American Rifle - Alexander Rose [239]
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29. On Sharps’s employment with Hall, see G. S. Henig and E. Niderost, Civil War Firsts: The Legacies of America’s Bloodiest Conflict (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole, 2001), p. 72.
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30. Scientific American, March 9, 1850.
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31. Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of Central Park in New York, traveled across Texas armed with a Sharps in 1853. He said that “at a single trial, without practice” he and his companions fired their weapons nine times. Quoted in L. A. Garavaglia and C. G. Worman, Firearms of the American West (1803–1865, 1866–1894) (1984–85; reprint Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1997–98), p. 1:242.
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32. W. R. Austerman, Sharps Rifles and Spanish Mules: The San Antonio–El Paso Mail, 1851–1881 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1985), p. 122. Some worried passengers might have gone a little overboard. Thus when in 1850 John Bartlett, the boundary commissioner charged with dealing with a Mexican-American border disagreement, left for the Southwest, his personal carriage was a wooden fortress on wheels (“what in New York is called a Rockaway”). From its ceiling hung a double-barreled shotgun, and to each door was strapped a large-caliber Colt six-shooter pistol. Bartlett and his companion (Dr. Webb) each carried a pair of Colt five-shooters, the driver was armed with two Deringer pistols, and close to Bartlett’s hand at all times was a Sharps. “We were thus enabled,” he wrote, “to discharge a round of thirty-seven shots without reloading; besides which, Sharp’s [sic] rifle could be fired at least six times in a minute. J. R. Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas . . . (1854; reprint Chicago: Rio Grande Press, 1965), p. 1: 48.
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33. Austerman, Sharps Rifles, p. 38.
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34. New York Tribune, February 8, 1856, quoted in W. H. Isely, “The Sharps Rifle Episode in Kansas History,” American Historical Review 12, no. 3 (1907), p. 548. On the boxes of “Books,” see pp. 552–53.
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35. R. O. Boyer, The Legend of John Brown: A Biography and History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), p. 111. Donors to the aid committees were sent a lithographed certificate quoting the Second Amendment, with two words in particular being highlighted: “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the Security of a FREE STATE the Right of the People to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” Isely, “Sharps Rifle Episode,” pp. 548, 553.
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36. Senate Report on John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid, June 15, 1860, 36th Congress, 1st Session, Report no. 278, reprinted as Invasion at Harpers Ferry (New York: Arno Press/New York Times, 1969), pp. 3, 7.
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37. Mordecai is an obscure soldier, and finding information about him can be difficult. However, the biographical details in this section mostly come from Mordecai’s useful memoir, written for his children’s edification, which is printed in J. A. Padgett, ed., “The Life of Alfred Mordecai, as Related by Himself,” North Carolina Historical Review 22, no. 1 (1945), pp. 58–108. The Library of Congress has many of his papers, though in subsequent numbers of the Historical Review, Padgett prints Mordecai’s private letters to his family dating from his time in Mexico. The sole detailed study of Mordecai’s official affairs is S. L. Falk, “Soldier-Technologist: Major Alfred Mordecai and the Beginnings of Science in the United States Army,” an unpublished Georgetown University Ph.D. dissertation (1959). A recent book narrates the interesting story of the Mordecai family (but deals cursorily with Alfred), and that is Emily Bingham’s Mordecai: An Early American Family (New York: Hill & Wang, 2003).
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38. A. Mordecai, Military Commission to Europe in 1855 and 1856, Senate Executive Document no. 60, 36th Congress, 1st Session (Washington, D.C.: G.W. Bowman, 1860). The report