WI Josiah Gorgas Remained Loyal to the Union?

Anaxagoras

Banned
IOTL, the Confederate war effort during the American Civil War was largely the brainchild of one brilliant man, Josiah Gorgas, the Confederacy's chief of ordinance. It was he who created, basically from scratch, the factories and foundries which produced the war material necessary to keep the Confederacy fighting until 1865, and he was also very influential in the organization of blockade running. His organizational genius was absolutely vital to the Confederate war effort, and it was largely through his work that it can fairly be said that the South never lost a battle because it lacked sufficient rifles, cannon and ammunition.

But Gorgas was actually from Pennsylvania. He decided to go Confederate because he had married a girl from Alabama. What if Gorgas had remained loyal to the Union?
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
Any takers? Anyone at all?

It seems to me that if Gorgas' talents are denied to the Confederacy, its war effort will be severely curtailed vis-a-vis OTL, and that the Confederacy might well be brought to its knees a year or more earlier than it was IOTL.
 
Any takers? Anyone at all?

It seems to me that if Gorgas' talents are denied to the Confederacy, its war effort will be severely curtailed vis-a-vis OTL, and that the Confederacy might well be brought to its knees a year or more earlier than it was IOTL.

Depends on if anyone in the Confederacy can replace him.

I don't know enough on the specifics of his work to know how unique he was.

But I'd wager on it being crippling - the Confederacy barely made do into 1864 with his incredible efforts, anyone even otherwise-good-but-not-this-good would see things fall short much more drastically.
 
In addition to weakening the Confederacy, Gorgas could render value service to the Union. Meigs was superb as quartermaster, just imagine what he could have done with the help of Gorgas.
 
Confederate armies really will be beaten for having no ammunition against Union armies with plenty of ammunition in a much shorter war where the Confederacy economically collapses over at most three years. The CSA had nobody to replace Gorgas, as it was his visionary nature that let the CSA develop a lot of its Deep South industrial basis on which it survived the early Western disasters. Without that when the initial string of defeats starts the Confederate armies are going to be sending Tsarist-style waves of men with broomsticks at cannons and rifled muskets and in 1860s America that attitude will endure as long as it did in Tsarist Russia: not very long at all.
 
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