American Gun: A History of the U.S. In Ten Firearms (6 page)

Rifle-muskets such as the Springfield 1861 and the 1853 Enfield quickly became the mass-produced standard infantry gun as the conflict revved up. By the time Lincoln went out that fine morning, both North and South were trying to get as many of them as they could. But there’s one thing every soldier knows: the quicker your reload time, the better your odds of living to fight another day. Ol’ Abe had spent a bit of time in the militia during the Black Hawk War, and I suspect that lesson was still fresh in his mind some thirty years later out on the White House lawn. The weapons he was testing were capable of firing several rounds before a soldier had to stop and reload.

The first gun Lincoln picked up was believed to be a Henry Repeater. It was a lever-action rifle that could reliably fire sixteen shots in stunning succession using a tube magazine that ran down beneath the barrel of the gun to the breech. It could be loaded relatively fast through an opening at the end of the tube.

The weapon had been manufactured by the New Haven Arms Company. New Haven had been purchased by a man named Oliver Winchester a few years before. Winchester was pretty wily for a Yankee; he’d bought the company for a song from two guys named Smith & Wesson when they hit financial problems in 1857. We’ll come back to Misters Smith & Wesson later.

Oliver Winchester had made his money manufacturing shirts. It’s said that he didn’t know all that much about guns, but he certainly understood a lot about manufacturing, which in mid-eighteenth-century America was more important. And he also must have been a good judge of talent, because he quickly entrusted a man named Benjamin Tyler Henry with improving the factory’s most promising but tempermental product, the Volcanic repeating rifle.

Henry made a host of improvements to the design, but the most important was arguably in the type of ammo it packed. The Volcanic repeater fired a Rocket ball. The bullet was similar to a Minié-ball, except that the hollow base was filled with powder, then sealed with a primer cap. The closed metallic cartridge gave the gun a complete piece of ammunition. Unfortunately, the small size of the bullet limited the size of the charge; the bullet didn’t have quite enough pop for the bloody but necessary business of killing an enemy on the battlefield.

Henry changed that by providing his repeater with a hefty rim-fire cartridge. His copper cartridge fit some twenty-five grains of powder behind a 216 grain, .44-caliber bullet. It had pop to spare.

Back at the target range near the White House, Lincoln was impressed by the Henry. The multi-shot, fast-loading rifle was a potential game-changer for the Union army. It took about half a minute to reload; a soldier could then squeeze off another sixteen shots as fast as he could jerk the lever back and forth. There were downsides—among others, you had to move your hand out of the way of the cartridge follower after a few shots, and the barrel got awful hot if you shot fast and long enough. Still, it was an exciting weapon with a lot of potential.

After firing the Henry, Lincoln gazed at the plank of wood he’d perforated with a contented smile. The repeater concept was sound, the execution good. Lincoln’s aide, William O. Stoddard, handed him a second weapon. This was a modified Springfield smoothbore musket that used a screw-on adapter to feed nine high-powered rounds into a breech, rather than a single round rammed down the muzzle. It was called a Marsh rifle, after its inventor, Samuel Marsh.

As the president was kneeling down to line up a shot, a voice began cursing loudly behind them. “Stop that firing!” bellowed a pissed off man in uniform. Trailed by four enlisted soldiers, the captain marched toward the two amateur civilian marksmen who were not only interrupting the peaceful Washington, D.C., morning, but were violating a presidential order forbidding shooting in the capital city. Swearing up a storm—cussin’ like some Navy SEALs I know—the captain reached his hand out as if to confiscate the guns and arrest the shooters. It looked like the Second Amendment was about to face its very first challenge in Washington, D.C.

Lincoln peered down the barrel and squeezed the trigger. Then, smiling shyly, he rose from the ground.

“Here comes the fun!” thought Stoddard, watching his boss get up. Or as Stoddard put it later, “Lincoln’s tall, gaunt form shoots up, up, up, uncoiling to its full height, and his smiling face looks down upon the explosive volunteers.

“Their faces, especially that of the sergeant . . . look up at his, and all their jaws seem to drop in unison. No word of command is uttered, but they ‘right about face’ in a second of time. Now it is a double-quick, quicker, quicker, as they race back toward the avenue, leaving behind them only a confused, suppressed breath about having ‘cussed Old Abe himself.’ His own laugh, in his semi-silent, peculiar way, is long and hearty, but his only remark is:

“Well, they might [have] stayed to see the shooting. . . .”

Abe Lincoln was a gun buff and a technology whiz. Other presidents before him—including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson—were highly gun-savvy, as were most Americans at a time when the nation was primarily rural. But Lincoln took presidential involvement with gun technology to a new level. Fiddling with another experimental repeating gun on his firing range one day, he shot off a few rounds, then announced, “I believe I can make this gun shoot better.” He produced a hand-whittled wooden sight from his vest pocket, clamped it on the rifle, and let loose at a piece of congressional stationery pinned more than eighty yards away. He hit the paper almost a dozen times out of fourteen.

President Abraham Lincoln (directly below flag) observes Union troops in front of the White House.

Library of Congress

Another time, Lincoln showed up at a target practice for the 2nd U.S. Sharpshooters, one of the few specialized Union marksmen units. He borrowed a rifle from one of the surprised soldiers in Company F and scored three good shots as the men whooped and hollered. A witness reported that Lincoln “handled the rifle like a veteran marksman, in a highly successful manner, to the great delight of the many soldiers and civilians surrounding.”

“Boys,” said the President to the cheering troops, “this reminds me of old-time shooting!” Now, that’s a commander in chief any combat vet would be proud to serve.

Lincoln was also a man who loved machines of all kinds. Abe liked to roll up his sleeves, get dirty, and take contraptions apart. He scoured magazines like
Scientific American
for the latest technology. He was the first chief executive to embrace telegraph communication. He personally heard pitches from gun inventors and entrepreneurs, tested products, reviewed plans and machinery, and battled bureaucrats. Abe pushed his underlings for research and development, threw his weight and opinions around like a seasoned CEO, and managed the equivalent of a multimillion-dollar firearms investment fund through the U.S. military. He was a venture capitalist of weaponry.

Lincoln seems to have admired the Henry Repeater he fired that spring morning, putting him in line with a lot of soldiers. As the war progressed, many would dig into the patched pockets of their woolen pants to purchase a Henry for themselves. Officers would outfit whole units with them, raiding the family treasury in hopes of giving their men an edge in combat. But Lincoln eventually turned his favor to a rival model—the Spencer Repeater. He did this even though his own experiment with the gun was something of a failure: Testing two models supplied by the Navy, he had one misfeed and the other lock up after a double feed. Reports by others who raved about the gun apparently convinced Lincoln that his experiences were just flukes, and so it was the Spencer’s manufacturer, Sharps, that got the prized Union contract to supply 10,000 repeaters later in 1861.

Named after its inventor, Christopher Spencer, the repeater was a marvel of both advanced design and (comparative) simplicity. Handling this weapon or even a replica today, you can sense the careful smithing as soon as you pick it up. It has weight to it, and when you move the trigger guard down, the smooth action of the metal components, all expertly fitted, reminds you of a fine watch.

Brimstone Pistoleros

The Spencer fired a .52-caliber metallic rimfire cartridge. Seven cartridges fit into its magazine, which loaded through the back of the weapon’s stock. Using an innovative dropping-block design and lever action, all seven rounds could be quickly and accurately fired. When you pulled down on the trigger guard, the breech opened and the spent cartridge was ejected. Push the guard back on up and the new cartridge slipped into place, ready to fly. Spare magazines could be kept ready for speedy loading in combat. Sharing parts with the single-fire Sharps rifle—another classic American gun—it was easy to manufacture, and proved very reliable in field tests and in combat.

But like presidents before and after him, Lincoln would soon find that executive power was often more theory than promise. Even though his War Department placed initial orders of 25,000 of the Marsh guns and 10,000 seven-shot Spencer Repeaters before the end of 1861, they didn’t reach Union troops. Or anyone else.

If I were writing this up as fiction, I might spin a yarn about a daring Confederate attack against the factory, complete with 1860s-style special ops work, fine explosions, and general pandemonium. But the Rebs had nothing to do with it.

No, a Yankee was responsible for sabotaging Lincoln’s plans to get modern technology into the hands of his men. And not only was he on the Union’s side, he was one of its highest ranking officers.

Head shed’ll get you every time.

James Ripley was an ultrapowerful bureaucratic monster, a cantankerous, backward-looking, sixty-seven-year-old Northern Army general. He was the chief of Army procurement, and he was a wizard of red tape, delay, and obfuscation. Truth be told, he was also a master at supply logistics and standardizing artillery ammunition, but he was an idiot when it came to guns. He hated breech-loading weapons, even the superb Sharps rifle, considering them “newfangled gimcracks.” And he absolutely detested repeating rifles like the Spencer Repeater. By his convoluted logic, soldiers would only waste ammunition with a multi-shot gun. He wasn’t crazy about the prices, either: he could buy good muskets for $18 each from multiple vendors, but a Spencer Repeater was $40.

Through the end of 1861 and much of 1862, General Ripley conducted a one-man mutiny of disobedience and delay against President Lincoln, General-in-Chief George McClellan, and many other officers and regular troops who were begging for breechloaders and repeaters. He refused to approve production orders, threw gun inventors out of his office, and repeatedly slow-tracked Lincoln’s orders. Lincoln couldn’t fire him, because Ripley had powerful friends on Capitol Hill. The delays and the threat of a patent suit sunk Marsh’s gun and his company, rendering him and his weapon a footnote to history. And what would have been the largest order for breech-loading rifles to that point was never fulfilled.

Ambrose Burnside leads Union forces at Bull Run, 1861. The blinding layer of smoke was typical of Civil War battles fought with black-powder muskets.