American Rifle - Alexander Rose [38]
Stubblefield did not invent this system; he inherited it. As early as 1806, even before he appeared on the scene, making 4,000 muskets at Harpers Ferry required more than 140 men, while half that force at Springfield sufficed to produce the same number.9
While working conditions were certainly more pleasant at Harpers Ferry than at Springfield, the dark side of the merry old ways was everywhere evident. Corruption, back-scratching, and bullying were endemic, and the armorers fiercely resisted any kind of innovation or reforms. One went so far as to shoot a manager who hoped to introduce more regular hours.10
The old guard at Harpers Ferry would soon meet its match in a Yankee from Maine: John H. Hall.
Son of a Harvard divinity graduate, Hall was born in 1781 and in 1803 joined, as many young American males did, a militia company, where he developed a lifelong interest in firearms. Seven years later his mother (the father having predeceased her) died, leaving him a comfortable, if not lavish, inheritance that he invested in his own small carpentry firm making barrels, cabinets, and boats. In his spare time Hall tinkered with rifles, always mindful of what he had witnessed during his time in the militia. “Among those things which appeared to me of the greatest importance and particularly attracted my attention,” he later wrote, “was that of improvement in firearms regarding their accuracy and dispatch.” No mere technician he, Hall ambitiously dreamed of “render[ing] the issue of battle less dependent upon that perfect discipline, subordination, and unison, in which regulars may always excel a militia composed of all the citizens.”11
Whereas the Revolution had ended with the domination of European-influenced views on discipline and musketry favored by Alexander Hamilton, Anthony Wayne, and Baron von Steuben, Hall wanted more heed paid to the country’s militia traditions—even as he acknowledged that battles would henceforth be fought mostly between professional soldiers. His gun, Hall believed, would permit regulars to fight like militia.
Standing up for the militia was unpopular. For years the Federalists had attacked the very idea of civilian defense. In today’s more complex society, they emphasized, the division of labor into specialized tasks was critical: universal militia duty took men away from their occupations, detracting from their ability to produce goods and condemning America to the poorhouse.12
They thought it more sensible to make military service a paid, voluntary job. Warfare, no longer the province of amateurs, now required expertise in strategic theory and the scientific disciplines, an understanding of the logistics of supply, distribution, and stockpiling, and a mastery of intricate battlefield tactics. Part-time colonels and weekend sergeants were no longer up to the job of running a modern army.
The force of this argument was not lost even upon Thomas Jefferson, the high priest of republicanism, the militiaman, and the frontiersman. The United States, he knew, still faced French incursions in the Floridas and Louisiana, British adventurism in Canada, and Spanish machinations in the West. During his administrations (1801–1809), while still paying lip service to the ideal of a citizen army, he recruited no fewer than ten thousand men into a professional one and established the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to train the army’s nascent officer corps.13
Jefferson had concluded that the nation’s fundamental republican ethos now required for its protection an antirepublican institution. In this respect, his and John Hall’s views were identical. For Hall, arming America’s soldiers with an American rifle so that they could beat Europeans became a lifelong obsession.
Improving its “accuracy and dispatch” were his two immediate concerns. Enhancing the accuracy of a weapon already famed for