American Rifle - Alexander Rose [73]
Upon first arriving in Richmond, Gorgas found just 159,010 weapons in the Southern arsenals, and about 3.2 million cartridges, plus sufficient gunpowder to make an additional 1.5 million bullets. There were also 2 million percussion caps (and nine musicians’ swords).105 The capture of Harpers Ferry by Confederate troops in April 1861 netted about 4,200 minié rifle-muskets and sufficient parts to finish up to 10,000 more. Most important, at least in the long term, were the armory’s 300 machines and crates of specialist tools that fell into their hands. Two weeks later John Hall’s old Rifle Works was stripped bare of its own equipment (most designed and built by the great man himself) and sent to Richmond.106
The haul was a good one, but nowhere near enough to supply the new army, especially over several campaigns. The Harpers Ferry machinery formed the foundation of wartime production, but to raise out-put Gorgas needed the South’s foundries to make still more, a task rendered impossible by the shortage of iron.
Gorgas also strove to improve distribution but was continually frustrated by the South’s decrepit railroads and transport networks, and his centralization of production at the Richmond Armory owed more to necessity than to choice. It, and a smaller plant at Fayetteville, North Carolina, were the only two armories in the entire South. Together they could manufacture 1,500 firearms per month, hardly anything considering that the Confederacy lost 70,000 weapons at Vicksburg and Gettysburg alone.107 By 1862 the Confederacy’s resources were so stretched that the desperate chief planned to issue medieval-style pikes to the infantry.108
Unable to improve domestic production, Gorgas zealously sought alternative sources of weaponry. He purchased substantial numbers of foreign-made firearms (such as British Enfields) at exorbitant cost with cotton, even as he contended with Union agents sent abroad with orders to buy up any guns for sale, no matter the expense. His Ordnance Bureau also bought four vessels to smuggle weapons from Nassau and Bermuda; but while gunrunning from the Caribbean or from Mexico through Texas along the “Cotton Road” helped relieve the chronic arms crunches, the 182,000 pieces that the Ordnance blockade runners sneaked past Union patrols between September 1862 and December 1864 could not hope to compete against the North’s home advantage.109
What Gorgas lacked in resources, he made up for in ingenuity. The bureau relied on work-arounds, makeshifts, and expediencies to a remarkable degree. When the importation route was closed after the Confederacy lost the Mississippi River, the bureau replaced mercury, a key ingredient of percussion caps that was available in quantity only in Mexico, with a compound of chlorate of potash, sulphuret of antimony, and nitric acid. Gum arabic, used in Enfield cartridges, was ingeniously replaced by flour paste. Gorgas even told his officers to cut down on their correspondence to save paper that could be used as cartridges.110
Given the difficult circumstances, Gorgas performed miracles, and it was testament to his unflagging perseverance that after General Lee abandoned Richmond in April 1865 and retreated to Amelia Court House, where he expected to find crates filled with rations for his hungry men, he found no food but instead a train packed with homemade ammunition.111
As northern production gained momentum, Ripley suffered from quite a different, indeed enviable, problem: too many guns. His primary concern now was the potential wastage of his precious, hard-won stock-piles. Repeaters, he was convinced, were the greatest threat in this regard. It was a standard Ordnance complaint that men blew through ammunition with repeaters, thereby causing supply headaches.
Theoretically the supply problem was a worrying factor. By 1865 soldiers armed with repeaters had to