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:
“Upon the whole, necessity is something, that exists in the mind, not in objects; nor is it possible for us ever to form the most distant idea of it, consider’d as a quality in bodies. Either we have no idea of necessity, or necessity is nothing but that determination of thought to pass from cause to effects and effects to causes, according to their experienc’d union.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“Come, dear children, let us away;
Down and away below!
Now my brothers call from the bay,
Now the great winds shoreward blow,
Now the salt tides seaward flow;
Now the wild white horses play,
Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)