civil war cannon, info please

[John Kepler]

Without question Vern, but a lot of it went to the very foundation of the Confederacy....States Rights!

Unlike the Federal forces, the Confederate Gub'mint didn't own those guns, the STATES did, and in some cases (militia groups), the individual gunners!. Once a battery was organized and equipped by a state or a community, it was pretty much inviolate! E. Porter Alexander tried on NUMEROUS occasions to re-organize the various hodge-podge of guns in his batteries in 1862, only to start gigantic sh*t-storms with the state governors, particular John Letcher of Virginia and Joe Brown of Georgia over the attempted THEFT of state property by the central government! It was Robert E. Lee, then military adviser to Jefferson Davis that quietly told Alexander that the artillery re-organization he proposed was simply a political impossibility, and that he'd better cook up a way to work with what he had. Porter then did the best he could, organizing Batteries with as many similar weapons as he could get away with. Yes, it was a logistical nightmare....but then it was only one of many such handicaps the Confederate Armies were saddled with. This single example of military idiocy gives a great deal of validity to one of the epitaphs of the Confederacy, "Died of a Theory!"