"This splendid biography rescues George Washington Rains from unwarranted obscurity.
It also provides the best examination to date of the Confederacy's effort to guarantee a
reliable supply of powder during an escalating war. On both counts, it deserves
to find an appreciative audience."
--Gary W. Gallagher, Nau Professor of History Emeritus, University of Virginia
and the author of The Enduring Civil War: Reflections on the Great American Crisis
eBook coming later this summer.
Click HERE to read the Introduction.
Click HERE to see the Bibliography.
Don't read this book unless you want your understanding of the Civil War to change radically, because it will.
George Washington Rains was a West Point graduate, engineer, combat staff officer, inventor, and entrepreneur whose visionary genius impacted the course of the Civil War. Rains lived five distinct lives, but it was his fourth, as a Confederate officer working in the shadows alongside generals, politicians, and business leaders, that changed history. The Indispensable Man is his life’s story.
In the summer of 1861, Rains left his wealthy Northern family to accept an extraordinary assignment with the new Confederacy. In a private meeting with President Jefferson Davis in a hotel suite—recorded here for the first time—he learned a shocking truth: Confederate gunpowder reserves were “scarcely sufficient for one month of active operations, and not a pound was being made throughout its limits.” Many forts and important positions had no ammunition at all and there was nothing to send. If pressed, the Confederacy would collapse for want of powder.
Davis tapped Rains to create from scratch a massive powder works “of sufficient magnitude to supply the armies in the field and the artillery of the forts and defenses.” The survival of the new nation hinged on his success. Making military-grade powder at scale was one of the most exacting industrial challenges of the era. Working with remarkable independence and technical mastery, Rains conceived, built, and managed the Confederate Powder Works in Augusta, Georgia—an industrial achievement unrivaled in the nineteenth century. In doing so, he helped shape Confederate strategy and changed the entire course of the Civil War.
Rains’s simultaneous and overlooked efforts in the Western Theater in 1861—heretofore unknown to historians and students alike—supplied Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston’s command with powder and ordnance, for as Rains wrote, “he had not sufficient ammunition at that time for an extended skirmish.” These immense but unheralded accomplishments worked in tandem with Davis’s strategy to hold the Union at bay by hiding the South’s fatal weakness until it could fight a prolonged war. Embedded within this story lies a deeper historical question that reshapes our understanding of the war’s first year: how much did the Lincoln administration know about the Confederacy’s crippling vulnerability, and why did it fail to act on what it knew?
Author Theodore P. Savas spent nearly four decades examining primary sources—most presented here for the first time—to craft a deeply researched and vividly written study of an astonishing man and his oversized impact on the Civil War, while at the same time challenging long-held assumptions about the conduct of the war itself.
And this was just one of Rains's five incredible lives.
The Indispensable Man blends biography, strategy, logistics, and narrative suspense to restore one of the conflict’s true unsung heroes to his rightful place in American history. Once you close the final page, you will see the Civil War in a wholly new light—and agree that George Washington Rains was, indeed, an indispensable man.
ADVANCE REVIEWS
“Many little-known individuals played a significant role in keeping the Confederacy alive—none more so than Col. George W. Rains, who met with President Davis early in the war to craft a strategy to provide the time and space needed to build the Augusta Powder Works. The startling production of tons of powder a day in the mills Rains established changed the course of the war. In The Indispensable Man, Theodore P. Savas presents a rich and well-rounded portrait of a man with enormous responsibility and matching dedication. The path-breaking primary research also presents startling new questions about how the first year of the war was conducted. It is not too much to say that ‘the powder maker to the Confederacy’ did more than anyone else to keep Southern armies marching for as long as they did. The Indispensable Man is itself indispensable for understanding the Civil War and the Confederacy’s amazing record of materiel and logistical supply.”
-- William C. Davis, Exec. award-winning historian and Dir. (Ret), Virginia Center for Civil War Studies
