American Rifle - Alexander Rose [117]
Anticipating that day, diehards managed to insert a clause into Ordnance’s 1873 conclusions judging that the “adoption of magazine-guns for the military service, by all nations, is only a question of time.” When a repeater was considered “as effective” as the Springfield and possessed “a safe and easily manipulated magazine,” it added, “every consideration of public policy will require its adoption.”92 The clause contained a sufficient number of get-out phrases, loopholes, tall orders, and ifs-and-buts to lull the board’s progressives into believing that nothing would ever come of it.93
Their certitude was shaken the following year when the longtime chief of ordnance, Alexander Dyer, died. Replacing him was his forty-seven-year-old assistant, Brigadier General Stephen Vincent Benét, who would serve until 1891. If there ever was a stereotypical Ordnance officer out of central casting, it was Benét. Born in Florida and something of a prodigy, Benét had read Blackstone’s legal Commentaries by the time he was thirteen and had attended the University of Georgia before heading to West Point. In 1849 he graduated third in his class and, like many Academy stars, was ushered straight into the Ordnance Department. Reflecting the department’s antebellum Francophilia, Benét translated Jomini’s Political and Military History of the Campaign of Waterloo from the French and was posted to the Watervliet and Frankford Arsenals. In his spare time he composed poetry, prefiguring the literary talents of two of his grandsons, who would both be awarded Pulitzer prizes. (The first, in 1929, would go to his namesake Stephen, for John Brown’s Body, an epic poem; the other, in 1942, to William, for The Dust Which Is God, an autobiographical “novel in verse.”)
Benét’s Civil War was not a glittering one: he never commanded troops in the field (automatically a source of suspicion among line officers) and spent much of the conflict at West Point as a captain teaching geography, history, ethics, and gunnery to cadets. Following a stint as commandant of Frankford, he was lucky to be bumped down only to major in the postwar downsizing.94
Benét trod a moderate path between the progressive and diehard cliques. As Dyer’s man, his reputation and career were invested in the Springfield single-shots, but he was also aware that repeaters were the coming thing. His personal preference, he said, would be to commission “a gun that will carry a few rounds in the magazine for a reserve supply, but will be ordinarily used as a single[-shot] breech-loader.”95 Notice (because the Winchester people certainly did) Benét’s assertion that any repeater would be restricted to carrying “a few rounds” as a reserve, essentially for close-range work. With that hint Benét was alerting the Winchester company that the standard Winchester, with its tubular cartridge capacity in the midteens, was never going to be accepted. Whereas the company had traditionally tried to cram as many cartridges as possible into their weapons, now the arms-maker was expected to reduce the number to fit army requirements.
To junk existing models and start over with a new design would have been too painful and would have hurt civilian sales, so Winchester reverted to form and simply sought out and bought out a competitor. Company agents sallied into the field to track down a firm making a suitable weapon. At the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, Winchester men were scouring the firearms displays when they discovered a prototype that they thought would perfectly fit the bill: a five-shot rifle whose magazine was located in the butt stock (as in a Spencer).96
This piece had been invented by an expatriate Connecticut machinist in his midforties named Benjamin Hotchkiss, once a formidable name in Civil War artillery-shell design but currently finding Europe more to his taste. In America metallic cartridges were old