their raw materials. but their niter is only costing 13 cents and 10 cents from what they're getting from the east india company. the powder is going 20 cents a pound. so, you can get five and a half pounds of union powder for what the confederacy is paying for a single pound. it's interesting too that the union will ultimately seize the confederate niter works, first the caves, and then those trenches and decide it simply isn't economical to manufacture powder using the confederacy's method.

following the civil war, all of the niter manufacturing materials in the united states will be dismantled, as will those confederate powder works. the union army is more than willing to shoot what's left of the works and issue out to the u.s. armies during 1860s in reconstruction. but from that point on, the union is running almost entirely on their own supplies. and these four successful corporations have been able to corner a majority of that market following the civil war contracts. with those contracts drying up, more and more of the money that's coming in from purchasing agents is directed to these four, and they control more and more of the supply of u.s. government contracts as well as the civilian market because they got to bigger during the war. in many ways you can ask what's the application of this. there are applications for tactical historians or for historians of resource policies.

tactically the confederacy is going to rely on a very consistent product from its own powder works for 3 million pounds of powder. but another 2 1/2 million pounds of the powder the confederacy uses during the war are going to come through the blockade. that blockade powder usually isn't the best powder england has. it's the surplus powder. much of it is damaged. that powder is going to be worked into ammunition casons particularly in the eastern theater along with the high quality powder. so, who knows what you're shooting on a given day? the difference that's coming through the government can be up to 10% or 15% of your velocity. think about artillery views. i'm shooting an enemy a thousand yards away, so i set a one second fuse. if my velocity is only 900 meters per second instead, my frs shells are blowing up a hundred yards in front of where i want them to.

or that lower velocity can be the difference between a naval cannon like a baxley cannon or the alabama versus the kearsarge where they'll claim bad quality powder is one of the principle reasons the alabama isn't able to defeat the kearsarge. the question is what country is 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 the production of this dirty, difficult, dangerous good. we decide to be england throughout our history. we make exceptions to that in the revolution when our supplies are cut off, during the war of 1812 and the embargo, and for the confederacies case, during the civil war. it's not that it's impossible to be self-reliant, but self-reliance comes at such a massive cost over the alternatives of external supply that it's not supportable for a large army for a long period of

time. and as soon as the necessities for self-reliance go away, the u.s. army turns back to supplies of imported raw materials and we become a world looking army once again. in a way, america could never cut itself off because the good which provides our security, the good which provides our livelihoods, the good which allows us to build railroads or mines comes from abroad. those ties to the world are why gunpowder remains so important both in this era and in the study of u.s. history. thank you so much for your attention. >> thank you very much for your explosive talk. >> love it. >> but as far as thomas jefferson being against having saltpeter underneath the capitol with that acting as air

conditioning, you totally destroy the fact that thomas jefferson was in favor of small government because i can't think of a better way of having small government than putting saltpeter under the capitol. >> fair enough. >> i'm curious as to if you look at the environmentalism of the first international treaty we had was regarding -- first international treaty was regarding birds. so, you look at bird guano and the guano islands act. there's a very good exhibit at the american museum of -- the smithsonian museum of american history. >> i stole the pictures. >> yeah. i recognized that one as far as did you go to that one and the one on the mound. one thing that's interesting is it seems to me that environmentalism which is never talked about, environmentalism,

is that it's very much connected to the warfare. if you look at sweden, they prevented the cutting down of oak trees because oak trees were necessary for the war effort. so, you see this here. i'm kind of curious if you see that elsewhere. also the selling of urine in -- back in the middle ages was also tied to -- always used for tanneries is what we hear. but what you're telling me is that was probably also tied to gunpowder. i would be curious as to your comments on that as well. and in 1957 there was an afghanistan geological survey that identified the rare earth metals in afghanistan. i think it's one of the reasons that we're there now. were there any additional surveys done in india previously that caused them to know that hey, this is there. we also saw that in the middle east as far as the rothschild as well and baku and elsewhere. so, that changed our foreign policy 20 years later. they got the jump start on that. >> okay. i'm getting three really good questions here. i'll try and answer them in order. the question of guano is the

first one. the guano aspect of this is absolutely fascinating. guano is one of the big commodities that's going to be pulling americans into the pacific world in this time period. the guano island act isn't originally targeted at providing supplies of gunpowder. the first research that produces practical guano based powders isn't performed until 1857. guano island act is produced in 1856 and it's a major play for millard fillmore. what's so interesting about that is the duponts have been investigating the process for making guano into gunpowder as early as the 1830s and simply found no economic incentive for doing it. what begins to change by the time you get to 1857 is a much larger market for blasting powders which they can do economically with that powder and additionally as pointed out during the civil war the loss of the british supplies as a potential issue with true british neutrality in the war.

i think it's fascinating. i can't directly see the conservation being linked to the protection of sea birds. the biggest reason why is that fresh sea bird guano isn't going to give you what you need to make gunpowder. so, a lot of the guano islands are going to be wet islands. that'll be places like johnson. those have too much water to be able to produce really good gun powder grade bird poop. the places that make good gun powder grade bird poop are like off of chile. most of those are claimed by other nations that we're trading with. the reason is for enough nitrate to build up in the soil it has to be protected from water. these are areas where it's incredibly arid but also has large populations of sea birds. so, those fall a bit outside the original treaties. in a way, conservation is a counterpoint to the ethos of the

men manufacturing gunpowder during the embargo period or during the civil war. there's an anticonservationist ethos. it's a very gold rush ethos when you read their writings. they see a good market for this product of caves and they want to extract as much of it as quickly as possible even if it's inefficient with the view that there will always be another cave. mammoth gave and saltpeter gave are almost denewted of soils by the time you get to 1812 and 1813 which is part of the reason of the closures. they could have put the stuff back. they could have left the bats alone for a few days, and they probably would have had a more sustainable business model on that. but that was never the goal because they want to make as much money as possible before trade reopened with england. the people producing saltpeter weren't necessarily the people who had incentive to maintain a long term stable supply for the

united states government in case of war. and it's interesting how duponts almost show more of that conservationist ethos to the people of saltpeter saying we should leave the caves alone until we need them and let them regenerate which is the stance they began taking in the 1830s. i think it's fascinating how it's not the people utilizing the resource that want to preserve it. it's the people one or two steps down the chain either the duponts who want to manufacture powder out of it or the u.s. government that wants the asset which allows them free maneuver in the u.s. policy. another question was buying and selling of urine. what i can find from research is that there is definitely buying and selling of urine going on in the german states by the time you get to around 1545. that's also when i can find evidence of it in england with henry viii attempting a bunch of experiments using a german manufacturer who he imported to england to attempt to set up german-style niter beds. there's a market there but it's difficult to quantify. the french works on the other hand don't appear to be purchasing urine. they appear to be using run off and sewage from paris as primary

supply. they also don't appear to be buying straight ogs. they appearing to using awful from tanneries and slaughter houses as their primary source of animal waste. it's interesting seeing that aspect where waste becomes a commodity. and i think you definitely see traces of that. but there's so little of it preserved in the historical record from the early german experiments. >> as i understand it, chile, peru, and bolivia had a nasty little war over islands of guano. did the united states government get involved in this in any way? >> so, i don't believe that the u.s. was directly involved the in the guano war, but i know with had naval warships observed it. one thing that's going to happen though is by the time the guano war occurs, the u.s. started shifting its powder production away from black powder. part of the reason why i end my research with the civil war most times, there's about a five year, ten year period after the civil war where the u.s. army is

shooting off extra powder they built up from stocks in the civil war. following that time period, we start to see new powders entering the market. putray b begins to enter production in the 1850s. it's pretty common by the time you get to the 1860s and 70s. cordite enters in the 70s as well. there's a shift away from the military importance of these powders. i know the military is using smokeless powder by 1873. there's in a way less incentive to keep investing in the technology and fighting wars over it as we begin to have alternate technologies that provide that role. plus trade relationships with britain are pretty good following the end of the civil war, so there isn't that incentive to diversify away from the saltpeter that we saw throughout the other periods

where the chilean supplies were prioritized. >> yeah, can you tell me the -- what was the relationship between disease and these niter beds and wherever they were, especially in the 16th century? they didn't really figure out the cause of cholera until victoria's time. >> they did not, but there was one critical thing that kept on that relationship for disease. so, when you set up a niter bed, traditionally you don't want any of the niter to leak out. but the niter is incredibly soluble in water. so, the way these niter beds were set up is they almost always had an impermeable clay base under the beds to stop it from leeching out. they had a roof or tarp placed over them to prevent water from being able to come in and affecting the niter. so, in a way niter beds weren't producing a large amount of run off during their actual stationary time. now, in order to extract the saltpeter, well, you had to take earth from the niter bed, leech it, and boil it. so, the run off that was then

put in streams as a result of these niter beds or dumped on the ground was at least boiled too which probably cut down on the disease effects. there's a number of accounts of people saying how horrible it was to work at the niter beds from the confederate niter bureau, carrying around large amounts of urine, turning this matter day after day but they don't have too much in firsthand accounts that points to disease burden that i could locate. >> thank you for your service to the nation, sir, and thank you for your briefing tonight. my question is concerning thomas jefferson. did he continue his interest in making gunpowder after his presidency when he left the government, or did he do that as secretary state and as president? >> you know, it's interesting, he actually kept at it throughout his life. but he had somebody else to do the gunpowder manufacturing for him. thomas jefferson remained close with the dupont family throughout his life.

pierre was a correspondent of his. there were several dozen letters in his papers of him discussing saltpeter manufacture. he had an interesting relationship with pierre's son who established the dupont family. part of the reason i say interesting is going through thomas jefferson's papers i get this constant feeling that irenee is trying to bribe him. there are so many points that irenee is attempting to send him new gunpowder. or new gun powder testing devices. he sends him a bunch of scientific instruments for measuring gunpowder. and then keeps -- thomas jefferson keeps complaining he hasn't received a bill yet for all the things he's received. the duponts also maintain a sideline as traders with france during this time period through the early 1800s and they provide thomas jefferson a lot of his wine cellar. their trading agents in france are the ones doing a lot of the

purchases while also purchasing the duponts their machinery with beneficial rates to napoleon who wants to set up a refinery as a thorn in the british side. jefferson has correspondents throughout the 18 hundreds. as you all know he was a prolific builder. so, his mills were constructed with powder and he had to be absolutely sure he found the right powder. so, he has all kinds of correspondents investigating the technical properties, asking which will be best, recommending different corning, and things like that. he remained an enthusiast if not a direct producer throughout his entire life. >> major, sir, why isn't disk three talking about the sportily nonsense? i listen to your training tape, s3 training tape that you made when you were a lieutenant in anabar province. and that's excellent.

i think it is online and everyone should listen to that. again, thank you -- >> wasn't in anabar. you've got the wrong lambert. there's a few of us running around. i think you have greg lambert. >> yeah, but i know that, but i think there is a tape that you made of 2003-2004 about s3. i think it's online. but anyway, thank you for your service. >> absolutely. >> i would like to talk about the marble man quickly. >> okay. >> marble man is idolized in the point and general mcchrystal in his offices had the marble man's picture. essentially there's no question that the marble man is a competent -- the most competent tactical leader, but in terms of

in an age of mass armies, how well is an army executed, the mundane functions of logistics, field sanitation, and medical operations are managed personnel furlough and legal requirements was and remains as critical as a battlefield brillance. while mccullen -- yeah. quickly. while mccullen was known for his overcautious maneuvers, he was also gifted trainer, organizer/manager, qualities much appreciated by soldiers and established the foundation upon which the army of the potomac was built. sources of supply dependent upon supply, fragile transportation networks, and his personal inattention remained less effective than they needed to be. if the south had all this gun powder, why wasn't it getting to

the people necessary? and in terms of the north, the main problem with the north seems to be personnel. they did not have people. they needed people. can you answer that question? >> sure. absolutely. you know, i think the part that i have the most to contribute on that is why isn't the south's gunpowder getting to where it needs to go and why does it not seem to do what it's supposed to do when it gets there. i think that's a fascinating question in a lot of ways. part of the problems the confederacy centralizes all their production in augusta. from a bureaucratic standpoint, as a guy who sets up armies or guidelines, that works perfectly. i have one center. i can be sure they're producing a consistent good. i can control it tightly and all of my supply lines run from this one place. the problem is my supply lines then. i'm entirely dependent on rail transport to get my gunpowder to my armies. and i'm entirely dependent on this imported raw material because i'm never making enough

on my own to be able to get that gunpowder to those armies. so, i have to fill the gaps in a way. i fill the gaps in my own production of the high quality good with whatever works its way through the blockade or whatever people are able to make in their basements 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 projectile is going can do to how far it hits. and you see those changes repeatedly with confederate artillery. there's become this entire historiography asking why is confederate artillery not shooting as well as union artillery. mcclellan gets a lot of credit for using the things he does. lee gets credit for using infantry. but his artillery takes back burner in many ways. part of the reason why is that inconsistent quality. it's nearly impossible to make good fuses, to train well, or know how far your rounds are

going to go when you shoot with low quality powder. and the powder isn't sufficient. remember i told you it was going to be 8 1/2 thousand pounds of powder just to be able to equip an army. the problem is in one engagement you're going to shoot out a field army's worth of that, almost 300,000 pounds. but 300,000 pounds is a lot to move. in all five years, the confederacy is only producing 3 million pounds. you've just shot off a 10th of everything you can produce in a single battle. and how long is it until the next set of powder gets in? how long do you have? the union can draw on multiple producers on a robust transportation network and if dupont doesn't have the powder, then hazard has the powder. if nay don't have the powder, oriental has the powder. with this robust unit of powders, the union is able to sort out the supply. if you're lee, you're depending on these shipments coming from augusta periodically. but they may not come. they may not be there when you need them. they may already be allocated.

after a battle, you've shot off all the powder in your cartridge boxes, all the powder in your casons, and you're waiting for that replenishment. it's that gap that explains the confederate powder shortages and the quality problems when they use less capable powder to fill in the gaps. >> you mentioned josiah gorgas, the head of the effort to get the gunpowder. there was a gorgas in the building of the panama canal, either the engineer or the doctor. the doctor, okay. is there a relation there? >> i don't know off the top of my head. i'm sorry. i really should. especially being from west point where george washington goethe is buried. i would have to look that one up though. i know -- lots of times my cadets follow me because i never give the confederacy enough

credit. if we think about the confederacy and the things they achieved, they built an armament production from scratch that produced high quality technologically advanced weaponry, sometimes more advanced than the union. but it questions our narrative of what the confederacy was if he admit that in a way. people like to think that the confederacy was about personal freedom, decentralized, all these other myths built up about it. in actuality they have a weapons productions system that's producing high quality modern goods but entirely directed by the government whereas the union is the group that's relying on individual initiative and these individual companies in a less controlled way to produce weaponry. >> thanks for a great lecture, major. i've been to reenactments, and one of the things you see in reenactments is not only the safety procedures for handling

the powder, but also just the smoke it creates. talk about the smoke on the battlefield problem and if there was anything you could do in the manufacture process that would reduce that smoke so you could see more than 50 yards. and then if you think this is an obscure subject, anybody who's ever been to broadway or seen the production of 1776 as a movie or on broadway will know there's a song between the john adams character and the abigail adams character that just talks about saltpeter. so, it's actually -- >> really? >> yeah. it's in the cultural relevance. so, the next time you see the movie, you'll get a whole song about the thing. but talk about the smoke aspect of it. >> sure. the smoke aspect. black powder is very different from smokeless powder. many of you have shot modern rifles or shotguns. the big reason why is that in smokeless powder, it's smokeless. the reason why it's smokeless is that the materials that make up smokeless powder are almost completely transformed into a gas as a result of the powder burning. black powder doesn't do that. instead, black powder has an accelerant and a fuel. the accelerant makes the fuel

which is the charcoal and sulfur burn faster, but it doesn't completely combust it. as a result about 50% of the black powder charged is going to come out as soot and cinders and as the stuff that makes the dark black powder smoke. now, the way that you minimize the smoke is by making the powder with the right proportions as close as possible. you have to have exactly enough oxidizer to burn all of the saltpeter and all of the sulfur because unburned or smoldering material, stuff that's burning slowly because it didn't have enough oxygen to burn quickly, is going to create more soot and smoke. that said, 50% of the charge is still going to come out as cinder no matter what you do. the other thing you can do is you can attempt to minimize the amount of water in powder. very commonly if you see a lot of soot or sinders in your powder, it means your powder is somewhat damp.

that was often a result of poor glazing. very well glazed powder has a coat of graphite that repels water. poorly blazed or manufactured powder would absorb lots of water. absorbing the water makes it smokier and less powerful. as a result you could see reductions of 10%, 20%, 50% of your muzzle velocity using projectiles fired by the weapons using the wet powder during the civil war. that matters because think about a springfield rifle. springfield rifle has muzzle velocity of 1,100 meters per second. because that has a really strong arc to its trajectory. as people like earl hess have said, about three feet above the level you're aiming at. if you're using slower powder, that arc becomes much more pronounced. you'll need a higher lob to hit a target with more dead zone or your round is going to fall very short and has a very arcing

trajectory so you have little chance of hitting a target. so, poorly manufactured or smoky powder is a very good indicator that you're not going to hit anything if you fire with it. it was one of the key things they attempted to prevent. i will say as a re-enactor, you're probably pretty lucky. i've done a few talks with reenactors before. typically they're using a cannon charge for a six pound cannon that's only about an ounce of powder. the rule used for civil war armies is you want a quarter of the size of the round you were firing. so, that ounce charged they use to make the smoke should be about a pound and a half charge if you were firing service ammunition using that cannon. so, even though the powder might have been a little bit worse and a little bit smokier, particularly if we're talking about confederates, you should be burning five or six times as much is of it as your civil war re-enactment. so, think about what that would do to the smoke problem. it's part of the reason why so many of the civil war battles are so confused and so many

people involved in these battles say after three or four rounds we couldn't see anything. so, i think that's an interesting mathematical problem to bring up. that's sort of what they did. they focused a lot on moisture, on composition, on glazing. >> my question is even if we can draw a parallel now to the rare metals, i saw a documentary. i understand the u.s. government gave away a big mine, i think the clintons, somewhere, i don't know where, but chinese bought this mine. and if you have any information about it, maybe can you draw a parallel? >> i'm not sure quite what mines we're talking about. are we talking about the local production of saltpeter sources? so, what we saw there was the u.s. government would initially

purchase an interest in some of the saltpeter refineries. but they really focused on controlling the imports of these goods. they would purchase or contract for the purchase directly of saltpeter raw materials from companies like the east india company or mine operators and then store that in centralized warehouses in places like philadelphia or at west point itself which had a major refinery and then distribute that material as a way to control production rather than directly purchasing mines or owning the companies that made the powder. but they always maintained the stocks of strategic resources. rather than mine produces, i think the equivalent for us is the strategic petroleum reserve. it's the good we know we don't have enough of in a way and the government decides when prices are high enough and it needs to release this key material in order to support u.s. economics or industry or diplomacy. in many ways the saltpeter filled this reserve in a way that's essential in this period. >> last question. >> yeah, i know in the later -- well, earlier napoleonic period,

big problem with cartridges and both for musket and cannon is that a lot of the charge was basically wasted because it's not really directed at any one particular decision, direction. and also of course there's a high chance of a misfire. so, i wonder if there are any technological changes in, like, the construction of the cartridges themselves that, you know, increase the odds of not having a misfire or direct more of the force in the straight ahead rather than in all directions? >> well, so for a blasting charge, that's when you would worry about it going in all directions. and so tamping technologies had developed. one of the nice things about the soda powder used by the duponts after 1857 is that it had a finer grain. it was relatively easy to force into the nooks and crannies of areas they were blasting. that said though, ignition is what your question comes down to and finding better ways to ignite. the biggest thing that's going to happen is a technological change from 1840s and '60s and

infantry weapons will switch over to mercury comes down, hits the percussion cap and a small amount of contact explosive inside that cap goes down into the charge and ignites it. that was a far superior system in terms of the amount of flames produced and the impermeable abilities. the friction primer was manufactured by the same arsenals we look at. the duponts and others had a sideline manufacturing them. flint locks were used to initiate cannons. the friction primers on the other hand would use a pressure compound together with a pirite.

the powder got better at igniting, and as they got better at manufacturing it. there weren't any technological changes to the powder grains themselves to make ignition easier. it was primarily a question of powder technology. thank you. >> the cities tour is exploring the american story. as we take book tv and american history tv on the road. in cooperation with our spectrum cable partners this weekend we take you to missoula montana. montana's second largest city sits in the western part of the state. in the heart of the northern rocky mountains. >> we see bears here all the time, particularly in the fall

when they're out looking for both wild and domestic fruit in the valley. the state of things for grizzlies and humans in the west is at a crucial moment where we have to decide how much space we're going to make for these wild animals. particularly difficult wild animals like a grizzly. >> join us saturday at noon on c-span2's book tv for this and other offerings. and sunday at 2:00 p.m. our look continues on c-span3's american history tv. >> smoke jumping started in 1939. the goal of a smoke jumper is to parachute into wildfires where it's inaccessible to other firefighter resources. we're jumping these fires in the wilderness and keeping them from becoming massive wildfires. >> the c-span cities tour. exploring the american story every first and third weekend each month as we take book tv and american history tv on the road.

>> american history tv products are now available at the new c-span online store. go to c-span store.org to see what's new for american history tv and check out all of the c-span products. this week on american history tv, author and historian gary gag ger analyzes the differences among the three major civil war theaters. here's a preview. >> evidence abounds on how people on both sides thought about the eastern theater. confederates focussed on lee and his army because lee and his army supplied almost all the good news they got from the battle field. by the end of 1863 lee and his army functioned much as the most important national institution. the one to which confederates civilians looked to gauge their chances for success in their effort to establish their slave

holding republic. it was also the primary impediment to crushing the rebellion. l lincoln said a splendid record in the west including shy low and the capture of new orleans and the capture of nashville and the capture of memphis, all that great success in the west, seemed to count for little as far as the europeans were concerned. it seems unreasonable the pthd complained to a french diplomat that a series of successes extending through half a year and clearing more than 100,000 square miles of country should help us so little while a single half defeat should hurt us so much. that half defeat being the performance at the seven days. >> tune in friday at 8:00 p.m. eastern to learn more about major civil war theaters with historian gary gallagher.

you're watching american history tv only on c-span3. next a discussion of the role of women in politics since the 1920s both behind the scenes and as elected representatives. new deal era political appointees and politicians barbara jordan, and nancy pelosi. american history tv moderated this session at the organization of american historians' annual meeting in philadelphia. >> good morning, everyone. welcome to this morning's discussion a round table on women wielding political power. american history tv on c-span3 every weekend is happy to coordinate with the organization of american historians to moderate this panel di