American Rifle - Alexander Rose [75]
What specialist knowledge Lincoln lacked, he more than made up for in sheer curiosity about all things mechanical and scientific. One of his colleagues, Henry Clay Whitney, well recalled his friend’s insatiable inquisitiveness. While on the road and traveling together, when they stopped at a local farmhouse for dinner, Lincoln would obtain
some farming implement, machine or tool, and he would carefully examine it all over, first generally and then critically; he would “sight” it to determine if it was straight or warped: if he could make a practical test of it, he would do that; he would turn it over or around and stoop down, or lie down, if necessary, to look under it; he would examine it closely, then stand off and examine it at a little distance; he would shake it, lift it, roll it about, up-end it, overset it, and thus ascertain every quality and utility which inhered in it, so far as acute and patient investigation could do it.122
Given Lincoln’s fascination with firearms technology, small wonder that he took a fatherly interest in the arming of his troops. Time and time again he would conduct his own experiments with a new weapon and report the results to an irritated Ripley—sometimes accompanied by an order to purchase several thousand of them, which irritated him still more. Thus, in the summer of 1861 Lincoln and his private secretary, William Stoddard, tramped across the White House south lawn for some shooting practice. Lincoln carried, most probably, one of Winchester’s very early repeating Henrys, and Stoddard a Springfield rifle-musket specially modified into a breech-loader.123 Lincoln himself at this point took only an “especial interest” in repeaters, having had little experience with them (the gun he carried that day was a prototype, not a finished model), and he was convinced the “single-shooting breech-loader” was “the army rifle of the future.” Even on that point, Stoddard remarked, “the Bureau [i.e., Ordnance] officials” were “against him.”124
At the bottom of the lawn there was a patch of ground picturesquely called Treasury Park (about where the Washington Monument is), though it was less a verdant park than weedy, gravelly turf enclosed by a shoulder-high wooden fence and containing a large pile of lumber that Lincoln used as a buffer for bullets gone astray. (Sometimes they went too far astray. In November 1862 one such ball crashed through Mrs. Grady’s nearby window, flew through her parlor, and lodged itself in the opposite wall.)
Having set up a target against the woodpile, Lincoln and Stoddard took their positions one hundred yards away. Lincoln fired, missed. Stoddard fired, hit. “I declare, you are beating me,” said Lincoln. “I’ll take a good sight this time.” Hearing shots in the middle of Washington, where discharging firearms was banned, a passing sergeant and his men appeared, shouting, “Stop that firing! Stop that firing!” Seeing the president, the sergeant stopped short, did a comical double-take, and rapidly withdrew. “Well,” remarked Lincoln, “they might have stayed to see the shooting.”125
Shortly afterward, impressed by the modified rifle-musket’s performance, Lincoln asked Ripley to look into placing an order for these rifles, the brainchild of one Samuel Wilmer Marsh. Expecting the president soon to forget about it,