Born and raised in poverty, Gorgas had to put work before education as a youth. He won an appointment to West Point, however, and graduated sixth in his class in 1841. For the next 20 years Gorgas belonged to the ordnance service of the U.S. Army and was stationed at a number of posts. He eventually rose to the rank of captain and married an Alabama woman.

Motivated by his wife's sympathies and his own intense dislike of the abolitionists, Gorgas chose the Confederacy (Confederate States of America) when the South seceded. In early April 1861 he resigned his commission, moved to Montgomery, Ala., and was appointed chief of ordnance in the Confederate Army. Within a week the North and South were at war.

Gorgas' fame rests on his outstanding performance in providing arms and ammunition for the Confederate forces. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the South had few modern weapons and virtually no manufacturing facilities for making them. Gorgas simultaneously sought arms from abroad while laying the groundwork for internal production of rifles, small arms, bullets, powder, and cannons.

An extraordinary administrator, Gorgas by 1863 had several factories producing weapons, mills making powder, and mines supplying needed raw materials. And despite the Confederacy's constant financial and political problems, Gorgas kept the ordnance service running at high efficiency. In recognition of his ability to keep Southern soldiers supplied, Gorgas rose from major to lieutenant colonel to colonel to brigadier general by the end of the war.

After the collapse of the Confederacy in 1865, Gorgas took a job as manager of an Alabama ironworks and remained there until 1869. He then joined the teaching staff of the University of the South, in Tennessee, where he became vice-chancellor in 1872. In 1878 he was elected president of the University of Alabama, but he resigned a year later because of ill health.