The Value and Necessity of Salt
Salt works were Midnight’s favorite targets. Vast quantities of salt were needed by the South to preserve meat, fish and other perishable foods; to cure hides; and to bolster the Southern munitions industry. The Union Navy’s systematic attacks on salt works seriously impaired the Confederacy’s ability to remain at war. Midnight’s most successful expedition began 1 February when a party landed at St. Andrews Bay. Three days later they returned to the ship, after destroying beyond repair several large salt plants and dumping tons of the precious chemical into the sea.
Midnight served at St. Andrews Bay through the end of the war. She sailed north early in July and was sold at public auction in Boston, Massachusetts, to C. H. Miller 1 November 1865.
Read more about this topic: USS Midnight (1861)
Famous quotes containing the words necessity and/or salt:
“No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man’s power is hooped in by a necessity which, by many experiments, he touches on every side until he learns its arc.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Unquiet wanderer
Draw the Glasnevin coverlet anew
About your head till the dust stops your ear,
The time for you to taste of that salt breath
And listen at the corners has not come;
You had enough of sorrow before death—”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)