• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1951 0

carry an average of one hundred rounds compared to the usual forty or so issued to rifle-musketed troops. As a practical matter, however, evidence gained from actual field experience was proving that soldiers soon learned to husband their ammunition: at Gettysburg, over the course of three days’ hard fighting with a 20 percent casualty rate, one veteran unit with repeaters shot on average only thirty-two rounds per man.112 The morale of troops armed with repeaters also tended to be higher and more resilient than those without. A perceptive Lieutenant Green of the U.S. Marines had reported on this unexpected phenomenon in February 1860 following his testing of a Sharps rifle. His report concluded that “the soldier in battle, possessed of a gun that can be instantly loaded, keeping his eye on the foe, confident of his power and strength (that he always is ready), naturally is inspired with courage and self-possession.” Conversely, for the soldier carrying a muzzle-loading rifle-musket, his “severest trial occurs after he has discharged his piece, and during the interval of reloading.” At that point panic sets in. “Hence it is, after an engagement, so many arms are found disabled by the insertion of the ball below the powder, or double or treble loading.”113

In a controversial letter to Scientific American, Oliver Winchester opportunistically highlighted another advantage of repeaters over rifle-muskets and other single-shot weapons. Owing to their rapid rate of fire, a unit armed with a sixteen-shot “magazine gun like the Henry rifle” could “produce a sheet of fire and lead which no troops could stand to receive the last shot.”114 Then he damned Ripley by name for opposing the introduction of repeaters, cruelly remarking that the “saving of life does not appear an element worthy of [his] consideration.” And then, resurrecting the florid Jacksonian distrust of the highfalutin, European-minded Ordnance boffins, Winchester sarcastically added that “this is West Point opinion—the deductions of West Point science!”115

“West Point science” or not, some of Ripley’s worries, especially at the war’s outset, were justified, but he was hopelessly wrong not only in his fanatical determination to stop any kind of trials with the new weaponry but also in his reluctance to approve the meanest issuing of breech-loading repeaters to specialist troops, even when ordered by the president himself.

Ripley had no time for “amateurs” like Lincoln. When the president sent a letter to the department directing Ordnance to conduct experiments with a new type of firearm, Scientific American reported that “some functionary” sneered, “What does Lincoln know about a gun?”116 Readers were left in little doubt who the Ordnance “functionary” was.

Certain American presidents had been intensely interested in firearms: George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, of course, and Andrew Jackson. Lincoln, much to Ripley’s unpleasant surprise, was another.

Lincoln may have lacked hard combat experience, but he certainly knew his way around a rifle. How could he not, given that his father was a Kentucky frontiersman who moved to Indiana when Abraham was eight. Then it was still a “wild region,” in the president’s words, “with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods.”

When he was a boy, the Lincolns owned an “old smoothbore” and two “riffle” guns left behind by the late grandfather. Abraham himself sometimes went hunting with them and on one occasion shot a wild turkey.117 Never a keen hunter, however, Lincoln did not set his sights on larger, more dangerous beasts. In 1832, as a young captain during the Black Hawk War, he drilled with muskets, and during the Civil War when Seth Kinsman, a well-known California hunter, brought his old Kentucky to the White House, Lincoln happily held it and marveled at its beauty.118

Lincoln was by no means an expert on ordnance, nor was he a first-class shot, but he was nevertheless able to grasp the essentials—and much more. As early as 1855 he was keeping abreast of ballistic developments. He knew, from his treasured