moved men farther and faster than troops had ever been moved before. He had united two Confederate armies, his own and Smith's [Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith] and stood poised to change the direction of the war." In the fall of 1863 the Army of Northern Virginia sent most of Gen. James Longstreet's First Corps, Army of Northern Virginia via rail from Virginia to northern Georgia in order to reinforce Gen. Bragg's Army of Tennessee just prior to the Battle of Chickamauga. Approximately 15,000 men were transported about 900 miles to the Georgia theater of operations. This operation involved sixteen different railroads and took a total of seven days (9–16 September) for the entire corps to arrive in Georgia. In the last year of the war (1865), the Confederate railroad system was on the verge of collapse. The impressment policy of quartermasters ran the rails ragged. Feeder lines were scrapped to replace iron for trunk lines, and the continual use of ill-maintained rolling stock wore them down faster than they could be replaced. Foreign trade Export The Confederate States accounted for seventy percent of total US exports by dollar value. Confederate leaders believed that this would give the new nation a firm financial basis. Cotton was the primary export, accounting for seventy-five percent of Southern trade in 1860. The Confederate States entered the war with the hope that its near monopoly of the world cotton trade would force the European importing countries, especially Great Britain and France, to intervene in the war on her behalf. In 1861, Southerners at the local level imposed an embargo on cotton shipments—it was not the government's policy. Millions of bales of cotton went unshipped, and by summer 1861 the blockade closed down all normal trade. A small amount of cotton was exported through blockade runners. In the course of the war, 446,000 bales of cotton were exported to England and Europe. Ironically, the largest amount of cotton exports went to the United States. Most cotton however, would never be traded during the Confederacy's brief existence, either being destroyed during the war or hoarded until the end. Disputes over the proper tariff rate had been a sectional political issue between Northern and Southern states at one point almost leading to a prior dissolution of the Union. Southerners mostly opposed protectionist tariffs for finished goods, fearing they would lessen the value of their raw material exports, as