Alfred Roman, The military operations of General Beauregard in the war between the states, 1861 to 1865

Of men willing to engage in the defence of their country Mr. Davis himself testifies there were many more than the government could arm. There were very many out of the army who were anxious to enter it, but for whom the government had no arms. Three hundred and sixty thousand offered their services to the government before it moved from Montgomery, at the end of May, 1861. In 1862 accepted regiments were encamped at Richmond which had been awaiting their arms for several months. The chief anxiety of General Albert Sidney Johnston at Bowling Green was to procure arms and men. Half of his troops were imperfectly armed, and whole brigades remained without weapons during the autumn of 1861. Importunate cries went up to the government from the West for the supplies which would enable patriotic citizens to defend their homes. Here, there, everywhere, the difficulty of the Confederate administration was the want of arms. The first Secretary of War, General L. P. Walker, after vainly urging the importation of arms by the hundred thousand, resigned, because it was determined by the President not to put into camps of instruction, for the campaign of 1862, the large number of troops on which the Secretary insisted.

2. In the procurement of a navy the Confederate administration was not more successful. An appropriation of ten millions of dollars in bonds, invested in cotton, would have enabled the Government to obtain a sufficient number of first-class steamships, to prevent a blockade; and such a proposition was actually made to it. When the East India Company surrendered to the Crown its control of British India it had for sale a fleet of swift and stout steamers, built for armament, to secure the Company's interests in the Indian seas, and for long voyages. These vessels, of great size and power (then recently built) were ten in number— four first-class, and six, for our purposes, scarcely inferior. They could have been bought in England at less than one-half the cost, and could have been equipped, manned, armed, and put on the coast of the United States within six months after the formation of the Confederate government ¹—that is, by August or September,