American Rifle - Alexander Rose [72]
He underestimated. Before the Civil War arms manufacturers had still been imbibing the Ordnance Department’s lessons about interchangeability while exploring the new cartridge/repeater technology and raising financing. Their production runs and factories remained quite small, at least compared to the output of the national armories. During the Civil War the task of arranging funds at least became relatively easier thanks to the government’s largesse when awarding contracts. Private firms also found that if they took a step back from Ordnance’s emphasis on seamless interchangeability, their cost per unit fell while output rose. So while they relied on machines as much as possible, in the very final stage they still used specialized labor to “fit” the parts exactly. The process lacked the precise perfection demanded by John Hall and his successors, but that was offset by the advantages of building faster and shipping weapons on schedule.97 As a result, while the total output of the entire American private sector in 1860 had been just 50,000 shoulder arms and pistols, by the end of the war it had produced between 2.5 and 3 million, a number exponentially beyond anything the Europeans or British could even imagine.98
Abroad the rifle remained the property of professional soldiers and well-off hunters: the British regarded their gunsmith as they did their tailor, as the chap who made firearms on a bespoke, personally customized basis. But in the newly united States after 1865 the rifle became the common man’s gun, mainly because there were so many floating around and so many ex-soldiers who knew how to use them.99 In less than a century, the American rifle had transformed from being the specialized firearm of frontiersmen to the tool of Everyman.
During the war, too, the differences between Northern and Southern business styles—that division between the Springfield way and the old Harpers Ferry way—helped break Dixie’s back. While both sides struggled to harness managerial expertise to the industrial, technological, and logistical demands of the war, Lincoln emerged as more competent than Jefferson Davis at exploiting the talent at his disposal, despite the South’s many able engineers and organizers.100
Ripley’s Confederate counterpart as chief of ordnance, for instance, was Josiah Gorgas, but he for-ever lacked the mammoth resources enjoyed by his opposite. Cantankerous and impatient, the Pennsylvania-born Gorgas had married an Alabama lass and fondly dreamed of buying a plantation staffed by a retinue of slaves. As the war came closer, Gorgas’s sympathies turned strongly secessionist as northern abolitionists threatened his retirement plan. The ideology of states’ rights attracted him, and aware that his impertinence toward his superiors at the Ordnance Department had doomed him to a captain’s rank for the rest of his career, Gorgas made noises about joining the fledgling Confederate Army.101
Jefferson Davis, however, was keener to acquire Major Mordecai and made him an offer on March 4, 1861. Mordecai refused. Davis then turned to Gorgas, who accepted the post of chief of Ordnance, an offer that came attached with a promotion to a majority and the prospect of eventual elevation to the rank of general.102 On March 21 Gorgas resigned his commission with the Union Army and headed south.103
Until the last his faith in inevitable victory remained unswerving, though it did waver once or twice (after Gettysburg he wondered whether “we [can] believe in the justice of Providence, or must we conclude that we are after all wrong?”).104 The peace at Appomattox devastated him, and Gorgas transformed