| From the Southern Christian Advocate
(Columbia, S. C.) |
| |
| November 7, 1861 |
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| Iron for War Vessels |
| Our railroad iron comes from
Wales. Agents have to go over there and dance attendance upon the
manufacturers of it, and beg for credit in order to build our railroads.
The earnings of the roads, consequently, to the extent of paying for
such material, to go out of the country, which is made so much the
poorer thereby. If there were any necessity for this, any reason for it
in the nature of things, the money would be well spent. We cannot do
without the roads and without the iron for various other indispensable
purposes. We must have it. It is not an open question. But are we
obliged to go three thousand miles for it? On the contrary, we can reach
as good iron as any in the mountains of Wales by a ride of less than
three days. We can retain every dime for the purchase money at home for
all the iron we need for railroads, for iron-clad vessels of war, for
steam engines, and for all other purposes. Every body knows that the
mountains of North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas, not to mention any
other Southern States, are full of iron and coal, and various other most
valuable minerals. Read the following, which we clip from a Tennessee
paper: |
| Mineral Resources in East
Tennessee |
| The Chattanooga Gazette, of
the 17th, has an article referring to the mineral riches of the Eastern
division of our State, in which it is very truthfully observed that the
capitalists and men of enterprise in the South scarcely know that East
Tennessee is not a plateau -- that it is not a part and
parcel of our belt of cotton lands. Nine our of nine hundred perhaps
have heard of the towering mountains, which teem with ores of iron of
the best quality and inexhaustible quantity. There and
there only, in all the Southern Confederacy, copper is found in all its
invaluable richness. Besides iron and copper, also are found deposits of
lead, tin, gypsum, zinc and epsom salts or sulphate of magnesia, in such
quantities as to at least convince the geologist or even the man of
practical common sense, that there, after all, is the mineral El Dorado
of the South, if not of the world. |
| Could anything exhibit in a
clearer light the penny wise and pound-foolish, the suicidal, almost
ridiculous policy which we have hitherto pursued of sending to the North
or to England, of somewhere else, for such an article of prime necessity
in a State as iron? |
| What do our capitalists with
their idle money in view of such facts? What are they waiting for? Do
they propose to wait for peace, and then send to Wales again for iron?
In view of the necessities that are upon us, we submit that it is time
to inaugurate a different policy. It is demanded in any contingency, in
peace or war. We hardly know in which it would be the more important. |
| N. O. Bulletin |
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