Cast Steel … and Civil Wars

“… Beaten, hammered, laughing blue steel … hear ’em laugh.” Carl Sandburg

left: William Butcher (English) …middle: Buck Brothers (American)… right: Hawes Patent Square (American), all ca. 1830–1850

Swords … and plow-shares (or chisels or axes or any number of implements whose function depends on taking and holding an edge through repeated continuous hard use) have much in common. Etymologically … cut, coulter, culture, culinary, cultivate … all stem from the same Latin root … cultus.

Carbon steel is a super-cooled liquid composed of particles of ferric carbide suspended in a matrix of iron. It has been around in a very limited way for perhaps a couple thousand years, arrived at through empirical processes that were mostly held secret by those who possessed them. The village blacksmith was an alchemist …capable of turning base material into something far more useful. Heat and hammer … quench and temper.

Damascus steel is made by repeatedly heating, hammering, and folding together two different pieces of ferrous metal, one harder one softer …building up many layers, much like a baker making croissants or phyllo dough. Damascus steel was brought to the Iberian peninsula in the 11th century, where Toledo became renowned for the quality of its swords. Properly done, Damascus steel produces a slightly serrated edge, good for cutting meat, not so much for cutting wood.

Do you need a tool? … or, do you want a weapon?

In the England of the early 1600’s, a gentleman soldier was obliged to procure his own sword (often at great expense) usually made either at Toledo or at Solingen. Around 1630, Charles I brought blade-smiths from Solingen, establishing them at Hounslow, just across the Thames from Windsor. As history has it, Charles had his head cut off with a good stout English axe a few years later. England then lapsed into Civil War, and the Hounslow smiths made themselves scarce …or at least less obviously German.

About a hundred years later, second quarter of the 1700’s, Benjamin Huntsman (very likely descended from the Hounslow smiths) “discovered” a method for making highly refined steel in graphite crucibles. Exposing the crucibles to the extreme temperatures of glass-making furnaces, Huntsman was able to heat the molten metal to white-hot, burning off impurities, and casting it into ingots in sand molds. Thus “Cast Steel”, and thus began the Industrial Revolution.

CAST STEEL — WARRANTED was for several centuries the hallmark of quality in the manufacture of everything from swords to sewing needles to hewing axes. It made English trade goods, and thus English trade, the basis of a global empire …from western Africa to the Caribbean to the American colonies, ultimately to India. Buffalo hunters prized their Green River skinning knives made in Sheffield.

Why does this matter?

Aware of their advantage, England had no interest in allowing the colonies to produce steel. The colonies were for the production of raw materials, such as iron and timber. During the eighteenth century, competent smiths emigrated to the New England colonies, and set up as makers of edge tools, primarily axes and chisels … using steel imported from the great industrial enterprise at Sheffield. American toolmakers were still using English steel well into the 19th century. They were, without exception, located in the northern states.

This placed the southern states at a distinct disadvantage. While they could purchase (at a premium price) edge tools from England or from their northern neighbors; aside from the creative efforts of local blacksmiths the southern states lacked the industrial enterprise with which to manufacture tools in quantity. They were also subject to tariffs on direct trade with other countries. In effect, the North was treating the South as a colonial enterprise.

As a native southerner, descended from poor white sharecroppers, I have spent an inordinate amount of time puzzling over why the South pursued secession. The answer is never as simple as we have been led to believe. Slavery may well have been the prime cause … it just wasn’t the only cause.

After the Civil War … “Reconstruction” … Northern industrialists greedily exploited the labor and natural resources of the South, with the collaboration of whites willing to serve a “Carpetbagger” government; maintaining power by pitting poor whites against poorer blacks. Names and faces may have changed, the paradigm remains essentially the same. Koch Industries owns Tom Cotton … Wal-Mart owns John Boozman. It’s no surprise that people in the South are pissed off … will they ever figure out why?