American Rifle - Alexander Rose [70]
Ripley drew Samson-like strength from his Ordnance background. Like Mordecai, he accepted as divine revelation the modern methods of interchangeability. Also like Mordecai, he believed unshakably in the efficacy and superiority of the muzzle-loading rifle-musket.
Ripley believed his task was simple. The Union needed to arm at least tens, probably hundreds, of thousands of volunteers and conscripts with a satisfactory firearm, and that firearm must be the rifle-musket—tried, true, and tested. Nothing else mattered, certainly not the imprecations of Winchester, Spencer, and the hordes of other non-Ordnance-approved amateurs all claiming to have invented war-winning, revolutionary weapons, and especially not these newfangled repeating breech-loaders with their metallic cartridges. When he eventually did get around to replying to Winchester and Spencer, Ripley was unmovable. He told Winchester that his Henry repeater was useless for war, despite its “singular beauty and ingenious design.” As for Spencer, his wasn’t the kind of weapon “which I would be willing to adopt for the military service.”80
Before condemning Ripley too harshly for his inflexibility, bear in mind his predicament. Swarms of inventors showed up at his office, all claiming to have conceived a miracle weapon. Some were well-meaning patriots, others hoped to make a quick profit, but a significant minority were simply cranks. A few of these souls were genuinely unhinged, such as Edward Tippett, a machinist who snowed the White House with rambling letters quoting the Book of Joshua and fantasizing about a gravity machine; one time President Lincoln, tired of him, scribbled on one such letter, “Tippett. Crazy-man.” Others were respectable businessmen or lawyers, outwardly well grounded and blessed with wonderful families, who had got hold of one Big Idea somewhere along the line and turned it into a mind-warping, monomaniacal obsession. And still others were merely dreamers, such as the man who proposed outfitting the army with “water walkers” (small watertight canoes that fit on a man’s feet), the investors who wanted soldiers to be encased in heavy metal body armor (perhaps not such a bad idea, and one given serious consideration until it was realized that unarmored troops thought wearers cowards), and the advocates of steam-powered “centrifugal guns,” a weapon that could fire four hundred bullets simultaneously, “enemy-slaughtering, far-shooting, spider-wheel-mounted, two-ounce-ball rifles,” and double-barreled cannons that fired two balls connected by a chain to scythe through the rebel ranks.81
Whereas Lincoln tended to treat inventors with good-natured for-bearance, Ripley was obnoxious to any who dared show up on his doorstep. Horror stories about Ripley’s behavior became common knowledge. Scientific American magazine blasted Ripley for his “rudeness and circumlocution of the rankest kind” and asserted that because of him “inventors are shy of presenting plans that have to be experimented upon by Government before acceptance, and the consequence is that the country suffers.”82
Within a few months of Ripley’s arrival at the Winder Building, governors and generals too were complaining about the haughtiness of Ordnance and about Ripley’s impertinent habit of ignoring their letters demanding guns.83 (His nickname became “Ripley Van Winkle.”)84 The editor of the Washington-based National Republican, whose inept brother Ripley had turned down for a patronage position in the department, roared about his “disdainful refusal to examine and adopt the improvements in arms and matériel by which the superior civilization of the free States could have put down this semi-barbaric rebellion.”85 Ripley ignored him too.
In response, Ripley had one of his deputies, Captain Kingsbury, write an amusingly