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By Root 1929 0

the differences between North and South at the time. Both had been established in the 1790s to ease the weapons-supply issues that had dogged the American forces during the Revolution, but from the beginning Harpers Ferry had been a major headache. Whereas Springfield benefited from its New England geography and a pool of business and artisan talent, Harpers Ferry began as a pork-barrel project, advised against by surveyors but pushed by George Washington, to aid local commercial development. Being closer to the new federal capital, the armory was subject to intense political pressure from whichever administration happened to be in power. It was distant from established roads, lacked natural resources, and every summer was stricken by devastating diseases that sent the armorers (many lured away from the gunsmithing workshops of Pennsylvania) to their sickbeds.7

A harbinger of the chaos to come was the Model 1803, the first official production rifle to emerge from Harpers Ferry and the first official U.S. military rifle. Before the Model 1803, the armory had made a small quantity of the experimental Model 1800, which was originally envisaged as a high-performance heir to the Kentucky rifle but actually seemed to have been designed by committee—and not a very competent one either. The weapon certainly looked a bit like the graceful Kentuckys of ages past, but it had clearly inherited the stout, heavy genes of its German Jäger ancestors. This unfortunate familial trait was mostly the result of the War Department’s insistence on a larger caliber and a much shorter barrel than the Kentucky, so that the weapon would be easier to clean and load. To compensate for its “sawn-off,” big-caliber specifications, shooters had to use very fine powder to burn off the charge. The price was that the gun kicked with a colossal recoil.8

The Model 1803 rectified some, but by no means all, of the 1800’s deficiencies and it remained an inaccurate weapon, at least compared to a customized Kentucky. As a by-product of its large caliber, it did enjoy significant knockdown power, while its short barrel made it easy to carry slung across one’s back through tangled forests. For these reasons Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark settled upon an advanced prototype of the Harpers Ferry Model 1803, fifteen of them to be exact, to equip their Corps of Discovery on its mission to extend the American frontier to the Pacific. Lewis and Clark also ordered basic Model 1795 smoothbore muskets for the army volunteers attached to the corps, as well as tomahawks and knives. The nine frontiersmen who accompanied the team refused, however, the Harpers Ferry rifles and instead carried their own Kentuckys as well as a host of Indian weapons. Clark himself had a personal weapon of which he was most fond: a specially made Kentucky “small rifle” with a tiny caliber of .33.

If it had been detailed to make limited batches of custom rifles, the Harpers Ferry armory would always have done a fine job, but it wasn’t: its task was to produce many thousands of them, and in that respect it was a failure. This was primarily owing to the way it was run. In Massachusetts the superintendent was the no-nonsense Roswell Lee, who was intent on making the Springfield Armory the most efficient, progressive, and economical arms manufacturer in the region; but for two decades from 1807 onward, Harpers Ferry was controlled by James Stubblefield, a man in whom patronage and paternalism were inextricably entwined.

In conjunction with the local gentry, which controlled the schools and stores, Stubblefield ran the armory as a personal fiefdom. He rarely bothered to keep accounts, he installed his relatives and cronies at every level of power, he contracted out work to whichever firms his friends owned, and any employee who dared rock the boat was shoved overboard. The oligarchical web of personal fealties and kinship at the armory became familiarly known as the “Junto.” Still, the armorers at Harpers Ferry were fond of their feudal master: unlike the hyperefficient Roswell Lee, Stubblefield