American Rifle - Alexander Rose [60]
The army, for its part, was not impressed in the slightest. As part of its efficiency drive, its engineers and ordnance experts had become fixated on numbers. Driven by the search for scientific certitude, they desired nothing less than to quantify, standardize, classify, assess, and analyze new weaponry, its capabilities, and its effects. The greatest of these soldier-technologists was Major Alfred Mordecai (1804–87) of the Ordnance Department. The Mordecais were an old German-Jewish family long settled in America; his father, Jacob, had served as a sergeant of, coincidentally, a rifle unit during the Revolution.37
At West Point, Mordecai excelled in mathematics, especially differential and integral calculus, and relished his courses in “Civil Engineering & the Principles of Machines.” As he was graduated first in his class, Mordecai was allowed to select his field of specialty. Like many other stars, he chose the Corps of Engineers and then joined Ordnance. Distinguishing himself from the outset, Mordecai was given command of the Washington arsenal in 1833, then Frankford in 1836, then Washington again, and finally Watervliet (New York) in 1857. In 1854 he was made major.
Mordecai’s prewar career was devoted to the principles of interchangeability, standardization, testing, and production, as well as to refining the army’s appreciation of military science. He did his most memorable work at the behest of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, who sent him and two colleagues (Major Richard Delafield and Captain George McClellan, future commander of the Union Army) abroad to observe the Crimean War and to survey the state of European armaments and military organization.
Mordecai’s subsequent report, Military Commission to Europe in 1855 and 1856, is a landmark in military literature. Even at the time, it was considered so important that it was published by order of Congress.38 Its most striking aspect is Mordecai’s fascination with the minute variations between the types of weapons issued by each nation to its soldiers, and their almost infinite complexity and splendor. To him, the differences—imperceptible to the uninitiated—between, say, the Hanoverian seven-grooved rifle-musket, the Hanoverian eight-grooved rifle, and the English two-grooved rifle, or the precise degree of deviation between shots fired by Swedish and Nor wegian breech-loaders—were endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful.
His report is a masterpiece of unbiased scholarship, carefully weighing the pros and cons of each system, compiling intricate tables to demonstrate contrasts and similarities, tracing every historical variation in bullet design back to its original source, and motivated above all by the belief that if a given variation proved unsuitable to its surroundings, it would eventually disappear and be replaced incrementally by ones more adaptable.
Mordecai’s grand vision of the origins, efflorescence, and evolution of the rifle and its projectiles was the martial equivalent of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection; not coincidentally On the Origin of Species was published in 1859 to worldwide acclaim and Military Commission to Europe less than a year later. By linking the evolution of weaponry to Darwinism, Mordecai helped inspire a tradition of interpreting rifle development as a line of progression moving endlessly upward. Thus the matchlock naturally gave way to the wheel lock, which was superseded by the flintlock, inevitably rendered obsolete by the superior percussion lock.39
In truth, science and technology rarely march so neatly forward. The number of false starts, strange