| The following is quoted from Bruce, "Virginia Iron
Manufacture in the Slave Era," published in 1930. The book
references and partially quotes letters to and from the Tredegar
Iron Works which are now too fragile to be allowed to be seen by
researchers. Should the letters be found in other locations, the
quotations will be updated. Partially legible copies of a few of
these letters have been seen and confirm the thrust of the below
quotation. |
| |
| pp. 362 - 364 |
| That the rich border fields were
available merely for local use was swiftly demonstrated. Not only
did freight rates rival the price of the pig iron, but it was
uncertain whether the metal, after it had been started, would ever
reach Virginia or even Georgia. Scotch pig iron and other supplies
purchased at New Orleans could be sent with comparative ease up the
Mississippi to Memphis and trans-shipped from Memphis by railroad
via Corinth, on the northern edge of Mississippi, to Chattanooga in
southern Tennessee. Pig iron from Tennessee and well as Alabama
could be forwarded to Florence on the northern border of the latter
state and run up to Chattanooga. To this point Sam Tate and C. W.
Ross controlled the railroad. But unfortunately the sum of all the
railroad presidents between Richmond and Chattanooga could not match
Tate and Ross in executive ability. The Chattanooga junction should
have offered a choice of transportation to Richmond by way of
Knoxville in eastern Tennessee and Lynchburg, or via Atlanta and
Augusta, Georgia. By dint of persuasion, tact, and epistolary
bombardment the Tredegar firm succeeded in getting the chiefs who
controlled the four separate roads between Memphis and Lynchburg to
agree to charge two cents the ton on every mile. Transferred to
canal boats at Lynchburg, iron could be brought from the mines to
Richmond at a minimum cost of eighteen dollars the ton, an expensive
but a possible rate. But so much time was lost in bringing the iron
through east Tennessee that Anderson and his partners turned to the
southward and longer route via Atlanta and Augusta. By November,
certain that this was the more successful of the two ways of
transportation, they urged the presidents of the connecting roads to
grant them a two-cent rate. They did not cease, however, to exert
all the pressure they could muster upon the executives of the more
northerly route to induce them to bring their metals into Virginia.
{Numerous letters to the various RR Presidents
from September 9 to November 19, 1861, Tredegar Letter Book (MS)}. |
| Meanwhile, pig iron, zinc, tin, and
copper from "the West" which by this time should have been dumped in
the Tredegar yards, lay hung up at Chattanooga. |
| "We hope our pig metal will reach here
before the war closes," wrote the company to Colonel Tate at Memphis
about the middle of October. "But this is doubtful as you can [send
it] no farther than Chattanooga." {J. R.
Anderson and Company to Colonel Sam Tate, Memphis, October 15, 1861,
ibid} |
| As for the greater part of the iron
shipped from Georgia, nobody knew what had become of that. In a
letter of September twenty-seventh to Colonel R. L. Owens, President
of the Virginia & Tennessee Railroad Company, the Tredegar people
told him that, though they had railroad receipts dated August second
for two hundred tons of pig iron purchased from Doctor Lewis of
Georgia, they had received only twenty tons. Weeks later Anderson
who had become a brigadier general and was stationed at Wilmington,
North Carolina, left a subordinate in charge one day and discovered
side-tracked at Wilmington 150 tons {23 car
loads} of the lost Scotch pig iron from New Orleans on which
a bill of $3600 for transportation had rolled up
{$20 per ton}. Thus after eight dollars
the ton was paid for carriage from Wilmington to Richmond, the
freight charge on this pig iron from New Orleans amounted to
thirty-two dollars the ton when money was still within the normal
rating. {J. R. Anderson and Company to Colonel
R. L. Owens, Lynchburg, September 27, 1861 and to Colonel Sam Tate,
Memphis, November 9, 1861, ibid} Some time in December the
various supplies from South and West reached the Tredegar, but not
before the delay had forced the Tredegar firm to seek a new policy, |
|