The Gun (68 page)

10.
A copy of the patent submission is reproduced in George M. Chinn,
The Machine Gun: History, Evolution, and Development of Manual, Automatic, and Airborne Repeating Weapons,
Volume I (Washington: Bureau of Ordnance, 1951), p. 18.

11.
“A New System of Artillery for Projecting a Group or Cluster of Shot,” lecture presented to the Royal United Services Institute on May 9, 1862, and published in the institute’s journal the following year, p. 377.

12.
Chinn,
The Machine Gun,
p. 36.

13.
The term was used in 1914 by Dr. Charles Dennis, a medical beat writer for the
Indianapolis Star,
writing under the pen name Dr. Oldfish.

14.
Indianapolis Daily Journal,
May 30, 1862.

15.
From “On Mitrailleurs, And Their Place In The Wars Of The Future,” by Major G. V. Fosbery, Her Majesty’s Bengal Staff Corps,
Journal of the Royal United Service Institution,
1870, p. 543.

16.
Charles B. Norton,
American Breech-Loading Small Arms: A Description of Late Inventions Including the Gatling Gun and a Chapter on Cartridges
(New York: F. W. Christern, 1872), p. 240.

17.
Lieutenant Skerrett’s letter to Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren, chief of the Navy’s ordnance bureau, is printed in full in Norton,
American Breech-Loading Small Arms,
p. 241.

18.
From Joseph Allen Minturn,
The Inventor’s Friend; or, Success With Patents: A Practical Book Telling How to Discriminate Between Valuable and Worthless Inventions; How to Avoid Mistakes and Disappointment; How to Patent and Protect Inventions, and How to Dispose of the Monopoly
(Indianapolis: Meridian Co., 1893), p. 83.

19.
Butler, who was nicknamed the Beast by the Confederacy, would become even more hated during Reconstruction. But long before that he was loathed. His military skills
were virtually nonexistent. Volume II of
History of North Carolina from the Earliest Discoveries to the Present Time,
by John W. Moore, 1880, summarized his reputation on p. 261: “Such had been his conduct that the Confederate government had, by proclamation, set a price upon his head and instructed its armies to show him no quarter, but slay him like a wild beast wherever captured.”

20.
Lieutenant W. W. Kimball, “Machine Guns,” published in
Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute,
November 16, 1881, p. 407. Lt. Kimball did not cite his source for this information, and historians of the Civil War have largely concluded that the Gatling gun was not widely used in the war.

21.
Paul Wahl and Don Toppel,
The Gatling Gun
(New York: Arco Publishing Co., 1965).

22.
Louis M. Starr,
Bohemian Brigade: Civil War Newsmen in Action
(New York: Knopf, 1954), pp. 222–24.

23.
General Ripley presents historians with a curious case. The nemesis of would-be arms dealers to the Union, he has been derided by many of Gatling’s chroniclers as a small-minded officer who missed an opportunity to field a decisive weapon against the Confederacy. Interestingly, he also resisted the introduction of repeating rifles, missing another chance to equip his army with more lethal arms. He is, in this portrait, petty, unimaginative, inclined toward bureaucracy, and unresponsive. Ripley had a singularly difficult job. He needed to sort through the issues of arming a force that swelled severalfold within months, all the while puzzling through ways to keep the weapons flowing into service compatible with one another, and managing the weapons’ disparate ammunition needs and soldiers’ training. John Ellis, in his acidic treatise,
The Social History of the Machine Gun
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), called him “an inveterate standardiser.” Given the circumstances, this seems a reasonable approach, although standardization also thwarted the fielding of valuable weapons at a time when arms development was proceeding at a rapid clip. Ripley was hardly the first armorer who fought for standardization of infantry arms; the philosophy he embraced has become a foundation of modern military training and logistics. Standardization is part of the core of the Kalashnikov system, and one of the reasons for its martial success and its emergence, in the eyes of those who would more fully regulate the international small-arms trade, as a global scurge.

24.
David Lloyd George,
War Memoirs of David Lloyd George, 1915–1916
(Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1933), p. 81.

25.
David A. Armstrong,
Bullets and Bureaucrats: The Machine Gun and the United States Army, 1861–1916
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), p. 10.

26.
W. Reid McKee and M. E. Mason, Jr.,
Civil War Projectiles II: Small Arms & Field Artllery, With Supplement
(Orange, Va.: Moss Publications, 1980), p. 8.

27.
The rumor was not substantiated and is offset by evidence otherwise. The Confederacy was no more disposed toward rapid-fire arms than the North. Whether the rumor was a product of war hysteria or a malicious plant by a competitor is unknown. But history would show that Gatling lived in the North, worked from the North, and saw himself as a man of Northern industry. No scholar of the Civil War has yet turned up evidence that he worked surreptitiously for the South, or offered his weapons for sale to the Confederacy.

28.
This letter has been reproduced in several books about machine guns, gunnery, and Gatling. Chinn’s work,
The Machine Gun,
is most useful, as it reproduced the original handwritten note, which shows Gatling’s own underlining for emphasis.

29.
William H. McNeill,
The Pursuit of Power
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 232.

30.
McKee and Mason,
Civil War Projectiles
, p. 10. The data on the velocities and penetrating powers of the era’s musket balls all come from this source, including the charts and text on p. 10.

31.
Frank R. Freemon,
Gangrene and Glory: Medical Care During the American Civil War
(Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Press, 1998), p. 48.

32.
Ibid.

33.
From Hannah Ropes,
Civil War Nurse. The Diary and Letters of Hannah Ropes,
John R. Brumgardt, ed., (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 1980), p. 68.

34.
Ibid., p. 88.

35.
Nugent and Palmer litigated over the American patent from 1861. Ager received British patents for the gun in 1866. If the possibility of riches from future sales motivated the disputes, it was a battle over not much. There were no riches to be had. By the end of the war, in 1865, the Repeating Gun had been discredited due to its frequent jamming.

36.
For many of the weapons described in these pages, a more thorough description of their design and operation can be found in Chinn,
The Machine Gun,
in this case, Vol. 1, pp. 37–40.

37.
Robert V. Bruce,
Lincoln and the Tools of War
(Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. 119.

38.
The prices were published by Lt. Col. Calvin Goddard, chief of the Historical Section of the U.S. Army’s Chief of Ordnance, in
Army Ordnance: The Journal of the Army Ordnance Association,
and were reprinted in
The Machine Gun: The Period of Recognition,
Ordnance Department, Washington, 1943.

39.
In fact, neither the Ager nor the Gatling were true machine guns, but Mills was the first to succeed in closing a sale of a rapid-fire weapon, and his sale presaged the widespread distribution of weapons of this sort in Europe and beyond.

40.
Kimball, “Machine Guns,” p. 406.

41.
Armstrong,
Bullets and Bureaucrats,
pp. 18–19.

42.
Test report of January 20, 1865, on file at Connecticut State Library, Record Group 103, Subgroup 12. Hereinafter referred to as “on file at Connecticut State Library.”

1.
From a letter to the Royal United Service Institute in 1875 by Captain Ebenezer Rogers.

2.
Copy of contract on file at Indiana Historical Society Collection.

3.
Quoted from a letter of July 14, 1866, from T. G. Baylor, captain of ordnance, to Major-General A. B. Dyer, the army’s chief of ordnance. In Norton,
American Breech-Loading Small Arms,
p. 243.

4.
Quoted from the report of three officers to Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy, May 30, 1868, in Norton,
Breech-Loading Small Arms,
p. 244.

5.
Minturn,
The Inventor’s Friend,
p. 83.

6.
On file at Connecticut State Library.

7.
Tatiana Nikolayevna Ilyina,
Voyenniye Agenty i Russkie Oruzhiye
(
Military Agents and Russian Weapons
), (Saint Petersburg: Atlant, 2008), pp. 75–83.

8.
Peter Cozzens,
Eyewitness to the Indian Wars, 1865–1890: Conquering the Southern Plains
(Mechanicsburgh, Pa: Stackpole Books, 2003), p. 69.

9.
Gatling’s System of Fire-Arms with Official Reports of Recent Trials and Great Success.
This undated brochure, printed by C. W. Ames in New York, is on file at Indiana State Library.

10.
The test results are published in Norton,
American Breech-Loading Small Arms,
pp. 268–74.

11.
Copies of correspondence are on file at Connecticut State Library.

12.
Fosbery, “On Mitrailleurs,” p. 547.

13.
Letter from R. J. Gatling to General John Love, February 3, 1868. Gatling told
Love that he expected the French to buy his guns. “The best of the officers are of the opinion that the 1-inch Gatling gun will supercede the ordinary field guns now in use,” he wrote. “If such should be the case, then making guns must soon grow [into] a large business.”

14.
Cited in Norton,
American Breech-Loading Small Arms,
p. 238.

15.
Brevet-Colonel Edward B. Williston, “Machine Guns in War,”
Army and Navy Journal,
May 20, 1886.

16.
Major General Beauchamp, from the transcript of remarks at the Royal United Service Institution after a presentation, “Machine-Guns and How To Use Them,” by W. Gardner. In Ordnance Notes No. 198, 1882, p. 7. That mitrailleuses were carted off no one disputes. It seems unlikely, however, that the quantity was 600; another officer noted that the year before the war, the French had 190 mitrailleuses.

17.
Kimball, “Machine Guns,” p. 413.

18.
A series of letters in late 1869 between the secretary of state for war in Great Britain and officers of the Gatling Gun Company provide details. On file at Connecticut State Library.

19.
Abridged Treatise on The Construction and Manufacture of Ordnance in the British Service,
July 1877, p. 262.

20.
Gatling’s System of Fire-Arms with Official Report of Recent Trial and Great Successes
(C. W. Ames, printer, circa 1874), pp. 6–7. On file at Indiana State Library.

21.
Letter from W. H. Talbott, August 31, 1871. On file at Connecticut State Library.

22.
G. A. Henty,
By Sheer Pluck: A Tale of the Ashanti War
(Glasgow: Blackie & Son, 1884), p. 197.

23.
H. A. Brackenbury, captain, Royal Artillery,
The Ashanti War: A Narrative Prepared From The Official Documents By Permission of Major-General Sir Garnet Wolseley,
Vol. II (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1874), p. 44–45.

24.
John H. Parker,
Tactical Organization and Uses of Machine Guns in the Field
(Kansas City, Mo: Hudson-Kimberly Publishing Co. 1899), p. 35–36.

25.
A full copy of the handwritten test report is on file at Connecticut State Library.

26.
Letter from R. J. Gatling to General John Love, October 26, 1873. On file at Indiana Historical Society Collection.

27.
Letter from R. J. Gatling to General John Love. August 1, 1873. On file at Indiana Historical Society Collection.

28.
Letter from Edgar T. Welles to General John Love, August 2, 1873. On file at Indiana Historical Society Collection.

29.
Letter from R. J. Gatling to General John Love, November 30, 1873. On file at Indiana Historical Society Collection.

30.
Letter from R. J. Gatling to General Love, November 8, 1873. On file at Indiana Historical Society.