American Rifle - Alexander Rose [69]
The sixty-six-year-old Ripley was born in Connecticut in 1794, entered West Point in 1813, was commissioned a second lieutenant of artillery after graduating a mediocre twelfth in a class of thirty, and was promoted to first lieutenant in 1818. That is the sum total of our knowledge of Ripley’s first twenty-four years of life; he steadfastly refused ever to provide editors of encyclopedias or biographers with any other details. Ripley felt that such matters were irrelevant and wished to be judged solely by his military accomplishments.
In 1818 we gain our first glimpse of Ripley’s mettle. During the Seminole War the lieutenant received an urgent requisition order from a high-ranking officer, which Ripley, as he proudly declared, “refused to comply with, on the ground that it had not reached him through the channel pointed out by the regulations.” General Andrew Jackson (for it was he who had made the requisition) was livid at this insolence. A message was sent. If Lieutenant Ripley did not instantly fulfill the order, Jackson “would send a guard to arrest and bring him into camp, and there hang him on the first tree.” Ripley blinked and “promptly complied.” Only on a few other occasions would he back down, at least without fighting a ferocious rearguard action.
Ripley’s saving grace was his efficiency and dogged adherence to duty. General Winfield Scott, later commander of the Union forces, thought Ripley had “no superior in the middle ranks of the Army, either in general intelligence, zeal or good conduct.” In 1832, as a reward for his sterling work, Ripley was allowed to transfer to the Ordnance Department. In 1841 he was granted the plum post of superintendent of Springfield Armory and immediately began refashioning it after his own image. Ignoring a slew of lawsuits and the effigies of him burnt atop the armory’s flagpole, Ripley converted workers to his own upright creed of Episcopalianism and fired those who subscribed to subversive newspapers. The armory’s grounds, which had become overgrown, were laid out symmetrically according to the best military principles, a verdant simulacrum of Ripley’s neat and tidy mind. That mind even reduced the average cost of producing a rifle from $17.50 to $8. 75.
Soon after the guns fired at Fort Sumter, Ripley arrived in Washington and was elevated to the chieftaincy of Ordnance.76 On April 24, 1861, he entered for the first time the dingy, cramped Winder Building on 17th Street, the wartime headquarters of the Ordnance Department (or Ordnance Bureau, as it was often called). The clerks shuffled to attention as he shimmered by. Papers were piled up higgledy-piggledy on the dark heavy desks, and wooden models of various guns were scattered around. The disorganization offended Ripley’s sensibilities, and he quickly instituted a complex set of procedures to impose order.
Order, but not necessarily efficiency. Under Ripley, papers were no longer piled but were neatly stacked, and the model guns were placed tidily on a special desk; but he preferred to generate red tape rather than cut it.77 His unfortunate staff found themselves engulfed by interdepartmental memoranda, dictated missives, forms to be filled out in duplicate and triplicate, signatures and countersignatures. Ripley, who was becoming an avid Washington turf warrior, was apparently less concerned with increasing the number of Ordnance officers to conduct experiments, run the arsenals, and arrange contracts than with enlarging his staff of filing clerks. Between 1860 and 1863 the number of officers rose from 41 to 45, but that of clerks from 8 to 36, and even then Ripley complained there were too few to handle all the paperwork.78 At one point he became obsessed with the lovely, neat “hand” of one Private