American Rifle - Alexander Rose [62]
By 1830, accordingly, West Point was being subjected to numerous offensives by Jacksonians. “There is not on the whole globe an establishment more monarchial, corrupt, and corrupting” than the academy, exclaimed one. (Jackson’s opponents shot back that, yes, in fact there was: Jackson’s White House.) Of particular irritation—even to Jackson’s enemies, like Davy Crockett, who sided with him on this matter—was West Point’s creation of a European-style “military aristocracy”; but no less annoying was the habit of these elite graduates, educated at public expense, to leave the army after a couple of years for more lucrative occupations in private business.45
No breed of men more aptly represented the spirit of Jacksonianism than America’s gun-makers. Unlike the Ordnance and Engineers’ finest, the greatest among them—Winchester, Colt, Spencer, Hall—lacked formal higher education, and most had barely attended a school. The sum total of Christopher Spencer’s time, for instance, in any educational establishment consisted of twelve weeks at an academy for apprentices. Yet these men were collectively responsible for creating a true revolution in weaponry by perfecting the metallic, all-in-one cartridge and the repeater rifle.
Cartridges and repeaters, as concepts, were not new. In the early 1600s the warlike prince King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden directed his troops to carry preprepared cartridges made of a cylinder of paper (“cartridge” stems from the Latin charta, “paper”) containing powder and ball and twisted closed at both ends. In America and in Europe, some regulars adopted the practice and stored their cartridges in a pouch on their hip; it was thought to hasten loading and to avoid wasting precious gunpowder. For the next two centuries, while muzzle-loading smoothbores reigned, cartridge development remained static.
That began to change around the first decade or so of the nineteenth century with the advent of the metal-canning industry. In 1795 the Revolutionary French government offered a 12,000-franc prize for a successful method of preserving food for long periods. Nicolas Appert, a pickler, spent fifteen years trying to solve the problem. In 1810 he presented the emperor Napoleon with a solution to the problem of keeping his soldiers and sailors healthy over the months they would be away on service. After partially cooking the food, Appert sealed it in glass bottles with airtight corks, as one did with wine, and then immersed them in boiling water to kill the bacteria. In that same year King George III of England granted Peter Durand a patent for a similar idea to preserve food in “vessels of glass, pottery, tin, or other metals or fit materials.” Durand’s key improvement over Appert’s method was to use sealed, airtight metal cylinders instead of breakable glass and undependable corks. By 1814 even Napoleon, then cooling his heels on the isle of Elba and plotting his return to the helm of France, was eating tinned British food—a punishment nearly as dreadful as exile.
Meanwhile another Englishman, Thomas Kennett, had set up shop on the New York waterfront to can hermetically sealed fruits, vegetables, oysters, and meat. In 1825 President James Monroe granted him a patent to use “vessels of tin.” Over the next twenty years the American canning industry exploded as the hordes of prospectors and settlers heading out west brought tinned food (corn, tomatoes, peas, and fish mostly) along with them.46
It was a simple conceptual jump from using a metal container to hold food to using