American Rifle - Alexander Rose [61]
Mordecai was nevertheless too mesmerized by the fruits of his own research to realize this significant reality. To him, breech-loaders were patently useless. Referring to the breech-loading rifle newly issued to the French Cent Gardes, who served in the emperor’s palace, he said that their weapon might work tolerably well “under cover of a roof; but it would not seem to be adapted to use in the ordinary vicissitudes of military service.”40 Bafflingly, despite all his decades in the Ordnance Department, where he was undoubtedly familiar with the Rifle Works, the name of John Hall makes no appearance in this massive report; and neither does the Sharps. It was as if they, and their magnificent guns, had never existed.
Mordecai’s essential complaint about breech-loaders was that they fired rapidly. Rapidity resulted in waste and inaccuracy, which upset Mordecai’s painstaking compilations of barrel lengths, angles of elevation, and precise ranges. The ballistician in him objected to messiness and disorder—the unwavering indicators of mass firepower, terror, and the spattered guts of the battlefield that would characterize the awful war between the states that was soon to come.41
Mordecai, like other scientifically minded Ordnance men, was hypnotized by the prospect of achieving perfect accuracy. To them, that quest was the be all and end-all of rifle development, and other considerations—such as hitting power and celerity of fire—were distinctly secondary. By the outbreak of the Civil War the department was wholly concerned with neatly placing bullets inside a given area at long distance. Whether those bullets were capable of killing a human target at four hundred or more yards was disparaged as an irrelevant question.
Rather than encouraging technology to develop in diverging directions just to see where they led, the Ordnance Department’s policy from the 1840s onward amounted to pursuing a single-track strategy. Owing to their myopia, Mordecai and virtually the entire staff of the Ordnance establishment missed the most radical innovation of all: the all-in-one metallic cartridge and the consequent and lethal rise of the repeating rifle.
How could this development have escaped the brightest lights in the military firmament? It was the spirit of the age that ultimately told against them. Jacksonian America was a nation engulfed in violent, and often contradictory, tumult. At once “the people” were democratically exalted as the highest moral, intellectual, and political authority, while the individual “self-made man” (a term invented at the time) improved himself by sheer will, brilliance, and discipline. For such superachievers, tenacity, individualism, enterprise, and the arrogant defiance of conventional belief were the determinants of success. A self-made man got ahead by relying on his eye for seizable opportunities, his calloused hands, and his nose for profit.42 Business entrepreneurs and armorers who started their working lives as apprentices were practical fellows. Not for them the rigors of logical induction, syllogism, and mathematical analysis. Convinced that a refined intellect was inferior to the raw power of emotions, the narcotic delights of the senses, and good old common sense, they read men, not books.
The Ordnance Department, unfortunately, was completely out of step with the social and political hurricane represented by Jackson and his allies. Bewitched by European design and innovation and obsessed with which weapons the European governments were using to arm their troops, they wanted to introduce them to America. The department, too, was crammed with the cleverest book-learners, the elite of West Point’s elite, and the country