American Rifle - Alexander Rose [40]
The bold scheme was doomed to fail. Employing between six and eight men, Hall concentrated on manufacturing his patent rifle, as well as a series of pistols and smoothbore muskets based on his hinged-receiver concept, but he never managed to produce more than fifty weapons a year. His primary market was restricted to Maine, and he did a brisk business there during the War of 1812, when locals were threatened with British invasion. The Eastern Angus of September 8, 1814, commented—Hall was one of the paper’s major advertisers—that “at the present time of danger and alarm, when all are anxiously seeking means of defense of their families and firesides, we would recommend to our fellow citizens as the most effective defensive weapon for light troops in use, the improved fire arms made by MR. JOHN H. HALL.”16 At this time Hall married Statira Preble, a “tall, elegant woman” whose even temperament counterbalanced her husband’s “mad genius” character, and she proved a rock in the troublesome decades to come. No firmer advocate of Mr. Hall’s breech-loader could be found than Mrs. Hall, and a good thing too, for between 1811 and 1817, Hall had blown through his mother’s inheritance and was $6,000 in debt to Statira’s family.17
As bankruptcy threatened, Hall was sustained by a glimmer of interest from the War Department. Hall tried to obtain a government arms contract, despite Thornton’s poisonous whisperings in Washington to scotch it. Thornton, already frustrated once by Hall’s shenanigans, was determined not to lose out twice. He knew, as did Hall, that if the government stepped in to purchase his breech-loaders, the patent rights could never be sold off privately and he would wave goodbye to any windfall. This was because in an era of scarce capital and few banks, the government’s ability to provide funds to subsidize the cost of labor, raw materials, shop construction, and tools made it indispensable as a source of financial security, but its largesse came at the cost of permanently taking the vendor off the market. Gaining access to the charmed circle of sumptuous government contracts was exhilarating for anyone, but the price exacted was never-ending subservience to the vagaries of Washington politics and War Department infighting.
Hall, however, was caught desperately between Thornton and imminent financial meltdown. He wrote to Secretary of War William Eustis in 1811, but because the department had recently contracted for 85,200 conventional muskets, Eustis passed on funding Hall’s rifle. Two years later Hall tried again, this time with Eustis’s successor, John Armstrong. Armstrong passed his letter on to Colonel George Bomford, an uppercrust, West Point–trained engineer who was friendly with Andrew Jackson and serving as Colonel Decius Wadsworth’s deputy at a new agency, the Ordnance Department. Bomford was intrigued by Hall’s invention and asked him to send eight sample breech-loaders for trials.
Between December 1813 and November 1814 Bomford experimented with the guns and submitted a favorable report recommending their adoption into the service. He ordered two hundred rifles just before Christmas 1814. There was one problem: Bomford wanted the firearms delivered by April 1, 1815—an impossibility given Hall’s limited production runs and the need to handcraft each one. Disappointed, Hall was obliged to turn down the request, though he did spend the subsequent year refining his rifle design. Two key innovations that he introduced were adding an attachment for a bayonet and moving the priming pan from the traditional right-hand side to the top of the receiver so that, as he explained, “the powder in the pan is not blown violently against the left cheeks of all the right hand men [in an infantry line], and does not induce that injurious habit of starting [flinching] so injurious to marksmanship.”
Hall was intent on turning his experimental rifle into a viable replacement for the entire army’s muskets. Said Hall, men armed with his rifles would outshoot those carrying muskets because “they