While Huse’s request to transfer to Ordnance was denied in 1853—ironically by then Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis—his abrupt defection to the South on the eve of the war earned him an Ordnance branch assignment with the Confederacy. Huse’s new position provided his uncle with an important ally connected to the highest levels of the Confederate government.
Here’s how it unfolded
In late 1859, Huse secured a leave of absence from the War Department after political pressure was applied. One man who exerted influence, militia officer, engineer, inventor and former U.S. Sen. Charles T. James of Rhode Island, was also a consultant to The Boston Associates, especially in its cotton milling concerns.
Huse traveled to Europe on an Ames-financed business trip to promote a rifled cannon invented by James to European governments. Huse spent most of his six months’ leave in England and France.
Huse returned to his home in Owego, N.Y, in May 1860. He contacted his uncle, explained that he was broke and unable to pay about $200 he had borrowed. He also expressed a desire to leave the military, albeit with some hope that he might be assigned to Ordnance. Soon thereafter, Huse received his long-awaited transfer to Ordnance—and then immediately declined it. The details of why he decided against the offer he had long desired remain a mystery. However, his career path thereafter offers a clue. About August 1860, he moved to Tuscaloosa, Ala., to oversee the newly formed military academy at the University of Alabama. The Ames Company was already selling arms to the state. In fact, Huse supplied the 90-some odd cadets in his new corps with all military equipage in record time in the fall of 1860.
Huse’s relocation to Alabama has long challenged historians to explain his conversion to southern sympathies. His dutiful and successful direction of the Academy, and loyalty to the state’s political interests, underscores his allegiance to his adopted state. But Huse may have also been working for his uncle, as evidenced by a September 1860 contract to Ames by the state of Alabama for 10 rifled cannon, presumably the new James pattern. Huse could have certainly influenced this purchase, though no known evidence connects him directly to the sale. His ability to quickly arm and equip his cadets also points to an active connection with his uncle.
Huse’s activities in Alabama led to his meeting with President Jefferson Davis in Montgomery just prior to the bombardment at Fort Sumter. The two men met the better part of a day. In Huse’s 1904 memoir, he feigns a lack of memory of the meeting details, the result of which was that Davis dispatched him to Europe to become the principal purchasing agent of military goods on behalf of the Confederacy. Davis, as former U.S. Secretary of War, would have been familiar with the Ames Company. Huse’s representation to Davis, outlining his relationship to Ames and his prior interaction with his uncle’s business would have no doubt influenced Davis’ decision to send Huse on this mission.
In his subsequent travel from Alabama to the Atlantic coast to board a vessel to Britain, Huse describes a head-snapping itinerary in his memoirs. He claims his travels took him to Canada via New York City and Buffalo, with a plan to catch a trans-Atlantic vessel out of Montreal. But he could not make that departure work. He wrote that he left Buffalo and ultimately crossed into New England and boarded a ship at Portland, Maine. While Huse indicates that he shipped his baggage to England from a New York City port, he decided against boarding the same ship. His apparent desire to become undetected as a Confederate may or may not explain his circuitous route. It is also possible that his elaborate itinerary was fabricated to cover up a visit to Chicopee which is on a relatively direct line from New York City to Portland.
A visit by Huse to his uncle would have paid dividends to both men. It is easy to imagine Huse being briefed on minutiae related to the weapons industry in Britain. Or Ames picking his nephew’s brain about Jefferson Davis and the state of the nascent Confederate nation.
What is certain is that by this time Huse had to have been aware of the military stockpiles of the Ames, Gaylord and Carter factories, most of which were intended for shipments south. According to Emerson Gaylord biographies published in 1879 and 1897, an agent arrived in Chicopee after the firing on Sumter and offered a premium to purchase leather goods. The agent could have been Huse, who would have wanted to secure these items for the Confederacy.
A Chicopee visit would have also been Huse’s last opportunity to meet with his uncle before crossing the Atlantic. Interestingly, when Huse arrived in England, he boasted that he would secure all the London Armoury Company weapons production for the Confederacy.
Over the course of the war, Huse moved an estimated 200,000 Enfield pattern rifles from England to southern ports. The Confederacy would have been hard pressed to prosecute the war without them. While Huse claimed to have acquired large numbers of guns from the London Armoury Company, very few Enfields with the Armoury mark are present on period shipping manifests and in modern collections of Confederate weapons. One theory suggests that Huse and Armoury management bargained their guns for lesser quality arms for the Confederacy.
Huse also attempted to purchase and ship gun-making machinery to a proposed arsenal near Macon, Ga. Using contacts from his Ames connections, he negotiated a deal, the terms of which remain murky. The machinery was reportedly manufactured by the English firm of Greenwood & Batley, which had furnished sheaves and pulleys accommodating the operation of Ames equipment at the Royal Small Arms Factory. However, it is unlikely that Greenwood & Batley had the capability to produce this machinery, and this is evidenced by their purchase of Ames gun machinery as late as the 1870’s. It is more probable that the machinery intended for Macon was decommissioned from the London Armoury Company, which was Huse’s recommendation to save time. The machines, valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars in period currency, were sent in 12 separate shipments to Macon. They never arrived. One fell to the blockade and no record of the fate of the remaining 11 survived.
Post-war, Ames sees another Southern opportunity
In the winter of 1865, Ames investigated the possibility of spending the season in Milledgeville, Ga., with his wife and daughter. Union troops under Gen. William T. Sherman had caused significant damage to the then Georgia state capital only a year prior. His Southern contact, William Mitchell, seemed incredulous that Ames would even consider such a destination. The trip never materialized.
One explanation as to why Ames had an interest in Georgia was perhaps a desire to reunite with the missing machinery intended for the Macon arsenal.
As it turns out, Ames had another goal.
Back in 1850, Ames left Massachusetts for a months-long business tour across the South to promote cotton manufacturing machinery. On its face, the idea of a weapons producer selling cotton-processing equipment does not add up. But Ames, by this time, had become closely connected to The Boston Associates, who in turn were keenly interested in expanding its cotton portfolio. A review of Ames Company documents reveals that by 1848, 220 of 300 employees were assigned to fabricating cotton machinery.
Ames intended to rebuild the destroyed cotton mills in Milledgeville. He finally did make the move in 1872, settling in Roswell, Ga.
Conclusions
Historians have claimed almost since the close of the Civil War that the antebellum Southern industrial complex had been meager at best. Their reasoning is supported by the fact that by 1865, Southern industry had been almost completely destroyed by Union military forces. Even the Lost Cause mythology recognized that the South’s industry was inferior to the North. Other supporting evidence points to the superior industrialization of New England, where cotton mills employed tens of thousands of men and women, and Great Britain, where roughly 20 percent of the 22 million populace earned a living from cotton production.
Recent research, however, presents a different picture. In his 2014 doctoral dissertation, Michael Sean Frawley of Louisiana State University analyzed the 1860 census and other sources. He found significantly more Southern industry existed beyond what the federal government reported in census documents.
During the decade prior to the 1860 census, Southerners had responded to a call by advocates to industrialize. Calls to adopt steam-powered mills and Ames’ 1850 business trip connect to this program. It is estimated that by 1860, the combined cotton production of the seceding states would have placed it in fifth place on a world ranking—and their capability was on the rise.
Ames contributed to this production by furnishing cotton milling machinery to known factories in Milledgeville and Macon. Ames pursued this activity on his own. It is noted that The Boston Associates were approached by advocates wanting to expand southern cotton mills, but they were not prepared to invest in the advancement of Southern commerce.
Southern slaveowners, wealthy as they were, are presented by historians as having preferred to convert their profits into more land and slaves rather than invest in industry. Thereby, slavery serves as the nexus from limited industry before the war to an industrial boon of the New South afterwards.
Southern cotton mills expanded in the 1880’s. The Dwight Manufacturing Company, established by the late Edmund Dwight, who befriended the Ames boys back in 1829, became involved in the Southern economy in 1895 and built a new mill in Alabama. The Dwight management closed their monstrous Chicopee mill in 1927. Such was the fate of all the New England cotton mills.
On July 19, 1889, Caleb Huse wrote to Jefferson Davis. It was their first communication since the surrender at Appomattox. Davis’ letters to Huse are missing, but documented in the papers of the ex-President. Huse’s reply to Davis survived. In it, Huse declared, “I am not disposed to talk or write about the ‘Lost Cause.’ I have not the time, or indeed the inclination.”
Huse’s allegiance to Alabama and the Confederacy is questionable in light of loyalties to his uncle and the Ames Company.
Davis went to his grave never knowing precise details of the role played by Huse. Davis didn’t live long enough to read Huse’s memoir, in which he described himself as “a Massachusetts-born man and of Puritan descent.” That pedigree held significant meaning to The Boston Associates, and no less for James T. Ames.
And what of Ames? He eventually left Georgia and returned to Chicopee, where his factories diversified to include sewing machine and bicycle parts. The sword business spun off into a separate entity in 1881 and continued until 1898. Ames died in 1883 at age 72. His death attracted little notice in the press.
The surviving Ames pike and documents lend credence to an argument that the Ames Company participated in the support of John Brown’s Raid that antagonized pro-slavery Southerners. Moreover, that the Ames Company materially assisted the South in its preparations for war. Lastly, that weapons machinery produced in the Chicopee factory at least indirectly supplied the Confederate military with rifled muskets during much of the conflict.
Were the events and actions simply coincidental and based entirely on opportunity as it presented itself, or were they deliberate activities engineered as elements of a larger plan?
Special thanks to Margaret “Maggie” Humberston, Curator at the Springfield Museums, for graciously allowing access to their Ames papers; Fred Gaede, for his “Gaede-grams” and their enclosure of Ames material from the National Archives; Ron Field, for providing the British military strength reported in 1860; Tim Prince, for his collaboration regarding British Enfield rifle production to the Confederacy; Kerry Gossett, and his associates, for tracking the paths of the agents who purchased items from Ames for Southern states and the Confederacy.
References: Davis, The New England States, Their Constitutional, Judicial, Educational, Commercial, Professional and Industrial History, Vol. 1; Van Slyck, New England Manufacturers and Manufactories, Vol. 1; Huse, The Supplies for the Confederate Army. How they were obtained in Europe and how paid for; Private and Special Statutes of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from May 1830, to April 1837, Vol. VII; Record of the Proceedings of the Board of Commissioners, appointed under the Act of the General Assembly of Virginia, passed January 21st, 1860, Entitled; An Act making an appropriation for the purchase and manufacture of Arms and Munitions of War, Library of Virginia Collections; Pitts, “The Alabama in the Civil War Message Board–Archive, Feb. 22, 2008, RE: 1860 Sabres by Ames Mfg. Co. Notes: Governor A.B. Moore report on arms purchased from Ames by Alabama in 1860. Joslin, “Manufacturer’s Index–Ames Manufacturing Co., Vintage Machinery.org; Iobst, Civil War Macon, The History of a Confederate City; Hoyt, ed., “Some Personal Letters of Robert E. Lee, 1850-1858,” Journal of Southern History, Vol. 12, No. 4 (November 1946); Ames Family Letters, Hargrett Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries; “Civil War Raids in Alabama and Caleb Huse, 1861-1865, Transcribed Letters Between Caleb Huse and Jefferson Davis, James Austin Anderson Finding Aid, University Libraries Division of Special Collections, University of Alabama; Wight, Some Old Time Meeting Houses of the Connecticut Valley; Official Records, Series IV, Volume II; James Tyler Ames Papers, Duke University Libraries, Repository Collections & Archives; Holland, History of Western Massachusetts. The Counties of Hampden, Hampshire, Franklin and Berkshire, Vol. II; Private and Special Statutes of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, for the Years 1849, ’50, ’51, ’52, ’53, Vol. IX; Cudd, The Chicopee Manufacturing Company 1823-1915; Brooks, “Role of the Massachusetts Textile Mills in the Industrial Revolution,” History of Massachusetts Blog, Jan. 9, 2017. Frawley, “More Than Met the Eye: Industry in the Antebellum Gulf South,” LSU Doctoral Dissertations; New Georgia Encyclopedia; Lozier, “Taunton and Mason: Cotton Machinery and Locomotive Manufacture in Taunton, Massachusetts, 1811-1861,” Dissertation, Ohio State University; Turner, “Terrible Swift Sword, The Edged Weapons of John Brown’s War on Slavery,” Man at Arms (December 2012); McAulay, “Dr. Maynard’s Secessionist Gun (1st Model Maynard),” Man At Arms (June 1990); Territorial Kansas, Online 1854-1861, A Virtual Repository for Territorial Kansas History, The University of Kansas; New York Times, April 10, 1864; Lewis, “The Development of the Royal Small Arms Factory (Enfield Lock) and its Influence upon mass production technology and product design (C1820-C1880),” Middlesex University Thesis; Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town: A Study of Chicopee, Massachusetts; Mitchell, “Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Civil War,” Dissertation, Boston University.
Ron Maness has researched the Civil War for more than 50 years. His primary research topic is the Ames Manufacturing Company and their pre-war operations. This article has been 30 years in the making.
