American Rifle - Alexander Rose [54]
The Model 1861 Rifle
Chapter 4
THE BIG BANG
By the time John Hall died, the U.S. Army was beginning to resemble a business corporation, while U.S. companies were assuming the characteristics of an army. In the mid-nineteenth century this extraordinary melding of organizations and outlooks, dedicated, respectively, to making money and making war, combined to produce a “big bang” in weapons development that ultimately raised the rifle to supremacy over all other infantry firearms. Truly, proclaimed an excited magazine in 1858, “in no branch of scientific industry have there been greater strides in improvements” than in that of “weapons of destruction.” What had been scarcely heard of five years before, it continued, “already we have grown to consider . . . obsolete.”1 By the end of the Civil War, the debate was no longer between the rifle and the musket, or the breech-loader and the muzzle-loader. The breech-loading rifle had no peer, no rival. Put into hard numbers, between 1811 and 1860, inventors patented 135 breech-loading longarms, but between 1860 and 1878 alone, that figure ballooned to no fewer than 624.2
By the second decade of the nineteenth century, American soldiers and government officials realized that the army desperately needed to be placed on a new, professional footing if the republic was to have any chance of surviving the tough post– Napoleonic world of clashing empires, gunboat diplomacy, and ruthless acquisition. The resource-rich United States might be an infant, but it was heir to a vast fortune that its European uncles longed to steal. At the same time popular suspicion of standing armies had not yet entirely abated, and the army tried hard to prove itself a useful and progressive force in the domestic affairs of the great Jacksonian democracy.
To this end, the secretary of war’s annual report of 1828 took pains to explain that soldiers should not be seen “in the light in which standing armies in time of peace have usually been regarded, as drones who are consuming the labor of others.” The army was instead “a body of military and civil engineers, artificers, and laborers, who probably contribute more than any other equal number of citizens not only to the security of the country but to the advancement of its useful arts.”3 Henceforth the army was to be not only the sword and shield of the republic but its pruning hook and plowshare as well.
The armed forces provided private manufacturers with the venture capital, infrastructure, freely distributed government patents, tax exemptions, and talented brains that they needed to set up shop and compete with foreign firms. In order to oversee its burgeoning responsibilities to soldiers, the army also established distinct pay, quartermaster, judge advocate general, and medical bureaus, as well as specialized departments dedicated to Indian affairs, veterans’ pensions, and land surveying. In this respect the army provided the organizational blueprint for the corporations that were then gestating. The latter would acquire a phalanx of legal, pension, planning, pay, human resource, overseas, financial, medical, operations, marketing, inventory, strategy, and advertising departments run by a legion of vice presidents answerable to a board and chief executive. Their bureaucratic resemblance to a military’s chain of command, with ultimate authority residing in its senior general and his staff, was not coincidental.
War was business, and business, war.4 Indeed, the very first popular “business best seller” was a guide to efficient factory management written by the army captain in charge of Frankford Arsenal.5Accordingly, the ways of the army and its subsidiaries—in particular, the Ordnance Department, the national armories, and