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