American Rifle - Alexander Rose [71]
In June 1861 Ripley launched another offensive by circulating a memorandum on the subject of small-arms contracting. He complained of “the vast variety of new inventions, each having, of course, its advocates, insisting upon the superiority of his favorite arm over all others and urging its adoption by the Government.” Reportedly soldiers were already carrying some of these weapons, a situation that Ripley declared was “very injurious to the efficiency of troops.” The only way to stop this “evil” was by “adhering to the rule of uniformity of arms for all troops.” At bottom, felt Ripley, the Union forces simply had no need to waste time with these “untried” weapons because “the U.S. [rifle-] muskets as now made have no superior arms in the world.” In any case, he was convinced that many of the claims made by private makers were just hooey: “I know of none, and I do not believe there are any, who have the requisite machinery, tools, and fixtures for making such arms, and but few who can prepare them in less than one year’s time.”87
Ripley’s snottiness notwithstanding, he was right about many things. He correctly highlighted the perils of outfitting troops with a myriad of weapons, some good, many bad. At the beginning of the war the Union Army recognized as “official” ordnance no fewer than 79 models of rifles, muskets, and rifle-muskets, 23 models of carbines and musketoons, and 19 models of pistols.88 Ripley additionally had to consider the vast amount of ammunition the new Union Army would require for battle operations. By issuing a single, affordable model of rifle-musket, he could ensure sufficient ammunition by making just one type of standard bullet.89 The alternative was a logistical nightmare: at the Second Battle of Bull Run an officer horrified Ripley by demanding no fewer than eleven different calibers (ranging from .52 to .71).90
He was also correct to be skeptical about the optimistic claims made by inventors that they would hit their production deadlines. Even Colt’s factory, which was probably the most efficient in the United States, could not hope to be ready and tooled up for mass production in less than six months.91 As for Winchester and the rest, they were accustomed to handling outputs of a couple of hundred rifles a month, not the several thousand the army would require.92
In any case, Ripley was already confronted by major delivery failures on the part of officially approved factories making standard models. Typically, one contractor, John Rice of Philadelphia, had promised to supply 36,000 regulation rifle-muskets in November 1861 but could not deliver a single one. And another eight businesses, which together contracted for a total of 351,000 rifle-muskets, produced precisely zero.93 Scores of similar cases beset the ordnance chief.94
Despite these letdowns, Ripley performed sterling service in rapidly outfitting Union troops with the weapons they needed to fight. Six months or so before the war’s outbreak, federal stocks of shoulder arms totaled the seemingly impressive figure of 610,598. But just 28,207 of them were first-class modern arms (.58-caliber rifles and rifle-muskets), while some 503,664 were twenty-year-old smoothbore .69-caliber muskets that had been converted into percussion firearms.95 They would do in a pinch, but the soldiers must also have more up-to-date weaponry.
Between April 1861 and November 1862, by way of contrast, Ripley’s arsenals made or acquired 263,182,600 small-arms rounds, 422,198,600 percussion caps, and 867,303 guns for the infantry (plus another 393,294 for the cavalry). Initially, most of these firearms—rifles and rifle-muskets particularly—were purchased abroad, but whereas in 1860 Harpers Ferry and Springfield had together been able to produce 22,000 weapons annually, Ripley