American Rifle - Alexander Rose [56]
These men had learned their good habits from General Winfield Scott’s four-hundred-page General Regulations for the Army of 1821, once called “the first comprehensive management manual published in the United States,” whose chapters exhaustively covered every facet of army life and procedure. As Congress sometimes still suspected the army of being an imposition on civil society, the Regulations focused on instilling financial accuracy, personal accountability, and individual probity, and thus it laid down exact methods of compiling monthly, quarterly, and yearly reports on performance targets and cost-effectiveness, as well as budgetary breakdowns, supply bottlenecks, personnel assessments, and inventory figures. These were pored over in Washington, and inefficient or lazy officers were weeded out, and instances of corruption severely punished.17
Such diffusions of technological and managerial knowhow had profound implications for the development of the rifle. Between the 1790s and the 1840s the general emphasis in weapons development had been not on making firearms more lethal but on making factories more efficient at producing them. From the mid-nineteenth century, however, innovators applied an array of new techniques and technologies to firearms development. Moreover, the American market and the managerial revolution offered the enticing possibility of profits and fame to talented men who had previously been confined to working in government armories for government wages. No longer beholden to the superintendent, the clock, the War Department’s edict, or the master armorer’s whim, they could work alone or with their business partners to find ways of breaking the technological stranglehold held by ball-and-powder ammunition and muzzle-loading firearms. In so doing, they transformed the rifle into the American weapon par excellence.
During this period of fierce ferment government arsenals and private weapons manufacturers took diverging paths. For a mixture of economic, political, and logistical reasons, the arsenals insisted on manufacturing muzzle-loaders, whereas their private competitors mostly saw a future for breech-loaders. By 1860 there were twenty-four major gun-making businesses; just six of them made traditional muzzle-loaders, but of the eighteen others (including Colt, Remington, and Smith & Wesson), no fewer than fifteen concentrated on making advanced breech-loading guns, including revolvers and repeating rifles that relied on a magazine to feed newly invented metallic cartridges into the chamber.18
How and why had this happened? The Ordnance Department, which had once been in the forefront of nurturing homegrown technological innovation, had begun looking to Europe for inspiration. This transatlantic shift is a significant reason why, after John Hall’s death, further official interest in breech-loading declined in favor of a new French idea called a “rifle-musket” that used an innovative type of projectile: the conoidal minié bullet. In short, the competition between muzzle-loaders and breech-loaders pitted two advanced technologies against each other, not, as one might intuitively think, “backwards” or outdated muzzle-loading technology holding out against the futuristic, and allegedly superior, breech-loading system. The choice was never as simple as that.
The rifle-musket’s origins lay in the absence of a French John Hall. Abroad, breech-loaders had retained their traditional reputation as gas-leaking, underpowered, easily fouled contraptions. The whole idea of opening the breech to permit faster loading was regarded as an evolutionary dead end in firearms development. The most promising way forward, the French thought, was to retain the muzzle-loading method but enhance performance by concentrating on